May the Fourth be With You Where No One Has Gone Before!

So I'm having lunch and the guy behind the bar decides he's going to troll everyone.

He puts on screen "Encounter at Farpoint", the pilot episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation".

Yeah, they went there.

Re-watching that episode really drove home for me how I find ST:TNG fairly unwatchable unlike "Star Trek: The Original Series".

Sure, both shows are over-acted, but I find the self-righteous, stiff-postured, priggy smugness of TNG to be just unbearable when compared with the milder, more overly-sentimental TOS.

And then there's the characters. Sure, TOS had caricatures: the square-jawed, torn-shirt, womanizing James Tiberius Kirk. The crotchety, folksy Leonard "Bones" McCoy. The brilliant, reserved, slightly alien Spock. The hard-drinking Montgomery Scott. Etc. Etc. Those caricatures were interesting! They had actual passion to them! TNG characters were bland, self-righteous, and uninteresting. Sure, Jean-Luc Picard got a little romance later, after he established his love of Earl Grey, but the rest were yawn-inducing or, in the case of Data, utterly predictable plot points to explore human psyche. Worf's Klingon stories, introduced later to give more conflict, passion, and depth, never felt like they fit.

Damn! Now I want to re-watch the old show.