Entirely possible, but I strongly disagree with this logic. “The Cage” is Trek in every way.
Back in the '90s, they published a hilarious article comparing all of the Trek series to date. My favorite item on the list was:
Neelix: Wears all that makeup to hide the fact that he’s really just Pete from Benson.
Odo: Wears all that makeup to hide the fact that he’s really just Clayton from Benson. 
Even “Spock’s Brain” and “Spectre of the Gun”?
Yep, even those. :o
There’s no way I can click the link right now seeing as how I’m sure it goes to playboy - can somebody post the top 5 and the bottom 5?
Thanks!
The Enemy Below is a good movie quite aside from it’s being the inspiration for that episode. Well worth watching. And much better than that other inspiration, “Zero Hour.”
“The Man Trap” on its first airing, of course. I was just going into 10th grade, an sf fan already, and I was pumped for Trek. To my delight it started good and got better.
No time to peruse the whole list, but my most-hated episode of TNG, “Genesis,” made the upper half, so I know I’m not going to see eye-to-eye with this guy…
Best of Season 3 is faint praise, and I prefer “Enterprise Incident” but I agree this isn’t a bad episode. The cheap sets were an important plot point, part of the unreality of the situation. Well above average for the third season and even the second half of the second season.
Yeah. I’m not clicking that at work either.
- “Shades of Gray,” The Next Generation, Season 2
- “And the Children Shall Lead,” The Original Series, Season 3
- “Code of Honor,” The Next Generation, Season 1
- “Threshold,” Voyager, Season 2
- “These Are The Voyages…,” Enterprise, Season 4
… - “Darmok,” The Next Generation, Season 5
- “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” The Next Generation, Season 3
- “Mirror, Mirror,” The Original Series, Season 2
- “The Inner Light,” The Next Generation, Season 5
- “The City on the Edge of Forever,” The Original Series, Season 1
Thank You!
Can’t really argue with the overall quality of those episode - the top 5 are indeed good and the bottom 5 are truly bad. I think Shades of Gray is a bit of a cheat since it’s a clip show - lazy lazy writing but basically a recap of what came before it. But then again, it’s the one with the least original content so I’m not opposed to last place.
Did anyone else notice that the best TNG episodes are, almost uniformly, ones that focus on Picard?
Two of the top 5 are original season. Probably not about Picard.
Because he and Data are easily the two best characters. Geordi, Deanna, Beverly centric shows? You knew it was going to be a snoozer.
That’s the beauty of DS9. Even a Dax centric show had a decent chance of being good. And after her the odds go up greatly for other characters.
Hell they could have done a Weyoun show and it would have been awesome.
Any love shown for All Good Things?
Ranked #21, with this comment:
Absolutely (agree with the miss). Spock figures out that everything they are experiencing is simulated - not real. So he is able to “convince” the others that what they’re experiencing isn’t real, and that their own minds can “control” the rules of the simulation.
Sound familiar to a certain movie with Keanu Reeves ? When I first saw “The Matrix”, this episode struck me as an obvious precursor in concept !
Indeed. I’d put it at least in the 100-200 bracket (“one of the best of season 3 (TOS)” is a fairly low bar, after all) – maybe swap it with the execrable “Genesis” (TNG Season 7), which unaccountably rated #193, and perhaps shuffle that bracket a bit to move SotG up a few dozen notches.
The author is a dear friend of mine and I can confirm he puts most Trek fans to shame. (Except that he’s completely wrong about the Voyager Q episodes, which are great.)