Rating: 
Summary: Ah, those wacky Pakleds!
Review: This season is notable for a few things not many other reviewers have commented on-- the sole appearance of the wonderful Pakleds, the Dummies of Space, a very refreshing change of pace from the typical ST space menaces/pushovers. To this day, "He is smart!" and "We look for things to make us go" remain in my vocabulary. The Pakleds never fail to make me laugh. Too many trekkies are too uptight to enjoy them, I fear. Then there is Lycia Naff's delightful Ensign Sonia Gomez, who only appears twice, alas. Would that there were more episodes with this charmer! They could have done a lot more with the Ensign Gomez; pity we never saw this. Her enthusiastic naivete probably annoyed a lot of 'serious" fans, but I found her charming and the character could have filled the need for an "everyman/woman" type on a show mainly revolving around super-gifted types.
Q returns again (hurrah!) and Riker grows a beard and the holodeck begins to exert its colorful influence on the series and the crew survives the writers' strike, more dangerous than a pocketful of Klingons. One misses Dr. Crusher, but no fear, she'll soon return for season three and beyond. The ST:TNG program began to improve this season; by the next, all thrusters would hit warp speed at last.
Rating: 
Summary: Capricious Entertainment
Review: This season of star trek was very fickle. It had moments of brilliants, Measure of a Man amd its moments of disapointment, Outrageous Okona. Still it was provokative and entertaining so if you enjoy Star Trek or sci/fi, you will probably appreciate season two on DVD.
Rating:
Summary: Mellow, bottle show filled season
Review: To add to what others have said, season two is notorious among many fans for not only its season-ending bottle show, but its abundance of them throughout. Bottle shows, as some call them, are shows in which the "action" takes place entirely on the ship (sickbay epsisodes, Wesley Crusher episodes, Holodeck stuff, Lwaxana Troi garbage, etc.). Besides, I was never big on whatever one wants to think of as the politics of TNG, especially in the first two seasons; I just don't like the feeling of being preached at by what I think of as [a] 24th century socialist(s). It's just too in your face in seasons one and two; later on the material lightens up, for goodness sakes. Maybe I'm being a bit critical here, but why critique something if it's no good? This is a great series, and season 2, in my opinion, lays bare a lot of the struggles of the show's growing pains. In fact, it's a wonder that season two even lasted the shortened 22 episodes that it did. What it had against it was the continuing writer's strike, a further depleted field of writers as a result of the restrictions placed on the staffers (resulting in writers leaving and coming by week), and a big budget limit. Still, after all this, they found ways to make some of these interesting. "Where Silence Has Lease," "The Measure of A Man," and "A Matter of Honor" are clearly the best. "Q Who?" as others have mentioned, is a rare gem in this mix too as it introduces us to the Borg.
The disasters include "Shades of Gray," "Peak Performance," "Samaritan Snare," "The Dauphin," "Manhunt," "The Schizoid Man," and "The Outrageous Okona," as these shows tended to be uninteresting or infamously anti-climactic. The crew gets Geordi back from the Pakleds, a dim-witted nonsense race introduced while they were looking for a "threat race," in "Samaritan Snare" with a fireworks show, which allegedly "scares" them. "Manhunt" is about a terrorist plot but was unfortuantely wasted on Lwaxana Troi. "Peak Performance" has too many subplots and a too deliberately shaky main plot to be interesting. What could be more uninteresting than a self absorbed, slap-happy master strategist who plays video games overseeing a war simulation between Picard and Riker? And watch too--at the outset of the contest, both Picard (in the Enterprise) and Riker (in the Hathaway) execute a number of maneuvers before it strikes Riker to open fire. When they show the external shot of Riker's ship opening fire, both the Hathaway and the Enterprise are in the same spots as before the maneuvers, and the Enterprise is sitting still! The Ferengi interrupt the nonsense (someone had to), and the fiasco is resolved with a ruse that's laughable.
Several races are introduced in season 2 as well, most of which thankfully never resurfaced. The Pakleds and Zackdorns are easily the most annoying and awkwardly drawn-up species to ever grace Star Trek. The Borg, of course, came back in "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Descent." The encounters with them, however, in TNG never even come close to the intensity and explosiveness of the encounters with them in Voyager. Anyway, The Romulans reappear here in "Contagion" as well, and it's certainly good to see them. I began wondering what happened to them and even the Klingons after the Pakleds and Zackdorns.
Whether to complete the library while waiting for Voyager (or DS9) I think season 2 is a worthwhile purchase, even if to underscore any appreciation for how far the show came by the later seasons.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent season with Dr. What'sHerName
Review: We see some new uniform styles, some new plot lines, and a deeper look into the Star Trek mythos that made it great. The switching of Doctors was a bit abrupt, and I think having her be a trasporter-phobe was too McCoy-esque to be coincidental; I think the writers were TRYING (too hard) for us to like her. The same goes for trite manner in which Picard's heart replacement needed to be done by (suprise, suprise) Dr. Pulaski. Data's character was developed well, and I liked seeing the cast starting to settle into their roles. A good strong follow-up to a great beginning. This series was crawling in Season One, and definitely walking by the end of Season Two (making the audience wonder just how fast this baby will RUN.) A move that must be owned by the die hard fans, and a few disks borrowed by the casual fan friends of the die hard fan. It will not dissapoint.
Rating:
Summary: Its getting better.
