Star Trek: The Next Generation -- Season 3

Just as there’s a giddy kick to looking back on a TV series’ beginning, it’s a thrilling endeavor to see it hit its stride, and the third season is when ”The Next Generation” did just that, with episodes like ”The Best of Both Worlds, Part I” — the grandest of ”The Next Generation”’s year-ending cliff-hangers, this one found Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) kidnapped by the Borg — and ”Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the Star Trek universe’s smartest time-travel experiment (and a longtime fan favorite).

This collection is of a piece with the last two boxed sets — a handful of retrospective featurettes are the only supplements, and they’re not bad if you’re a newcomer to ”Next Generation” lore but kind of stale if you’re a hardcore geek (and it takes one to know one). Still, these 22 installments represent a high-water mark for episodic ”Star Trek,” and, as such, for TV science fiction as a whole.