The Movie: I've been waiting for this for a long time -- the Star Trek: The Next Generation complete first season on a seven disc set! Remember how overjoyed I was when TNN picked up ST:TNG and started showing it every day... now I can watch all my favorite episodes whenever I want... from the first season anyway.

In my opinion, ST:TNG is one of the best written, best directed, and best acted television series of all time, and I don't just mean that as a Star Trek fan. I think the characters and interactions with each other were very well developed.

But. This is the first season. The actor's hadn't yet found their identities yet, and the writers were still searching for exactly who the characters were, and this is very apparent if you watch the first episode, "Encounter at Farpoint". Everyone and everything seems a little bit awkward and uncomfortable. Sure, in the story, it's a new ship with a new crew, so things should be awkward, but what I mean is that it is apparent that ST:TNG hadn't yet settled into the well tuned machine it became.

That being said, by the time you get to the end of the first season, things are running much more smoothly, everyone seems to have figured out what they are doing and gotten comfortable with their characters and their environment, and it starts to gain the consistency of the ST:TNG that I know and love.

All I can say is I can't wait for the rest of the seasons to come out on DVD. I've long had this fantasy of owning all of the episodes on VHS, but it was never really feasible, as 180+ video tapes would take up a whole lot of room. Here we have a seven disc set with four episodes per disc -- a much more neat, and compact solution, and in the end, when the rest of the entire series has been released, 50 DVD's will take up a whole hell of a lot less room on the shelf than 180 VHS tapes!

The DVD: Well where do I start. I guess I'll start with the packaging, which I found to be rather cumbersome. There is an outside collector's box, and on the inside is the actual case for the seven discs. This case is rather difficult to remove from the outside box, and is quite unruly, as it folds out... and out... and out... until you have all 7 discs sitting there in a row. It takes a lot of room to open this thing up and get the disc you want out, especially if you want one of the ones on the ends.

As for the actual content, the video is in the original 4:3 standard aspect ratio, and looks very clean... probably cleaner than it has ever been shown on TV, and there is certainly a marked difference between watching the reruns on TV and these DVD's.

The audio has been mixed into a new 5.1 mix that seams a little heavy on the treble, but is otherwise pristine... like Patrick Stewart is sitting right in my living room. The last disc in the set has only two episodes (for 26 total, if you count the 2-hour pilot as 2 episodes), but it also has 4 behind-the-scenes type featurettes that range in subject matter from the initial conceptualization of the ST:TNG series, to the actors discussing their roles.

Truthfully, I didn't feel this extra content was as enlightening as it could have been considering the magnitude of this series, but it was certainly nice to see the late Gene Roddenberry speak at length about the series in some old interviews.

The menus are all done up with the LCARS interface from the show, which definitely adds some geek appeal to this set. All in all, I got this set to have all the episodes, and though I would have liked to see the packaging designed a little better, and perhaps some better behind the scenes stuff, let's face it -- you already knew if you wanted to get this set or not before you read this review. I can't see anyone but hardcore fans going out to buy this thing, and those people would be buying it anyway.