Star Trek: The Next Generation-Season 6 (1992)

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General		Extras
Category	Star Trek	Main Menu Introduction Menu Animation & Audio Featurette-Mission Overview Featurette-Departmental Briefing: Production Featurette-Departmental Briefing: Profile - Dan Curry Featurette-Special Crew Profile - Data Featurette-Select Historical Data Featurette-Sets and Props Theatrical Trailer-Star Trek: Nemesis Trailer-Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Rating
Year Of Production	1992
Running Time	1127:50 (Case: 1177)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered Multi Disc Set (7)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Alexander Singer Cliff Bole Winrich Kolbe Les Landau
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Patrick Stewart Jonathan Frakes Brent Spiner Michael Dorn Marina Sirtis Levar Burton Gates McFadden Whoopi Goldberg
Case	Custom Packaging
RPI	$234.95	Music	Jay Chattaway Dennis McCarthy Don Davis

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Full Frame	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	None
16x9 Enhancement	No
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.33:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired French German Swedish Danish Norwegian Dutch Spanish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Season Six of Star Trek: The Next Generation comes after a bit of a break (I think a religious festival of some kind intervened). If you missed them, here are reviews of Season One, Season Two,  Season Three, Season Four, and Season Five.

    Season Five closed with Time's Arrow, Part I. This season starts, naturally enough, with Time's Arrow, Part II. The episodes in Season 6 are:

    Note that the season as a whole scores an M rating, but only disc 4 is rated M — all the others are rated PG. I'd have expected it to be the Chain of Command double episode that caused the higher rating, but that's on disc 3. Maybe it is the moment in Tapestry where Picard gets the injury that damaged his heart?

    In some of the extras, some of the cast and crew say that they thought Season Six was the best. I don't think so. There are some quite decent episodes, but there are some that have gaping plot holes. The episode Rascals is perhaps the worst — it is bad enough to assume that all four members of the away team can be transformed into children, but how come they appear with clothing that fits perfectly? Perhaps their clothing got younger, too? And the double-episode Chain of Command has major plot holes, too — are we really expected to believe that the Federation has no properly trained spies? Ridiculous. And as for the idea that a shuttle could use a gravity whip around Titan to reach a speed of 0.7c? That's complete rubbish. It's such a shame to have such big holes in that part of the plot to Chain of Command, because Patrick Stewart's performance is excellent. Jonathan Frakes' performance in a similar situation in Frame of Mind is a bit less convincing, but he doesn't have Patrick Stewart's acting background.

    I noticed what is probably a slip by the prop people — one of the people in Starship Mine is holding a Varon-T disruptor, a weapon supposedly incredibly rare (only 5 ever made, etc).

    Birthright, Part I, was apparently a cross-over episode with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — Dr Bashir comes aboard the Enterprise briefly.

    There are very few guest stars of significance this season, but one of them really stands out. It's a classic piece of Star Trek trivia: who is the only person ever to play himself on Star Trek: Next Generation? It's (SPOILER ALERT: highlight with mouse to read) Stephen Hawking, who appears at a poker game with Data, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Newton at the start of Descent, Part I. There are other guest stars, but none of that calibre.

    There is no Lwaxana Troi this season, although Majel Barrett continued to be the voice of the computer. Maybe she didn't want to play the ebullient Lwaxana after her husband died?

    Unfortunately, Q appears in two episodes this season, True Q, and Tapestry. The first is not too offensive, as Q episodes go, but the second one annoyed me.

    This entire season is without any appearance of Wesley Crusher, which will make some people happy.

    For all that there was to dislike about this season, it does include a few excellent episodes. Relics is one of my all-time favourites (and LeVar Burton's too) — although it does cast aspersions on Scotty's reputation. A Fistful of Datas is a lot of fun (bear in mind that I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood and his spaghetti Westerns).

    I was a bit surprised at how topical a couple of the episodes were, such as Starship Mine, but then I realised that this series was being made shortly after Desert Storm, so that is completely understandable.

    If you are a believer in the "jump the shark" theory, I think it can well be argued that this series jumped the shark with the episode Rascals.

    All-in-all, this is not the best season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it is still worth watching.

Video

    These DVDs are presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and they are not 16x9 enhanced. This is the aspect ratio in which the series was shot.

