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Watch "Yesterday's Enterprise". But to fully appreciate it, you must first watch TNG season 1.
My top tip for getting someone into Star Trek!
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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My top tip for getting someone into Star Trek!
If you really want to do it, I'd say whatever's normally regarded as the Top 10 Episodes for each of the non-serialized series.
For the serialized series, it's trickier, but this should do: Key episodes of DS9. Whatever you think the best season of DSC is and the best season of PIC is. And Prodigy just has the one season, so that one's easy enough. Seasons for all of the newer serialized series are self-contained. DS9 is only series that requires true curating.
For the serialized series, it's trickier, but this should do: Key episodes of DS9. Whatever you think the best season of DSC is and the best season of PIC is. And Prodigy just has the one season, so that one's easy enough. Seasons for all of the newer serialized series are self-contained. DS9 is only series that requires true curating.
That being said, I find the SNW Enterprise too big on the inside. All the sets are time and a half as large as they need to be. It's somewhat distracting.
Production order isn't THAT different from Aired order. Also, you're calling "production" the schedule where they filmed the actors. Corbomite Maneuver was in "production" right up until it aired. I totally understand what people mean when they say production order, I'm just saying it wasn't as cut and dried as people say it is.
Although I agree that Corbomite should be the "first" episode. Not sure what you do with Where No Man Has Gone Before in that case. It's one of my top 5 episodes of all time, but CM is a better first episode than WNMHGB.
But as it is, The Man Trap IS the first aired episode of Star Trek and should be respected as much.
OTOH, outside of psychos like us, nobody cares.
Question answered yet?
As long as George Takei isn't running for office!
Here's how it is:
The aired order of Firefly is BETTER than the "intended" order.
1) Do you know how many people that I got to watch Firefly after the DVDs came out that STRUGGLED with Serenity (the pilot)? At the end of the show it's a masterpiece. At the front it has all of the problems Fox said it did. The Train Job manages to give you all of the exposition that you need from Serenity in an episode that hits the tone the show would have AND leave room for the episode Serenity to exist. Then they wrote subsequent episodes (Bushwhacked for example) that continued to fill in the gaps.
2) One of the biggest moves is the episodes Shindig and Safe. (One of the few significant ones other than the pilot movie.) Shindig is fine pretty much wherever it airs. But Safe is just not as good as early as it was "meant" to go. You need more time to connect with River. There are moments with River in Safe that in intended order they are OK stepping stones for River. But in the terrible aired order they are heartbreaking.
3) Sorry it didn't work out, Joss. Really. But Objects in Space is NOT the final episode. The "intended" (and sadly NOT aired) order was Heart of Gold was to be the mid season cliff-hanger with Inara saying she was leaving. (I don't know how Whedon filmed the alternate scene with Mal and Inara in Objects in Space. But the fact that he did meant he clearly saw the writing on the wall.)
I'm pretty sure that our local affiliate ran them in production order because this was how they always showed these three episodes.
When I was a kid I LOVED Quark. But then I loved Holmes & Yoyo.
It's the Get Smart of sci-fi TV. (Buck Henry worked on both.) It's the first place I ever saw Richard Benjamin. To this day he's Quark to me.
Until you realize what a masterpiece it is, yes.
Heeeeey!
LMFAO.
Agreed. You could play football on most of those sets. I'm getting used to them, though.
I prefer WNMHGB. Corbomite is a good intellectual puzzle for Kirk and the crew, but WNM presents an emotional dilemma for Kirk as well, which I find much more compelling. Plus they actually get off the bridge and go to a planet, which is a better thing to showcase the series. (Although to be fair, Corbomite does have an encounter with a new life form and features the regular cast in place.)
Hurtful but accurate.
It helps that most of them are GORGEOUS. If I ever have too much money and time I will have a summer cabin someplace based on Pike's quarters.
It's a better intro to the ship, the crew, and the mission. It's about equal in introducing Kirk and Spock. And CM has the Kirk Speech and "Hey, these are our Star Trek ideals, let's live up to them."
Honestly, you can get rid of the rest of TOS and you would still have Star Trek. That's not the case with WNMHGB, as wonderful as it is. (See also Edge of Forever, City on the.)
I see what you're saying. And honestly, you find that sort of thing in most first regular series episodes after the pilot. They're essentially reintroducing the show to anyone who missed the pilot. So they're trying to convey the same information in a new way.
But interestingly there really aren't other episodes that do it to quite the extent that CM does.
Yes, almost EVERY episode is a good intro to the relationship between Kirk and Spock. And they hadn't really cooked up the formula for The Trio quite yet.
But for example WNMHGB and CM both just spit out that Spock is half human in an offhand way that doesn't really relate to the plot. (WNMHGB works Spock's lack of emotions into the actual plot better, actually.) It has the whiff of "exposition" or "info dump" that most episodes don't have. CM feels like it has to tag more of the bases than your average Trek episode. And certainly more than The Man Trap does.
