I said “Equally good.” I love the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad and the retro charm of TOS, but I also love Picard and Data, the all-in-all better stories and better sfx of TNG.
FTR, Kirk never had a green chick, though he came close once (Marta in “Whom Gods Destroy”). I’d have boned her too!
Green hair does not an Orion make, but I loooooooved Shana’s bouncy chrome bra. :o
I’ll take action and blatant sexism over touchey-feeley-psychobullshit-psocialworker political correctness any day.
Worf was also an orphan, raised by a kindly old Jewish couple from the Old Country.
“The Enterprise Incident” sucked. If you want to nominate any third season episode, I’d suggest something like “Spectre of the Gun,” “Day of the Dove,” or “The Tholian Web.” “That Which Survives” was not bad either.
Even “All Our Yesterdays” and “Turnabout Intruder” were better than “Enterprise Incident.”
I fucking hated, hated, hated Data and the whole “I want to be a real boy!” trope. And the idea of a counsellor. And the technobabble. And the holodeck. And the fucking smug superiority of it all.
TOS all the way.
“You lissen t’me, boy! Stay wood!” 
Notice that most of these shows were written by sf writers. A big negative of TNG was that it was pretty much all internally written, and often lacked the freshness of TOS.
I watched TOS during its original airing from the first episode, and I think I saw every one. (No, I didn’t have a life.) It was one of the few shows which exceeded my expectations. It was by far the best non-anthology sf show aired to that point. It was the first that actually understood that you couldn’t exceed the speed of light by pushing harder on the accelerator, and the first to have an open universe which is now so common.
Plus the McCoy, Kirk, Spock id, ego, superego combination was top notch. TOS could mostly include all the major characters in stories - TNG had far too many episodes focused on one where the other characters made contractually obligatory appearances.
Picard and the whole bunch always struck me as smug and superior, even to god-like beings. Contrast to Errand of Mercy where Kirk finds himself arguing with the Klingon to be able to have their war. And realizing he is being stupid. A wonderful moment which Shatner pulled off well.
What really wraps it up is that though Patrick Stewart is technically a better actor then Shatner, he has absolutely no sense of humor. The best TOS episodes had adventure, drama, and humor, with Doomsday Machine a prime example
Yeah TOS was a bit sexist. But racially, which was more a concern at the time, it was great. Not because of the kiss. In Court Martial, the Admiral, Kirk’s superior, was black. And nothing was made of it. At the time (and I was there) the concept that white people would work for black people might have been more revolutionary than anything else shown on network TV.
Of course you would. She was Batgirl!
And yet his foster brother was a middle-aged Italian man from Brooklyn!
One thing I hated about TNG was that the “starry” backdrops were so obviously crude and fake (and even worse than those in TOS) that it threw me right out of the story each time I saw them.
A little defense of TNG. There are some episodes that I think define what ST is supposed to be. Episodes that, if they were the first one you’d seen, will give you the essence of ST, plus, get you hooked in. Naturally, these are YMMV choices. The (subjectively) best episodes:
We’ll Always Have Paris
A Matter of Honor
The Emissary
The Defector
Inner Light
Remember Me
Darmok
Cause and effect
Second Chances
Parallels
I’m also a big fan of Family, but that only works as the third “half” of The Best of Both Worlds.
But, to me, the episode that truly defines what ST is, is The Devil in The Dark. It has the horrible monster that Kirk goes from wanting to kill, to defending. For all the talk above of TOS being action to TNG’s talk, Kirk’s handling of the situation is almost Picard-like.
Turnabout Intruder? If you continue in this manner, I will take it as evidence that you are psychologically unfit, and I shall ignore you on that basis.
TOS *Enterprise *was a better looking ship, too. The TNG *Enterprise *has the same aesthetic problems that late 80’s cars did - lines attempting to smooth out corners just looking kind of flabby and soft.
Shatner also usually names that as his favorite episode, although for different reasons. It was during the filming of that episode that his father died. He has warm memories of the love and support the cast and crew gave him during such an awful moment in his life.
I agree with this entirely. The Original Series “felt” much more like the written science fiction I was just getting into.
In large part, this is, I think, because the Original Series actually used scripts by recognized or up-and-coming science fiction authors. The later series did NOT do this. Some contributors:
Harlan Ellison
Theodore Sturgeon
Jerome Bixby
Norman Spinrad
Robert Bloch
David Gerrold
Fredric Brown
Some of these contributed more than once. Gerrold wasn’t an established writer, but became one later. (In addition to “The Trouble with Tribbles” he worked on two others). Fredric Brown didn’t actually contribute, but “Arena” was sorta based on his short story (I’ve heard that they started writing the episode, then noticed the similarity to Brown’s story, and then bought the rights.)
