I’ve seen 'em all. With very few exceptions I’ve seen all the TOS, TNG, and DS9 eps multiple times. At different times, I consider each of those three series my favorite. TNG had some spectacular episodes, but nothing matches the inoxerable build from the end of DS9’s S3 through the next four years. Plus DS9 was worth watching by about the fifth episode, while TNG took a season and a half.
I have a lot of episodes I really enjoy. For TOS there’s Balance of Terror, the submarine chase between the Enterprise and a Romulan bird of prey; By Any Other Name, where the ship gets taken over by these aliens that can turn humans into blocks of salt; the wonderful Amok Time; and A Piece of The Action, the one where the planet is controlled by Prohibition-era mobs.
TNG, there’s too many to name. The Inner Light is powerful as is the Picard love story in Lessons. I love Parallels for all the different versions of the Enterprise you see. Frame of Mind, where Riker finds himself going insane, actually had a lot of effect on my thinking, and there are lots of other great ones.
DS9, like I said, it’s all about the build, so it’s not the brilliant episodes so much as watching everything get worse and worse for the Federation. But Progress is good, as is The Visitor, with a grown-up Jake Sisko telling about his father’s death, For the Cause, the one where Dr. Bashir is outed as a genetically enhances, and that one where they pull of the heist of the Vegas casino in the holosuite. Oh, also More Tribbles, More Troubles.
With Voyager you have to look a little harder, but individual episodes in the last half of the series are enjoyable such as Shattered and Juggernaut. Plus the tried to do a season-long arc in S2 which didn’t exactly work but wasn’t bad at all and had a great climax.
Enterprise was, for its first two seasons, the worst of all. The third season was OK, although they didn’t take the opportunities they could have. The fourth season, though, was really good and was very much back to being Star Trek. Almost all of that season is worth watching, although your enjoyment would be considerably enhanced if you’re famiiar with TOS, on which a lot of ENT S4 eps are based. The best of the lot is the Mirror Universe arc, In a Mirror Darkly Pts 1 and 2, but the Klingon arc (Affliction and Divergence) is also much better than it has a right to be given that it exists solely to explain why the Kilingos of TOS lokk diffrerent than the Klingons from later series and the movies. The last arc, Demons and Terra Prime, starts off pretty slow but Terra Prime is not only Enterprise’s best episode, it’s actually good enough to be counted among the best episodes of other series. I knda liked the final episode as well, but that’s a distinctly minority opinion.
The animated series is fun, but definitely a kid’s show. The Counter-Clock incident and the one where Uhura takes command because all the men are effected by the song of siren-like aliens are both pretty good.
Of the movies, the even number rule holds up until Nemesis, which was pretty poor. I also liked Insurrection, although again, that’s a minority opinion.
–Cliffy