At the moment I’m watching old Star Trek episodes (the ones with Kirk and Spock). I watched them as a child and I’m surprised how much fun many of them still are, but mostly it’s a lot of enjoying the nostalgic feeling. Now I’m considering starting with the follow up series. Is it worth it or is it just cheesy without the nostalgia bonus? I give a lot of credit to the first series because they were a kind of pioneers in bringing a science fiction series to TV (BTW: An interesting correspondence between Asimov and Roddenberry: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/getting-star-trek-on-air-was-impossible.html), but can’t imagine doing the same for a later series.
I’d say not all of them in order. Find an ‘essentials list’ that will give ideas of the good ones too watch. Stay away from the whole first season.
The Next Gen is an awesome series, period.
And don’t skip the first season. There were some awesome episodes in there.
Well, the first season had at least one excellent episode, “Conspiracy”, that’s worth watching. “The Neutral Zone” is also worth a watch. After that, yeah, find a list of the best eps and watch those. There are a lot of wonderful episodes, but there’s also a lot of crap. My personal recommendations would be:
S2:
Elementary, Dear Data
The Measure of a Man
Q Who
S3:
All of it, it’s really the best season.
S4:
The Best of Both Worlds: Part II
Family
Brothers
Data’s Day
First Contact
The Nth Degree
Qpid
S5:
Darmok
Ensign Ro
Disaster (my personal fave)
Unification Parts 1 and 2
Cause and Effect
I, Borg
The Inner Light
S6:
Relics
Rascals
A Fistful of Datas
Chain of Command Parts 1 and 2
Tapestry
The Chase
S7
Phantasms
The Pegasus
Journey’s End
All Good Things…
And skip the rest.
It’s pretty solidly watchable, although you’ll need to be ready for as many “diplomatic escort mission gone awry!,” "the holodeck is malfunctioning and X!, "and “the Prime Directive sure makes the culture/laws of this planet hard to interact with!” eps as the Original Series had “godlike being fucks with Enterprise crew” eps.
It’s philosophical, thoughtful, and occasionally very moving. It’s perfectly fine TV, and far more episodic and quickly consumable than DS9. I have vague memories of watching some eps with my dad when I was younger, but I recently rewatched a solid chunk of it this summer and had plenty of fun.
And of course you should note that the TNG episodes are being re-done in high-definition. If you’re going to start with the start, do yourself a favor and get the HD disks from Netflix or what have you.
I believe that Season 3 as well as the second half of the “Best of Both Worlds” cliffhanger will be released in the next month or two on BluRay.
I would say it’s better on the whole than the original series, but probably like TOS should be carefully rifled for standout episodes without approaching it holistically. DS9 would be the only Trek series I could see watching completely these days, though this is partly due to my feeling that strictly episodic TV no longer works in a post-Babylon 5 era.
The first two seasons of any of the later Star Trek series pretty much suck. That said, TNG and DS9 are definitely still very much worth watching.
Brian Rubin’s is an excellent list of some of the best episodes of TNG, but I don’t think you should skip all the rest, especially if you’ve never seen them before. I’d only cherry-pick episodes from the first two seasons, which were rough and all over the place, but starting with season 3, it gets much better and more consistent and I’d recommend watching full seasons for the remainder of the show. I’d suggest:
S1:
Encounter at Farpoint
Where No One Has Gone Before
Datalore
11001001
Conspiracy
The Neutral Zone
S2:
Elementary, Dear Data
A Matter of Honor
The Measure of a Man
Contagion
Time Squared
Q Who?
Peak Performance
And all of S3-7.
Same for DS9. Cherry-pick the first two seasons, then watch all the rest. Copying myself from another thread I’d suggest:
S1:
Emissary
The Nagus
Duet
S2:
Cardassians
Rules of Acquisition
Necessary Evil
Whispers
The Wire
Crossover
The Jem’Hadar
And all of S3-7.
I gave up on TNG after season one. I’ve heard repeatedly that later seasons were better, but every time I’ve seen segments since (either on TV or internet clips) they’ve been pretty bad.
Encounter at Farpoint for example is just awful. I can see recommending it if you need an introduction to Q, but not otherwise.
I did watch the series finale, I’m not particularly sure why given that I hadn’t watched anything in between, and it was good.
Yeah, I don’t like to be the guy who shows up in threads to piss all over a thing somebody loves but I can’t find much worth watching in the New Generation. It’s far too technobabble-y, has a lot of pretty poor CGI, and introduced some terrible new races (though my least favorite, the Ferengi, were pretty well rehabilitated by DS9). And I just didn’t care for any of the crew; Picard is boring, Riker is a poor substitute for Kirk, Data is a poor substitute for Spock, and I’m having trouble even remembering the rest. There’s blind guy, Klingon guy, and telepath lady I think. Just jump ahead to DS9, I’d say. It has a seriously rocky start but gets really good.
Hey, nobody told me Colin Farrell was on Star Trek! Was he a Romulan or something?
Don’t even front motherfucker, you’re on thin ice as it is. ;)
I liked TNG, but yeah, you have to make allowances for the budget they had to work with and the tech available. The original series can get away with some sketchy props and effects because anyone can enjoy a healthy dose of 1960’s camp. TNG just looks dated and rough.
That said, I like the sedate nature of the show. You didn’t really find too much scripted TV at the time (or really even now) that allows a plot to slowly unwind as it does in Trek.
If all you saw is the first season but actually liked the final episode, you’d enjoy many of the other episodes just fine. The first season really is that bad. And the series finale is not particularly better than other good episodes like Inner Light or Parallels.
They had huge budgets. Money was never a problem. Tech, sure, that can get to looking dated quickly.
They didn’t have movie-like budgets, which is my point. They had high-end network TV budgets.
I have a sneaking suspicion you’re correct, which is one reason I find the recommendations in this thread interesting.
Like (I suspect) a lot of people here, I can’t actually answer the original question, because I watched TNG as a kid. What I can say is that I watched all seven seasons as an adult, and enjoyed it enough to immediately move on to watching DS9 (which was boring dirt-farming for a while, and then got legitimately very good). And then into watching Voyager, which… okay, I seriously watched every episode of that in order, but I’m not going to claim I was sober the whole time.
I had a love/hate thing with TNG but probably have seen every episode at one time or another. Never could quite get into DS9 although I liked the concept, was not a big Voyager fan and really tried to like Enterprise.
Is any network running DS9 re-runs now?