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TOS Still The Best

The collection of characters were more distinct and vibrant (in my opinion).

TNG has its moments, but that crew just isn't as dynamic as the TOS crew. The TNG group come across as rather more sedate.

Totally, moralizing and superior Picard, mind-intruding-
social worker Troi, Riker who wants to be a swashbuckler but is just Picards's parrot, and Worf the only wussy Klingon in all of trekdom.

And, don't even get me started on immaculate saviour Wesley!!!!

While I like TNG and it has become nostalgic in some ways it just never really reached the heights of TOS. I do agree Worf especially early on in TNG kept getting his ass kicked. Even Riker fought better than Work at times.
 
The collection of characters were more distinct and vibrant (in my opinion).

TNG has its moments, but that crew just isn't as dynamic as the TOS crew. The TNG group come across as rather more sedate.

Totally, moralizing and superior Picard, mind-intruding-
social worker Troi, Riker who wants to be a swashbuckler but is just Picards's parrot, and Worf the only wussy Klingon in all of trekdom.

And, don't even get me started on immaculate saviour Wesley!!!!

While I like TNG and it has become nostalgic in some ways it just never really reached the heights of TOS. I do agree Worf especially early on in TNG kept getting his ass kicked. Even Riker fought better than Work at times.


I'm glad to see someone else acknowledge this. I posted something about this a few months ago. I like TNG, but Worf getting his ass kicked all the time grew tiresome.

I can understand why TNG avoided space battles from a certain point of view, but then the relentless "course corrections" got old too.

BOOM! BOOM! "Return fire!" (we don't see the phasers or torpedoes). "Alter course to 3-5-2, mark 1. Correction: 256!" Shields down 15%! BOOM! We've lost impulse engines!" Boom! (No one is firing phasers or torpedoes). They still have not responded to our hails!

People talk about Wesley saving the Enterprise 3,000 times in Season 1, but I found the "space battle" course corrections one of the worst aspects of TNG.

Ugh! I love TNG, don't get me wrong, but it definitely had its flaws.

(I guess that's one of the reasons "Best of Both Worlds" was so cool. They were actually TRYING to defeat the Borg, but just kept getting their asses kicked. Almost every other time in the series, it was like they were too passive when being attacked.)
 
TOS is great comfort food. I can be in a terrible mood, turn on some TOS, and feel better by the end of the episode. Whether it's the best Star Trek, I can't really say, because I've seen so many great episodes over the various spinoffs, too.
 
Why is TNG even being brought up here?
The OP's initial assertion invites comparisons. And TOS and TNG as well as VOY and ENT are essentially the same basic concept: travelers finding adventure in strange places during their voyage.

Stargate is a varition of the basic idea only you replace the starship with a stargate.
 
While I like TNG and it has become nostalgic in some ways it just never really reached the heights of TOS. I do agree Worf especially early on in TNG kept getting his ass kicked. Even Riker fought better than Work at times.

It is true that Worf did keep getting beaten, but it wasn't so much that I was thinking about. It was more his sniveling attempts to temper his Klingon-ness and become like the Humans. This combined with the overall smug "aren't Humans so perfect now " tone of the show, almost (to me) came across as racism.

Could you imagine there being a character, in a current setting tv drama, who was born into one ethnic group, but raised by another ethnic group, constantly apologizing for his own culture's ways and trying to be more like the culture he or she was raised into.

At the time I loved TNG, but then, over time the cracks started showing, and the constant technobabble, and the characters were the two biggest cracks. They were all so smug, smarmy and, for me leeched the the excitement out of the show, unlike the more individual, dynamic TOS crew.
 
While I like TNG and it has become nostalgic in some ways it just never really reached the heights of TOS. I do agree Worf especially early on in TNG kept getting his ass kicked. Even Riker fought better than Work at times.

They were all so smug, smarmy and, for me leeched the the excitement out of the show, unlike the more individual, dynamic TOS crew.

That's funny because some of the actors seem to mirror those qualities in person and in interviews as well.
 
I like TNG too though.

Patrick Stewart and Picard both are right up there with the big three and their actors in TOS, for me. After him, however, there's a big fall off in interestingness/acting ability. In my opinion. Due to Gene's initial concept of no stress among the crew, which, granted, changed.

I find VOY more fun and closer to the TOS vibe, with a more flawed, conflicted crew. Maybe I am projecting my flawed/conflicted nature onto the shows? :)
 
Yes, I love TOS. Loved it for 43 years. But I have to say, I enjoy the new Star Trek films more.
'


The effects are good in NuTrek and beat TOS in that department but when it comes to story telling episodes like City on the Edge of Forever, Doomsday Machine, Corbomite Maneuver, Where No Man has Gone Before etc. beat NuTrek by miles imo.
 
