Customer Reviews

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 7

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In the 7th and final season, the crew runs into Hugh the Borg, Picard and DaiMon Bok meet again, we meet Data's mother, Worf's half human brother, Wesley is back, and Tash Yar returns in the final two-part episode.

All 26 episodes are contained on 7 disks.

1) Descent (part 2) - Taken prisoner by Lore and the Borg, the away team consisting of Picard, Troi and Geordi is trapped while the Enterprise is attacked by the Borg ship. Riker and Worf, discover that Hugh, a Borg, is in hiding on the planet.

2) Liaisons - Picard's shuttlecraft crash lands and when he leaves to look for medical aid for the pilot, he meets a woman named Anna, who has apparently been stranded alone on the planet for seven years. Anna won't let Picard leave and he finds out that no there is really alive.

3) Interface - A new interface is being tested by Geordi to control remote unmanned probes. Utilizing his visor implants, Geordi is able to see, hear, and experience whatever conditions the probe encounters.

4/5) Gambit (part 1/2) - Captain Picard is missing and Riker, Troi, Worf and Crusher are searching for him on Desica II. Riker goes to a planet in the Barada system where he finds out that Galen is Picard. Riker joins the Baran's. A Romulan mercenary Tallera reveals herself as an undercover Vulcan security agent, and she earns Picard's trust enough for him to reveal his own identity. Riker is left for dead on the Enterprise by Picard to resume command.

6) Phantasms - The Enterprise receives a new warp-core, which does not work. Data experiences his first set of nightmares that drives him to commit acts of violence.

7) Dark Page - Lwaxana visits the Enterprise along with a small delegation of Icarans, who communicate in telepathic imagery with no verbal elements whatsoever.

8) Attached - Captain Picard and Beverly Crusher Beam down to meet with Kes representatives and they are kidnapped by the Prit, who believe the Kes affiliation with the Federation to be a military pact.

9) Force of Nature - Investigating missing starships, the Enterprise finds that a brother and sister have been misleading and damaging all warp-capable vessels that enter the region of space near their home world. They claim that warp engines are disrupting their space and it's threatened to destroy everything.

10) Inheritance - Dr. Tainer and her husband have joined the Enterprise to help save a planet. She reveals herself to be the ex-wife of Dr. Soong and co-designer of Data and Lore.

11) Parallels - Returning victorious from a Klingon martial arts competition, Worf walks into a surprise birthday party, but notices that something is incorrect aboard the Enterprise.

12) The Pegasus - The Enterprise heads for an asteroid belt between Romulan and Federation space, with Admiral Pressman. It becomes clear that Pressman and Riker have some old business issues that need to be addressed.

13) Homeward - Dr. Nikolai Rozhenko, Worf's human foster brother, sends a distress call from his hidden observation post on Boral II. Worf beams down, disguised as a Boralan, and discover that Nikolai has also been masquerading as a native and providing them technology from his observation post.

14) Sub Rosa - The Enterprise visits Caldos, so Dr. Crusher may attend the funeral of her grandmother. Beverly learns that her grandmother, despite being over 100 years old, had a much young lover.

15) Lower Decks - A promotion is nearing for one of a group of four friends who are junior officers aboard the Enterprise. The Enterprise undertakes a top secret mission, the true purpose of which is unknown to the four friends - though each of them has a piece of the puzzle, and a part to play, in the "exercise".

16) Thine Own Self - Troi returns from her Star Fleet Academy class reunion to find Dr. Crusher in charge of the bridge, and she begins thinking about her own position in the ship's chain of command. Data is on a shuttle mission to retrieve radioactive material.

17) Masks - Studying an ancient comet at close range, the crew of the Enterprise becomes aware of strange objects appearing on board.

18) Eye of the Beholder - A young officer assigned to the Enterprise commits suicide by leaping into the ship's warp core.

19) Genesis - Testing Worf's new photon torpedo guidance system sends a hazardous torpedo off course into deep space, which Picard and Data set off to recover. When they return from their mission, they find that every inhabitant of the ship has somehow mutated into more primitive life form

20) Journey's End - Wesley Crusher, on a sabbatical from Starfleet Academy, has returned to the Enterprise.

21) Firstborn - Alexander nears the age where he must decide whether or not to become a warrior; Worf grows worried that the boy will choose to discard his Klingon heritage ways.

22) Bloodlines - Picard receives a threat from his old Ferengi adversary DaiMon Bok, who still blames Picard for the death of his son.

23) Emergence - Picard and Data are rehearsing a scene from "The Tempest" in the holodeck, when they are nearly run over by the Orient Express.

24) Preemptive Strike - A reception for recent Starfleet Advanced Tactical Training graduate Ro Laren is cut short when the Enterprise responds to a Cardassian ship's distress call. Ro has to face her loyalty to Star Fleet vs. her hatred for the Cardassian.

25/26) All Good Things (part 1&2) - In the past, the EXACT moment in which life is "started" a chemical event fails to happen. The human race does not come into existence.

