Trekathon Season Review: The Next Generation, Season 4

Because of how far behind I’d gotten I had to get through this season very quickly – all of it in less than a week.

Overall this season suffers from wild swings from good to bad. There are a lot of great episodes: *Brothers*, *Reunion*, *The Drumhead*, *The Mind’s Eye*, *Redemption*. But then there’s also *Qpid,*, *Legacy* and worst of all *Devil’s Due*.

The actors have really settled into the characters now, and the writers are just starting to play around with more arc-based, serial story telling. But there’s also been a bit of a drop in the quality control, or maybe just the judgement about what’s a good story and what’s not. A lot of the problems aren’t with the writing, like Season One, but with the basic premise of the story – many of the bad to average episodes were simply doing as well as possible with that premise.

It’s a little tricky to slot this season into the rankings. Clearly it’s worse than the previous season of TNG, and better than Season Two. I think, by a very narrow margin, it’s a little worse than the second series of TOS, but a little better than the first.

That brings the rankings so far to:

– TNG Season 3

– TOS Season 2

– TNG Season 4

– TOS Season 1

– TNG Season 2

– TAS Season 1

– TOS Season 3

– TAS Season 2

– TNG Season 1

So another season down, and 9,439 minutes watched. And I’ve written a little over 34,000 words in these reviews so far. Next we have year 5 of TNG, and also coming up to Star Trek VI. Season 5 will be the last time that there’s only a single Star Trek series running at once until we get to the final two seasons of Voyager. Oh, and one day ahead of schedule.


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