Revisiting original Trek

[GKarsEye]

Since I've exposed my sister to Babylon 5 (which she likes and is re-watching with another friend, which means after years and years of failure I've finally gotten two new people into it), Farscape (which she adores), Firefly (which we both like but not love) and the beginning of BSG (awaiting season 1 on DVD), I figured it was time to do the Trek thing. Also I figured it would be a kick for me.

I don't want to sit through every episode in the franchise, that would take like forever. And we're certainly skipping Voyager and Enterprise (though we may watch the pilot and a few of the eps in the last season just for kicks).

All will be done via Netflix.

The plan:

Original Series
To watch pretty much all of seasons 1 and 2 and couple from 3. I want to see where all the ideas in future Trek come from. The results have been interesting. But I want to skip over the repetitive annoying stuff.

Unfortunately Netflix has the original DVDs in their catalogue, with two episodes per disc, 40 discs total. This requires constant diligence of queue maintenance on my part. And for some reason they don't have disc 7. WTF?

So we finished disc 11 recently. Man, I can't believe how many episodes I don't remember. The Squire of Gothos basically has a Q-like being. In the Return of the Archons, the first episode about a planet of people run my a computer, Spock for the first time mentions "our prime directive of non-interference." Yet at this time they're still calling the Enterprise a "United Earth Ship," no mention of the Federation of Planets.

The only two eps we've skipped so far are The Cage, since most of it is in The Managerie, and Charlie X, which basically has the same plot as the second pilot Where No Man Has Gone Before (human gets ultra-super-powers and wreaks havoc) but with a teenager instead of an adult.

The Alternative Factor is the first episode dealing with a parallel universe, and the science explanations sure made my head spin. Probably because they make very little sense.

Also love how they travel through time in Tomorrow is Yesterday- let's fly towards the sun very fast and then fly backwards. If it were that easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it?

Next Generation
Will watch: everything "arc" related: Klingons, Romulans, Bejorans, Borg.
Won't watch: a lot of seasons 1, 2, and 7
I figure we'll end up watching a bit more than half.

DS9
Will pretty much have to watch the whole thing. Except that fucking baseball episode- god I hate that one.

 

[hypatia]

Which was the baseball episode of DS9?

You must catch "Loud as a Whisper" I think it is called. The episode with Reeva. I think that must be my favorite episode of STNG ever. Even if it isn't yours, it's still a great ep.

Not that the ending is realistic in ANY way, shape, or form, but well... that's something we just learn to forgive Trek for, isn't it?

 

[GKarsEye]

Oh Reeva was the mute who had three people that spoke for him but they got killed. Yeah that one was pretty decent. Of course the other classic "language barrier" episode is when Picard is stuck with that guy who spoke completely in stories.

Season 7 of DS9 had an episode that was about a baseball game between the crew of DS9 and some Vulcans. It was about this feud between Sisko and some Vulcan who tried to prove that they are superior to humans and then Sisko realised that winning isn't important and let Rom play. I swear to god that was a real episode, and I sat there slack-jawed at how retarded the whole thing was.

 

[Pobman]

Though I agree with the sentiment of not exposing your sister to Voyager, how much trouble would it be to show her Blink of an Eye (with Daniel Dae Kim) and Bride of Chaotica ?

Perhaps I think these episodes are great because they are surrounded by the sheer rubbishness of other Voyager episodes, but I happen to think Bride of Chaotica is one of the best episodes of Star Trek.

**gets ready for imminent "you must be insane" rants**

 

[GKarsEye]

Blink of an Eye was really good. An excellent suggestion, thanks.

I don't like the Captain Proton stuff, at least not enough to bother.

It's easy enough to rent specific discs in a box set, the trick is just figuring out which episode is on which disk, which can be done.

 

[darth_librarian]

That sounds like a viewing project and a half!

Just a thought, what about the movies? Stark Trek VI is one of my favourite films ever, well worth it just for Kirk fighting himself (again). You could do the even numbered OS movies, but they are best watched all in sequence. I'd only bother with First Contact out of the TNG films though.

 

[GKarsEye]

Yeah we'll do movies. 2-4, 6, maybe Generations, and First Contact

Though 3 isn't considered one of the best, it's connected dramatically to 2 and 4 and I don't think it's really bad. 1 is ambitious but boring and 5 is just bad (though I've been meaning to re-watch it just for kicks)

Generations is not classic but it does have Kirk and that's something.