Review: When I wrote that the first season was okay, the second season was much better but still not as good as the show became to be in the third season. They brought in a new doctor, Diana Muldar as Dr. Kate Pulaski. They built a new set, Ten Forward, they introduced the Borg, and Whoopi Goldberg the first major star to appear on TNG as Guinan. Here is some of my favorites in this season.
Where Silence Has Lease
Elementary,Dear Data
The Schizod Man
Loud as a Whisper
A Matter Of Honor
The Measure Of A Man
Time Squared
The Icarus Factor
Q Who
Emissary
Peak Performance
This season was much better but the show still needed work, but watching this season proves that TNG was headed in the right direction.
Rating:
Summary: NextGen picks up some momentum
Review: You know, it's just not fair. I plunked down just as many shekels for this NextGen box set as I did for the first one. Now that might not seem like much of a problem to most, but here's the messed-up part: this set contains only six DVDs, rather than its predecessor's total of seven . So why am I paying the same price for something that has less? Wouldn't it make more sense for me to pay six-sevenths as much? Of course, if that screenwriters' strike hadn't cut down NextGen's second-season eppie total, I wouldn't've had to worry about it in the first place......but enough griping, at least for the moment. Compared to the original series DVDs, the NextGen platters have more episodes per disc (four to Classic Trek's two), and the and the box set takes up about the same space as three standard-width snap cases. Which means the entire run of NextGen DVDs will take up about two-thirds as much space as the entire run of original series platters presently do. Of course, this makes me wonder why Paramount didn't give the classic show a similar treatment in the first place? After all, when it comes to collecting Star Trek on video, shelf space becomes an essential commodity. This is after all a franchise made up of five series, nine (soon to be ten) movies, and a cartoon show, with endless sequel & spin-off possibilities! With these facts staring a DVD-collecting UberTrekkie in the face, one can NEVER have too much shelf space, and... um... whoops, I did it again, didn't I? Sorry 'bout that. Gimme a mome to get back on track, okay? Thanks... While not particularly exceptional, NextGen's second year was a fair improvement over the first in many respects. It displayed a potential that would eventually make it a worthy successor to its 23rd-century forebear. The follicular abilities of Riker & Picard went in opposite directions as our beloved overly-dramatic-pose-prone executive officer sprouted facial hair. Worf & LaForge receive new uniforms and new duties. Also noted here is Ten-Forward and the first poker games between the members of the bridge crew. Then there was THE big shake-up: Dr. Crusher was temporarily replaced by a somewhat McCoy-ish woman who wasn't too keen on the notion that Data might actually be more than a mere machine. Sadly, Dr. Crusher neglected to take her son Wussley-- whoops, I mean Wesley with her, much to the chagrin of most NextGen trekkies outside of the adolescent female demographic. A few of the show's high points in Year Two: Being a big fan of the Borg, I consider 'Q-Who' to be the best moment of the second season. In this show, Q introduces our star-hopping protagonists to the Borg-- and the rest is history. 'The Measure of a Man' is probably one of the best Data-showcase eppies ever made. In fact, a good portion of the second season was dedicated to the further character development of Starfleet's most valuable android: There's 'Elementary Dear Data', as he plays the part of Sherlock Holmes tracking down a self-aware holodeck creation of Prof. Moriarty. I found it to be a better-than average entry in the show's run of 'Holodeck Malfunction' eppies. In 'The Schizoid Man', Data's taken over by the consciousness of a dying cyberneticist. 'Pen Pals' has our beloved android making covert contact with an alien child on a dying world. Riker also gets some development in 'A Matter of Honor' and 'The Icarus Factor', both of which have a bit more action than the average NextGen eppie. Then of course there's the shows I'll likely skip past when I host my next NextGen marathon:
Being a Wesley Crusher anti-fan (as any self-respecting NextGen Trekkie should be), viewing his first crush with a young lady who can morph into a weird furry wookiee-thing in 'The Dauphin' was almost unbearable. And although 'The Royale' is kinda fun to watch in a cheeseball way, it's definitely not one of the series' more able entries. To top things off, they saved the worst for last: the season finale 'Shades of Grey'. I prefer to call it 'Riker's Greatest Hits', since about half of the footage for this show was culled from the first two seasons, all of it featuring our beloved Number One's greatest moments of both blissful pleasure and hellish torture from the show's first two years. As I expected, the sound quality of each episode is really good, far better than their preceding VHS presentations. The subtle background sounds are more perceptible. The picture quality, however, is not as consistently good as that of the First Season set. There are a few parts here and there that look a bit grainy. Of course, this may be due more to the quality of the source film than the digital transfer, but I couldn't tell you for sure one way or the other. The extra features include several documentary featurettes, which cover pretty much what you'd expect from TV docs: behind-the-scenes looks, memories of the show's second year from both cast and crew, and other info. If nothing else, these featurettes are a good way to prep you for that trivia contest they'll be holding at the next convention that blows into town! I found the doc about the Star Trek archives- a vast collection of props, models, backdrops, and set pieces from all the shows and films- to be the most interesting of the lot. And now, my biggest gripe about this set: Paramount decided to make the foldout disc holder out of cardboard, which means you'd better expect this storage unit to disintegrate faster than a Romulan hit by a full-power phaser beam after several NextGen marathons. Well, unless you have some duct tape ready that is. 'Late
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