Star Trek on the Small Screen: The Next Generation

As a culture, our love affair with all things Trek began in 1966, and as the franchise continues to grow, so does our passion. In this six-post series, we’ve been exploring Star Trek’s role in television comprehensively, beginning first with The Original Series. We’re now moving on to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’m a huge fan, but no expert. I may miss something, and there’s always room for more Trek goodies. I’d love your feedback and welcome a hearty discussion, “where no one has gone before”.

Captain – Jean-Luc Picard

Vessel – USS Enterprise  NCC-1701-D

Mission – To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before

Setting – The nearby regions of the Milky Way Galaxy

Number of Seasons – 7

Number of Episodes – 178, each one hour

Aired –  September 1987 to May 1994

Stardates – 41153.7-47988

Pilot Episode – “Encounter at Farpoint”

Awards – Two ASCAP Film and Television Music Award nominations, two wins; Two British Science Fiction Association Award nominations; Two Cinema Audio Society Awards nominations, one win; 58 Emmy Award nominations, 19 wins; Three Hugo Award nominations, two wins; Nine Saturn Award nominations, five wins; One Peabody Award nominations, one win; One Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination; One Writers Guild of America nomination; Seven Youth in Film Awards nominations, two wins.

Quotes –

Picard: “Make it so!”

Data: “Theoretically, it is possible…”

 

Picard: “It is exactly as they left it, Number One. In the bottle. The ship in the bottle. Good Lord, didn’t anybody here build ships in bottles when they were boys?”

Worf: “I did not play with toys.”

Data: “I was never a boy.”

 

Riker: “Flair is what marks the difference between artistry and mere competence.”

Guinan: “My name is Guinan. I tend bar, and I listen.”

Worf: “Klingons are born, live as warriors, and die.”

Riker: “Think about it. A blind man teaching an android to paint? That’s got to be worth a couple of pages in someone’s book.”

Picard: “Engage!”

Data: “Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.”

Data: “Apologies, Captain. I seem to have reached an odd functional impasse. I am, uh… stuck.”

Q (to Worf): “I can’t disappear any more than you could win a beauty contest.”

Beverly Crusher: “I’m here, Jean-Luc. I’m not going anywhere.”

The Borg: “Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.”

Worf: “Klingons do not… pursue relationships. They conquer that which they desire.”

Trivia –

Data’s cat’s name is Spot.

In its seventh season, Star Trek: TNG became the first and only syndicated television series to be nominated for the Emmy Award for Best Dramatic Series.

TNG’s music theme was born of combining TOS’ theme and the theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Patrick Stewart (Picard) and Jonathan Frakes (Riker) are the only actors to appear in all 178 episodes of TNG.

Random factoid: I named my dog Riker. (after Bearded Riker, not Clean-Shaven Riker)

Icon Compendium: Michael Westmore

Legend. Icon. Idol. Exemplar. Whatever label you apply to them, they are the characters and the creators that stir the imagination and make each of us a geek. Outright Geekery likes to put a spotlight on those creative and entertaining legends that have given us so much. We celebrate geek greatness in this installment of Outright Geekery’s Icon Compendium, featuring legendary make-up artist extraordinaire Michael Westmore.

There are a lot of elements that went into Star Trek The Next Generation that all came together to become something special. There wasn’t anything new about great acting on the small screen when TNG premiered. There was nothing really special about the story-telling or the techno-jargon, or the technology, or the mission. Despite all that unoriginality, TNG become something greater than the sum of all its parts. Well, all but one of its parts, that is. There was a singular aspect of The Next Generation that raised the bar for not only all science-fiction television, but all television to follow. It was an important aspect of this new Trek from the very beginning, but became such an integral element of the show that it’s almost impossible to imagine The Next Generation without it. I am speaking, of course, about the amazing make-up work that embodied just about each and every episode, spawned some of the most famous alien faces in the history of entertainment, and changed the way TV approached make-up forever. Although there were many great artists working on Star Trek The Next Generation’s crew of make-up talent, one man was the driving and creative force behind the magic that became a mainstay, Star Trek The Next Generation’s primary make-up supervisor Michael Westmore.

Michael Westmore was born into movie make-up royalty. The grandson of George Westmore, creator of the first studio make-up department in Hollywood, and son of Monty Westmore, make-up supervisor on Gone With the Wind, the Westmore’s could be called the First Family of Hollywood Movie Make-Up. Michael’s uncle Bud Westmore co-created the famous creature in Creature From the Black Lagoon, one of the most recognizable pop-culture character of all time. Michael attended the University of California – Santa Barbara, graduating in 1961 and immediately began working at Universal Studios. Some of Westmore’s earliest work is actually some of his most famous and popular characters, as the artist did work on the Munsters TV show, as well as the children’s program The Land of the Lost where he created the race of lizardmen known as the Sleestaks.

