The teaser is the introductory bit, usually 4-7 minutes long that opens the show, precedes the opening credits, and teases you into watching the entire program (supposedly).
My favorites: TNG: The time loop one in which the teaser is literally about 40 seconds long and concludes with the Enterprise being destroyed.
Voyager (I hated Voyager), but: The Borg episode which opens with the Cube and the voice-over, saying somehing like “We are the Borg. You will be assimilated.” A second later the cube is utterly detroyed by the ship they are facing. This one is about 30 seconds long at most.
Short catchy teasers seem to be best.
Worst: TNG: An early episode. Riker wanders seemingly aimlessly around the ship for eight minutes, insults Geordi and Data (“A blind man teaching an android to paint.”), but little else happens. In the climactic seconds, he steps into a turbolift and goes somewhere else on the ship. I wasn’t teased at all, had nothing relevant to do with the episode as I recall. In fact, I remember the teaser but can’t recall the plot of the show.
Well don’t mind me, my taste in TNG episodes is notoriously unaligned with most other folks. For example, I am amazed at how many people regard “Darmok” as a great episode; I consider it incredibly inane.
I just could only watch the same scene over and over again so many times and still care, and I thought the final “solution” was silly. Data hears “three” and instantly knows what it refers to. Uh-huh.
Hey, “Darmok” is my favorite episode! (So, out of curiosity, Legomancer, what’s yours?)
There’s a TNG teaser which opens with Data doing a scene from Henry V on the holodeck, and another one where he’s doing a scene from The Tempest. I really like these. (The one with Henry V is the ep where James Sloyan plays a Romulan defector – another of my favorites. Another nice touch is that Data mentions that he’s studying the performances of famous actors who’ve played Henry V, and one of the actors mentioned is Kenneth Branagh! Woo-hoo! :D)
I know DS9 has done some good ones, but I can’t think of any…
back when my brother was about 6 years old or so, he and I were watching ST:NG and it was the time loop/two Picards episode. The following conversation ensued:
“Ben, which one is the robot Picard, and which one is the real Picard?”
“They’re both the real Picard. One of them is from the future, and he came back in time to meet the present-day Picard.”
(Puzzled silence…)
“Ben, which one is the evil Picard?”
He went through a number of scenarios like this, and never quite figured it out.
It’s almost as good as the time I told him that we were living on the outer surface of the earth. He looked very puzzled and distressed, and said, “No! We’re living on the inside of the earth!” (He hadn’t even watched “For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky.” I have no idea how he became so thoroughly convinced that we’re living on the inside of the earth- probably one of his teachers told him that.)
I hope your brother suffered no ill effects at your teasing.
Great chidhood anecdote, but… you’ve got your time loops mixed up. The one with the effective teaser is the one wherein they keep crashing into Frasier Crane’s ship, basically the first three acts are the same act told over and over again.
I recall the first or second season ep you’re talking about though with the duplicate Picard.
Another vote for “Darmok.” It’s my favorite TNG ep after “The Inner Light.” Third is “The Chase” about the star map in the DNA sequence.
I don’t want to hijack the thread into a favorite TNG episode list, so I won’t go into the ones I like. My original comment was not meant as a hijack - I think that opening teaser is very effective, but is let down by the silly treatment of the rest of the episode.
I think that teaser is particularly effective because I do remember thinking “WTF?” when I first saw that episode, even though I knew I was watching a show that would, after 50 minutes, return everything to the status quo, no matter what it took to do so.
I cannot remember the teasers to the three favorites that I listed. Sometimes, as you have notd, regardless of honest disagreements about the quality of an ep, the teaser is far superior to the episode. By the same token, I recall a few B stories that outshone the main plot of the episode.
The Voyager teaser I mentioned. Great teaser, but the ep, IIRC, was just a set up for the HR867-5309 race, or whatever the hell they were called.
As soon as you brought up teasers I thought of “Cause and Effect,” the episode where the ship blows up at the start. I know of no episode of any show that made better use of commercial breaks. You knew that as they built to each break the damned ship was gonna blow up again. I loved it.
I also thought it was sort of “actor’s revenge” in the sense that we saw the episode the way the actors do: little scenes done over and over and over again…
Another great teaser: Data playing poker with Stephen Hawking.
The teaser for “Endgame,” the Voyager finale, was quite good.
ALso the Voyager episode “Living Witness” in which the
teaser seems to take place in an alternate universe with an
evil Capt Janeway.
My avorite teaser was when McCoy tussled with a patient and accidentally injected himself with the drug meant for the patient. What was that episode? Oh yeah, “City on the Edge of Forever”.
(So, out of curiosity, Legomancer, what’s yours?)
(The one with Henry V is the ep where James Sloyan plays a Romulan defector – another of my favorites. Another nice touch is that Data mentions that he’s studying the performances of famous actors who’ve played Henry V, and one of the actors mentioned is Kenneth Branagh! Woo-hoo! :D)