Star Trek TNG goes out with a bang. It starts out with the second half of the cliffhanger involving the borg,Wesley returns only to leave again in a very unususal way, ensign Ro leaves as well. In the series finally the crew come full circle, Q puts Picard on trial again. Picard must time travel to save the universe.

The seventh season of Star Trek: The Next Generation would be its last. A hectic time for Star Trek with so many things going on at once. Everyone knew going into the seventh season that it would be the last. We saw some great episodes in this season, however, the only sense of closure we got was in "All Good Things..." This was a fantastic show and all seven seasons are worth every penny. It had great writers all the way through and the seventh season is no different. It's great to see how the show ends its journey. Great show...great season...It's too bad that it's over. BUT. Don't fret...the Next Generation crew returned to the bridge of the Enterprise in four feature films. Congratulations Star Trek: TNG. You never dissapointed me.

Personal Favorite Episodes:

Descent: Part II, Gambit: Parts I and II, Phantasms, Inheritance, Parallels, The Pegasus, Lower Decks,Masks, Eye of the Beholder, Genesis, Journey's End, Emergence, Preemtive Strike, and All Good Things...

All good things must come to an end...at least the series went out on the highest note possible!

I have recently finished my trek through Star Trek, watching the entirety of Season 7 on DVD. Through 6 seasons, Star Trek managed to survive inconsistant writing and some questionable acting because it had flair, imagination, unquenchable optimism, and a core of very good actors. Season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation is where the Star Trek franchise largely lost its grip, though, and the deterioration process has continued (and even accelerated) right up through Enterprise.

OK, so we'll get it out of the way ... the series finale, All Good Things, is quite good. Everything that we've come to love in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and of higher quality than many odd-numbered Star Trek movies. Despite what the fanpeople might say, however, this episode alone is *not* worth the price of the set (duh), partly because the plot is still a bit contrived unfortunately, but mainly because no hour and forty-five minutes of television is worth what they're asking. So what else do you get?

Primarily, you get more episodes in the "unwatchably bad" cateogry than in any other Star Trek: TNG season. It starts right out of the gate with Interface, which features Geordi behaving like a total moron given alien possession only kicks in about every 3rd episode. We also have the horrendous and inexplicable Force of Nature, the awkward Homeward, the poorly-written and badly acted Sub Rosa, and the (again) poorly-written, tedious, and insufferable Journey's End (despite the emotional pull of a nice ending for Wesley and the reunion of with the Traveller). Bloodlines is terrible and utterly contrived, and Emergence is simply pointless.

To see how far Star Trek has come, it's instructive to look at two episodes that are actually pretty good, Lower Decks and Thine Own Self. Both have good imaginative plots, and Thine Own Self features Data heavily, who everyone likes. Both could have been great, but are significantly flawed in execution - in Lower Decks, the entire Alyssa/Crusher plotline is entirely pointless and simply serves to make the episode more tedious. This is a shame, because both the Sito/Wharf and Lavelle/Riker relationships are very well-done with a nice emotional resonance - somthing Star Trek may only have achieved in this episode - and the 10 minutes wasted with Alyssa could have been much better spent here. Or with Taurik - it's nice to see a Vulcan struggle with the interpersonal relationships, and his dillemas have potential - but he ends up getting short shrift to a worthless subplot which serves only some misplaced sense of symmetry. This episode is well-written, acted, and directed, and with tighter execution and a firm editorial hand, this is a best-of-Trek type episode. Likewise, Thine Own Self; this wants to be two episodes, but apparently the writers didn't have enough ideas and didn't really care, so they just crammed both ideas into one episode, even though they are not even tangentially related; you keep waiting for Troi and Data to link up in some way, but the two plotlines remain confusingly and completely seperate. And since when does becoming Commander require only passing some sort of wierd Civil Service exam? And despite all this, the episode *still* takes forever to really get going. Sadly, despite these problems, these two episodes still rate amongst the best of Season 7.

Interestingly, a few of these episodes have almost direct counterparts in The X-Files. It might be instructive to watch Sub Rosa back-to-back with The Ghosts Who Stole Christmas, or Thine Own Self with The Post-Modern Prometheus. They aren't as exact parallels as with, say, Cause and Effect and Monday (which I mention in my ST:TNG Season 5 review), but they are close in spirit, and to see the professionalism and skill of the X-Files team in every aspect of their show up against a Star Trek outfit that always had writing problems, uninspired directing, and a lack of attention to detail is, well, interesting. These are both similar big-name, big-price box sets, and Star Trek is just having trouble competing on the technical aspects. Now, I won't deny that Star Trek is still Star Trek and your average Star Trek viewer is not going to be genetically predisposed to become an X-Files junkie ... but for me, it makes the high price of the Star Trek box sets hard to justify. Or you can compare Geordi's utterly unconvincing response to the loss and strange return of his mother in Interface to the so-real-it's-scary writing (if not always acting) of Sheridan's similar loss in Babylon 5's Revelations.