Westmore then became a freelance artist, but the lack of big studio support did nothing to spoil the artist’s zeal. Throughout the ’70’s and ’80’s he worked on popular films and TV shows like Rocky I, II, and III, and the cross-dressing sitcom Bosom Buddies starring one Tom Hanks before he hit it big. Westmore soon returned to big budget blockbusters, with 1984’s sci-fi epic 2010, and 1985’s Mask, the story of a boy growing up with a deformed face, earning Westmore an Academy Award. Although his next job would take him back to the small screen, for us passionate Trek geeks out there, it’s where Westmore made his biggest contribution.

Westmore wasn’t even sure he wanted the job as Star Trek The Next Generation’s make-up supervisor. After working so extensively on award winning, extremely popular, and very profitable movies, moving back to television initially felt like a step down. Fortunately for us geeks, Westmore’s wife encouraged him that a steady, year-long project may be a nice change of pace, and in 1986 he was hired to work on Star Trek The Next Generation.

Although Westmore would go on to work on every series to follow in the Star Trek universe – Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise – and many of the films in the franchise, his groundbreaking work on TNG is his landmark effort. One of his first jobs as lead make-up supervisor for TNG was to create the memorable make-up Brent Spiner wore as the android Data, as well as recreating and establishing the look that would be forever unmistakeable as a Klingon with Michael Dorn’s portrayal of Worf. In only his first few months as make-up supervisor for TNG, Westmore had already put his individual stamp on the entire Star Trek mythos, and changed the way special make-up effects were approached by television shows. Effects like large applications and the use of prosthetic pieces was seen very seldom on television, and here was a show that put two very complex make-ups into starring roles. But Westmore wasn’t done changing the game quite yet.

Star Trek The Next Generation didn’t stop with Data and Worf when it came to amazing, complex, and outright alien make-ups. Westmore went on to create such memorable races as the Ferengi, the Cardassians, the Borg, and scores of other races and individual alien creatures and beings. But Westmore didn’t just create elaborate and unique alien creatures. The range he has in his chosen art can be seen in any number of episodes, including the intensive age make-up work of Too Short a Season, his work in creating the LED receptors for Geordi’s Visor (with help from his son Michael Westmore Jr.) and way too many particulars to mention here. Westmore’s nuance and singular imagination did not end with the final episode of TNG, either, and he went on to do more work on Star Trek, creating characters like Morn the barfly in Quark’s from DS9, Ron Perlman’s portrayal of The Viceroy in Star Trek Nemesis, among many others.

Although Westmore stopped working on Trek with the 2005 cancellation of Enterprise, he remains an avid author of instructional and mentoring books, and is currently mentoring up-and-coming artists on the SyFy reality/competition show Faceoff. The past work of this master will continue to be some of the most recognizable and memorable make-ups, creations, and aliens that have ever appeared on screen, and the work he’s doing now to help shape and mold the future of the industry will assure his standing as one of the greats. Without this artisan we’d have no Jem’Hadar, no Borg, and Star Trek as we know it would be quite different from the greatness it is, giving Michael Westmore a place of honor in the Icon Compendium.

 

Top o’ the Lot: Captain Picard’s Love Interests

From time to time Outright Geekery brings you a slanted and biased opinion on some trivially specific topic of geekery. We call it Outright Geekery’s Top o’ the Lot.

In the Original series of Star Trek it was pretty cut and dry who the woman’s man was. When you;re cast next to an emotionless alien and a crotchety old doctor it’s easy to be a pimp. Star Trek: The Next Generation was a completely different deal, however, and just about every main character had at least one love interest at some point or another. Geordi has his holodeck warp drive engineer, Worf had a mate and a child, even Data got in on the action occasionally, and Riker had way too many encounters with the opposite sex to count. Out of all the bridge crew on the Enterprise-E, though, Captain Picard had the most interesting affairs of the heart, ranging from longtime friends, to advanced holograms, to cybernetic aliens. So, without further ado, we set phasers to love, adjust tricorders to detect high levels of pheromones, and Engage passion as we run down the Top o’ the Lot: Captain Picard’s Love Interests.

