Which was totally rescued and/or justified by “All good things…”
TNG was good, relatively speaking, but it was horribly formulaic. They used to spend the first 40 minutes setting up a problem, and then the last 20 minutes solving it. In a pinch, they would pull some deus ex machina to fix everything, often in the form of a rousing Picard speech. There were good TNG episodes, but mostly they were the same old stuff.
DS9 has a rough start but got much better as soon as they added a larger story arc, so that episodes didn’t have to start and end in the same state.
- Alan
They used to spend the first 40 minutes going on about the prime directive, and then the last 20 minutes ignoring it completely.
Always seems to spring to mind about TNG, but I prefer it over the others. I liked DS9 for Terry Farrell, but got bored with it before it got good by the sounds of it, voyager was a mess and even if they’d greased that vulcan up every week I couldn’t have maintained my interest in enterprise. TOS is ok, but I haven’t watched it for years and remember mainly the movies.
Exactly FTW
Cheesy F/X aside, when has a SciFi show had such a cultural impact as TOS?
The first interacial tv kiss?
pointing out the idiocy of racism?
“…” of war?
not to mention the influence it had on some of the most influential musicians of all time.
Indeed, why it influenced the ballad of bilbo baggins!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1189977381292772054
This gets brought up a lot whenever ground-breaking TV moments are discussed, but remember that a. you never actually see the kiss, and b. aliens made 'em do it.
Spock playing his harp with the Space Hippies, on the other hand, did more to bridge the generational gap than Bing Crosby caroling with David Bowie.
Re: Poll: DS9 pulls ahead of TOS, closes in on TNG. Nice!
To anybody who gave up on DS9 in the first couple of seasons - and really, who could blame you? - go watch the season 4 premiere, when Worf joins the show and the shit, as they say, starts hitting the turbines. If that doesn’t grab your attention, I don’t know what will.
I was so predisposed to hate it at that point that I think it wouldn’t have mattered. Sort of similar to the way that I was feeling about Firefly when trying to watch it in the midst of the horrific last season of Buffy.
Now with some time away it might be fun to go back and re-watch from season four.
The
Original
Series
Hands down, no questions asked.
First off, Kirk is an Iowa farmboy. Picard is French for fuck’s sake.
Sisko, lost without Robert Urich.
Kathryn Janeway…Katie Jane Ass Pain, yeah, we get it, you’re a woman, and you’re in charge, but keep reminding us every 5 fucking minutes so we don’t forget.
Archer, where’s Sam and Gushie?
In addition to the TOS episodes mentioned, “City on the Edge of Forever”.
I see Captain Stubings’ recorder lessons and raise you letting the woman you love die, to save everything you ever knew.
PS. Deep Space Whine is nothing more than a shitty rip-off of Babylon 5.
(in case you happen to be wondering how this could be when DS9 aired before B5 was ever green lit for a single episode?, Straczynski shopped his little project around with a number of networks/studios, including Paramount.
He outlined his show in fair detail with a 3 ring binder and they/Paramount kindly thanked him and explained that they were in fact developing their own show along “similar” lines)
The similarities between B5 and DS9 seasons/storyarcs are pure coincidence.
Yay for Voyager! Been watching Star Trek TNG and now Voyager (DS9 was simply unwatchable even after several attempts).
Voyager is just a bit more fun than TNG, particularly the doctor. I love the idea of a sarcastic, egotistical hologram. He never ceases to crack me up a bit. If only Neelix would go away, probably the least funny character I have seen since Jar Jar Binx.
You have to give ds9 another chance, the first couple seasons are a bit rough, but after that it is the best trek out there.
Agreed!!
Triple Agree.
In 5 years (I have always lurrrrrrvvveeddd polls), there have been 3 votes for Voyager.
That should tell you something. About yourself.
Just go watch DS9.
There are plenty of good Voyager episodes it just it never gets in a rhythm. One episode Janeway and crew might be going through a year of hell against an enemy that erases entire civilizations to restore their own civilization and the next week Chakotay is captured by space dinosaurs.
Like many, I gave up on DS9 somewhere in the season 1-2 void when I couldn’t stand any more of them boldy sitting where no one had sat before. I never went back, but based on the comments in this thread and elsewhere, someday I might.
I loved TNG, but I must also agree that, from a creative/literary POV, DS9 was the better series…except that ending that disappointed me (because I want a better, happier, less religious-alien-crazy one!).
I agree that Voyager is a bit uneven, but honestly I found TNG the exact same way.
There were NOT.
My wife got me a Star Trek trivia book for Christmas. It’s embarrassing how much minutia I remember about Trek overall. But what’s interesting is that Voyager was sooo bad, I seem to have committed almost none of it to memory. I watched every episode, just like all the other Treks, but they’re mostly gone. Just smatterings of bad memories like the bad hair Klingon ripoffs and the presence of an annoying elf girl in the first season…
As a great science show, I stand by The Original Series. Star Trek originally was taking all those stories that sci-fi authors wrote about our own society viewed through other planets and cultures in science-fiction.
As a tv series, I stand by Deep Space Nine, a longer complicated story and many great characters that developed over the course of it.
If you look at the movies they’ve done, you can generally say that the bad ones are those films that cared only about servicing the franchise or characters and didn’t have any compelling science-fiction story that tried to reflect our own.
I can pick great episodes from most of the series except Enterprise I think. Though my favorites would be “City on the Edge of Forever” and “A Taste of Armegeddon” from TOS, “Inner Light” and “Darmok” from TNG, “The Visitor” and “In the Pale Moonlight” from DS9. My TOS and TNG favorites are certainly more outside of the franchise as a whole, while my DS9 ones are especially character focused.