Something that the early TOS episodes had that was abandoned was the captain's logs being "after the fact". I kind of miss that. "What we didn't know at the time was..." or "I was in sickbay at the time..." Maybe that made it sound more Dragnet than Star Trek. Maybe I only like it because from this vantage point it's novel. (Kind of like how I'm the guy who says "Vulcanian". Which was really the accepted term for nearly 1/3 of the show! Darn it. Another thing to get statistics on!)
Whenever I see sci-fi TV from the '70s or '80s, it makes more sense how TNG made it out of the first season.
I loved the two V miniseries in 1983 and 1984. The weekly NBC series was just one step above tripe. Weekly sci-fi with a regular cast didn't work for the most part between the 1970s and the arrival of TNG.
Cruel but fair. Yes, we were starving.
V had an astonishing set up but no idea how to continue with pew-pew bang-bang.
I'm glad I saw them as they aired (and taped them to hand out and convert people!) I've never tried watching them in the "intended" order. Now I probably won't.
Whoa! THAT takes me back. John Schuck FTW.
God, me too. It's nicer than my house. I might even learn to cook!
Right, because audiences in 1987 were thinking about how the later seasons were better.
No, people in 1987 were saying "Ummmm... Well... But hey, it's STAR TREK! And it's on TV! EVERY WEEK!"
Two years later (and some only a year later) people were saying "Oh thank Zod, it's getting better!"
TNG Season 1 felt goofy and awkward at times but I was just stoked to have new Star Trek on TV for the first time since I was a toddler(TAS). It's...inferior quality, if you will, didn't really become evident in my brain until Seasons 2 and 3 became much more watchable in reruns.
Not where I was going with that and you know it. I meant that most of the sci-fi on TV at the time was crap. So that made TNG Season 1 look better than it actually was. At least that's what I'm thinking happened.
V turned into a mess once the original showrunner (Kenneth Johnson) left after the first miniseries. Johnson, who was also behind the Alien Nation TV series (which plays with the idea of aliens as an allegory for an immigrant underclass), originally intended V to be a straight adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel "It Can't Happen Here," but was urged by NBC executives to change it. So they made the fascists into alien lizards to capitalize on Star Wars as well as making the political message not so explicit.
So when the second miniseries comes around, that's why the political allegory gets to be less and less evident and it begins the slide towards all sorts of bad science-fiction tropes with the "star child" and more pew-pew action.
Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.
Beauty and the Beast.
Ducktales.
Doctor Who.
Max Headroom.
The Highwayman
Defenders of the Earth.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Amazing Stories.
Twighlight Zone.
Transformers.
Out of This World.
Dinosaucers.
Alf-Tales
Good Morning Miss Bliss. (The Hero can freeze time, manipulate reality and see the Future. Just because all he uses the powers of a god for is to make a teenage girl fall in love with him, it's no less science fiction than Star Trek.)
You are the only person I have ever encountered in my life that remembers DINOSAUCERS!
Thank you for validating my memory and assuring I am not like Worf and just went from one reality to another.
Let's run through @Guy Gardener's list one-by-one.
Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.
Beauty and the Beast.
Ducktales.
Doctor Who.
Max Headroom.
The Highwayman
Defenders of the Earth.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Amazing Stories.
Twighlight Zone.
Transformers.
Out of This World.
Dinosaucers.
Alf-Tales
Good Morning Miss Bliss. (The Hero can freeze time, manipulate reality and see the Future. Just because all he uses the powers of a god for is to make a teenage girl fall in love with him, it's no less science fiction than Star Trek.)
.
.
.
What I say stands. And you left out Small Wonder.
PS: So there's no confusion, I'm shrugging at the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone. The one time I tried watching that version, I wasn't able to sit all the way through it.
Most cartoons during this time existed to sell toys. Transformers, like G.I. Joe, had the honor of also being late Cold War Era Propaganda to brainwash little boys.
As far as the Turtles, it's hard to watch the cartoon once you've read the black-and-white comic. The one my mother didn't want me to read, so that only made me more curious about it.
Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.
Beauty and the Beast.
Ducktales.
Doctor Who.
Max Headroom.
The Highwayman
Defenders of the Earth.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Amazing Stories.
Twighlight Zone.
Transformers.
Out of This World.
Dinosaucers.
Alf-Tales
Good Morning Miss Bliss. (The Hero can freeze time, manipulate reality and see the Future. Just because all he uses the powers of a god for is to make a teenage girl fall in love with him, it's no less science fiction than Star Trek.)
.
.
.
What I say stands. And you left out Small Wonder.
PS: So there's no confusion, I'm shrugging at the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone. The one time I tried watching that version, I wasn't able to sit all the way through it.
Most cartoons during this time existed to sell toys. Transformers, like G.I. Joe, had the honor of also being late Cold War Era Propaganda to brainwash little boys.
As far as the Turtles, it's hard to watch the cartoon once you've read the black-and-white comic. The one my mother didn't want me to read, so that only made me more curious about it.
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