Concluding My Musical Trek

Today, I conclude my series of reviews on the Star Trek: The Next Generation Collection -- Volume One. The third and final disc of the set presents the efforts of three composers who each worked on only one episode of the series. The scores for their episodes are presented in their entirety.

First up is Fred Steiner. This long-time composer worked on the original Star Trek series, in fact creating most of the music for those classic episodes. When The Next Generation started up, one of the supervising producers was also a classic series veteran, and thought to bring in Steiner for regular composing work on the new series. Steiner's Next Generation work was very much in the style of those classic episodes, and thus did not mesh at all with Rick Berman's "wallpaper" mentality. Steiner was never offered another episode after his first.

But that one episode of music is a treat. That was "Code of Honor," in which negotiations with a backward world go sour when Tasha has to fight the wife of the sultan-esque leader. Admittedly, this is one of the cheesiest episodes in a first season with more than its share of cheesy episodes. But the thing is, "Code of Honor" really felt like it could have been an episode of the original Star Trek, and so how fitting that it had music that sounded like that series too. The music is loud and bombastic. Every cue ends with a crazy, trilling musical sting. Every action cue has ascending horn crescendos. But the thing is, it's all just fun to listen to. If it weren't for the quality of the recording, you might not know it wasn't written in the 1960s. Okay, so nothing here will stick in your head like the classic "Star Trek battle music" that any Trekker could probably hum from memory. Still, the score for this episode is the highlight of the entire 3-disc collection. I grade it a B+.

Don Davis is up next. Today, he's best known for providing the music for The Matrix trilogy -- a really solid score, in my book. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, he seems to have been a struggling up-and-comer, brought in to score "Face of the Enemy," in which Troi is kidnapped and surgically altered to appear as a Romulan for the purpose of escorting defectors out of Romulan space.

Sadly, the most flattering thing I can say about this score is that if you really strain to hear it, you can hear hints of The Matrix score playing in the horn section. I mean, you either have to know that film's score up and down, or have just listened to it, but it is there. Sort of. Occasionally. For the most part, it's just vanilla texture of the kind Rick Berman surely asked for. The Romulans don't even really get a discernable theme amidst the muddy strings and absent percussion. It's a grade D+ score, I'd say, one I'll seldom listen to.

Lastly, there's John Debney, who after one episode of The Next Generation would work on Deep Space Nine and then go on to film scores. He's not on the composers A-List today, but he works steadily. His score for "The Pegasus" is featured on this collection, from the episode in which Riker's old commanding officer comes to the Enterprise with a top secret mission to locate the wreck of their lost ship.

I'm not really familiar with Debney's film work, so I don't have a base for comparison. I can only say that unfortunately, his score for The Next Generation is like those of Dennis McCarthy and Don Davis. Bland, to a degree where you question why the producers bothered commissioning original music every episode when they could have easily tracked the same music across multiple episodes and no one would ever have known the difference. It's not actively bad music, just uninteresting outside of the episode for which it was created. Grade D.

So, now that you've waded through three days of Star Trek music posts, we're back to my original synopsis -- this collection is one just for the Trek enthusiasts and music completists. There are highlights that are very enjoyable, especially the Fred Steiner music. Overall, though, the collection rates a C+.