Flashback to the summer of 1990. Iraq was gearing up for an invasion of Kuwait. Madonna was vogue-ing her way to the top of the music charts. Arsenio Hall was taking prime time by storm as a talk show host. And all I cared about was whether Jean-Luc Picard would survive the season premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I wasn't alone. Thanks to The Best Of Both Worlds, the riveting third season finale that found Picard transformed into a Borg, Star Trek: The Next Generation suddenly became the coolest thing on television in 1990. The show found itself with an enormous legion of new fans that couldn't wait to find out if Riker would blow Picard to bits in an attempt to save Earth from the vicious Borg.

The third season will go down in television history as the year that changed Star Trek. Thanks to a band of new writing and production talent that year, The Next Generation finally emerged from the shadow of its predecessor and found its own voice and spirit. The Best Of Both Worlds became the series' ultimate achievement, transforming an already great season into a classic.

Given its landmark status, it's disappointing and somewhat baffling to find no featurette or retrospective on The Best Of Both Worlds in the latest DVD box set release for the third season. In fact, there's very little reference to the show at all, except a short interview with then-executive producer Michael Piller, who penned the episode as the series' first-ever cliffhanger. But don't fret. The fourth season box set will apparently make up for it, according to a preview available on Amazon.com.

Much of the attention in the extra features is given to the season's other great episode, Yesterday's Enterprise, which finds the Enterprise in an alternate reality battling the Kingons, and The Offspring, in which Data creates an android child. The Offspring was actor Jonathan Frakes' first directing effort for series and - it seems - the unanimous favorite of everyone on the show. We learn the complications the writing staff had in crafting Yesterday's Enterprise on a severely tight schedule and the production challenges faced in pulling off some of its elaborate special effects sequences.

It's nice to see a bit more attention given to the production side of the series in this set of extra features. Piller gives a great retrospective on the challenges he faced taking command of the writing staff that year and Dan Curry unlocks some of the secrets of the show's superb special effects. Perhaps the best soundbite in the set goes to Levar Burton, who says, in a surprising display of honesty, that he wasn't always happy with the way his character, Geordi LaForge, was being developed, especially his love life.

If you're finally looking for a good reason to buy one of The Next Generation box sets, the third season is it. The episodes are top notch in almost every respect. The third season was a beautifully photographed year, thanks to the addition of cinematographer Marvin Rush, and nowhere is his work more radiant than in some of the early, on-location shows such as The Survivors and Who Watches the Watchers? and later ones like Menage à Troi and Captain's Holiday. Season three was also a musical year for Star Trek, with composers Dennis McCarthy and Ron Jones producing some of their best work. Jones' bombastic tour de force for The Best Of Both Worlds comes through wonderfully on DVD as does McCarthy's martial score for Yesterday's Enterprise. There's nothing more to be said about this box set other than this - buy it!

Reviewed by Robert Heyman
theLogBook.com staff writer