MATT GURNEY BOLDLY EXPLORES THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE.

STAR TREK’S SIGNATURE SERIES MADE FRANCHISE ENORMOUS

Settling in on sofas and easy chairs across the continent on Sept. 28, 1987, even the most hard-core Star Trek fan couldn’t have imagined what was about to unfold.

I’m not referring to the actual premiere episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Encounter at Farpoint, a two-hour outing that was received generally well by TV critics of the day. I’m not even referring to the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG, as fans call it) itself, which became one of the most successful shows on television during its seven seasons, and certainly the most successful of any of the Star Trek shows to date.

I’m talking about the four television series and the equal number of feature films that came after TNG, and almost certainly because of it, an astonishing 320-plus hours — more than 13 continuous days — of original sci-fi content. (For those keeping score at home, I’ve excluded the J.J. Abrams film reboot of the original television series with Kirk, Spock and McCoy recast for a depiction of an alternate timeline, but did include this week’s double-length premiere of the latest incarnation of the franchise: Star Trek: Discovery.) You can also add novels, video games, comic books and enough merchandise to founder a merchant marine.

Star Trek is gigantic. It’s cultural reach is impossible to define or really even to comprehend (I am consistently amazed by how many TV shows watched by my children, both under five, are basically ripoffs of Star Trek). Some of the terms and phrases TNG invented — holodeck, “Resistance is futile” — have been adopted widely by the public. Moments of the show are now social media memes recognized even by those who’ve probably never seen an episode.

And it’s here today because of the clunky, even occasionally dull premiere that hit the airwaves 30 years ago this week. Our wide familiarity with all things Star Trek should not blind us to how strange this is — arguably even stranger than the fact that TNG, a continuation of the brilliant 1960s sci-fi romp created by Gene Roddenberry — was created at all.

The massive fan support for the original series that ultimately led to TNG’s creation was entirely grassroots and organic, and took 20 years to fully develop. TNG, in contrast, created a massive modern franchise virtually all by itself, all while it was on the air. There was no cooling off period, no decade of fan-organized conventions and letter writing campaigns. It took off in such dramatic fashion that Star Trek: Deep Space 9 launched while TNG was still on the air, and Star Trek: Voyager premiered as soon as TNG ended. (TNG itself was then immediately converted into a feature film franchise of moderate success — it never translated as well onto the big screen as it had on TV, but still held its own).

A belated (if likely unnecessary by this point) disclosure: I’m one of “those” Trekkies/Trekkers (don’t get me started on that ridiculous debate). I can quote Starfleet regulations and dialogue with the best of them.

But I’m also not blind to its faults. Though a bit too young to have caught Encounter at Farpoint live, I was aboard the TNG bandwagon by the third season of 1989/90 and stayed Trek until the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005. Jumping on TNG for season three was entirely a coincidence — my parents finally let me stay up late enough! — but the timing was fortuitous: the third season was when the show really hit its stride.

TNG was painstakingly remastered for the high-definition video era a few years ago, and I picked up each season as it was released and rewatched them in order. It was revelatory.

Most fans would grant that the first two seasons of TNG were nothing special, with the first, in particular, struggling to hit its stride. But actually sitting down to work my way through the first 50 or so episodes of TNG was pretty grim at times.

There are diamonds in that rough, but you need to look very, very carefully to find them.

Encounter at Farpoint wasn’t one of those diamonds. But it also wasn’t terrible. Patrick Stewart as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and Brent Spiner as the android officer Lt. Commander Data are immediately believable in their roles. The studio was clearly willing to spend money on the show, which boasted lavish sets and detailed costumes and props. The plot was a bit barebones (executives made a late decision to extend it from a planned 90 minutes to a full two hours, and the end result feels a bit stretched) but it does the job.

The real magic doesn’t come for two more full seasons, but it came in a big way.

When Star Trek: Discovery premiered this week, rather than amazement that this 51-year-old franchise is still in business at all, the mainstream press instead took the attitude that Star Trek was back, and that’s how it should be.

That’s an incredible achievement, and if Star Trek: Discovery lives up to its potential, fans and nonfans alike could be in for a treat.

Last week, streaming Encounter at Farpoint on Netflix (if you’d tried explaining what that means to a 1987 viewer it would have seemed as futuristic as android officers and Galaxy-class starships), I saw hints of the great things to come, but really only hints.

The episode is almost more interesting as an improbable time capsule than it is a television production. You can enjoy the drama on its own merits, or you can sit back and marvel that this is where the Star Trek of 2017 got its start, and that Star Trek fans have spent the last 30 years doing what Capt. Picard commanded his crew (and the viewers) to do in the episode’s final words: “Let’s see what’s out there.”