I think both *Voyager *and *Enterprise *are unfairly hated, *DS9 *is properly revered (except for some of the barfy and overlong “relationship” scenes), and *TNG *is overrated.
I wanted to expose my wife and daughter to some Trek, and as they are both feminists Voyager was a natural pick. But I knew it wasn’t highly serialized, the quality of episodes was uneven, and we just didn’t have time to go through every episode anyway. So I did some online research and asked a Trekker friend, and came up with the following list (not including the obvious starting point of the pilot) that was a little longer than I had intended but still repped less than half of the episodes in the series:
A couple years in, we just finished S3, so that’s 25 episodes in total. With twice that number to go, at this rate it will take us another four years–so the characters will age in “real time”, I guess. From those 25, the ones I was particularly impressed with were “Eye of the Needle”, “Meld”, “Death Wish”, “Remember”, “Unity”, and best of all, “Distant Origin”.
Going through this series again, I was surprised how long it took for Seven of Nine to finally arrive. She became such an iconic cast member (love or hate her), that in retrospect I thought of her as coming along a lot earlier.
One thing I always thought was irrefutible, no matter how people felt about the character, was that she had revitalized the franchise by increasing viewership. It even says exactly this in the Wiki article about her. But looking over the audience numbers on Wikipedia, they actually look somewhat lower after she was introduced. Is this just an amazing job by Jeri Ryan’s PR team of somehow fooling us all?
Super interesting graph! Thanks. I geeked out on that for a while, and decided to see if I could find any with a rating above 8 that I didn’t have on my list. There were two, both from the highly regarded S4 that we are about to start, so I added them: “Hope and Fear” and “Scientific Method”.
I actually thought one of the strongest things about DS9 was that they had a balance between episodic episodes, character development episodes and arc episodes. I think as TV dramas have become less episodic, they’ve kinda gone to far in the other direction, getting too wrapped up in slow moving, multi-season plot arcs. DS9, probably because it straddled the time period where shows were just giving up the purely episodic format, managed to strike a really good balance.
I suspect that’s why Voyager has improved somewhat with age. A purely episodic show seems new again. And in that type of show, even when your characters are weak (and they were), your over-arcing plot is barely awknowledged and your setting is non-sensical (and they were), well you can still get a good episode just by having an idea good enough to base forty minutes on.
Again I’ll restate I’m a Voyager fan…it actually explored space, had some good characters (yeah and some forgettable ones like Kim) and some great episodes that more than balance out holodeck nonsense episodes*
Anyway, my question is just…where are you streaming the episodes from? I’d love to watch some of those eps again.
The most flagrant example was an episode where two members of the crew are being held at gunpoint on the holodeck, and (surprise, surprise) the safeties have been deactivated. Someone advises the captain to just turn off the holodeck and she handwaves it saying something about not wanting to take such an extreme measure and harm the story.
So…let’s risk lives so we can play dress up and try out our old-timey accents?
Note there was no suggestion of an independent sentience in this case, no reason why you wouldn’t just turn it off (or, hey, isn’t there a pause button)?
And as the library of All the TV Shows Ever keeps getting larger and larger (and more accessible, with some frustrating exceptions), the episodic format is all the more appealing when you want to dip into a show and enjoy some of its best episodes, but just don’t have enough remaining seconds left in your life (even if you are young–after all, they aren’t likely to suddenly stop making good TV shows) to go back and watch a show’s entire run. A heavily serialized show won’t allow for just sampling the best episodes (after the pilot, later eps simply wouldn’t make much sense); and so it had better establish itself as one of the all-time greats, or a decade or more hence few will go back to watch it because they can’t commit the time to follow it all the way through.
Mijin: This, and I think all Trek ever, is streaming on Netflix.
I’m going to leave this open on the off chance that syndicate.01 is actually interested in discussion. While that post looks an awful lot like spam, I don’t think there’s any way he could have monetized a single image. I have, however, taken the liberty of removing the coding from the post, because nobody needs 48 point colored text to make their point, and the rest of us don’t need to see that, either.
[Not moderating]
What I’m seeing at that link is a shapely woman with body art reminiscent of a circuit board. While, to that extent, she does resemble 7 of 9, that’s a very broad similarity. I expect that a similar motif has been used many times for a “sexy robot”, and that it’ll be used many times more.
I believed Troi could do the things she actually did. Sure, their idea of therapy was limited, but not worse than shows today.
Wesley is a type of character I can believe exists, (I’ve met a 14 year old sophomore in college.) But I agree the actual execution was bad quite often. Though, as a kid, I liked the fantasy, and still don’t quite get Wesley the character is hated, though I do get hating how he was used.
Troi is similar, except I do get why stating the obvious can come across as condescending.
I gotta say, I don’t “get” a lot of poetry.
On the subject of Voyager, I’ve been watching a lot of Trek reruns lately thanks to BBC America (which, apparently, means big blocks of reruns of American shows that were in no way produced by the BBC for some reason) and while some ST:TNG episodes are really cheesy, I can still stand to watch them. Voyager episodes, on the other hand, were just painful, and I gave up on trying to rewatch them.
There’s a guy named Markwho is going through and posting reviews of his first time watching any of Star Trek. He’s doing it in airdate order, and he’s up to Voyager (and the last season of DS9) now. And he’s liking most of the episodes. He mostly liked TNG, but hates any of those horrible episodes (and is upset that the movies seem to be the Picard and Data show.)
Though I warn you that his rules for his comments section are kinda strict, so read them before commenting.
Mark is a gay Hispanic man who was adopted by some rather restrictive and abusive parents. He got his start by reading through Twilight and pointing out all the flaws. But then he decided to watch and read things he actually likes–based on what his followers tell him.