I’ll say that the best TOS episodes (which, incidentally, tend to be ones with unhappy endings) are better than the best TNG episodes (which tend to be the ones with happy endings). But that TNG has, proportionately, more good episodes. I don’t care about the special effects; I care about story and character. TOS wins there because it has better focus: it’s almost always about Jim & Spock & McCoy, and everybody else is window dressing. TNG was too often lacking in focus, because they never had less than seven major characters to service in an episode.
Incidentally, the TNG-era producers did learn from this when they went on to DS9 (my favorite among the Trek series). They were happy to ship out characters for a given episode if they didn’t belong.
I can still believe it. There are probably thousands of Starfleet officers in the science and engineering divisions who are captains but who never see combat, or never do any first contact. In the gladiator episode, whose title I am not currently prepared to admit knowing*, the captain who is collaborating with the mock-Romans says that starship duty (by which I assume he means Constitution-class starship duty) is different than regular duty–“a special ship, a special crew.”
We were talking about the useless commodore from the old age episode I am not going to admit know the title of.** I think his mistake was to try to put himself in the place of a Kirk or a Pike. Successful captains of the Enterprise and ships of her class tend to be ones who break the rules a lot, I suspect. So he said to himself, “What would Jim Kirk do if he were fit for command right now, and I was the one dying?” His answer was “Jim would break the rules”–except he didn’t know what rules to break and what rules not to.
*Okay, it’s “Bread & Circuses.” Why do I know THAT but not the boiling point of mercury?
**“The Deadly Years.” And yet I don’t remember how to make alcohol from scratch, despite being taught to build a still in chemistry.
