I’m a Star Trek fan, but not really quite a “Trekkie,” I don’t think. I like to watch Trek shows when I can, but I’ve missed an awful lot of them when they first aired. Especially since they all seem to start out weakly, then improve as they go, it’s easy for me to ignore or dismiss the shows until they get really good. Plus I’m a husband and father of three girls… that tends to take up some of my TV time. I also don’t know the titles of many of the episodes, even my favorites.
So anyway… I’ve gradually discovered some of the real gems that I’ve missed in the new Star Trek series. They’re generally not the “big event” episodes, though a few of those are good too, but seem to be one-offs. Good stories in and of themselves, that don’t necessarily fit into the larger whole all that well.
“Deep Space Nine” is probably my favorite of all of the Star Trek series. It also started out weakly too, but found its footing pretty quickly and stayed consistently good until the end. Tonight I saw the best episode of DS9, though, in which Odo regains his changeling abilities and discovers something new about himself after trying to nurse a sick changeling back to health and teach it to shapeshift. Impressively touching and a nice look at an underused character… I enjoyed it immensely.
“Voyager,” on the other hand, was a very hit and miss series for me. Some episodes were OK, some were pretty bad. Some characters were overexposed, others almost ignored. Some episodes were excellent.
I recently saw a two-part episode in which Voyager is inadvertently trapped in the time manipulations of another race. The episode sets up an alternate timeline and puts Voyager through its paces. Many of the crew end up dying, and Voyager herself gets increasingly pounded as the plot progresses. By the end of the episode, she’s barely held together at all, and in a last ditch effort Janeway rams the whole ship into the time manipulator’s vessel. One of the strangest, but most compelling, episodes of “Voyager” I’ve seen.
I also liked the one in which the Doctor Hologram awakens in a Voyager museum, thousands of years after the Voyager first passed through, and has to defend the actions of Voyager to a race that has the history wrong.
And the “Voyager” episode in which all the lights on the ship go out was pretty damn creepy. The ship without its ever-present background hum just seemed wrong.
For “Next Generation,” my favorite episode is probably “All Good Things…” which is the last one of the series.
Also very good, however, was an episode in which the crew are suffering bad dreams in which they remember being operated on on a strange table. By reconstructing their fragmented dreams in the Holodeck, they build a model of a table surrounded by masty-looking instruments. They discover, slowly, that they’ve all been the victims of a Communion-esque abduction and memory erasure. A nice buildup, and a fun payoff.
And the episode in which Picard is captured and tortured by the Cardassians, cheifly by David Warner, was a classic. “There are four lights!” I almost cheered aloud.
For the original series, I like a lot of them, but my all-time favorite always has been “The Doomsday Machine.” The power plays, the twists and turns, the Moby Dick parallels, and that plodding, methodical score (which I remain convinced John Williams “borrowed” from for his classic Jaws score). I hear it was James Doohan’s favorite episode, and I can see why. It’s a good episode for Scotty.
So, those are mine… does anyone else have some particular favorite episodes of Trek? What makes them stand out for you? I’m interested to hear about any other good ones I may have missed, but also just to know what other people find that they like about Star Trek.
