by the time The Next Generation was ready to embark, Star Trek was a bona fide phenomenon. Devoted fans kept the fire burning during the wilderness years, the decade between the airing of final original series episode “Turnabout Intruder” and the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And the cult continued to grow during that period, thanks to nightly reruns on local TV stations. Attendance at Trek conventions, which began in earnest in 1972—nearly three years after the show’s cancelation—grew steadily through the ’70s. Star Trek Lives! gets much of the credit for being a pioneer in the convention space, but the New York City fan celebration—which ran for five consecutive years—was not the first. That honor belongs to a much smaller gathering, Star Trek Con in Newark, New Jersey in 1969.
The relatively brief run of Star Trek: The Animated Series from the fall of 1973 until the fall of 1974 also helped stoke the Trek revival movement.
When “Encounter at Farpoint,” The Next Generation pilot, aired, the franchise already had four original-crew movies under its belt. The last of these, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, had been the most commercially successful of the franchise and nearly tied with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as the most critically acclaimed of the classic crew movies; Khan scored 88 percent and Voyage Home registered 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, these scores were retroactive since neither Rotten Tomatoes nor the internet existed in those days. Needless to say, Paramount believed in the franchise and was willing to put some money and production value behind its new syndicated sequel series. The effects are laughable by today’s standards, but they were nothing short of cutting-edge in the ’80s. The production team wanted its world to be as believable as its budget and technology would allow, and that meant populating the Enterprise. It also meant that sometimes that population wanted to go where everybody knew their names. That watering hole had its own Sam Malone, in the form of Guinan. The fact that a very familiar face, Whoopi Goldberg, embodied the role, meant the audience would instantly bond with the barkeep, just as the crew of the Enterprise-D would.
Guinan’s familiarity was already baked in to the series. We didn’t get an episode that spent any significant amount of time introducing this new character. There was no fanfare. Her first scene didn’t even have any lines (those would come later in the episode). She just was. Only Whoopi Goldberg could pull that off.
When it came time to launch another spinoff series—Deep Space Nine, (DS9) which debuted midway through The Next Generation’s sixth season—you could be damned sure there’d be a drinking establishment on the titular remote space station at the edge of a wormhole. It was such a volatile location, with peace always hanging by a thread. Booze played no small role in keeping a wide range of galactic species’ worst instincts in check. And Quark, the resident publican—well, casino owner, really—was just the Ferengi for the job. Ferengi were the wheeler-dealers of the galaxy. They could be a bit sleazy, but they also knew how to defuse a heated situation. When the Cardassians withdrew from nearby Bajor, Captain Benjamin Sisko was intent on keeping Quark around as a community leader—a role played by many a bar owner throughout history and today—for a sense of continuity, of familiarity.
DS9 is the closest thing to a Western that’s existed in the Trek franchise. There’s the obvious frontier aspect to it. If Sisko was the mayor of this one-horse town on the edge of eternity, then Odo was its sheriff. Quark is very obviously its Al Swearengen (without all of the “cocksuckers”). Folks might argue that Enterprise was more Wild West than DS9 because everything was so new and uncharted versus “lived-in.” But I would argue that Enterprise was more like the age of explorers and conquistadors that predated the young America’s westward migration.
Romulan Ale
Each beer geek has their favorites. These “addictive brews” are often rare, and brew aficionados camp out at tasting rooms or wait in lines for hours at major beer festivals to get a taste. It’s nice to know that three or four centuries from now this tradition will not die down. In the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries, the galaxy’s obsession will be Romulan ale, which made its first appearance as such in the sci-fi franchise film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Of course, it’s not the beverage’s rarity that makes Federation (and Klingon) officers go gaga over it, but its illegality on one side of the Neutral Zone.
It’s Kirk’s birthday. Bones shows up at the captain’s apartment and declares, “Beware of Romulans bearing gifts.” The good doctor’s boss, with a touch of faux concern and shock, reminds him of the illicit nature of the drink.
“I only use it for medicinal purposes,” Dr. McCoy lies.
Another thing to love, perhaps more than the continued existence of the beverage equivalent of a white whale, is the excuses that emerged during America’s early-twentieth-century Prohibition still work in the late twenty-third. In fact, it appears that Enterprise-A-era pilots may have learned a few tricks from rum runners of the Roaring ’20s. Bones reveals that a border ship “brings me in a case every now and then across the neutral zone.” Dr. Leonard McCoy was the distant future’s Nucky Thompson!
Kirk notices the bottle’s date: 2283. “Well, it takes this stuff a while to ferment,” the Enterprise chief physician explains. Wrath of Khan is supposed to take place in 2285, so it’s not clear what Bones means by that. Does he mean it’s bottle-conditioned and it’s taken a full two years to ferment? Regardless of how long it took the space yeast to do their thing, the microbes created some pretty strong stuff, as evidenced by the look on Kirk’s face when he drinks it.
Even the Klingon physiology is no match for Romulan ale. In the film, Star Trek: Nemesis, Worf had a few too many at Will Riker and Deanna Troi’s wedding (spoiler alert!), moaning, “Romulan ale should be illegal,” while slumped over a table in the middle of the reception.
“It is,” Geordi La Forge reminds him.
Fake Brews
As promising as the Star Trek future may be for moderate, social drinking, it’s not without elements that suck the joy out of everyday life. Principal among those is synthehol, supposedly the stuff has the aroma and flavor of actual alcohol but lacks some of the more harmful side effects of the real deal. It’s a creation of the twenty-fourth century, as it doesn’t show up in Star Trek series until The Next Generation. That’s confirmed in the season six episode, “Relics,” a.k.a. “The One Where Scotty Shows Up.”
Through some techy sort of glitch, chief engineer Montgomery Scott was hiding in some beaming netherworld between de-materializing and rematerializing for seventy-five years. The Next Generation crew finds him, and we get a lot of Rip Van Winkle/fish-out-of-water-style antics. Among those is Scotty’s attempt to order a Scotch whisky at Ten Forward (Guinan’s bar). The bartender obliges, but when Scotty sips it, he’s disgusted and says, “I don’t know what this is, but I can definitely tell you it’s not Scotch.” Data notes that Scotty is unaware of the existence of synthehol, whose “intoxicating effects can be easily dismissed.”
It doesn’t seem like anyone actually likes synthehol—least among them, Captain Picard. The captain shares some of Guinan’s secret stash of fluorescent green Aldebaran whiskey, which Picard himself procured for the bar. Scotty marvels at its strength, and Picard downs it in a single shot.
Captain Jean-Luc, whose family has owned a French winery for generations, knows his way around a good drink. In the episode “Family,” the captain visits the Chateau Picard winery while on his post-Borg assimilation shore leave in season four, and his brother Robert—a man with a chip on his shoulder as big as his vineyard—ribs Jean-Luc about the captain’s diminished ability to distinguish a 2346 vintage from a 2347 and that it’s all synthehol’s fault. Jean-Luc assures him that the artificial stuff heightens one’s appreciation for the genuine article—and he’s right.
There’s no replacing
