Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) in uniform looking ahead in Star Trek: The Next Generation.Image via Paramount Television
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Liam Gaughan
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Liam Gaughan is a film and TV writer at Collider. He has been writing film reviews and news coverage for ten years. Between relentlessly adding new titles to his watchlist and attending as many screenings as he can, Liam is always watching new movies and television shows.
In addition to reviewing, writing, and commentating on both new and old releases, Liam has interviewed talent such as Mark Wahlberg, Jesse Plemons, Sam Mendes, Billy Eichner, Dylan O'Brien, Luke Wilson, and B.J. Novak. Liam aims to get his spec scripts produced and currently writes short films and stage plays. He lives in Allentown, PA.
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There isn’t a better case for why shows should be given the chance to expand beyond a flawed first season than Star Trek: The Next Generation, which infamously started on a sour note. Although the Star Trek sequel series would evolve into one of the most beloved science fiction shows of all time, its first season was plagued with difficulties, and it often felt far too silly to be taken seriously. Among the many hurdles that the show faced within its inaugural year was that Star Trek: The Next Generation had the penultimate episode of its first season banned in the United Kingdom. Although it wasn’t the only time that a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode faced a censorship issue, it was the only instance where the ban was based on explicit content.
The episode "Conspiracy" featured a mystery in which leading members of Starfleet have been possessed by parasitic aliens that intend to manipulate their behavior into an invasion of the Federation of Planets. To show how dangerous this alien race was, a scene was included in which a head was exploded in graphic detail; while a warning ran before the scene in its Canada debut, it was deemed to be too extreme to air on BBC One, and later ran in a severely edited-down form on BBC Two. It may not have sunk Star Trek: The Next Generation any further, but “Conspiracy” was an indication that the show needed to make some adjustments moving forward.
‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ Got Too Gross With ”Conspiracy”
“Conspiracy” played an important role in the arc of the first season because the episode had to introduce a larger threat to the crew of the Enterprise that would see them working together. One of the regular complaints that the series had faced up until that point was that characters were often siloed off into their own storylines and rarely interacted with one another. “Conspiracy” did feature Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) teaming up to examine the peculiar nature of the Starfleet officers, but other members of the crew, such as Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), were first aware of the conspiracy thanks to their scientific analysis. However, the more graphic violence did feel at odds with the tone of the series; even though the original Star Trek series had some episodes with a tinge of horror, “Conspiracy” played its violence for shock value.
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Posts By Liam GaughanThe controversy over “Conspiracy” is representative of some of the broader issues with the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The series struggled to develop nuanced threats that required critical thinking to solve, as the path to defeating the parasites ended up being fairly straightforward. While there may have been an attempt to use the episode to parallel the Iran-Contra scandal of the Ronald Reagan administration, many of the more thoughtful allusions were lost when “Conspiracy” turned into schlock. Although the episode ends with the fate of the parasitic alien issue unresolved, as the enemy species sends out a distress signal to contact other hives across the universe, this was never resolved during the rest of the show, and would only be mentioned in a few in-universe spin-off books related to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ Evolved Past Its First Season
Despite the narrative issues and lack of a compelling conclusion, “Conspiracy” was still one of the high points of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ended on a rather disappointing note with the finale “The Neutral Zone.” The leap in quality between the first two seasons may have been minimal, but Star Trek: The Next Generation really began to turn around its quality by the time it made it to its third year. By avoiding the type of one-off threats in episodes like “Conspiracy” and developing more serialized storylines, Star Trek: The Next Generation was able to become the more mature, intelligent, and timely alternative to the original series.
Star Trek has faced multiple censorship issues over the years, but “Conspiracy” showed how the franchise could be pushed too far with extreme content. What made Star Trek: The Next Generation a more adult-skewing series wasn’t the inclusion of graphic violence, but the introduction of complex issues that didn’t have simple heroes and villains. “Conspiracy” isn’t necessarily a bad episode, especially when compared to some of the other blatant misfires in the first season, but it is indicative of how long it took Star Trek: The Next Generation to find its footing.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
TV-PG
Drama
Mystery
Action
Sci-Fi
Release Date
1987 - 1994-00-00
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