Captain's Log: Season Seven

To boldly go no further

This is one of a series of transporter room shots taken of the season seven cast, the ‘best’ of which was later sold as a poster. But during the shoot, Michael Dorn reached out and grabbed Patrick Stewart’s shoulder and said something (it’s not clear what) and cracked Stewart up. Despite the resolution being a bit poor, I just love this photo of Stewart, Sirtis, and Frakes smirking while the others try to look serious - what a great cast photo for ending WAMTNG’s season introductions!

At last, the inevitable has happened… we have reached the final season of TNG. What a great journey this has been!

Season seven isn’t one of my favourites, I’m afraid… it suffers greatly from comparison with the astonishing season six before it, and there’s a patchy quality to the episodes that mars my enjoyment of it. It doesn’t help that one of the candidates for worst episode is in this bunch (even if one of the absolute best is here too). While season one may be worse in many practical ways, there are qualities about the debut year that make me remember it warmly despite its flaws, and that’s just not the case with season seven. I acknowledge it’s a far more polished production at this point than the first two seasons, but I’d still rather watch either of those than season seven. Such, at least is my memory. I’m looking forward to challenging that assumption by re-watching all the episodes again!

Behind the scenes, although Michael Piller continues to receive a credit as Executive Producer, he has actually handed the showrunner role over to Jeri Taylor. I believe this change at the helm is rather too apparent. Taylor just isn’t Piller (unsurprisingly), and although she’s both done and will go on to do great work on the Star Trek franchise relative to this point in her career, I fear she may have been slightly overwhelmed by the challenge facing her. That said, I don’t think anyone else was up to the job! Ronald D. Moore would eventually get there, but let’s be honest: he was 29 when TNG finished and Taylor was 55. There really was no better choice, it’s just those were very big shoes she had to fill…

It’s also significant that Taylor terminated the remarkable open-submission process that Piller had pioneered on TNG. I don’t believe it ever came back on any future show, either in the original production run or in the ‘big budget fan fiction’ that came later. For season seven, Taylor centred the writing process upon the core team of writers, and even though she occasionally invited freelancers to the table to make submissions, this was a very small part of the show’s final year. Fortunately, a few lucky folks got in ‘before the bar dropped’! More on this as we work through the final set of WAMs.

Finally, despite being quite a bit weaker than the last season, the Emmy Awards finally honoured the show that year with a nomination for “Outstanding Drama Series”. Okay, it didn’t win (this is the Emmies we’re talking about) but no other syndicated series has ever been nominated in this category. Just to get the nod was a huge and richly deserved achievement, even if it did come just a little too late to truly honour the greatest achievements of this show.

Is This The End of WAMTNG…?

Just twenty six more episodes and that’ll be the end of WAMTNG. Or will it? I could go on and do two more instalments, WAMTNG: Origins (with WAMs for classic Star Trek) and WAM DS9, for the sequel show…

So what do you think? Does the voyage end here, or shall we boldly go on further? Click the link below to vote about what happens next!

Should we boldly go on...?

You may as well do this now, as I’m going to bug you about for weeks to come!

End of Season Promotions

It’s time for the final set of promotions! Tradition has it that the Captain (me) promotes one of the Away Team at the end of each season, but really the crew has been shockingly lax over the last twenty-odd episodes. Where are the comments? Where are the likes? I write you more than a thousand words a week and you can’t even click a button to say you enjoyed yourself! This is not the standard Starfleet expects from ranking officers! 🤣

However, one of the crew has never neglected their duties. And so - fittingly, since he wrote a screenplay that led to a season seven episode! - I’m giving this final rank advancement to Will Stape, who is officially promoted to the rank of Commander, and therefore becomes the First Officer of WAMTNG. Congratulations, Will - and many, many thanks for all your support throughout this three-and-a-half year voyage! Truly appreciated. If you check your imagination, you will find your black pip has turned gold!

And to the rest of you: please do yourself a favour and go and subscribe to Will’s Substack Sci-fi Guy, or if you’re not as horrified by Evil Google as I am, to his YouTube channel, A Sci-Fi Guy. Mostly the same content, different channels, but if you watch videos and love sci-fi, Will could use your support!

This gives us a vacancy in the command structure, so I am also promoting Lieutenant Ivo to Lieutenant Commander, with thanks for frequent comments and support. Truly appreciated! You can have Will’s old black pip, Ivo!

That’s all for now. Even if we follow WAMTNG with the sequels, I don’t think I’ll go on maintaining the duty roster as it’s been a fairly thankless task. Although if you’ve enjoyed this little game, do let me know in the comments.

Dismissed!

Final Duty Roster

Captain Bateman

Commander Stape, First Officer*

Lieutenant Commander Mower
Lieutenant Commander British Tennessean
Lieutenant Commander (Adam) Kozak
Lieutenant Commander Ivo*

Lieutenant Wightwave
Lieutenant Rob
+2 Lieutenants currently off duty

Lieutenant JG Jess H**
Lieutenant JG Elliott
Lieutenant JG (Benedict Tiberius) Cato*
Lieutenant JG inw*

Ensign Haddie
Ensign Gibbens
Ensign (Mordechai) Buxner
Ensign (Gustavo Jaramillo) Luzardo
Ensign (Homer) Picard
Ensign Vee
+93 crewmen

* indicates a Commendation
** indicates Citation of Conspicuous Gallantry