Other sorta-Trek related movies we'll do after everything else: Trekkies, Free Enterprise, Galaxy Quest

 

[Jonny_Fever]

The Squire of Gothos basically has a Q-like being.

Turns out he was a Q. He appeared in the ST:TNG Novel Q Squared as a renegade Q.

There are soo many eps its hard to list all my favorites. But the one for some reason that stands out for me is the TNG ep "Hollow Pursuits".

 

[Oatley1]

DS9
Will pretty much have to watch the whole thing. Except that fucking baseball episode- god I hate that one.

Amen to that, brother! It has got to be one of the most pathetic episodes of Trek ever made - and they dropped it in the middle of Season 7, where they were supposed to be tying up all of the Dominion War stuff.

Also, I was never a fan of the Ferengi-based episodes, so if I was rewatching DS9, I would avoid those - in particular 'Profit and Lace' which I thought was simply crap.

For Voyager, the last 4 or so shows from the Third Season (Before and After onwards), plus the opener to Season 4 (Scorpion, Pt 2) are probably the best set of episodes for that show.

Season 7 of TNG had some excellent shows, in particular 'Parallels' and 'The Pegasus'. Avoid 'Interface' at all costs. Gotta say, I am also not a big fan of the first 2 seasons of TNG.

And for the original... well, when it was good it was very good, but when it wasn't it was just crap - very few in-betweens!

 

[Chilli]

I never figured out what they were playing at in the baseball episode. I assume that they wanted to have some lightweight episodes in the very dark season to prevent it from being pure gloom - and someone out there thought this would be funny(I checked who it was that wrote this - Ron Moore. Yikes!)

Or someone thought that DS9 shouldn't feel left out since all other Treks had had an uniformly accepted worstest of worst episodes. But whereas Spock's Brain is bad in the way that it never stops being fun watching it and that I'd never, ever, ever skip it when rewatching trek, and whereas Shades of Gray (the one where Riker gets struck by a thorn and has flashbacks from the first two seasons of TNG that we really mostly didn't want to be reminded of) had the excuse of being a last-minute solution since they needed an episode but had no means due to strikes, there is no excuse for this one.

Though at least it didn't have the Holodeck/Holosuite malfunctioning. Has anyone counted the episodes in which that happens? I can remember .. too many.

Do Voyager and Enterprise actually have uniformly accepted worst episodes? I never got to seeing quite a bit of those series - of those on voyager I saw, 11:59 definitely was .. bad, even for Voyager .. but then, most of Voyager seemed bad by any standards to me. Of the parts I saw of Enterprise, "A Night in Sickbay" was the definite "I CAN'T believe this" episode for me. Though Oasis - the one with Rene Auberjonois - was up there too for me, just because it SO was an EXACT redo of a DS9 episode.

As for what to watch in TNG, I never really cared much about anything arc-related there. The Klingon arcs in particular started getting on my nerves pretty quickly - I hardly remember them now, in spite of having seen most of TNG several times over the years. The only excpetion being anything Borg-related. Q Who possibly being one of my favorite episodes of TNG, in spite of it being in the second season, in which I really couldn't grow to the show at all yet.

I personally would maybe, with the exception of Q Who, wait with the first to seasons till having watched seasons 3-7 possibly, since after that, one doesn't run the risk anymore of giving up on the show before it gets good. But that probably makes little sense

 

[PillowRock]

Though at least it didn't have the Holodeck/Holosuite malfunctioning. Has anyone counted the episodes in which that happens?

Overall, among all of the series? I have no idea of the actual number. There were a few that were interesting, or at least fun if nothing else. The original Mirror, Mirror worked OK. The ep of DS9 where Bashir and Garak are stuck in Bashir's James Bond program was kinda funny due to all of Garek's snarky comments that you had always wanted to make about Bond films. Without Garek that one would have been *horrible*; with him it was kinda fun.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

The original Mirror, Mirror worked OK.

The original "Mirror, Mirror" didn't feature a holodeck for the simple reason that the concept wan't invented until TNG was launched. TOS had no holodeck.

The first episode of TNG that really impressed me as both a good dramatic story and a good use of an SF concept to explore ideas worth exploring was "Yesterday's Enterprise". After I watched it I called a friend who was a much more enthusiastic TNG fan than I was and said, "They may finally have done their 'City on the Edge of Forever'."

