What was the best Star Trek show IYO?

[bluegate]

And I guess I?m in the minority, but I loved VOY, just as much as TNG. I just loved the idea of a crew being stranded 75 years away and trying to get home. Being in the Delta Quadrant allowed the writers free reign away from the tried-and-true Star Trek lore and do NEW things. Don?t get me wrong, I love me some Klingons, Romulans and the lot, but the best episodes of TOS and TNG were the ones that introduced someone/thing new. All the things the Voyager crew had to do to scrape by made for some incredible episodes; I thought Janeway was an amazing captain. It had been an amazing ride; I hated to see it end?

You pretty much ninja'd what was going to me my post with this.

One additional reason why I like Voyager, albeit minor, is that a lot of the special effects hold up relatively well, both practical and digital. Although thanks to TNG movie, the Borg look decent and not like black spandex wearing hippies with rubber tubing stuck to their face, 3D renders of ships and phenomenons in space look pretty decent still.

And although they were also used on DS9, I really liked the uniforms used on Voyager, elegant black with a small strip of color and a grey under-shirt.

Just too bad that we'll never get a widescreen Blu-Ray release for that series.

 

[Terminal Blue]

DS9 was overall my favourite. It had some elements which never quite worked (the mystical subplot was kind of bollocks towards the end) and it got really fan-servicey as time went on, but at the same time having ongoing storylines allowed for the stakes to be slightly better laid out. I also liked that it showed a different perspective on a lot of the ethical conflicts behind Star Trek without being too crude or in your face about it.

TNG is where I got on board the Star Trek train so it ranks very highly for me. It isn't quite as soap opera-ish and fan-servicey as DS9, but the flipside is that the quality of individual episodes is variable. I'd actually rate the best of TNG above the best of DS9, but you have to sit through a lot of filler or dud plotlines to get to those good episodes. Also, early-90s gender politics are weird..

TOS was too dated for me to get into, but I can sort of see the appeal and I have to recognise what it did for a generation of viewers and for the medium of television.

VOY was probably the reason why it took me so long to get into Star Trek. I remember watching it as a kid and if it couldn't keep my 12 year old self entertained I have little faith in its ability to do so now.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

TNG is my personal pinnacle of Star Trek, I think that it best represents what most people feel the idea of Star Trek is without it being too over the top or boring like The Motion Picture was. It isn't perfect, the first couple of seasons are shaky but 3-6 are basically solid gold and Captain Picard is the captain against whom I measure all others.

DS9 I have a very love/hate relationship with: it has some of the best characters in the canon like Miles, Kira, Odo, Quark, Worf, Dukat and the Dominion War is a great arc but a shit load of it's writer's desire to make it the anti-Trek (I also personally think its rude to use another job as a test case for your next one) is something that raises my hackles.

That and frankly, Babylon 5 did the space station setting better and as much as I love Trek, Babylon 5 could have just been the Londo and G'Kar show and still be leagues ahead of Trek on its best day.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

DS9>TNG>VOY>TOS>ENT
I like how the names of the shows are all so easily reduced to 3 characters!

I grew up watching TNG, so that's basically my childhood in a bottle there, and I'll love it every day until I die. But DS9 just had such solid writing and characters, and was generally more complex and nuanced than the rest of Trek. There are some simply brilliant storylines and character arcs.

Voyager gets a lot more hate than it deserves, but I'll admit I see it through some rather rosy glasses, as it was also a childhood staple. It has serious problems, but there's a lot to like as well.

TOS is such a weird show, honestly. It was so ahead of its time and also SO sixties. It ranges from really excellent sci-fi to dreadful nonsense to great social commentary to fairly offensive backwards politics. Nevertheless, I'll always love it.

And you know, Enterprise was a mostly terrible show that all but desecrated the history of the franchise, but... I recently rewatched the last 2 seasons to make sure it was as bad as I remember, and it kind of wasn't. It was sometimes decent once they stopped trying to do edgy-TOS and came up with an actual story.

 

[Tanis]

Overall?
I'll count movies as 'part of'.

Deep Space 9 > The Next Generation > The Original Series (Cartoon) > Voyager > The Original Series > J. J. Abrams Movies > Enterprise

 

[MrBoBo]

TNG is my personal pinnacle of Star Trek, I think that it best represents what most people feel the idea of Star Trek is without it being too over the top or boring like The Motion Picture was. It isn't perfect, the first couple of seasons are shaky but 3-6 are basically solid gold and Captain Picard is the captain against whom I measure all others.

