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.

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