Poll of the Day > Are there any truly great episodes of TNG in the first season?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's a bit of a slog.

Not really

Depends what you mean - a lot of the Season 1 weirdness sets up the universe and they were trying to capture the style of the original Star Trek.

As wonky as it is, Code of Honour is very in-line with how an OG Star Trek episode would go

The Last Outpost is a classic, even though it's also rather wonky

The Battle/Hide and Q/Haven are all good establishing episodes

Too Short a Season is probably the best episode, covering both the ambitions and compromises the Federation makes behind the scenes...

Arsenal of Freedom is probably the next best episode that is just a straight short story without any character or world establishment... some might not like it because of those reasons, but sometimes you just need a short story in space. Symbiosis is similar in this regard, but not quite as good.

And then Conspiracy... the episode that made everyone glue their eyes to the TV for the next 20 years

...

The first season is often regarded as the weakest one. Like watch the first two-parter, maybe the season finale, and then get through the highlights of season 2. After that, it's gold until some point in season 6 when it's mainly highlights again, iirc? But still decent beyond that.

Home Soil is my favorite episode in Season 1. Ugly bags of mostly water.

"truly great" is maybe hard to say, but there are some good ones. they basically all have some lower-quality/annoying issues though, so no, I can't say they're "truly great", though I might think differently if I had just watched them in the past few weeks/months.

Encounter at Farpoint
Where No One Has Gone Before (except for Wesley)
The Big Goodbye (I think I liked it more as a kid)
Datalore
Heart of Glory
The Arsenal of Freedom
Symbiosis
Conspiracy (this one could maybe be great but it's not perfect either and one might think it's silly too)

11001001 is supposed to be good but I don't think I liked it that much

Whenever I rewatch TNG I suffer through Season 1, but I always tell myself:

"Once this season is over, the worst will be behind me."

One of those shows where it gets better as the years go by and doesn't have that "They should have stopped years ago" feel to it.

I found season 1 a tad underwhelming but not bad, it's at worst mediocre.

the one where Wesley goes to the academy
like all the scenes of just Wesley and Picard are gold