Ranking the Star Trek television series

  • Thread starter Thread starter tomarin
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
If you’d have asked this ten years ago my take would have been much different. As it is, here’s my ranking:

DS9 - It’s a soap opera, but a good one and in the Star Trek universe. The fact that it’s so much different really makes it stand out and makes me wish they’d have done the long-rumored Star Trek Academy series, just to give us something else completely different. The entire cast was really strong and I don’t remember any weak episodes.

TOS - Primarily for nostalgia’s sake, but also because a couple years ago I tried re-watching TNG.

TNG - Oh, how I loved this when it was on the air! My friends and I would get together and watch it together. At one point, the local station that ran it would air two reruns after the newest episode aired and we’d watch all three. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged well. I still think Data is one of the best characters ever and Picard is my favorite captain, but so many of the episodes are laughable to bad and the ones that deal with relationships range from misogynistic to creepy to so creepy they give you nightmares. Anytime I see Riker’s come hither look I feel like I need a shower. Trying to re-watch it is what stopped me from trying to re-watch DS9. Still, it’s better than…

Voyager - Ugh! Can it ram its feminist empowerment message down our throats any more than it did, all while slapping Jeri Ryan in one of the most sexist outfits ever put on TV? I had a female coworker who used to refer to her as 7 of DD. When I was trying to re-watch TNG (my goal was to watch all five series) I read an article about Robert Beltran and how much he hated the show. He begged to either be given something to do or killed off. Unfortunately they had him locked in a contract and wouldn’t do either. A big Trekkie friend told me that a surefire way to guarantee you won’t get an autograph from him is to call him Chakote. I think I gave up on the series before it ended. I know I don’t remember how it wrapped up. Still, it wasn’t…

Enterprise - Um, what can I actually say about this show? I remember watching the premiere and laughing about the sterilization rooms. I remember wishing Scott Bakula would solve a problem in one of the episodes and finally leap to another show. I don’t think I made it through the first season.
 
Please don’t shoot me, but I can’t rank them all because gasp I haven’t seen any episodes of two of the series.

But I did want to chime in and say, what I didn’t notice when I saw them when I was young–TNG is smug. Sometimes really smug. I’ve seen a several episodes recently and the whole orientation of some episodes is annoying–a sort of “Look how much better we are than these aliens that have some resemblance to people we disagree with in the 1980s.” Even when I agree with their position, the attitude is annoying. Certainly all of the episodes don’t do it, but you never know which ones will until you watch them. And it’s not just a few.

They did the same thing in the Star Trek IV movie, but somehow it was (somewhat) less annoying there.

So, TNG goes at the bottom. I tend to cut TOS a bit of slack because they came out before I was born and so I can’t fully understand the atmosphere of when it came out and also because when you’re blazing a trail, you can’t be as good with the fiddly bits at the edges as the people who come along later can, and you may even leave some rather large rocks in the trail. 🙂 The worst episodes are still OK to watch because they are frequently (unintentionally) funny.

I quite liked DS9, but it’s been years since I’ve seen it and I’m afraid to watch it again in case it suffers the same way TNG did.

–Jen
 
[SIGN][/SIGN]
revert_jen said:
Please don’t shoot me …

I quite liked DS9, but it’s been years since I’ve seen it and I’m afraid to watch it again in case it suffers the same way TNG did.

–Jen
Click to expand...
Yeah, I find DS9 the least smug of all these shows. TNG was super smug.
 
The original Star Trek IMO was far superior to the spin-offs, including the movies. I loved it as a kid, and still love it now, but for different reasons. The effects are cheesy, the stories have holes wide enough for a worm hole, and Shatner’s over-acting at times becomes unintentionally funny. With all that, it’s still a great way to waste an hour of your life.
The shows that came later were a different animal. The world had changed dramatically since the original show, and you can never truly re-capture that. The original show is like seeing an old friend from childhood. He never changed, and you never want him to. It was just as much a part of my childhood as the Wild Wild West, the Man from Uncle, The Avengers, Lost in Space, and Batman. Just like an old box of toys. Don’t over-analyze, just enjoy it.
 
I would like to add, running the risk of phasers being set on kill, that Gene Roddenberry changed his narrative from the original show to the beginning of the revival movies and newer series. At the time Star Trek was on the air, and soon after, Roddenberry described it as “Wagon Train to the stars”. I also found an old interview with Lenord Nimoy in which he described the show as a kind of “space aged Gunsmoke”, not to be taken too seriously.
But by the 1980s and 90s, the narrative had changed to basically a liberal fantasy of the future. Just sayin’.
 
My personal ranking:
  1. TOS. I watched it in syndicated reruns in the late 60s/early 70s. The Apollo missions were on the go, and I was fascinated with anything to do with space. I loved the fact that space was BIG – and they were flying around in a ship that was not that huge. Many of the planets seemed to have a remote, “out-there”, space-boonies feel – like the lithium-cracking station in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” – and I liked the Run Silent, Run Deep feel of the episode where Enterprise is hunting a Romulan vessel. I’m pretty forgiving of the series for nostalgia reasons – it was my first one and I used it as the benchmark for whatever came after. Yes, Shatner was a bit hammy, but it seemed to fit well with the atmosphere of the show.
  2. DS9. Good storylines, a bit darker and grittier. I liked the outpost on the border of a formerly occupied area trying to reconstruct a cool idea. Yes, Sisko was a bit one-dimensional in his acting (Hawk in a Starfleet uniform), but I think it fit. Odo was my favourite regular character.
  3. Enterprise. I seem to be a bit more forgiving of this series than the rest of you – mainly, I liked the callback to the sixties sci-fi when space was big again and human pioneers were exploring the vast unknown in a tin can. Plus, I like Scott Bakula. And I learned to like Doug Trineer – I didn’t really like or dislike Trip early on, but by the series’ end he may have been my favourite character, and I was really cheesed when they killed him off.
  4. Voyager. Sigh. I had high hopes for that series starting off. But a lot of the characters were kind of annoying – ironically, the character most *meant *to be annoying – The Doctor – actually became my favourite.
  5. The Animated Series. Never saw any of them, so I can’t rate them. But unseen I would still rate them higher than…
  6. TNG. Oh, gawd. Love Boat in space. Picard does painting classes, Crusher runs around trying to get everyone into her plays, etc. Too many far-fetched plots solved by firing the Particle of the Week through the main deflector array. My least-liked series.
    But I loved Q.
I left (6) open because the new series has to be better than TNG.
 
