ST:TNG suffered from the writer’s strike their first season and an excess of Roddenberry. After those obstacles were gone, it hit its stride. There were still clunkers, but the over-all quality went way up. Even the stupid episodes with Alexander playing cowboy with Worf on the holodeck were mildly entertaining.
I don’t watch Buffy, but I will absolutely concede to your point about Wesley/Westley.
Anyway, I see that everyone has already gotten it, and I should have said it, but I don’t mind spoilers. I have vague memories of most of the important plot points, anyway.
Yesterday’s episode really made me uncomfortable. It was called Code of Honor, and it was about this alien planet that kidnapped Tasha Yar to be the leader’s wife. Ugh - a relatively primitive planet full of BLACK people that have multiple wives and who decide kidnapping the whitest, blondest woman was the way to go, and then refuse to give her back without a duel between the two women? Made me very uncomfortable…and they still had to shoehorn Wesley in somehow!
I actually skipped the scenes with him in them. Anyway, it was such a tribal view of blacks I was surprised to see that black people even acted in it (but then, everybody’s gotta eat).
But I was happy to see Picard start coming into his own. I always liked Picard because of his diplomatic ways of dealing with things, and of the way he could twist a sentence until you weren’t sure where he was going with it. And he had a lot of those lines here.
But oh my god the girl fight was terrible! They didn’t even try, with those stupid weapons that apparently can fly off your hands and kill someone in the audience. 
Do they ever explain why Picard makes that lazy hand wave every single time he says “engage”? It looks like he’s trying to cast a spell or something (Magic missile probably).
You really have to read Wil Wheaton’s take on the episode.
Code of Honor is one of my least favorite ST episodes of all time, across all series. (To be fair, there are large chunks of Voyager and Enterpise that I have not seen.)
Reading it now! Thanks. 
I’d also forgotten about the very uncomfortable situation of Tasha liking her kidnapper. Rape is love, don’t you know?
Oh my, this article is positively making me snort with laughter. I’m trying to hide it here at work because I’d never live it down if people knew what I was reading.
Oh god, now I started reading his synopsis of Encounter at Farpoint! I really need to not read this at work; I have tears in my eyes.
goes back to reading more
Amazingly, an episode of Stargate mirrors this almost exactly. Except it was a planet full of Mongols, their leader kidnaps Sam (the blonde female), and she has to fight him herself for her freedom. And she kicks his ass.
This is gold:
I saw it. I watched the first half dozen episodes of Stargate, but when I found myself shouting “QUARANTINE! PUT THEM IN FUCKING QUARANTINE YOU ASSHOLES! DON’T LET THEM WANDER ALL OVER INFECTING EVERYBODY!”
I felt I needed to stop watching.
What about the one where they are sent to engage a planet and bring them into the fold? The last ship that tried to do that was blown to smithereens by the planet folk for insulting them.
You see, the people of this planet need to be greeted in a very specific way in this weird bird chirp language. If you don’t do that they kill you and all several hundred of your shipmates. If I were in charge, I’d let that planet of sociopaths languish. If they were that strategic, I’d make sure my best in the Galaxy shields were working or maybe just blow the fuck out of them for destroying a starship whose captain said hello slightly the wrong way.
Luckily, Picard manages to save the day and it’s a testament to Patrick Stewart’s acting that he played the scene without rolling his eyes. If only Shakespearean actors were better paid.
I love Stargate SG-1, but I mostly pick and choose episodes here and there. One day about a year ago I decided I should watch the show all the way through. I watched the pilot: excellent. Then the very first, the very first episode after that was the sexist Mongol one. I stopped watching at 15 minutes in and couldn’t continue.
I still like the show, but watching episodes in order was clearly going to be hazardous.
In their defense, they got better. They lasted longer than any other continuously running scifi show (Doctor Who wasn’t continuous for the length of its run). I think the only reason they stopped the show was because the actors fees had gotten way too high so they started over with lesser well known people (Atlantis, etc.) who they could pay less.
If you ever feel like it I’d sure appreciate a list of “must watch” episodes for the show.
Keeping this post short for a variety of reasons:
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Window of Opportunity is a fantastic one-off episode, possibly the best I’ve seen in any sci-fi show barring Firefly. It’s season 4 (episode 6), so the characters have all had time to gel and get familiar with each other, but it’s not connected to any long-running arcs. The premise is entertaining, the writing is good, the comedic bits are funny as hell, and if you’re familiar with the characters, the climax is actually quite emotional.
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Also off the top of my head is Proving Ground (S5 E13).
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Wormhole X-Treme (S5 E12) is also downright hilarious, although since it’s more about making fun of the show itself, it helps to save that for later.
I actually tend to enjoy filler one-offs that are more for letting the actors play off each other than the epic multi-ep arcs, so those are what I focus on.
My 11 year old girl and I are doing this as well. Yay for Netflix! We’ve done all of Enterprise (surprisingly good overall), TOS (surprisingly, laughably BAD in many places), and now we just finished season one of TNG. We call it The Star Trek Project and we have until October 2013 to get through the end of Voyager.
All the way or bust, baby. All the way.
But boy, some of those early NextGen episodes are…less than hoped for. Let’s leave it at that.
**Jonathan **- you owe it to yourself to watch TNG in sequence, then graduate on to DS9. You’ll thank me later 
Thank you very much!
Last night it was “The Last Outpost”, which was actually a pretty good episode, even with the Ferengi literally acting like monkeys. But Riker had some amazing scenes and lines, and there was a moment of real, genuine tension between Crusher and Picard (when they first wake up from oxygen deprivation and she called him Jean for a second). The scene of Data getting caught in the Chinese finger trap was brilliantly done, what with Geordi and Riker’s amused reactions and Picard’s slightly irrascible reaction (what have you done - get unstuck!)
Even in this episode they felt obligated to mention Wesley but I can’t find any fault in it. When the crew is possibly dying of oxygen deprivation it seems fair to ask the doctor how her only son is doing; it’s the mark of a good captain to check on everybody (as he was doing when he asked).
The Ferengi were rather animalistic, and not how I remember Quark at all, but he’s from DS9 isn’t he? I presume things have changed by then. But you really started to get a feel for what both Data and Riker are going to do with their roles when given a little room.
I always thought it was some kind of French thing, like the Gallic shrug. Just to remind us that Picard is French – you certainly can’t tell by his speech.
He did say “Merde” in this episode, which made me smile.