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Star Trek TV series(es) - general discussion of the franchise

Reno said:
All the three first Star Trek spin-offs struggled for the first two seasons. Like TNG and Voyager, DS9 doesn’t really get good till season 3.
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I disagree about Voyager: I liked it straight away, and thought it was season 3 it started to flag. Season 4 was given new life by Seven of Nine, who is now my favourite non-TOS character.

DS9 does pick up around season 3, but remains patchy and trails off again. The Dominion stuff is only good for the build up. Once the Dominion become established, they're rubbish.

DS9 has some decent stand-alone episodes. The one with the Tribbles, for example. And were it not for O'Brien, I'm not sure I'd have kept watching to find them.

I'll rank my Trek spin offs once I've seen them all, but so far DS9 is at the bottom.
 
DS9 was always my favourite. Voyager only really got interesting for me once they introduced Seven of Nine. Picard was my favourite captain, but apart from Data I didn’t care for the rest of the cast of TNG. DS9 has my favourite crew overall. With Voyager it was all about Janeway and Seven of Nine for me. Of course all had great individual episodes, even from the first season on, but everything only really fell into place after two rocky early seasons for all of them.
 
1. TNG
2. DS9
3. VOY
4. ENT
5. DISCO
6. TOS

Rank pretty much all the TOS films bar 1 & 5 above the TNG films however.
 
Ok, so far:

1. TOS
2. VOY
3. TNG
4. TAS
5. DS9

All of the TOS films are better than those of the TNG ones I've seen. (Although Star Trek: the Motion Picture has very little of 'motion' about its story, and can be safely ignored).
 
I have to add that I tried to rewatch both TOS and TNG and failed at both. Their HD restaurations are glorious but they haven’t aged well when compared to today’s TV series. The pace is sluggish, the production values are low and they are mostly confined to the same, claustrophobic sets. I just seem to lack that nostalgic gene which makes me watch them with the mindset I had back then. I don’t feel like that about films but I don’t have the time for 8 seasons of 24 episodes each.
 
Having rewatched most of DS9 there's a lot more fat on it than I remember, and whilst I admire what it attempted to do it failed more often than it succeeded. Ergo:

1 TNG
2 DS9
3 Voyager
4 TOS
5 Discovery
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
68,312 Enterprise

Discovery redeemed itself in the second half of the series for me, when it stopped doing easter eggs and started doing proper plot development instead.
 
Reno said:
. Their HD restaurations are glorious but they haven’t aged well when compared to today’s TV series. The pace is sluggish, the production values are low and they are mostly confined to the same, claustrophobic sets.
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I can understand that: you do have to be ready to accept a completely different pace and so on. But one of the ways that TOS is much better than TNG onwards is the way character interplay is written. From TNG on there is far too much tell and not enough show. The way we find out a character fancies another is that someone says to them "oh come on, I can see the way you look at him/her". Well, how about just letting us see that?

The ratio of telling and showing is slightly better in Voyager. We do get to see Harry squirm and blush in Seven's presence (and his dream when she says "resistance is futile" before kissing him is a gem), but there's still a lot more "you fancy Seven" than just showing us him fancying Seven. It's a real weakness of all the franchises so far, and something TOS just knew not to do.

We do see Spock saying in the films "you are my friend", but this is long after the viewer already knows, and it's done as a touching Vulcan gauchness. A character thing in itself, rather than dialogue exposition.

Trek is always best when character leads plot. When the actor is up to it. The O'Brien vehicles in DS9 are great. The Sisko ones are terrible. Except the ones where Jake is lead, like the one where he is a writer on Earth (no spoilers).
 
Chz said:
More to the point, TOS hits the ground running whereas the first couple of TNG series are near-unwatchable for most of the episodes.
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TNG was a very 90s show, just as the X Files was (though the two series are very different, though). Those first two seasons are from the late 80s, though, aren't they?
 
Chz said:
More to the point, TOS hits the ground running whereas the first couple of TNG series are near-unwatchable for most of the episodes.
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As it only consisted of three seasons TOS wouldn't be remembered as the classic it is, had it only gotten its shit together by season three (which is the weak one of that series).
 
TOS - Easy fav
TAS - Super Watchable - The good bit are great the bad bit are at least funny
I find it really difficult to separate TNG, DS9 & VOY they feel very samy to me
I find TNG very watchable but often a little twee and 80's progressive. DS9 just bored the shit out of me the first time around but on reflection had some intresting things to say. VOY got me back into trek but was a little hit or miss.
ENT - Some intresting bits but it just felt off. almost like a trek parody.

DISCO - not finished watching it yet as I promised to watch it all with a fellow trekkie and we haven't managed to meet up a lot to watch it. So far it's fighting it out with the series in the big Berman moshpit
 
JMS master plan for B5 was to tell his story over 5 seasons, when they pulled the plug at season 4 he condensed the last 2 into 1 and then when they extended the contract again he was left fishing for stuff to put
into Season 5 which is why S5 isn't as good as the rest (though it's still pretty good), S1-S4 set the standard against which all subsequent TV scifi should be measured.
It was made in the mid-90's when CGI technology was in its infancy.
It's like the Day the Earth Stood Still, the 2008 film looked a lot more 'real' than the 1951 one but the earlier one is a vastly superior movie in all the ways that matter.
 
Essential to mention B5 in this context too, because DS9's production began after B5's, but the ST production budget was indeed way bigger than B5's. So though B5 was started first, DS9 aired first, and obviously they ran together for some time. It looked like B5 was a cheap rip off, but if anything DS9 was the rip off.

And then there's the Main Story arc that B5 has, that was never a feature of ST till Voyager.

Anyway, in Star Trek terms B5 pretty much outdoes everything except TOS, which was as groundbreaking in its own way as B5 was in its own way (and DS9 wasn't) - and TNG, which to my eyes was quite an influence on B5 anyway.

EtA, to mess things up a bit more, Farscape > Voyager and DS9 and Enterprise too :D
 
I could never get into b5.

Moment to moment it was fine but due to scheduling I missed bunches of it so could never keep up with the meta narrative.

Plus it felt a bit like Greek theatre where you had characters come on and talk a lot about Important battles and events but you never actually saw them.
 
I remember watching crusade and getting tonal whiplash.

I seem to remember kinda liking it though. Only saw a few eps due to it's sceduling.
 
There are some pretty epic battles too tbf, but not in every episode. Though at least one big B5 battle goes across at least two episodes, and the final war fills most of season 4 iirc.
 
Babylon 5 was ok, I ended up watching it long after trek tho. Linked minbarii caste system being a benign one, some good ships etc.
 
Also

II
VI (possibly controversial but a personal favorite [might even have been the first one I saw in cinema])
IV
III / Beyond / FC (I find it hard to order these. One from each series too.)
I (Right on the good bad threshold)
V (At least its bad is funny bad)
Gen / ST:09 (When aging actors from from other series are the best bits)
Ins
ID - Nem
 
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