Even after the Original Series left the air, Star Trek continued this use of established authors. The short-lived animated series has one story based on a Larry Niven story, and David Gerrold wrote a sequel to “Tribbles”.
When they thought of reviving Star Trek as a TV series, the planned “Phase II” already had scripts and outlines contributed by SF authors, including Sturgeon.
Even when they made the first movie, it had a screen story by Alan Dean Foster (who’d been writing the Star Trek Logs books, based on the animated series), and credited Isaac Asimov as an advisor.
But when The Next Generation started, they stopped the use of SF authors as scripters, and the series afterwards kept up that tradition.
You’re bluffing! :dubious:
No argument there. Matt Jeffries’ design was a thing of beauty! Picard’s ship looked like something that would indeed have “the lobby of the goddamned Hilton” as its bridge! :smack:
^:)^
“You’re either Jewish or Italian.” :dubious:
—Lisa Simpson
Hell, for all we know, the Rozhenkos made a hobby of adopting orphans of all nationalities and species!
“Time Squared”
“The Drumhead”
“The Measure of a Man”
“Yesterday’s Enterprise”
“Conspiracy”
“Relics”
“Family”
“Best of Both Worlds”
“Elementary, Dear Data”
“Sarek”
Would be my top ten.
I liked TOS better because I liked the characters and the “feel” of its world better.
I didn’t care for Troi, Crusher or Riker as characters. Worf, Geordi (sp?), and Data were better, but the timing of the series (real time not Star Trek time, I mean) called for a female in the captain’s seat or at a minimum in some significant in-charge role. Instead they parceled out versions of Nurturer-in-Chief and they weren’t very likeable people. Riker I just wanted to backhand, no particular ideological reason.
As much as I liked Data, he was too much of a Mr Spock stand-in to work well for me. We’d already seen “what happens if we put in a character that is supposed to act strictly from logic and rationality and has no familiarity with emotions etc?” Also, they played him too much like they’d invented androids exactly yesterday and it had never occurred to any android or to culture at large to explore these questions of android identity before.
Overall the inter-character chemistry in TOS was just so much better.
I also liked James T. Kirk better than Jean-Luc Picard—— either that or the former character’s role and world and way of being in it or something of that ilk. (This should not be confused with a liking for William Shatner over Patrick Stewart, either as a person or as an actor). The captain of the TNG’s Enterprise was a bureaucrat in charge of an interstellar territory’s code enforcement agency’s spaceship, or at least that’s how the series felt. United Federation of Planets Bureau of Starfleet Management and Administration, represented by delegate Picard. Under Kirk, you definitely had this wagon train to the stars thing going on, in which an ideal but very distant and detached vision of Starfleet was represented locally by the isolated exploration-mission starship Enterprise which, like the Texas Ranger of the fictionalized 1800s cattle trails, had to make a lot of local judgments and cope with things on its own, centered on the command shouders of the captain running the ship. It’s a difference in how they wrote the shows.
Yet, that was the well that ST kept going back to, with varying degrees of success and originality.
TOS: Spock
TNG: Data
DS9: Odo
VOY: The Doctor
Enterprise: Back to a Vulcan again
And TNG almost ruined the show in season 2 by trying too hard to replicate “what worked” by bringing in a new Bones. Pulaski was all curmudgeon without any underlying humanity. Plus, she even hated transporters.
Pulaski also caused issues in certain fans I would see at cons in that she really didn’t seem to treat Data well, thinking of him as merely a machine. A couple of eps even showed this fairly well. The one where Data and the officious bureaucrat played that game, for example.
She ended up falling down a turbolift shaft when Scotty’s grandkid accidentally left it open as he went to find some green tea to have with his hummus.
Rudely, too. Not “fun ribbing of a pal” but outright dismissal. Wouldn’t talk to him (“it”) at all. Not a way to make a good first impression.
She refused to even care enough to pronounce his name correctly:
Actually, I see Q as an example of why I feel that TNG is more coherent. While we still have immortal omnipotent aliens who appear to have minimal effect on the rest of the galaxy, at least they show up in more than one episode, and they do at least threaten to do something that would impact the whole human race. And the nature of Q’s visits makes it impossible to do anything proactive about finding them.
Now… don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that Q was a particularly good idea for the series. Or that TNG didn’t have its own its issues with continuity or coherence, or other problems altogether, like their love for pop psychology. It’s actually a pretty close call for me. If I give TOS 6 out of 10, I’d give TNG 7. (And with DS9, Voyager and Enterprise all down in the 1 or 2 range, that’s saying something.)
On another note: while everyone else is talking captains, Picard for me all the way.
TNG tried to have Riker played as a Kirk-like character, and I really feel that this was genius… except that they couldn’t pull it off. Whether we blame the writers or Jonathan Frakes, that character totally failed. Anyway, Kirk as Picard’s number 2 would be perfect for me, especially if the conflicts between their styles were played up correctly.