C57D you really summed up what bothered me about TNG very well. It's almost like you know what I'm thinking, you're not a sorcerer are you?

Star Trek, no colons or subtitles, is my favorite episodic TV show. It has been since I started figuring out if I have favorite anythings and continues to be with the one exception of television that is a serial or just one big story, a novel played out on screen, rather than just episode that can be viewed in any order. My favorite in that category is Babylon 5.
 
TOS is my favourite with B5 a close second.


I agree with you!

TOS has energetic actors playing their roles with gusto, and production with entertaining stories, backed with awesome incidental music cues.

I think it's the most simply entertaining television show ever produced.



"Babylon 5" is so thoughtful, so well planned out, many of the actors put so much passion into their performances.

As much as I am entertained by Classic Who, TNG & The Original Battlestar Galactica, TOS & B5 are the 2 best SF series I have ever seen!
 
B5 is okay, though a lot of the acting and effects are an extra large ham and cheese sandwich. Still, Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas are always worth watching.
 
TOS is Star Trek and always will be the best of the lot! I don't really include it as part of the franchise as it's a stand alone show! The movies seemed to have lost that spark I've always thought (Undiscovered Country was the only one in which it came back for even a few minutes)
JB
 
C57D you really summed up what bothered me about TNG very well. It's almost like you know what I'm thinking, you're not a sorcerer are you?

Star Trek, no colons or subtitles, is my favorite episodic TV show. It has been since I started figuring out if I have favorite anythings and continues to be with the one exception of television that is a serial or just one big story, a novel played out on screen, rather than just episode that can be viewed in any order. My favorite in that category is Babylon 5.

Marsden, no Sorcerer, I'm afraid to say, just a TOS fan(atic). My favorite sci fi setting of all time (and I have watched and read many different types). Give me the originals over any other ST incarnation.

The feeling of exploration, challenge, the vastness of space and being " the only ship in the sector" so you'd better fix the problem, was never more obvious in TOS.

I run the RPG as well and so get to share my TOS stories with friends also - the voyage never ends!!
 
Why compare? Really. Where is the basis for a fair comparison? Best in what way? Look, I get it that some believe Abrams didn't capture the essence and being of Roddenberry's "vision thing," whatever that really was (and I think we all -- myself included -- tend to define that to fit our own purposes). Let's move on.

Why must we constantly have to denigrate one form of Trek in order to support another? It's getting tiring. Why do they always have to be ranked? That's getting tiring, too. They all had strengths, they all had warts, they all entertained.

To be blunt, in the broadest sense, they all have one thing that ties them together, from TOS to Abrams and every spin off in between -- the belief that we really are OK people. Foibles and all, we will be fine. We are progressing towards something better even if we sometimes take three steps back and only one step forward. Just by being there, if not in theme or said explicitly in episodes, that "good future" we would all want to live in was on TV every week across several series. It's the one thing I've always thought all versions of Trek has had that had made it different than most of its competition. The feeling that in the end, everything will be OK. Our better angels will rule.

I thought that feeling was conveyed in both Abrams movies. And all Trek has conveyed it, they just entertained differently as they did.
 
Why compare? Really. Where is the basis for a fair comparison? Best in what way? Look, I get it that some believe Abrams didn't capture the essence and being of Roddenberry's "vision thing," whatever that really was (and I think we all -- myself included -- tend to define that to fit our own purposes). Let's move on.

Why must we constantly have to denigrate one form of Trek in order to support another? It's getting tiring. Why do they always have to be ranked? That's getting tiring, too. They all had strengths, they all had warts, they all entertained.

To be blunt, in the broadest sense, they all have one thing that ties them together, from TOS to Abrams and every spin off in between -- the belief that we really are OK people. Foibles and all, we will be fine. We are progressing towards something better even if we sometimes take three steps back and only one step forward. Just by being there, if not in theme or said explicitly in episodes, that "good future" we would all want to live in was on TV every week across several series. It's the one thing I've always thought all versions of Trek has had that had made it different than most of its competition. The feeling that in the end, everything will be OK. Our better angels will rule.

I thought that feeling was conveyed in both Abrams movies. And all Trek has conveyed it, they just entertained differently as they did.


I haven't felt that in NuTrek at all. The series always gave hope NuTrek has given us a genocidal maniac that wasnt stopped and destroyed Vulcan, a insane Starfleet captain that wasn't stopped before he killed scores of people, a woefully immature Kirk and a Spock that doesn't seem to be the strong first officer that Prime Spock was.
 
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