Star Trek: The Next Generation Reviews B

This is one of my posts where I “review” Star Trek episodes. I will be giving each one a star rating. I sometimes will make some comments about non-political parts of them that I like or don’t like. I’ll sometimes use the issues raised in the episode to discuss similar issues in real life. And I will sometimes simply high-light the progressive politics of ST. ST is in-line with the three original themes of this blog, as I explain in the first ST post where I offer some general thoughts about ST.

I’m not very familiar with The Original Series and there might be some small amount of material there that would affect what I say about Star Trek (i.e. how often religion is mentioned)

Lastly. multi-culturalism is such a pervasive theme in ST that I only comment on it when it goes beyond the norm (i.e. inter-species partners).

“The last Outpost” See this for a plot summary.


This is a fairly political episode. We meet the Ferengi and get some more information about them. They’re uber-Capitalists and sexists. My thoughts about them are in this post when I discuss the episode “A Man Alone.” Riker says that Ferengis are just like Humans on Earth several centuries earlier.

One complaint. Having watched DS9, which uses Ferengi for laughs and which makes it clear that there are VERY few Ferengis who are skilled in combat, it’s kind of annoying to see them portrayed most of the time on TNG as aggressive and violent.

I give it two stars out of five.


“Where No One Has Gone Before” See this for a plot summary.

In general a non-political episode, but there is, for the second time, a reference to a human colony that’s not part of the Federation and that has a major problem with “rape gangs.”

I give it one star out of five.

“Lonely Among Us” See this for a plot summary.

A non-political episode. I give it two stars out of five.

“Justice” See this for a plot summary.

One bit of politics is that Picard explains how the Federation doesn’t sentence criminals to death. On the other hand, he says that using the death penalty was ended in connection with progress towards eliminating crime by some investigative method that ID’ed potential criminals (we’re left to assume that therapy or something is used to turn such people away from criminality). So it’s more or less not saying that the death penalty is wrong today or in recent years, but that’s probably just some bad writing- elsewhere it’s made very clear that Starfleet is against the death penalty.

I give it two stars out of five.