I'm a nerd, but I've never been a Star Trek nerd. I've seen Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country many times when it was on heavy rotation on cable TV, and I saw the first reboot, and I've caught bits and pieces of the original series over the years.
But even without watching it closely, it's almost impossible not to be familiar with many of the Star Trek tropes and not to know many of the characters – Kirk, Spock, Bones, Sulu, Picard, Geordi, and Data, among others.
I've see lots of toots about various Star Trek things, so I've decided to give it a shot. I've started with The Next Generation. I watched First Contact and it was really good. Great sci-fi action, well-done time travel, iconic characters acting iconic, a compelling villain, a nice mid-90s combo of digital and practical effects, and many of the fun Star Trek tropes that I had absorbed through popular culture.
Then I started watching Season 1 of The Next Generation. Wow, it's quite different! The year 2364 has a strong 1980s energy with it's hairstyles and entirely practical effects. And it seems much more like The Original Series than the First Contact movie. I was surprised to see Gene Roddenberry's name in the credits – though I soon learned from my viewing and a cursory look at opinions on TNG season 1, that Roddenberry left his mark on the early TNG seasons, for better and worse.
So here are my mini-reviews / hot takes on what I've seen so far:
TNG: First Contact: 9 / 10 – Really good, as described above.
TNG S01E01-02 ("Encounter at Farpoint"): 8/10 – I thought the opener was good. I liked that it introduced lots of characters and seemed to have a lot of story to tell, even if the acting and pacing was stilted as heck – Big "Hell...O my NAME is WILL....i..AM shat....NER" energy. I was super relieved that Q did not spend the whole episode in bad Shakespearean English mode.
Also, Picard was a bit of a douche. Like, hey, let's have him say, weirdly, that he doesn't like children (surely no child characters will be introduced to put this declaration to the test!)
TNGS01E03 ("The Naked Now"): 6.5/10 – OK, it's the first episode after the premiere – what story should we tell next? If you said, let's have everyone get weirdly horny, you could be a TNG season 1 writer! But, overall, I still enjoyed this one.
TNG S01E04 ("Code of Honor"): 2.5/10 – This one has not aged well. There are a lot of problematic aspects about the relatively primitive race and their gender politics that, at best, were lazy when they were written. Now, they are full cringe. Also, Picard's plan just didn't make tons of sense to me leading up to the conclusion.
I'll post more as I work my way through more of the Star Trek canon.
My closing thought is this: Star Trek is a heck of a lot like DnD...in space! They go in with a party full of various combinations of classes (captain, first officer, medic, counsellor, security, android) and then they are presented with a crazy scenario, and it is up to them to resolve the situation in some way, for example, by fighting, diplomacy, trickery, or running away. I can totally imagine a DM being like "The alien leader grabs the head of security and starts to beam away....what do you do?"