Star Trek: The Next Generation was a very good TV series in its own, limited way. Neither as iconic as the original series nor as challenging as Deep Space Nine, it brought good, acceptable, safe science fiction to the masses in a reasonably entertaining way. Sometimes it was great! Sometimes it was not. But for quite a long time it really was the only game going in TV sci-fi, at least in America.

Season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation was finally released on Blu-ray yesterday (our review HERE), and to celebrate we here at WhatCulture thought we’d put together a list of the best episodes from that season. It really is something of a struggle in many ways, but we found five we think still hold up!

5. Encounter at Farpoint

Well, this is the episode that started it all. After nearly twenty years of no new Trek on TV (because who counts the animated series?), we finally had a new weekly show to sit back and enjoy.

This episode’s story isn’t great and it’s a bit predictable but it did a great job of introducing us to the series’ new concepts, like the holodeck and saucer-sep (something only mentioned before in the TOS novels), and the characters, especially Picard and his recurring nemesis, Q. It’s fascinating to go back and watch now and see how much of the series changed over the years. There were certainly better episodes than this one, but without this, you don’t get the rest.

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