Regards,

Joe

 

[GKarsEye]

I belive Mirror Mirror was about a transporter malfunction. They didn't have holodecks in original Trek.

I don't dig the holodecks malfunctioning either. The idea of a spaceship crew battling the villain from Sherlock Holmes is retarded.

DS9 didn't have outright malfunctions IIRC but they did have that extremely stupid Vic Fontaine character. Like the baseball ep, they thought it would be cute to put the characters in some contemporary context, and I hate all of it. Also the whole Sisko as a writer in the early 20th century getting visions of DS9.. what the fuck? Between all this and the wrong Dax, season 7 is a major dissappointment. Ironically, it also has my favorite DS9 episode ever, where they murder a Romulan senator and lie about it to get them into the war.

I think the Voygar episode that gets made fun of the most is where they turned into lizards. Also "Year of Hell," where the father from That 70s Show blasts entire histories away to try to find his wife and Voyager is almost destroyed and in the end they destroy his ship so that none of it ever happened. Everyone hates that but I actually liked it.

As for Enterprise, no one cared enough about it to choose a worst episode.

Oatley, I don't like the Ferengi eps either, but unfortunately some of them are arc-related. The first time the Dominion is even mentioned is in a seemingly trite, one-off Quark adventure.

 

[PillowRock]

[The original "Mirror, Mirror" didn't feature a holodeck

You're right, of course. For some reason in my head the repeated holodeck malfunctions and the repeated transporter malfunctions just sorta merged into one phenomenon.

My bad.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

You're right, of course. For some reason in my head the repeated holodeck malfunctions and the repeated transporter malfunctions just sorta merged into one phenomenon.

My bad.

Well, the holodeck is supposed to be related to transporter technology, and both wore out their welcome as plot devices. (Although I think the holodeck was the worst offender in this regard.) So they are easy to confuse.

Regards,

Joe

 

[GKarsEye]

Yesterday's Enterprise! Love that one.

Star Trek (in any incarnation) is a show that would have been benefitted greatly from the shorter "season" of HBO. Look at their shows- all killer, no filler- because they don't have to crank out 20+ eps!

 

[hypatia]

Oh Reeva was the mute who had three people that spoke for him but they got killed. Yeah that one was pretty decent. Of course the other classic "language barrier" episode is when Picard is stuck with that guy who spoke completely in stories.

Yea, the whole "Navajo-type-language" thing that made that code so hard to break in WWII.

And forgive me for loving a Picard-strong episode.

Season 7 of DS9 had an episode that was about a baseball game between the crew of DS9 and some Vulcans. It was about this feud between Sisko and some Vulcan who tried to prove that they are superior to humans and then Sisko realised that winning isn't important and let Rom play. I swear to god that was a real episode, and I sat there slack-jawed at how retarded the whole thing was.

No, no, now that you describe it, I remember it.

Thanks a lot. My years of forgetting it have now been undone.

 

[hypatia]

Yeah we'll do movies. 2-4, 6, maybe Generations, and First Contact

Though 3 isn't considered one of the best, it's connected dramatically to 2 and 4 and I don't think it's really bad. 1 is ambitious but boring and 5 is just bad (though I've been meaning to re-watch it just for kicks)

Generations is not classic but it does have Kirk and that's something.

Other sorta-Trek related movies we'll do after everything else: Trekkies, Free Enterprise, Galaxy Quest

Ah, Galaxy Quest. Did you know that Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver will be starring in a movie coming out in 2006? "Snow Cake".

I normally barely tolerate Tim Allen. But he really was excellent in Galaxy Quest, as well.

And isn't it the actor who plays "Monk" playing the (obviously) stoned engineer?

 

[Chilli]

I could forgive them for the transporter accident episodes, also if some of those were fairly retarded (Like Tuvix - god that concept was stupid), just because transporters were a "necessary" means of transportation in trek. After the gazillionth holodeck accident episode, I couldn't help wondering how the things remained legal.

As for the contemporary context .. it really bothered me in time travel episodes. Yes, I know, American show, of course it will be US centric, but just HOW many million times must some odd time warp thingy bring the crew to the US of the 20th (or 19th at best) century? The only exception I can think of there would be Qpid, which wasn't really time travel.

 

[hypatia]

Well, compare it to Dr. Who eps, especially the beloved Third doctor (Jon Pertwee?)

It's most definitely a draw to the primary audience thing, I suspect.