The premise of this book is a bizarre, metatextual one: what if Star Trek: The Next Generation had had an eighth season, and that eighth season had been so incredibly bad that it had never been aired, and then someone had had the chance to watch these unreleased episodes and write an episode guide about them? It’s not your standard sci-fi franchise spin-off book, but it’s a lot of fun.
Originally the author, Mike McMahan, had a Twitter account which he dedicated to writing really silly Star Trek TNG story synopsise. Due to its popularity, he was able to publish an official book filled with these storylines, which he said was inspired by his love of the silly B storylines that real episodes of TNG have. It’s a nice, loving way of sending the series up, and it’s sure to appeal to fans.
So what kind of things do the characters get up to in this season? Well, Q sets up a timeloop where Barclay relives the same day over and over, to see if it’s possible for him to survive without the help of others, but he ends up comically dying every single time, sometimes in the most mundane ways (e.g. an ear infection spreads to his heart). In another, there’s a planet that ends up being entirely populated with Riker clones. In another, Q asks for Picard’s help in breaking up with Cleopatra, but then accidentally changes all of history, so then needs to mess the timeline up so badly that it all snaps back to normal.
Some of them, in particular the one about Q messing up the timeline, are things I’d have loved to have seen as actual light-hearted episodes of the show. Other times though, it goes too far down the path of being silly. Most notably, Data and Geordi are both always written as socially awkward losers who are extremely childlike – they’re complete parodies, and I know that’s a weird criticism since the whole thing is a general parody of TNG, but I think it’s funnier when the characters are close enough to their legitimate portrayal, but still in the absolute silliest storylines.
Still, as a fan of TNG and Star Trek in general, overall I found this book hilarious. There are so many laugh out loud moments that fans are going to love. It’s a weird combination of storylines that are so silly, they’d obviously never have existed, and those that could be just about plausible. Still, to its credit, even though I didn’t love all the episode ideas equally, not one of them failed to make me laugh. Also, one of the stories introduces a member of the Q continuum who goes by the name California Steve. I want that to be canon.
Rating: 8/10
