Talia Levin says of spending the pandemic binging through all seven seasons of the Patrick Stewart-led Star Trek series: "The Next Generation is a deliciously peculiar show, and I found myself seduced by its expansive vision of humanity – a humanity that included countless alien races, adorned with putty on their foreheads and sometimes-impenetrable cultural mores, but which never flagged in its genteel optimism that all differences could be overcome, with enough Earl Grey and moral deliberation...As tens of millions of Americans face unemployment, eviction, and starvation, what began to strike me as the most radical element of The Next Generation were the things that had happened before it began: scarcity and poverty had been eliminated, and with it the drive to greed, and the desperation of the have-nots, and clenched fist of state violence shattering the will to upend a status quo that offers nothing to most, and the most to those who need nothing."
TOPICS: Star Trek: The Next Generation, Patrick Stewart, Retro TV