Season 1 Episode 1
Episode: "Encounter at Farpoint"

Whilst on its voyage to planet Deneb IV, the Enterprise is obstructed by an immense grid. The encounter is swiftly followed by contact with a member of an omnimpotent alien race that goes by the name Q. The Q have judged humanity's expansion into the galaxy has proceeded at far too great a pace but insist on using examples from humanity's past to justify arguments supporting that the species has failed to reached anything like civilisation or enlightenment and that they should therefore retreat back to Earth. Captain Picard of course protests and offers a counterproposal, that the Q observe the behaviour of the Enterprise crew throughout their mission to Deneb IV as a means of seeing first hand just how far present-day humans have come.

The holodeck is the ultimate evolution of virtual environment creation; large rooms capable of re-creating vistas, landscapes and environments for the purposes of training and recreation and even holographic characters with whom the user can interact and role play with. Commander Riker meets up with Lieutenant Commander Data for the first time and introduces us to this technology.

By 1987 science fiction had for a long long time served as a means of presenting some pretty fantastic technological advances, the popular staples of which being faster than light travel, teleportation, artificial intelligence, robots [and androids!] and even time travel. Star Trek's holodecks have surely got to be one of the last truly fresh out of the box ideas to be born out of science fiction. "The Matrix" trilogy brought a pretty fresh sci-fi concept to the masses, although I feel inclined to point out that Star Trek DS9 depicted a very similar concept several years earlier in about 1995. If I may be so bold, I would dare suggest that a truly original concept would evade science fiction for decades until about 2020 when the creative forces behind Star Trek Discovery came up with the idea of "programmable matter".

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