S1E1&2 Encounter at Farpoint

Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2: Encounter at Farpoint

Watchability: Recommended
Short Answer: It's the pilot, it would be hard to tell you not to watch it.
Notables: Introduction of the character 'Q'.

I got into TNG after it had been on for a couple of years, so I didn't watch Encounter at Farpoint until I had already become a fan. I remember this episode as being entirely cringe worthy. I still think it is not that great, but it does serve to introduce a lot of concepts of the show. As campy as it is, the character of Q and his test of humanity is a reoccurring theme through-out the show.

At the time I started watching TNG, I had been reading a lot of "Golden Age" SciFi authors (at least by today's standards: Asimov, Clarke, Pohl, etc). In most of those novels (and a lot of current SciFi television), the view of the future is a very gritty pessimistic "realism". While that aspect of SciFi does a lot to explore the "human condition", TNG was fascinating to me because it took the opposite tack. Gene Roddenberry's vision for the show was very firmly rooted in showing the best of humanity and what we can achieve.

The main thrust of this episode is Q's supposition that humanity is guilty for the "sins of the past". In this episode, we see examples of some of the fictional atrocities that happen after present day and before the start of the Star Trek franchise. At lot of it is really campy, but there are a couple of things I like about it. Mainly, I like how it gives Picard the ability to say that humanity learns from its mistakes. To paraphrase, he asks Q to "test us as we are, not as we were."

That notion is interesting to me, in the context of the show it is referencing very fictional history, but it also can be seen as talking about our actual recent history. Where we are today, is informed by the past (World Wars I/II, slavery, the Cold War, or whatever else), but we live in a very different world that would not be the same without that history. And still, what the show says is that we are constantly growing, possibly becoming the best versions of ourselves.

So I would say that this episode is definitely worth watching. It's a little rough around the edges, but it does frame the entire series nicely.