An Important Star Trek Creative Originally Described The Next Generation As 'Cheesy'

Even the most passionate Trekkies will likely agree that "Star Trek," throughout its 60-year history, has been corny a lot of the time. Despite its big budgets, a lot of "Star Trek" episodes had to create vast, exotic alien worlds out of nothing but studio soundstages, a few ficus plants, and a hard-working smoke machine. The original series was notorious for its styrofoam rocks, and "Star Trek: The Next Generation," especially in its early seasons, had too many scenes set against fake-looking monochrome "skies," that were clearly just indoor backdrops. Both shows got a lot of mileage from location shoots in Southern California, but L.A. natives could easily recognize that distant planets were being played by Vasquez Rocks (used in many sci-fi movies) or Topanga Canyon. The early cheesiness of "Next Generation" was largely accepted by Trekkies, who understood that "Star Trek" was going to have occasionally cheap production design, almost as a matter of tradition.

At the beginning of NextGen's fourth season in September of 1990, the showrunners hired a recent graduate of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to be an intern, named Brannon Braga. Braga, as all Trekkies can tell you now, became one of the show's star writers, and changed the direction of the series for the better. Braga would go on to write for "Star Trek: Voyager," and co-created "Star Trek: Enterprise" in 2001. 

According to the oral history book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Braga recounted those early days, and confessed that he was no Trekkie. He, like so many of us, thought that NextGen was cheesy. 

Braga didn't mince words, saying simply: 

"I had an internship through the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and I found out I was going to be on a show called 'Star Trek: The Next Generation.' Although I was not a 'Star Trek' fan, I had checked out 'Next Generation' when the pilot aired, and I watched the first couple of episodes. It wasn't my cup of tea. I thought it was cheesy." 

But, Braga was a quick convert. He was in school at UC Santa Cruz a back when the show started to get good, and he recalls a lot of his classmates recommending the series to him, even after he had rejected it. When he was about to begin his internship on the series, however, Braga decided to revisit the series, and just happened to land on "The Best of Both Worlds" (June 18, 1990). That episode is widely regarded as the best (and most famous) of the series, as it boasted an intense story of how Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) was abducted and assimilated by the malevolent cyborgs known as The Borg. After seeing it, Braga said, "Wow! I thought this show is pretty great." 

Braga said that the very first day of his internship was walking in on producer and writer Michael Piller, the man who would become his mentor, who asked the young intern, "How do we beat the Borg?" Braga got to witness Piller struggling with the second part of "Both World" first hand. Fifteen years later, wistfully, Braga was the last one out of the building when "Star Trek: Enterprise" came to a close. That was quite a 15 years.