If all you know about Star Trek: The Next Generation is the episodes, do yourself a favor and watch the gag reel for season two. Making a serious show about space can be pure comedy:
Season Two is where Whoopie “Guinan” Goldberg joined the show as a 23rd-century bar tender. Season Two was also our first look at the Borg, and we learned that Data’s storage capacity is stated as 800 quadrillion bits. In current terms, this equates to 88.818 pebibytes (PiB), or more simply, 100,000 terabytes (TB). For comparison, the entire Netflix library is estimated to be ~100TB.
Other fun facts about that season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The 1988 Writers Guild of America strike caused the season to be shortened to 22 episodes, the lowest amount for any season in the series. Writers including David Gerrold, who wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles” for the original series, came on board and pitched an episode called “Blood and Fire“, which included two homosexual crew members and an AIDS allegory. Roddenberry cleared the idea, but later his lawyer torpedoed the script. The behind-the-scenes shenanigans later caused Gerrold to ask for his contract not to be renewed.
I hope you enjoyed this deep dive on Star Trek! Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend! 🙂