Honorable Mention: The U.S.S. Stargazer

You never forget your first love

This one may seem like a cheat at first glimpse, but let me explain. Captain Picard, above all, is married to his job. He’s in love with The Federaion and is most passionate about his role as a Starfleet Captain. He’s admitted that he regrets never making time for a family, while also understanding how much good his commitment to his work has brought. And since it’s difficult to really put a finger on how to best example this love for his profession, you never really get over your first love, and the U.S.S. Stargazer, Picard’s first chance to sit in the captain’s chair, surely fits that bill. I know, this isn’t a woman, or even a person, but this aspect of Picard’s love life defienitely deserves a mention, if only an honorable one, and the rest o’ this Lot is full of people…well, they’re mostly people.

5. The Borg Queen

This one comes with way too much baggage for anything long-term to last. Been there, done that!

Little did Picard turned Locutus know what was truly in store for him when The Borg first kidnapped him in the two-part TNG episode The Best of Both Worlds, but he found out during the movie First Contact that he was going to be more than just another drone. The Borg Queen, the “leader” of the hive-mind collective that IS the Borg consciousness, was seeking a mate, and she had her cybernetic eye on one Jean-Luc Picard. It was more than a bit odd, and was destined to fail from the get go. He’s from the Alpha quandrant, she’s from the Delta quandrant; it just wasn’t meant to be. The Queen eventually went on to seduce Data for a brief time before putting the moves on Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine, but I’m not sure she had the same things in mind that she had for Jean-Luc. Of course, this wasn’t the only love interest Picard had that was partially artificial. One of them, the next spot on this Lot, was completely artificial.

4. Minuet

Riker just can’t keep it in his pants!

This one time, in season 1, the Binars, sort of like alien versions of Bill Gates, needed to upload their entire planetary database into the computer of the Enterprise to save it from some disaster or another, and in order to distract certain members of the bridge crew, including the Captain, created a holodeck character unlike any other seen before. Her name was Minuet, and she took Captain Picard by a bit of a surprise when he first met her. Those Binars really know how to make fake women seem realer than the real thing, and not even the esteemed Jean-Luc Picard could fight the appeal of Minuet. Too bad that c-blocking, testosterone-filled Riker took all the attention from the perfect girl made of light-waves and force-fields or we may have seen more of Picard in action way sooner. But his smooth sex appeal wasn’t denied for long as seen in the next love interest in the Top.

3. Kamala

The passion between these two characters was palpable

A part of Jean-Luc wished it was him receiving, not giving away, this bride.

I like this one for two very simple reasons. First, the relationship between the empathic female metamorph born and bred to be attractive to any man in any way, Kamala, and a Captain Picard placed in the awkward position of personally looking after the female with uncontrollable sex appeal made for an interesting and quite complex examination into the feelings of a man viewers rarely were given a glimpse of. It was quite the departure for the character, and made for some excellent moments of growth and enrichment for Jean-Luc that would carry on throughout the rest of the series. Secondly, the character of Kamala was played by one Famke Janssen, also known for playing the character Jean Grey in the X-Men films, which also starred – wait for it! – Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard himself, as Professor Charles Xavier. I can’t help it, I love it when I get my chocolate in my peanut butter!

2. Vash

All Jean-Luc was looking for was a nice quiet holiday on Risa, but what he found was one of the oddest and cutest couples in all of Star Trek. Vash was the antithesis of Jean-Luc: A greedy, self-centered scoundrel. The only thing the couple had in common was their love for archeology, but I guess that’s all it took and opposites attract because the two hit it off in the strangest of ways. Yes, they saved the universe together, but Vash decided her freedom was better for her than living in a stuffy starship. Although she eventually hooked up with Q for a while (surely just so the omnipotent being could get under Picard’s skin), but Vash left a lasting impression and pretty much sums up the “Oh, what could have been?” trend that is Jean-Luc Picard’s love life. Although, there is that one…

1. Doctor Beverly Crusher

It was put out there quite early in the series and was a constant tightrope walk for both character throughout the entire run of the storied show. But Captain Picard’s and Doctor Beverly Crusher’s relationship was deep and complex, straddling a line between precious friendship and hidden, and somewhat forbidden, feelings. See Picard was in command when Beverly’s husband was killed in the line of duty, and while the loss cemented Picard into the Crusher family for all-time, moving the relationship past anything but a close friendship seemed like a black mark on the memory of the fallen friend. But oh, man, we all wanted to see it happen. The tension between the two characters was an ongoing thing, they we’re arguably the closest of any two characters on ANY of the series, and wouldn’t Jean-Luc have made the best damned step-dad in the whole world to that unruly Wesley? Out of all of Picard’s love interests, all of them would have been better for having Jean-Luc, but only Beverly would have made Jean-Luc better for the experience. She was that damned good!

See a mistake? Disagree with the choices? Tell us what you think about this installment of Top o’ Lot, join in the discussion and share your opinion.