Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Complete First Season

It began with a simple question: “Kirk or Picard?” No sooner had our lips formed the letter P than the wretched geek leaped from his barstool and set upon us with his Palm Pilot stylus, jabbing us repeatedly in the left kidney and unleashing a spit-drenched litany of Klingon epithets. Only hours later, laid up at the Abbott-Northwestern ICU with a morphine drip and eleven different insurance claim forms in our lap, did we fully grasp our folly. Trek is Trek. To rank any single captain over another—except Captain Janeway—is to unduly divide the Trekker nation. We’d once felt so sure that the venerable Jean-Luc’s glistening pate was a vessel for a mind much greater than that of any generation before him. We’d poured studiously over seven discs with assorted behind-the-scenes featurettes documenting his first tour of duty, repeatedly driven to dumb astonishment by the superhuman steadiness of his command, the genius of his reasoning, the quiet triumph of his most vulnerable invocations. Of the many dastardly villains that lurk in our vast universe, had our very own DVD player proven to be the most treacherous?