About the only things that carry over, outside the basic "Space... the final frontier" setup, are:

• There is a strongly-godlike guy named Q who drops in occasionally.
• A member of the crew died during S1 and people were sad about it.
• The previous Chief Medical Officer is Wesley's mother; I don't even remember why she wandered off for S2.

Next Generation is very strongly a planet-of-the-week show. I'm not saying it's always good, and a lot of very silly things happen, but it's certainly consistently better after S1.

hS

Assuming "S1E1 - Pilot" is the first episode, obviously... ^_~

There's a lot to like. The muppets are shockingly Labyrinth, which shouldn't have taken me by surprise but did. I enjoyed the fact that John Crichton (Kaitlyn, incredulously: "Is his name actually John?!), Human Manly Adventurer, actually isn't a pilot. He's a scientist! The fact that he latches onto the first person he meets who looks like him is a problem, but it's a problem because of the character, not the writing. (I also giggled at the reveal that he apparently thinks Pilot is actually transparent and blue. Has he never seen Star Wars?)

In terms of plot, there wasn't much to say on the basis of one episode. It feels like it's setting up a "planet of the week (because we're being chased)" show, a la Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, arguably Voyager and Quantum Leap... there was a bit of a growth industry on those, wasn't there? But for all I know, they could have escaped the Peacekeepers at the end of the episode and will now spend three seasons floating in a nebula.

The Peacekeepers... would operate a lot better if they weren't being led by '90s Lin Manuel Miranda. The dude repeatedly watched clear footage of his brother harassing and sideswiping a stationary ship, and still went with "you killed my brother, prepare to die". If we could just promote him to a desk job, the rest of the crew should have this whole escaped-prisoners malarkey locked up by lunchtime.

Moya is beautiful ^_^. I'm less instantly enamoured of her crew, which consists of Ood Klingon, Sex-Cultist Twi'lek, Evil Muppet, Transparently Blue Guy, and now Adventure Scientist and Literally The Enemy. They're good TV, but I don't find myself liking them as people straight off.

Except Pilot, who... isn't a pilot? I'm confused. He seems to be the Ops officer, keeping ship's systems going and maybe telling the "autopilot" where they want to go. I would have expected him to have the manual flight controls, but I guess the translator microbes got a bit mixed up. (Love those, by the way, though them being given in childhood makes me wonder whether anyone speaks the same language as anyone else, or if everyone across space just invented their own language which the microbes translate.)

hS