DS9 I have a very love/hate relationship with: it has some of the best characters in the canon like Miles, Kira, Odo, Quark, Worf, Dukat and the Dominion War is a great arc but a shit load of it's writer's desire to make it the anti-Trek (I also personally think its rude to use another job as a test case for your next one) is something that raises my hackles.

That and frankly, Babylon 5 did the space station setting better and as much as I love Trek, Babylon 5 could have just been the Londo and G'Kar and still be leagues ahead of Trek on its best day.

That's kinda the problem I had with Voyager. Deep Space 9 was a spinoff, but vastly different.

Voyager had the premise of being a bajillion miles from known space, with a bunch of Maqui rebels. While Deep Space 9 took advantage of it's premise, aside from one or two episodes, in Voyager they all integrate like it's nothing. Once Seven of Nine appears, sexy to boost ratings, she becomes the central focus near enough. Chakotay and the rest of them might as well be wood-stumps.

I agree with the fellow above regarding Sisko as "The Chosen One", while the worm aliens themselves are worshiped as gods, they are for all intents and purpose still aliens. Even when they remove the Dominion in season 6, they are inside the worm-hole so it makes logical sense.

But Sisko becoming space Jesus, and Dukat, a very complex character reduced to a red eye'd monster man with telekinesis was a nonsense ending.

 

[Hawki]

Watching TOS, I find it weird how the Enterprise travels such great distances like it's nothing, but it takes Voyager years to get home. I'm pretty sure Kirk has flown from one end of the galaxy to the other a few times. I don't know why the shows even bother referencing each other.

Everything in TOS takes place in the Alpha or Beta quadrants. So, yes, that is a long distance, but Voyager takes place in the Delta Quadrant, which is on the other side of the galaxy. TOS may give the sense of operating at the same speed as other series, but it's taking place in a much smaller area.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Watching TOS, I find it weird how the Enterprise travels such great distances like it's nothing, but it takes Voyager years to get home. I'm pretty sure Kirk has flown from one end of the galaxy to the other a few times. I don't know why the shows even bother referencing each other.

Distance and time are kind of screwy in Star Trek because the writers didn't always maintain consistency, but yes, there is a vague rationalisation. Basically, the galaxy is really, really big. According to wikipedia, Voyager can go at warp 9.975 or 2,922C. This means at maximum speed in our galaxy it would take 34 years to cross the whole galaxy, but it's pointed out elsewhere that ships in Star Trek can't go at maximum speed for very long (one might say that the engines can't take it), which I would guess explains the 75 year journey in the show.

But yeah, everything in the previous two series took place in the alpha and beta quadrants (basically, two of the four quarters of the galaxy) of which the federation and the other big space empires are kind of implied to occupy only a very tiny proportion. Where it really starts to break down is when people are travelling within the federation, which should still take months but is often waved away to what seems like a few days for narrative convenience.

But this is one reason why I suspect the canonical size of various political entities in the galaxy is kept deliberately vague.

 

[Generalissimo]

I enjoyed DS9 by far the most, with Bashir and Odo I find myself relating to the most. The fleet battle sequences were fantastic, and were some of the best highlights of it.

ENT on the other hand was just....ugh. The idea of a series based on the early days of the federation was a pretty solid one. If only their didn't hire writers who were so coked up. Fanservices was blatant and awful, with barely an episode going by without finding an excuse to have an attractive female in a skintight outfit. Case in point, an episode where archer is gifted a few slave girls from the Orion Syndicate. If Archer were sane and not a fecking idiot he should have told them to piss off and that would have been the end of it. Instead, he falls straight into what is the most blatant plot in the galaxy and only escapes because his crew managed to scrape a few braincells together.

And let's not forget the __wonderful__ plot convenience which is decontamination gel which only exists for make plams uncomfortably sweaty. If a new trek series is ever made, perhaps they should hire writers who don't have a 24 hour hard-on.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

DS9>TNG>TOS>Voyager>Enterprise

Deep Space 9 had actual character arcs and an overarching story like normal shows. It's probably why I enjoyed it the most.

It wasn't a very good story though. If you want to give credit for story arcs, then "Neighbours" would be the best show of all time.

TOS and TNG had the best stories and actual ideas, by far.

 

[MrBoBo]

While Sisko's sucked, Deep Space 9's other character/story arcs are excellent imo, way better than TNG's. It didn't just manage characters either, it managed civilizations with depth and thought put into them.

Take the Dominion. From season 1 - they are mentioned briefly (a line of dialogue) mentioned as existing. Season 2 the Jem'Hader are revealed, then the founders - who relate directly to Odo's backstory. The Dominion do not just invade and try kill everyone, they make alliances by analyzing the other side, entrench themselves, then attack.

