I came across this idea a few years back about TNG being a more serialized show. The premise of that discussion was that Riker, since he had been promoted to captain in “Best of Both Worlds”, should have remained as CO of the Enterprise and Picard should have been promoted to Commodore/admiral. The idea intrigued me because it never made sense that Riker saved Earth and then got bumped back down to first officer. Especially since they promoted him in that episode. It’s not like they had done it in the cliffhanger leaving them stuck with how to deal with it.

A bit ago I read the TNG Rewatch written by Keith RA DeCandido over on Tor.com. It’s a fun little run through of TNG twenty years later. But one episode write up, in particular, got me thinking about that old idea.

In the rewatch of “Second Chance“, the one where Riker meets his transporter clone, it’s mentioned that the producers, very briefly, considered the idea of killing Riker, promoting Data to first officer and having the transporter clone take over at Ops. The opportunities for storytelling with that are endless.

It would have been a perfect idea because A) No one would expect it of Star Trek, B) You get all the drama and intensity of a character death without having to fire a good actor, C) You gain all kinds of interesting dynamics of crew relationships to explore (Data as XO, Riker and Troi, everyone and Riker whose not their Riker) D) No more excuses for why Riker doesn’t get his own command for 15yrs.

Star Trek would brush up against this idea again in Voyager when the crew encounters a duplicate of themselves and Harry Kim is killed. The one from the duplicate joins the crew. But those events are never mentioned again and the duplicate has about 30min of different memories, not eight years. So it turned out to be just another excuse to kill a character without actually killing anybody story.

Everyone claims the world wasn’t ready for serialized television when TNG aired. Just a few years later Babylon 5 and DS9 were serialized and people liked those shows.TNG was the far more mainstream show. Would it have lost that place if it had been serialized?

There are legitimate reasons it might not have worked. With serialized shows and no easy access to missed episodes, if you missed you would have trouble catching back up. I know there were some episodes I never saw until I got the DVD’s.

On the other hand, the kind of serialization suggested above isn’t like what we have now. It’s a major change to be sure but it would just be subplot in the background of each episode. If you missed the episode where Riker got promoted you might be unsure why he’s the captain now. But if you missed that episode you would be confused any time Picard’s abduction by the Borg came up. Despite lack of serialization, that did come up a few times.

I think TNG could have done it. And it would have been cool. We will see an inkling of what that would have been like when the new “Picard” show premiers. It won’t be TNG, but will feature some of the characters in a serialized story format. I can’t wait.