Star Trek The Next Generation Feature Length Episodes: Ranked
When the stories are simply too good to stick to one episode!
Back when The Next Generation was enjoying its first run, serialised television was not something that the producers were interested in. They were more concerned with stand alone episodes that new fans could watch on a week to week basis, without having to invest in seasons of backstory to be able to keep up.
Feature length episodes began as a rarity in Star Trek. The Original Series had only one, The Menagerie, and the first few seasons of The Next Generation spaced them out.
However, the success of the feature length stories on The Next Generation led to them arriving more frequently, they led to Deep Space Nine testing longer form storylines and in the long run, led to Discovery and Picard existing as purely serialised shows.
And some of those feature-length events were some of the best Next Generation episodes... But which ones?
10. Encounter At Farpoint
The opening episodes of The Next Generation were a mix of positive and negative. The new series debuted with excellent visuals and effects, a wonderful cameo from DeForrest Kelly and the introduction of the new cast. It is now well recorded that the cast hadn't believed the show would last. If each episode remained at the quality of this one (referring specifically to the general level of acting) then it would be quite understandable to believe that too.
But Encounter at Farpoint is not all bad. Q is introduced and while he is more menacing than he would later appear, he is an excellent addition and the plot thread of the trial would of course run through the series. Not much else works to be fair and many lessons were learned.
Season 1 of The Next Generation was shaky but as an opener, it was far from the worst episode of the season (Code of Honour will have that...honour...for the foreseeable future) but it is certainly the weakest of the two-part stories.