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Where No One Has Gone Before
I hope that my fellow Richochetti are Trekkies, too. I know that @jameslileks certainly is. I’d like to talk about something–anything–other than politics. I was excited to see that, yet again, we have landed a rover on Mars. I can’t get over how cool it is that we can put such an advanced piece of equipment on another planet. It got me thinking about space. So, let’s talk about something that no one has strong opinions about . . . Star Trek.
What I want to know is this: what is your favorite Star Trek episode and why?
I saw this question posed on Twitter, and it got me thinking about my favorite Star Trek episodes. You see, I love Star Trek. I have since I was in elementary school. I went as Captain Kirk for Halloween in 4th grade (I even made a communicator out of Legos–you really cannot imagine how cool I was). I still remember seeing Star Trek VI at our downtown movie theater (remember those?).
So, what is your favorite Trek episode? I don’t care which series. I also don’t want to know the “best” either. I want to know which episode you just enjoy watching.
I’ll go first. I only really know the Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine. I’ve watched Voyager, but never got really into it. My favorite episode of TOS is probably Space Seed. Who doesn’t love Khan? But my favorite episodes of all time are Q-Who on TNG and In the Pale Moonlight on DS9.
I love Q-Who because it’s the introduction of the Borg. The Borg are the ultimate villain. Yet the reason I love it is a brief scene at the beginning of the episode between Q and Guinan. Q and Picard appear in Ten Forward and there is a brief, but very tense exchange between Q and Guinan. They have obviously encountered each other before. Q warns Picard that Guinan is “an imp, and where she goes trouble always follows.” The exchange is short. An utterly forgettable moment. But in that brief exchange, Guinan’s backstory is limitless. Her “powers” are unknown. It is a great jumping-off point for an underrated character. I’ve always wished that the show ran with that. But, alas, they forgot it. Anyway, I love that episode and happily rewatch it.
As for In the Pale Moonlight, it is–hands down–my favorite Star Trek episode. I love the entire Dominion War story arc in DS9. I think that the concept of a multiple-season plot was new for that time period, and DS9 did it well. What stands out is that DS9 was grittier and more realistic than other Trek series. What I like about In the Pale Moonlight is that it is told simply, and without regret by Captain Sisko. Avery Brooks gives what I think is his best performance. Through the plot device of a personal log, Sisko walks through a series of events that leads him down a path from which he cannot turn back. Sisko knows that it is a dangerous path, but he also knows that the risk of not acting is too great. In the end, his monologue is perfect. I don’t know why. It just . . . is.
Star Trek is the ultimate escape for me. I think it’s a great franchise with a number of great episodes. I can’t wait to hear what others think–and I can’t wait to watch the episodes you all recommend.
Published in Entertainment
He’s the everyman, and there aren’t enough of those. No one’s fool, content with his rank and job, a engineer, not a philosopher. He even managed to redeem Bashir, whom everyone didn’t like at first because he was such a stuffed prig.
@josepluma
I have seen the Red Letter Media review. I actually agree with them (most of the time). I like the Star Trek movies more than they do. The Picard review was a terrific takedown. In many ways, watching their reviews is more enjoyable than watching the show.
I watched every episode of Picard as they came out. I nitpicked the episodes to death as I was watching it with a friend and I was keeping a list of plus’s and minus’s of every episode, and I had like 100 complaints by the end of the series. Then I talked it over with my friend and watched the review by RLM (among others) and hated it all the more. I felt like Palpatine was cackling as I let the hate flow through me.
I’d have to rewatch it to refresh my memory, but here’s a few major complaints which aren’t super detailed to avoid spoilers:
I know I can go on, but frankly I haven’t seen it since it came out and I would need a refresher. Save yourself some time and watch the RLM take down of it. You’ll enjoy it more without suffering as much. Mr. Plinkett’s Star Trek Picard Review – YouTube
Absolutely! He is really the only enlisted man in all of Star Trek. At the very least, he’s the only NCO. There’s a certain quality about him that fits that description regardless of whether it was intended. It also helps that Colm Meaney is great in that role. I don’t think it works with anyone else.
As I said, I let myself enjoy it, despite misgivings and irritations, and I did. As for the lefty politics, nothing, and I mean nothing beats the galactic speed limit imposed because dilithium-powered engines were bad for the cosmetic environment. I CAN’T WARP . . . 5 POINT 5
Apparently that was just temporary, unless you mean they were still yammering about that in Picard. Last I heard, technical improvements took care of that, such as the adjustable-nacelles setup like Voyager had.
That’s my favorite. Mark Leonard is great as the honorable Romulan commander.
“If we should meet at other times, we might have been friends.”
Close. But it’s Mark Lenard, and he actually said “In a different reality, I could have called you ‘friend.'”
P.S. I didn’t have to look that up.
It’s definitely more enjoyable for me because I have no intention of wasting my time on the show.
Hey! How come nobody has mentioned Star Trek: Lower Decks?
{Quickly ducks}
You mean VI. Also- they had to change the color of the blood to avoid an automatic R rating.
No, you don’t. It is a glacially slow trashing of everything we liked about TNG’s Picard and much of what we liked about ST generally. Cute moments like that and the good use of TOS musical cues don’t extinguish that dumpster fire, they make its flaws that much more glaring.
Correct. And keep in mind, it is not what they are saying, really. It’s what the thrice-accursed universal translator can make out of it.
It’s kind of existential theatre with Star Trek characters. But so is “I, Mudd”, but with a comic instead of tragic tone.