tomarin said:
[SIGN][/SIGN]

Yeah, I find DS9 the least smug of all these shows. TNG was super smug.
Click to expand...
Hadn’t considered it quite that way, but you’re right. TNG was super smug wasn’t it. DS9 and Voyager were much less smug, and their characters screwed up a lot more (hence were more human) than the characters on TNG. My wife would explain it away that TNG was set on the Federation flagship so of course they were the best of the best,and they knew it. Whereas DS9 was at the outset a podunk outpost in the middle of nowhere in space and Voyager was just a small run of the mill starship crewed by average Joe’s and of course Maquis malcontents just trying to get home.
 
By the way, does anyone commenting or reading here remember the first episode of the original series they saw, perhaps as a child, and the effect it made on you? I don’t have any recollection of which episode I saw first or the order in which I saw them, as I watched them in syndication on a UHF station and they just seemed to be on every day at the same time. Or perhaps I watched them with my father as a small child. One that may have been the first or the first that made a big impression on me was ‘The Enemy Within,’ the one about the transporter malfunction that creates two Kirks, one good and one bad, because Shatner did such a convincing portrayal of an evil and petulant Kirk and because that alien Pomeranian with the horn on its head just looked so weird.

Also the white ape-thing with the horn (the ‘mugatu’) from “A Private Little War” I recall being frightened of - and the flying pancake things from “Operation: Annihilate!” It stands to reason that a small child would focus on scary monsters rather than cerebral things he didn’t quite understand.

I’m thinking also ‘The Devil in the Dark’ which was also frightening is also a candidate for first episode.
 
Padres1969 said:
Hadn’t considered it quite that way, but you’re right. TNG was super smug wasn’t it. DS9 and Voyager were much less smug, and their characters screwed up a lot more (hence were more human) than the characters on TNG. My wife would explain it away that TNG was set on the Federation flagship so of course they were the best of the best,and they knew it. Whereas DS9 was at the outset a podunk outpost in the middle of nowhere in space and Voyager was just a small run of the mill starship crewed by average Joe’s and of course Maquis malcontents just trying to get home.
Click to expand...
At the time that I first immersed myself in The Next Generation I was in graduate school and watching it every night in syndication. I had a rather desperate hope that modelling myself on these single-minded perfectionist workaholics would save my career but alas it didn’t pan out.
 
tomarin said:
At the time that I first immersed myself in The Next Generation I was in graduate school and watching it every night in syndication. I had a rather desperate hope that modelling myself on these single-minded perfectionist workaholics would save my career but alas it didn’t pan out.
Click to expand...
Yeah better to model yourself on Voyager IMO. Grim determination sprinkled with dumb luck for the win.
 
Padres1969 said:
Yeah better to model yourself on Voyager IMO. Grim determination sprinkled with dumb luck for the win.
Click to expand...
Good advice, but sadly I think by the time Voyager aired and established its tone I already had my walking papers.
 
tomarin said:
By the way, does anyone commenting or reading here remember the first episode of the original series they saw, perhaps as a child, and the effect it made on you? I don’t have any recollection of which episode I saw first or the order in which I saw them, as I watched them in syndication on a UHF station and they just seemed to be on every day at the same time. Or perhaps I watched them with my father as a small child. One that may have been the first or the first that made a big impression on me was ‘The Enemy Within,’ the one about the transporter malfunction that creates two Kirks, one good and one bad, because Shatner did such a convincing portrayal of an evil and petulant Kirk and because that alien Pomeranian with the horn on its head just looked so weird.

Also the white ape-thing with the horn (the ‘mugatu’) from “A Private Little War” I recall being frightened of - and the flying pancake things from “Operation: Annihilate!” It stands to reason that a small child would focus on scary monsters rather than cerebral things he didn’t quite understand.

I’m thinking also ‘The Devil in the Dark’ which was also frightening is also a candidate for first episode.
Click to expand...
LOVED the monsters when I was a kid. I’d sit patiently through all the boring dialogue just see that week’s alien. The lizard in Arena was my favorite.
The syndication run was a main factor in the revival of the series. WIIC in Pittsburgh ran them constantly for years. Kids who were too young to remember the original run were introduced to the show in reruns. Who knows what would have happened if local stations decided not to run the show? Would Star Trek have been revived?
 
JustaServant said:
LOVED the monsters when I was a kid. I’d sit patiently through all the boring dialogue just see that week’s alien. The lizard in Arena was my favorite.
The syndication run was a main factor in the revival of the series. WIIC in Pittsburgh ran them constantly for years. Kids who were too young to remember the original run were introduced to the show in reruns. Who knows what would have happened if local stations decided not to run the show? Would Star Trek have been revived?
Click to expand...
Probably not. And of course the runaway success of Star Wars led Hollywood to reassemble the original cast in Star Trek: the Motion Picture and its sequels, giving the franchise new life until new series set in the Trek universe could be created.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top