The Founders have a reasonable motive, they do not view solids as worthy. So they modify them like tools, Vorta serve as diplomatic and scientists, Jem'Hader as enforcers, while The Founders lay strictly in the background hidden. It is a thought out structure.

The Cardassians, who committed atrocities, and maje an alliance with The Dominion, eventually turn against them, getting there planet turned to dust in the process, essentially turning them into the Bajorans dependent on aid. The one who sparks the rebellion is Damar, who much like Garrack, starts off a minor guest character and develops into something far more than any TNG character that isn't Data or Picard.

The show had the foresight to hint at this all seasons back again through a couple of lines of dialogue -


(I believe this was Season 4)


Final episode Season 7

I think even the Borg started to suck abit after the first few appearances in TNG. The first episode "Q Who" where Q is demonstrating how dangerous the universe is, they are genuinely intimidating. After that they get used more and more to the point it gets silly. Like Data's evil brother leading them.

Voyager espcailly ruined the Borg imo. They whipped them out every 5 minutes like it was a holiday to France. The final episode didn't even make sense. Bad guys in Voyager just basically had to look cool or wave the Borg like car keys. Deep Space 9 laid crumbs, set it up and then delivered.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I liked DS9 the best. It had a nice story running right up to the end, the characters had real dynamics and chemistry. Sisko knocked Q flat on his ass. I did like TNG, but The Wesley kept it from being my favourite. I might have placed Voyager higher on my list, but it felt too much like it was trying to mimic ToS too much. And Neelix. Goddamn do I hate that furball. Janeway's a shite captain.

 

[Ender910_v1legacy]

Each show has its strengths, although I find TOS to have somewhat worse weaknesses, which is rather understandable as it was something of a "prototype" for the entirety of Star Trek.

TNG's strengths lie in its exploration of humanity, ethics, philosophy, and something along the lines of cultural differences and diplomacy (which most shows delved into, but I think TNG had a particular charm about how it explored this). Scientific discovery was also a major hallmark of TNG, although because of the age/time some of the science-focused episodes seem less remarkable and occasionally dated when seen today.

DS9 shifted much of the focus away from the traditional Federation sort of situation, on the frontier where the Federation's influence/presence wasn't so prevelant. Because of this, the show was able to explore other cultures as well as very different characters at a much more even-level. Plus of course war, darker side of the federation, ethics, etc etc.

Voyager's... kind of mixed bag. Compared to the previous two shows, Voyager had a much tougher time at exploring its characters, and most seemed to change very little by the end of the series. The setting however gave the show a lot more room to try newer things with regards to alien races, cultures, and science/technology. Also given its more recent date, it was able to explore somewhat less dated areas in theoretical science. CGI was also much more affordable during Voyager, so action sequences were often more readily available, which may or may not have worked with Voyager being on its own most of the time.

And Enterprise I can't judge very well, as the move to UPN actually made it rather inaccessible at the time (my local TV signal could barely get the show at all). I did however find the whole Temporal Cold War concept to be kind of... convoluted. I did like how they were able to explore some of the TOS-era races a little more thoroughly than in the previous shows, such as the Andorians, as well as exploring a somewhat cruder setup with weaker technology at the crew's disposal.

 

[Dalisclock]

I used to be really into Trek. And then Voyager happened and I tried. I tried and I just kind of stopped caring. I gave it one last try with Enterprise and that just killed it stone dead for me. The reboot film brought me back briefly, and then Into Darkness reminded me why I left in the first place.

That aside, in order:

Deep Space Nine
Original Series
Next Generation
Voyager
Enterprise.

Voyager and Enterprise in particular suffer from "Good idea, bad execution". Voyager started out with "Alone, low on supplies, no allies, need to get home. A long journey through hostile waters". Except the whole "Low on supplies" situation was a joke(other then Janeway being low on coffee sometimes), someone the Prime Directive came to mean "We can't make alliances or trade tech", Janeway kept driving the ship into every dangerous looking object in space hoping to find more SCIENCE, and then there's the Borg. Oh, the Borg. And then the organic anti-borg species. Yeah.

Enterprise, OTOH, couldn't be bothered to keep to it's own premise of "We don't have all the cool toys yet" by introducing the new toys long before they showed up in the other shows. And Species that wouldn't be mentioned in TOS. Then there was all the weird time travel hijinks, which even as a fan of time travel stories....I could not take for very long. At least when Dr. Who does it, they're not even trying to pretend it makes a lot of sense. Half the time they just involve the Timey Whimey Ball and move on.

Honestly my hopes for the new show are pretty much zero.