We always played “hellish cornucopia” with Bugles.
There’s some show I was watching recently, where the main character is coming to realize that he’s actually in an alternate world. One of the tells was when he was discussing Star Trek with a friend, and the friend starts recollecting all the great adventures of Gary 7 and his cat companion, traveling through time and space with Teri Garr.
Wait, Gary 7? What about Captain Kirk?
Captain Kirk?? Let me see . . . Oh yeah, the spaceship guy that Gary ran into in that one episode about the rocket. Wasn’t he the guy with the dude with the pointy ears?
This episode was very good – I think about it a lot.
Oh good, you cleared that up. I was trying to remember any whale blood in IV.
Absolutely, positively my favorite Star Trek episode. Like James said, my favorites tend include starships doing starship things, so most of my TOS favorite episodes involve starship combat, such as The Doomsday Machine, Balance of Terror, and The Ultimate Computer. I even enjoy Journey to Babel due to it climactic final starship battle.
Oddly, even though I’ve seen every other Star Trek series except Discovery and Picard, it’s the episodes from the original series that stick in my memory.
On the starshisp doing starship things- I generally agree. But the human dramas with eternal themes that just happen to be set in space on a spaceship are good too, when well-written (for the genre/time/commercial tv constraints).
The last comment I understand and think, could be the age at which you watched them. I grew up with those characters in my living room almost every afternoon or evening from the time I was in second grade through high school. Some TNG stories really stuck with me, e.g. “The Offspring”, “The Defector”, “The Best of Both Worlds”, and so on, and I watched those in college/early grad school which is to say, I think your experience is not odd at all.
There is a cultural component of this perhaps as well. TOS was steeped in the western literary canon. It shows not just in allusions to Shakespeare and Milton, but in the dialogue the writers wrote. The degeneration of dialogue over the successive “generations” of ST is a phenomenon that you can track, and reaches its absolute nadir in my experience with Picard the dialogue of which sounds like it was written by junior high students raised on Telenovelas. I have not bothered with STD.
hahaha…you’re funny. Seriously funny though is The Critical Drinker’s take on it. Look him up if you have not.
On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the “Lower Decks” episode of TNG.
Star Trek is an interesting test case for cultural shifts over time. The left has totally claimed Star Trek for its own, I gather that it’s almost entirely because it was all about pushing things like racial equality. But conservatives also agree with that message. In rewatching Classic Trek, what I have come away with was the sense that it was a distinctly American television series, pushing very American concepts. It also had a much stronger sense of organizational hierarchy. Even if everyone disagreed, the Captain’s word was final. You didn’t have everyone constantly questioning the Captain’s orders as you do in more modern shows. I suspect I could find a lot of messages in Classic Trek that would have today’s young and woke demanding that the show be cancelled. Because the show wasn’t leftist, really. It was “classical liberalism.”
What I also found interesting in re-watching DS9 is the number of messages that were considered “liberal” just 20 years ago, but would now be considered entirely unWoke. (Wish I could recall some to mind, but when watching it, pay attention to the way the characters speak of other cultures and their attitudes. There’s still a strong sense of right and wrong that isn’t mushed over by “all cultures are equally valid — except Western culture which is evil.”)
Well, the model for Kirk was the young John F. Kennedy, so…
My favorites are all from TOS.
In no particular order:
Balance of Terror: Great cat-and-mouse game between the Enterprise and the Romulan ship. The tension between Lt. Stiles and Spock was well done. The internal debate about taking on the Romulan ship was believable. Then there was the growing mutual respect between Kirk and the Romulan Commander.
Space Seed: More relevant today because of the scary advances in genetic engineering. Ricardo Montalban really chews up the scenery, but it was gratifying to see the “inferior” Captain Kirk win in the end. Also, Lt. Marla McGivers provides a useful lesson in the danger presented by true believers.
The Omega Glory: About as patriotic as Star Trek gets. Captain Picard would never have given that speech. Written by Gene Roddenberry back when liberals were patriotic.
Bread and Circuses: Great humor. The Roman leader constantly teased Captain Kirk about the Prime Directive – dumbest of all Starfleet rules. The “fight” between and McCoy and Flavius is funny. One little gem (touching, not humorous) is at the the end when Lt. Uhura reveals (or guesses) the real meaning of “Sun Worship.”
A scene worth mentioning is the final battle scene in Elaan of Troyius, where the Enterprise defeats the Klingon ships. I actually like the pre-CGI version better, because the change in the Enterprise’s performance, after getting its di-lithium crystals, seemed more dramatic.
I’m well ahead of you. That’s where I first found out about it. I actually watched the show to see if it’s really as bad as everyone says. It’s not, but it’s not very good, either.
Guinan was an interesting character. Q referred to her as a troublemaker, revealing that he had encountered her before. She talked knowingly to Picard about the Borg and what they did to her people, so we know she’s more than just a bartender in 10-forward.
Then there’s that episode where they go back to Elizabethan England and encounter her there, though she doesn’t recognize them. Because she hasn’t met them yet in the future, obviously. But she is obviously a player, and knows them for what they are. So she’s from a long-lived race, and travels around a bit, been to Earth at least once.
I always wished the writers had inserted a scene where Guinan visited Earth in the 1990’s disguised as a comedian going by the name of Whoopie.
That would actually explain a lot.
It would be difficult for even someone as wise as Guinan to play someone as stupid as Whoopi.
“If our ratings go down because of you…!”- or something to that effect- from Bread and Circuses.