It’s so bizarre to read this in the present, knowing how incredible TNG was, but I get it - the original crew WAS Star Trek to them.
The dedicated fans revived this series in syndication, well after it had gone off the air in 1969, and felt attached to the characters that they had obsessed over between then and the 1980s. Like modern fans, they thought that departure from what they knew would ruin it.
I wish I could go back in time and tell them that TNG is going to rock.
Season one of TNG was compared to TOS and TNG didn’t fare too well early on. The Naked Now? A copy of The Naked Time. Data trying to be human was compared to Spock. LaForge wasn’t like Scotty. Picard was stuck up and by the book compared to Kirk rushing into battle and brawling with aliens with his bare hands.
It wasn’t until the show developed into its own thing that it became great.
Laforge wasn’t the engineer season one, right?
Correct, he was a helmsman