drst:
The single greatest cliffhanger of all time.
Try to imagine it. It’s the spring of 1990, and “Star Trek: The Next Generation“ has been on the air for three seasons - and is about to break the Original Series’ record by having a fourth season.
Denise Crosby (Lt. Tasha Yar) left the show before the first season was over. Gates McFadden was summarily fired and replaced for season two, only to return in season three at the insistence of Patrick Stewart. So change had always been a possibility.
There was no internet. Which meant no spoilers like we now know them. No set reports. No speculation amongst the fans outside of conventions or groups of friends. Which meant no way to cope with the anxiety, no bulletin boards to post “AHHH! WTF?” on while you waited.
We may know now how it all turned out, but back then? I’ve got friends who where trekkies in the day, and the summer of 1990 was full of anxiety!
This was an amazing story arc, really.
I remember seeing graffiti saying “Picard Lives” which was basically the 1990 equivalent of a hashtag.
I feel like this and the cliffhanger at the end of S1 of The West Wing are about on equal footing. I lived neither live (I came into TWW in S2), but, SHEESH.
There was in fact internet, but it was EXTREMELY limited and very few people had access to it.
Over that summer, it exploded with, well, Star Trek fandom.
We were away from the tv, I forget why (coulda been anything, it was on Saturdays in my town), and come to find out our VHS ran out thirty seconds from the end. We didn’t even know it was the season finale till we saw there was a rerun the next week. I wrote my mother, “Can’t have missed much, unless it was Picard coming on the bridge screen covered in rocker switches and flywheels.”
I had just gotten home from my first year of college.
That year, we’d take our trays from the dining hall into the largest living room at Bryn Mawr, where dozens of women would cram around a tv to watch each week. It was packed – there may have been 50-100 people.
Star Trek around a TV set in a college dorm room, which was the way my parents and their friends watched classic Trek when it first aired.
So then I came home from Hogwarts (it was Hogwarts; Google “Bryn Mawr”) back to the way things used to be, just me and Mom and Dad. Who were Trekkies, luckily, but still.
Shows didn’t do arcs in those days, and cliffhangers were rare outside Doctor Who. So it was a stunner. I had no friends to scream with after it was over. I had to wait until September.
And you’d better believe that room was PACKED. The anticipation was intense. You could’ve heard a pin drop in big, echoing, Erdman hall.
That was probably the most vivid experience for Trekkies of my generation and the original generation, second only to “I am and always shall be your friend.”