Most of the rest of the season tops out at about average. Liasons, Dark Page, Gambit, Masks, Firstborn, Bloodlines - all episodes of solid mediocridty. None are terrible, all are watchable, even marginally entertaining - but basically don't gel. The performances are often uninpsired, the pacing is off, and the writers usually can't come up with enough material to fill 45 minutes so they have to resort to extensive ues of technobabble or irrelevant 5-minute openers. There is usually one idea, and it seems like when it doesn't quite work out as well as they hoped, they just "ship it" anyway.

Now, there are a handful of solid episodes this season that are up to the standards of previous years. Parallels is by far the best episode of the season, simply because the writing is solid, it is skillfully and consistantly executed, the relationship between Wharf and Troi is touching, and it has a nice element of classic Star Trek wit without going overboard. The pacing is right, you don't sit around for the first 10-15 minutes of the episode waiting for somthing to happen as in Thine Own Self, Interface, Dark Page, or too many other episodes in the Star Trek franchise to count (including virtually every episode of Enterprise). It is a skilfully done whole, and it helps that Michael Dorn and Mirina Sirtis can in fact act, even if their characters are usually appallingly underwritten; when they're given good plots, as they are here, they are very good. It's frustrating to give this the title of "best episode" by dint of lack of egregious flaws, but that's all it takes at this point (even so, it is quite good).

Otherwise, Lower Decks is probably the best of the rest, Phantasms is pretty good, as are Attached, The Pegasus, Lower Decks, Thine Own Self, Genesis, Eye of the Beholder, and Preemptive Strike. Not an extensive list. Both Attached and The Pegasus are amusing because their conclusions feature fundamental character-altering revalations - and yet everything is back to normal the next week.

So to answer my own question, this is in fact the first season which for me the answer is "no" - this isn't worth the money. If only it had some commentary tracks (if somebody would just explain what the heck they were thinking in Sub Rosa, I'd pay money for that), I might reverse my opinion; it's close. I give it 3 stars for the stunning series closer, of course, and the handful of decent episodes and the fact that after all that, it still is Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Picard, Data, Wharf, and Troi are sympathetic charcters (it's a particularly strong "Wharf" season, and the poor guy has been given such short shrift in previous years). But it's also priced very high, and this year has a lot of episodes of truly stunning mediocrity.

The final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation rounds out the collection nicely. All seven seasons look great on a bookshelf, and this season has the same layout and quality of the first season.

Season seven has the same interior layout as seasons one and six, with the single screen playing clips of all four episodes. The most interesting feature is noticing that you get a fly-by view of the captain's ready room and the screen he uses to receive transmissions there. It's a variation on the other seasons, which included the communications panels, holodeck, and sick bay.

Although this is the final DVD release season of TNG - we have much to look forward to with DS9 & Voyager.

Season 7, just like all previous seasons takes you away...to far off planets. The characters in TNG developed so well over the 7 seasons - it's simply amazing to watch.
Although a bit pricy to own all 7 seasons on DVD - if you are a die hard TNG fan...you must. If you cannot afford them, then I would definately say season 7 is a must own...it ties up a lot of curiousitys.

The seventh season was one of my favorite seasons in The Next Generatoin. The script writing was all very creative and original, some examples of this being "Parellels" and my all-time favorite: "All Good Things..." . If you are looking into buying any one season of Star Trek, I would reccomend Season 7.

In what seems a trend in the Star Trek series,the final season, after previous ones had quality episodes,produce some of the worst ever episodes.
A majority of the episodes ranged from mediocre(Liasons,Bloodlines,Journey's End,Homeward,Interface) to just plain terrible(Masks,Emergence,the season premire Descent Pt II).There was even an episode that was the ultimate guilty pleasure(Sub Rosa).
But season seven also had some classic episodes(Phantasms,Attatched,Parallels,The Pegasus,The Lower Decks,Pre-emptive Strike) and of course the memorable series finale All Good Things which would've made a better movie than Star Trek Generations.
Nearly ten years after the last episode,and four movies that seemed like big screen TV movies,it really was the end as the movies shifted it's focus solely on Picard and Data,leaving the other characters in the background(excluding Worf who was featured in the latter four seasons of Deep Space Nine).But even a flawed final season is a safer bet than it's big screen offspring.

By far this is the best TNG season, it has some great episodes that really get you envolved, like Genesis, Attached, and of course All Good Things... Which i feel is the best TNG epsiode out of them all. I would definetly Recommend this season to anyone.

After living in Russia for four years without any Trek, I had to buy the DVDs. It's been wonderful to re-live and share the series with my friends and we are all looking forward to DS-9 and Voyager as the season sets arrive.

Only one small complaint about formatting. I normally skip the prolog "Space, the final frontier ..." and skip to the second track. However, the second track does not always take you to the begining of the first scene after the "commercial break". As a rule of thumb, if after 5 seconds you don't see the name of the episode, track back until you do. You could be missing up to 5 minutes!!!