    The picture is quite reasonable, but not quite up to the standard of Season 5. There are numerous shots which exhibit quite noticeable film grain (27:31 in Rightful Heir is a dreadful example, although the opening titles aren't a lot better). This affects the sharpness of the image. On shots that aren't grainy the sharpness is usually quite good (there are still occasional shots that are out-of-focus, and Quality of Life is rather softer). Shadow detail is fairly good, although the black trousers of the uniform often show no detail at all. Low-level noise is never a problem.

    Colour is not quite as good as in Season 5. There are a lot of places where the maroon of the command uniform is striated, showing blue lines; a bad example comes at 41:57 in Timescape, but worse still is at 24:12 in Starship Mine. There are no other colour-related artefacts of note, unless you count the rare false colouration on Geordi's VISOR. For some reason it is alway the maroon that's the problem — the blue and mustard uniform colours are never troublesome.

    There are very few film artefacts in anything but the stock footage (you know, the standard "Enterprise in orbit" shots, for example). Looks like they were really looking after the footage by this stage.

    Aliasing is common on model shots (all ship exteriors, for example), but not otherwise, although you can see some at 18:01 in The Chase. Moire is uncommon — the only example I noted was on some corduroy at 18:20 in Lessons. There are no MPEG errors on any significance.

    There are ten subtitle tracks, including both English and English for the Hearing Impaired. I watched most of the English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles, and they are fairly good — reasonably accurate, and always well-timed and easy to read.

    They must be using a different person for the subtitles now. This one thinks the Klingon language is Klingonese. At 31:51 in The Chase the subtitle reads "uranium" when it should be "duranium" — I guess this subtitle writer wasn't up on the techno-babble. Similarly at 24:35 in Man of the People the subtitle reads "Anxiety" when it should read "Imzadi" (the Betazed word Troi uses for Riker) — I guess this subtitler isn't a Star Trek fan.

    All seven discs are single-sided and dual layered. There are no layer changes inside episodes, because there are four episodes per disc (except the final one), with two episodes on each layer.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is presented in five languages — I only listened to the English. It is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1, but the subwoofer is used rarely, and the surrounds get virtually no use, so it reduces to a frontal mix with some stereo imaging but heavy use of the centre channel. Note that the cover claims that the other four languages are provided in mono — this is not true: the German soundtrack is Dolby Digital 5.1, the French and Spanish are Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded, and the Italian is Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround-encoded.

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand. I noticed no flaws in dialogue audio sync.

    Jay Chattaway and Dennis McCarthy scored most of the shows, mostly alternating. Don Davis scored a single episode.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    There are quite a few extras on disc 7 this time.

Menu

    A new design for the menu, and one which I found quite attractive, yet easy to use (except for the cryptic words they've used to label the functions).

Featurette — Mission Overview - Bold New Directions (16:57)

    I honestly don't know what "bold new directions" they are referring to here. Still this is an interesting look at some of the things that happened this season.

Featurette — Departmental Briefing - Production (14:41)

    An explanation of how they recreated the bridge from NCC-1701 for Relics, plus a look at make-up and graphics design work for the show.

Featurette — Departmental Briefing - Profile: Dan Curry (18:54)

    A documentary piece looking at Dan Curry, who specialises in visual effects. He designs weapons (he invented the bat'leth), amongst other things. He has trained for many years in Tai Chi, and a variety of martial arts. He even demonstrates how he intended the bat'leth to be used.

Featurette — Special Crew Profile: Lt Cmdr Data (18:00)

    Another documentary piece, this time about everyone's favourite white-skinned yellow-eyed character (no, not Angel), Data. It's quite interesting that Brent Spiner was reluctant to take the role at first.

Featurette — Select Historical Data (17:15)

    A look at a miscellany of subjects, including casting, music, and Data's double.

Featurette — Inside Starfleet Archives: Sets and Props (12:24)

    Two short pieces, one on set dressing, and one on props. Really rather interesting problems, both of them, because you can't go to the local furniture store, or electronics shop, to buy 24th century furniture and props.

Trailer: Star Trek Nemesis (1:28)

    A fairly standard, but interesting, trailer for the next movie from the ST:TNG crowd.

Trailer: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine DVDs (1:28)

    A decent trailer for the DVD releases of DS9 — they'll be coming out in 2003.

    This box set was released in Region 1 last year with the same features. The only difference, apart from the obvious NTSC versus PAL issue, is that the R1 is in a cardboard box, while ours is in this nifty plastic one (which is much more robust).

    A decent season of episodes, given an excellent transfer to DVD.

    The video quality is quite good.

    The audio quality is good.

    The extras are good, and will take a while to get through.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall