The Best and Worst of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Sci-Fi Optimism

The bright futurism of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the award-winning sci-fi series that warps into its 25th anniversary Friday, was so unique that the show probably wouldn't get the command to engage today.

"There is not a new hopeful, optimistic vision of the future that I am currently aware of," veteran Star Trek: The Next Generation writer (and Battlestar Galactica rebooter) Ronald Moore told Wired by phone. That shiny outlook, on display throughout seven alternately brilliant and bombed seasons, powered the show into our collective consciousness.

"I'd argue that in the last few decades in America, when people are asked what they hope the future will look like, they still turn to Star Trek," Moore said. "They hope we put aside our differences and come together as humanity, that we rise above war, poverty, racism and other problems that have beset us. They hope that there's a future where we set off into the galaxy to have peaceful relations with other worlds."

Still, some of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 178 episodes stand taller than others. We've beamed up our picks for the best and worst episodes (and feature films) in the gallery above for Trekkies (and Trekkers) to dissect, and tagged them with our own "Make it so?" ratings. Give them a level-one diagnostic and add your own picks in the comments section below for a shot at winning a Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season One Blu-ray collection.

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Otherwise known as the six best episodes starring the franchise's omnipotent trickster Q, a character whose evolution is intertwined with Next Generation's DNA. The Q Files range from theatrical debut episode "Encounter at Farpoint" to the moving closure of the two-part series finale "All Good Things." There are also stops off at the Borg-birthing "Q Who," the hilarious "Deja Q," the Robin Hood-inspired "Qpid" and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard's afterlife fable "Tapestry."

Report! According to Moore, who co-wrote "All Good Things," the Hugo-winning series closer "turned out beautifully, and it had no right to!" Meanwhile, "Tapestry" offered Picard, played by Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart, the chance to overwrite his violent history, even though, as Moore explained, "our past mistakes are what make our present lives possible." The results are Star Trek canon.

Treknobabble? Philosophical. The inscrutable Q are godlike jerks who love to mess with humanity's heads, hearts and lives. But they're also a reliable deus ex machina whose morality plays and cosmological inquiry keep The Next Generation much smarter than today's undead cultural programming.

Make it so? Engage, warp 13!

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The Best and Worst of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Sci-Fi Optimism