I think you’re confusing Robert Picardo, who played the Doctor, with Robert Beltran, who portrayed Chakotay.
(And I never understood all the Chakotay hate, but that’s another thread.)
[See post #37, Skald.]
I actually liked Chakotay, but they didn’t exactly give him much to do.
There was a lot of potential for conflict there. Political conflict Federation vs. Maquis; sexual conflict between Chakotay and Janeway, but they wimped out and didn’t go for it.
Scorpion was one of the best examples. Janeway trusted the Borg, Chakotay didn’t. She made the pact with them, but let him plan a way to deal with treachery, and he did.
Whoa…whoa…let’s not say things we can’t take back. Avery Brooks is no Patrick Stewart, but he’s a pretty good actor. To be fair, I’m basing this 99% on Deep Space Nine, not his other work.
Mahaloth, I truly wish I could convey the impressions me and any and all of my friends do of this guy via the text on this Web site.
I mean … really. He make Shatner look like a smooth mover.
I disagree completely. I think by far the best acting was on DS9. Brooks like Stewart is a classically trained stage actor. I like his take on the character and I feel he is the best captain. Stewart did very well. Mulgrew will never be more than a movie of the week level of actor. I like Bakula but he was just a typical TV hero, not a very good character. Shatner is Kirk. There may be better actors but it doesn’t matter. He is in a different category.
DS9 had Colm Meaney. TNG never did much with him. Very good actor. DS9 made Worf into a good character and it was well acted. Alexander Siddig is a very good actor. Armin Shimerman is an excellant character actor. Rene Auberjenois probably did his best work in a long career. Andrew Robinson and Marc Alaimo were fantastic, something I wouldn’t have guessed from their other work. It goes on. Top to bottom the best cast.
I can not believe that someone mentioned Ryan as one of the best actors in the franchise. She acted like a machine. It might have worked on the show but she always acts like a machine. She is on Shark now and is still playing 7of9. I will give you Picardo. Very good actor who did a great job in his role. He was the best thing about Voyager.
For me, Star Trek is TOS. The others are just pale imitations. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are simply perfect together.
The other shows seem to have… puny characters by comparison.
(But I do have to give Voyager some points for the hotness of Harry Kim and Robert Beltran. Maybe if I’d watched with the sound off I would have lasted more than a few episodes.)
One could assert that all they want, but they’d be dead wrong. It didn’t have a captive network… in fact it didn’t have a network at all. It was syndicated and appeared on different network channels in different cities… FOX, CBS, whatever.
Original recipe Star Trek for me - the chemistry between the characters is fantastic.
I’d put Enterprise next, if only because I like the doctor (can’t remember his name, of course). Captain Archer always struck me as weak, and T’Pol was a little too snotty for my taste. The rest of the cast was ok, but nothing to write home about.
TNG, however, always struck me as irritating, too earnest and self righteous. No one had a personality that wasn’t well telegraphed to begin with. The technobabble really got on my nerves after a while, as well.
I never really spent too much time watching the others.
I liked Enterprise, but T’Pol did seem to confuse cool logic with overly emotional snotty at times. Spock and Tuvok played the best Vulcans, I thought.
TOS remains the best, the king, the Big Number One. A uniformly charismatic and watchable cast; a dazzling, galaxy-spanning future offering unlimited discovery and adventure; scripts by noted SF authors; poignant sociopolitical content; humor that was quite often genuinely humorous; all this plus the third-greatest opening credit narration in television history. The highs were higher. The lows were lower. Even the space hippies were hipper. While the other series all had their moments, no one is going to be demanding movies about those same characters in 20 years.
Come, Sir. The only episode that fellated with greater alacrity was Spock’s Brain.
Exactly! And yet everyone remembers the space hippies! “Brain and brain, what is brain?” Even the abysmally horrible bits were abysmally horrible in uniquely memorable and entertaining ways! What other series are likely to have that much staying power for even the LOUSY bits? 40 years from now, nobody’s going to be making quips about that one episode where the Enterprise-D got taken over by evil voodoo masks, or how Captain Janeway turned into a newt. Hey, remember that really horrible Ferengi episode? Of course not. They all sort of blur together into one big stinky foam-latex turd. That’s the sort of mediocrity that the original series had no time for.
Don’t be such a Herbert. Groove with me! You know the words…
*Headin’ out to Eden… *
There are none, Sir.
