This Is Where TNG Really Clicked for Me

Season 4 of Star Trek: The Next Generation might be my favorite season of the show so far.

What is interesting is that I did not feel that way immediately. Compared with Season 3, which came out swinging, Season 4 starts as much more of a slow burn. The first stretch is quieter and more focused on individual characters. At first I wondered when the season was going to really kick into gear, but by the end I understood what it was doing. Season 4 spends a lot of time getting underneath these characters, and that groundwork makes the bigger moments hit much harder.

“Family” was probably the first episode where that really clicked for me. Watching Picard return home after everything that happened with the Borg felt incredibly personal. Obviously I cannot compare my own experiences to what Picard went through, but the idea of feeling lost after trauma and needing to reconnect with your roots and the people who keep you grounded hit very close to home. It remains one of my favorite episodes of TNG so far. That quieter, more reflective storytelling continues throughout the season, especially with Data.

I absolutely love the Data episodes. They have become some of the most interesting episodes of the entire show because Data gives TNG a way to examine humanity from the outside. “Data’s Day” is a great example. Through his eyes, completely ordinary human behavior suddenly becomes strange, funny, complicated, and meaningful. What surprised me most was how thoughtful this writing feels for television produced in the early 1990s. TNG is constantly asking questions about identity, emotion, relationships, prejudice, and what it actually means to be human. That feels very connected to what the original Star Trek was trying to do decades earlier. The franchise has always used the future to challenge the assumptions of the present.

Season 4 really leans into that.

“The Host” might be the episode that surprised me the most. It is dealing with love, identity, gender, embodiment, and whether your feelings for someone can survive when the body they inhabit changes. I would not call it a perfect modern exploration of those subjects because you can absolutely see where the cultural boundaries of 1991 still existed, especially in the ending. But the fact that mainstream television was even engaging with these questions that directly is remarkable.

That episode made me realize how much more ambitious TNG's storytelling had become. Season 4 also continued building Worf into one of the strongest characters on the show. The Klingon material has increasingly become some of my favorite worldbuilding in TNG, and closing the season with “Redemption” and a Klingon civil war was a hell of a move.

Also, Klingons continue to have the hardest dialogue imaginable.

“Your blood will paint the way to the future.”

Goddamn. Klingons are fucking metal.

I also really enjoy the cliffhanger structure TNG started using at the end of Season 3. Season 4 ends with “Redemption, Part I,” and I immediately continued into Part II. I can only imagine what watching this when it originally aired must have been like. Waiting months for the conclusion of “The Best of Both Worlds” or “Redemption” had to be torture.

I do still have one major criticism of TNG as a whole: I wish there were more continuing story arcs. I understand that episodic television is part of Star Trek's DNA, especially from this era, and Season 4 proves that individual episodes can still have enormous emotional and thematic weight. But when the show does allow stories to continue across episodes, particularly with Worf, Klingon politics, Picard's trauma, or recurring characters, I find myself wanting more of that.

Character-wise, Season 4 also rearranged my rankings a little.

Geordi La Forge is becoming one of my least favorite members of the main crew, which is frustrating because Season 3 had really turned me around on him. His behavior around Leah Brahms is incredibly uncomfortable, and even accounting for the fact that this was written in 1990, his romantic characterization just feels off. Then “Identity Crisis” comes along and has him slowly becoming an alien creature while giving off genuinely sinister energy, and apparently Season 4 just decided Geordi's vibes would be weird this year.

On the opposite end, Worf continues getting better.

And then there is Q.

I have not talked about Q nearly enough because I am slightly concerned he has become one of my favorite characters.

Q is chaotic, theatrical, funny, dangerous, and somehow genuinely invested in Jean-Luc Picard. He reminds me a lot of the Doctor from Doctor Who, except considerably more threatening and kind of an asshole.

“Qpid” really emphasized why I like him. Q has this strange ability to drag parts of Picard's personality into the open that Picard normally keeps carefully hidden from his crew. Vash does the same thing. Through both of them, we get to see a more vulnerable, adventurous, and human version of Jean-Luc.

Q is still my guy. I do not care if I am supposed to like him.

By the time Season 4 reaches “Redemption,” everything the season has been building feels worth it. What initially seemed slower than Season 3 ultimately became a season focused on deepening the people, cultures, and ideas at the center of the show.

Season 3 showed me how good TNG could be.

Season 4 showed me how much it could actually say.

Season 4 is top-tier TNG for me. It is thoughtful, surprisingly bold, occasionally uncomfortable, frequently hilarious, and at its best deeply human.