Games

Originally airing from 1988 to 1989, the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was beset by challenges. A writer's strike crippled Hollywood between seasons and the show was almost cancelled as a result. The producers were able to get around the problem by re-tasking scripts from the aborted Star Trek: Phase II TV show from the 1970s, reducing the season order by four episodes and - in a fit of true desperation - dropping a clip show (the terrifyingly awful Shades of Grey , widely-acknowledged as the worst episode of the entire franchise) into the mix. They scraped through to produce a season that is a notable improvement over the first year, and definitely better than it has any right to be given the situation it was produced under. As with the first season, things get off to a bumpy start but improve later on. Fortunately, they improve a lot faster. The first two episodes, The Child (Troi gets pregnant with a rapidly-evolving alien thingamajig) and Where Silence Has ...

Star Trek: The Next Generation 's second season will be released on Blu-Ray on 4 December 2012. Like the first season, the second season has been painstakingly re-mastered for high-definition, with each episode rebuilt from its source film elements from scratch. As a bonus for fans, the set will include a specially-extended cut of the fan-favourite episode The Measure of a Man . A longer cut of the episode was specially prepared back in 1988 for writer Melinda Snodgrass. Snodgrass kept her copy of the extended cut and loaned it back to the remastering team, allowing them to create this extended version of the episode. The set will also include a brand-new roundtable discussion between the original TNG castmembers as they talk about the show twenty-five years on from its launch. CBS has also revealed that the first season sold almost 100,000 copies in its first five days on sale in the USA alone, a highly impressive figure (making back more than half of the money invested in rema...

In 1987 Paramount undertook one of the bravest gambits in their history. They revived their most famous franchise, Star Trek , as a new, ongoing television series. Unable to afford to bring back the original actors, they created a new ship and a new crew, boldly going where no-one had gone before roughly a century after the events of the original series. Everyone expected the new series to flop badly, but instead it was an instant smash hit. 27 million people watched the pilot and the show would go on to last for seven seasons and 178 episodes (a hundred episodes more than the original series). It spawned no less than three spin-offs (the superb Deep Space Nine and the somewhat-less-accomplished Voyager and Enterprise ) and led to a resurrection in small-screen SF shows of all stripes. It would be fair to say that the series did not start off at its most promising, however. The show spends most of its 25-episode first season finding its feet. Fierce behind-the-scenes battles between...

The first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation launched on Blu-Ray last week as part of the 25th anniversary of the show. Much has been made of the updating of the series to high definition, with the Blu-Ray set dedicating an entire documentary to the process, which is fascinating. An original shot from The Arsenal of Freedom , upscaled to HD from the original 1988 videotape master. The planet is blurry because the original was a matte painting transferred into a low-res bitmap, whilst the Enterprise lacks detail due to coming off the SD video master tape. The jagged lines are down to less-effective mixing technology. The same shot from the new Blu-Ray version. The original, low-res planet bitmap has been replaced by a 3D CG model, based on the original but far more detailed. The Enterprise is actually the exact same shot as in the original episode, with the extra detail emerging from the original film footage rather than any modern enhancements. The original series of TNG was...

As mentioned earlier this year, Paramount have been undertaking a substantial amount of work to bring Star Trek: The Next Generation to the Blu-Ray format. They have now confirmed that Season 1 will be released on 24 July in both the UK and USA. This is more than just a transfer of the existing DVD release. In order to generate a true HD image, a team of editors and technicians had to go back to the original film (fortunately stored under a salt mine in Virginia) and re-master the entire series. This necessitated each episode being re-edited from scratch to match the original versions of the episodes from twenty-five years ago, only at a superior visual quality. This substantial amount of work is the reason for the Blu-Ray set's price: £52 in the UK (Amazon price; street price will likely be higher) is quite a lot for a Blu-Ray boxed set of an old series. However, the impressive amount of work put into the project so far goes some way to making up for the higher cost. The Ameri...

Paramount have pulled out all of the stops for the forthcoming Blu-Ray release of Star Trek: The Next Generation , going as far as re-assembling every single one of the 178 episodes from scratch. Back in the day, ST:TNG was produced with all the raw elements (live action, model shots, visual effects etc) on film. However, these elements were then transferred to video tape before the elements were assembled into the final episode. The previous VHS and DVD releases came from this video master tape. Unfortunately, this wasn't going to cut it for Blu-Ray and HD, so Paramount had to go back to the original film rolls - stored for a quarter of a century in a salt mine in Pennsylvania - and basically re-assemble every episode from the ground up. It's an impressive amount of work that, based on the video above, seems to have paid off. A precise release date for the Season 1 Blu-Ray set has not been set, although I'd put money on it being September 2012 (the 25th anniversary of ST...