Well, what did I say? Of course you don’t remember them. They weren’t really distinctive enough to be memorable, beyond the initial surface markers of “Ferengi episode,” “attempted humor” and “freaky sex” that trigger the antibody response. After that the brain swells to the point where the synapses fail to transmit a charge.
Remember the most distinctive feature of the space hippie leader? HUGE EARLOBES. Every Ferengi episode is, in a way, a tribute to the magic of the space hippies.
My Seconds shall call upon you in the morning, Sir.
I’ve borrowed some of my friend’s Star Trek DVDs recently and the answer is clear: Deep Space 9, in a landslide.
TOS was cute and did start it all, but it just didn’t age well for me. TNG and Voyager were mostly devoid of soul and personality; the characters were just so boring! That’s the main problem with Star Trek; the character interactions are about the stalest of any show I’ve seen. It’s a clinic of the sterile and sanitized; the characters don’t have quirks, lust/hatred/jealousy/etc are confined to one-episode stories on the rare occasions they come out at all, and there are no serious long-term conflicts between main characters (two cast members who can’t stand each other, for example). Voyager supposedly had that as a premise, but after that fake Bajoran/Cardassian chick made her move, the crew became as stale as the Enterprise.
**
Deep Space 9** was the only Trek that had a vaguely interesting cast. Having regular/semi-regular interesting gray characters like Garak, Gul Dukat, Vedek Winn and Quark really helped give the show some decent coverage of humanity’s darker side. Kira was fantastic at portraying a passionate woman caught in the middle of her own conflicting ideals and loyalties, and her interaction with the Cardassian file clerk (of the concentration camp) in the Season One episode “Duet” may have been the most compelling in all of Star Trek. Sisko was sometimes a bit melodramatic (the series opener “Emissary” made me wince a few times at his oddly girlish delivery), but again, at least he had passion and convinced me he was a human being. Odo and O’Brien were both quite capable as the curmudgeons of the show, and Bashir shone as the naïve enthusiastic doctor who grew up with the series. Only Dax was a typical boring Star Trek character, but at least she had a few decent stories and was hot. 
Speaking of the stories, the arcs with Bajoran politics, Prophets & Emissary, Dominion threat, changelings/Odo, wars of the great powers, etc. were so much more satisfying than most of what the other shows produced. DS9 had its share of pure clunkers, too, but the arcs more than made up for them.
All that said, DS9 still suffered from severely oversimplifying or not following through on some of the important storylines, and I was hoping that it would have been a stepping stone on the way to an even better and more thoroughly fleshed out Trek series, but alas, it ended up being the apex of the franchise. Kinda fitting in that it was the one right in the middle. At least we have Battlestar Galactica, which is what I had hoped the Trek post-DS9 would resemble.
Damn, I forgot about that forgettable episode where Janeway and the pilot turned into newts as you will. It would have been a little better if I had noticed at the time that I could have used the line “But the got better”. It is amazing how truly awful Voyager really was. It was dumber than even Spock’s Brain far too often.
I hear she got better.
Is there any other? DS9. I loved it for the reasons other fans have already stated: it was darker, more morally ambiguous, and wonderfully cast. Plus it had by far the best villain Star Trek has ever had: Gul Dukat, played by the incredible Marc Alaimo.
Some of my favorite episodes:
“Blood Oath”, in which Jadzia teams up with Kor, Koloth, and Kang (all classic Klingons from TOS, all played by the original actors) to take out an old enemy.
“Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night” in which Kira discovers that her mother was one of Dukat’s ‘comfort women’
Every episode Garak was ever in, especially whenever he and Dukat bitched at each other
“The Magnificent Ferengi”, in which Quark assembles a crack team of Ferengi to rescue his mother from the Dominion.
“Duet”, in which a low-level Cardassian clerk impersonates a famous war criminal in an attempt to force Cardassia to recognize their crimes against the Bajorans.
“The Muse”, in which Odo marries the pregnant Lwaxana Troi to help her escape her other husband.
But really, every other episode is my favorite and I enjoy almost all of them.
In my experience, there tend to be two kinds of Trekkies: the ones who love DS9 and the ones who don’t. The ones who don’t like it tend to dislike it because of the reasons its hardcore fans loved it: it doesn’t ‘feel’ like a traditional, optimistic Star Trek series. S’all good, not everyone has to love it, and yes, setting it on a space station where no one ‘boldly goes’ anywhere was sort of a bold move, but I loved it. The last season especially was just brilliantly written, even if they did go all kinds of over-the-top with Gul Dukat basically becoming Satan.