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Can Star Trek be watched chronologically?

Abi Smith

Commander
Red Shirt
By this I mean if you were a complete newbie to the franchise could you begin your viewing with ENT, (skip DISC because it's not yet complete), then on to TOS, then TNG, DS9 and finally VOY.
Would you encounter any serious problems , would it be coherent, does the foreshadowing work?
Do you think DISC, once finished, will fit into said viewing order?
 
No. TOS is simply anachronistic at this point. Really, TNG is as well.
 
All the series are pretty much self-contained, there really aren't any major issues in whichever order you approach them.
 
This is the order I watched them, and it worked fine for me:
1. TNG.
2. TOS movies/TOS. I started watching both the movies and the original episodes around 1990 when TOS went back onto syndication due to Star Trek's rising popularity at that time.
3. DS9/TNG's final 2 seasons/TNG movies/ Voyager's first 2 seasons.
4. Enterprise.
5. JJ movies.
 
No. TOS is simply anachronistic at this point. Really, TNG is as well.

TNG, how so? Especially since DS9 and VOY are in the same time period as TNG, in and out of universe.

TNG is very rooted in the 1980's. The other two aren't so much.

Everything is anachronistic, so being anachronistic isn't a very strong criticism of anything.

Your may have heard of an English professor who moonlighted as a writer, J.R.R. Tolkien. The stories he wrote were set in a fictional age thousands of years ago, before the dawn of recorded history. And the attitudes of the characters were more or less those of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Tolkien grew up, combined with those of the European Middle Ages and the "Dark Ages" before them. Quite the "Anachronism Stew" as far as the beliefs and attitudes of the characters, as well as their society and technology, was concerned.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnachronismStew

And one of the things that Tolkien did in his day job was to champion the virtues of Beowulf as a story worth reading for its own sake. Beowulf is known from a single manuscript written about the year 1000. So the story of Beowulf must have been created about the year 1000 and be full of old fashioned and obsolete ideas from the year 1000, or else have been created centuries earlier as Tolkien claimed and thus been full of even older fashioned and more obsolete ideas.

And yet ever since I was a kid I have read and enjoyed translated versions of Beowulf and several movies based on Beowulf have been produced in recent decades.

I remember that when I was on summer vacation when I was 12, the books I read included among others The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900) and an old anthology of American short stories including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allen Poe (1841) and "The Great Stone Face" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850). Even though they were all much older than the 38 years that have passed since 1980, or the 31 years that passed since TNG was first broadcast, I found much that was enjoyable in them.

I'm sure that many members of this forum have enjoyed works of literature from long ago. The War of the Worlds, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Frankenstein, The plays of Shakespeare, Don Quixote, The Canterbury Tales, Journey to the West, The Tale of Genji, the Iliad, the Odyssey, etc.

The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1600 BC) is one of the oldest of all known stories, and yet despite all its anachronisms for modern people it is still considered a great story.

So as I said, it is pointless to say that a story or program is anachronistic. That is as valid a criticism as saying a story is written with worlds, or that a TV program contains visual images.
 
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But if you were to go ENT, TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY would you encounter problems, does it run coherently enough? For example would the the end of ENT make any sense at all?
 
But if you were to go ENT, TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY would you encounter problems, does it run coherently enough?

No. It's perfectly fine watching it that way.
You will obviously be able to tell ENT was made in the 2000s and TOS in the '60s, but if that sort of thing doesn't bother you you'll be fine. There aren't any "you must watch this to understand that" across shows moments, and you'll get the connecting references in whichever order you watch them.

For example would the the end of ENT make any sense at all?

That's a loaded question you'll understand once you get to the show's finale, but it has nothing to do with the order in which you watch the other series. ;)
 
Many at the time of DS9's original run felt one of it's turn offs for some fans was it's story arcs, which actually required watching in the correct order, similarly with ENT. Hell, even some two parters are would confusing without the other. If you had only ever watched six episodes of season two TNG, missed the recap of All Good Things part one and sat through part two you would be downright perplexed. It's not all standalones, and frankly I wouldn't want it that way (I'm looking at you, Voyager).

I'm dismissing the aesthetics and focused on narrative, going back to my example of the end of ENT, would the appearance of Riker using a holodeck to running a recreation of Archer about to break ground on a new organisation to provide Riker with insight about events we know nothing about be a problem, given you would to sit through all of TOS and most of TNG to find out what was going on and would it be rewarding?
 
By this I mean if you were a complete newbie to the franchise could you begin your viewing with ENT, (skip DISC because it's not yet complete),

You can go ahead and skip Enterprise becasue it's not yet Star Trek.

Do you think DISC, once finished, will fit into said viewing order?

No. It doesn't fit anywhere

But if you were to go ENT, TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY would you encounter problems, does it run coherently enough? For example would the the end of ENT make any sense at all?

Enterprise doesn't even make any sense at all, so no.

:ouch:
 
Just watch TOS and ignore the rest! :vulcan: TNG, DS9 and VOY can be good but nothing can take away the lightning in the bottle that is TOS! :techman:
JB
 
If you started with TOS you need TNG to understand much of DS9.
If you started with ENT and moved to VOY, you'd think Riker is massively important (Jonathan Frakes is) and you'd recognise the Borg from that one episode, but much of the rest would be an utter mystery.
 
But if you were to go ENT, TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY would you encounter problems, does it run coherently enough? For example would the the end of ENT make any sense at all?

You would miss some context on certain things. I won't go into it, as to not give spoilers, but there are things that all the spinoff series use that were originally developed in TOS. There are things developed during TNG that show up on Enterprise, and so on.
 
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