How well do you know the goings on of the USS Enterprise? Take this quiz to find out
Before it started airing in 1987, the very idea of Star Trek: The Next Generation was sacrilegious to most Trekkies. For two decades, Captain Kirk’s Enterprise crew simply was Star Trek. That was true in the endless reruns of the original show, the cartoon series, the novels, and the big-screen movies. But Stark Trek creator Gene Roddenberry felt there was a market for a new show as long as no attempt was made to replicate the original characters or their unique dynamics. Things got off to a very rocky start in the first season due to painfully bad episodes like “Code of Honor,” which deals with matters of race in, let’s just say, unfortunate ways. But the show slowly found its rhythm in Season Two (despite the ill-fated decision to temporarily jettison Dr. Crusher), and became truly brilliant by Season Three. (And yes, Season Seven had jump-the-shark moments: Worf and Troi shouldn’t have dated. It felt very much like Joey and Rachel dating near the end of Friends — icky and wrong.) As we approach the 40-year anniversary of TNG, here’s a quiz designed to test even the most hardcore fan’s knowledge.
Zero to 30 percent correct: Set your television to Paramount+. Engage! You need to take a seven-season journey through Star Trek: The Next Generation. Be warned: It’s very inconsistent, and the lows can be painfully low. (We won’t judge you if you skip the Season Seven episode “Masks.” And would it have killed them to let Geordi have a romantic victory at least once? Even Data gets laid.) But the highs are amazingly high. If you don’t cry at the end of “The Inner Light,” you were born without an emotion chip.
31 to 60 percent correct: Nice work. You’ve clearly been through the series at least once or twice. For next steps, we recommend you read The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, by Edward Gross and Mark Altman. Yes, that is the book’s real title. It goes through the entire saga in fascinating detail.
61 to 100 percent correct: You made it so! There’s not much we can teach you, but it’s worth checking out William Shatner’s 2014 documentary, Chaos on the Bridge, which covers the first two seasons of the series. (Spoiler: It was a total shit show.) There’s also the 1994 documentary Journey’s End: The Saga of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which tells the broader story. We’d love to recommend the sequel series Star Trek: Picard, but it was mostly disappointing. (The scene near the very end where the entire TNG crew briefly mans a restored Enterprise D almost makes the whole series worth it. Almost.)
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