Who are your favorite Trek episode writers?
I had a look at my 30 favorite episodes list and tallied up the writers and found there was a 3 way tie between Braga/Moore and Menosky who all had 7 episodes each.
Looking at the complete lists of episodes on memory alpha, I'd have to Ronald D. Moore was definitely the most consistent by far. He only wrote a few episodes I'm not that keen on, namely Aquiel and Descent which is quite a feat considering his volume of work. And of course he wrote a lot of really fantastic episodes that number among my very favorites such as Trials and Tribble-ations, Improbable Cause/The Die is Cast, The Defector, and Change of Heart. On the other hand, a lot of episodes weren't necessarily story ideas that really drew me in, he tended to focus on character pieces and loved Klingons (who I got fed up with halfway through DS9) so while I enjoy most of his episodes and find them to be extremely well written, quite a few don't necessarily excite me and make me want to watch again.
Braga and Menosky of course worked a lot together so its somewhat hard to separate them but I'll try my best.
I feel Braga gets a bit TOO much flack, with too many people acting as if he was a *total* hack. I agree that he was a bad showrunner for both VOY and ENT - he should have tried to turn VOY around a bit and make it more cohesive/realistic but was too happy to just have it steam along and be totally overly episodic. And ENT was aimless, the fact Braga and Berman set up the temporal cold war with no idea of what they were going to do with it was unforgivable
Nonetheless, before Enterprise, Braga wrote a shit ton of episodes that I love. His TNG work could be a bit patchy although I don't feel he wrote any real major stinkers and his creativity really shone through in episodes like Frame of Mind, Schisms, Cause and Effect, Timescape and Phantasms - he definitely became an extremely distinctive addition to the cast of writers. I also find it really hard to say someone who could write "Ode to Spot" is a bad writer.
On VOY his work started off a bit shaky, brilliant episodes like Phage, Deadlock, Projections and the Thaw being mixed in with a lot of dreck in the first three seasons like Threshold, Non Sequitur and Cathexis. But whatever happened starting at the end of season 3/beginning of season 4, Braga's writing started to become incredibly consistent and although I feel his showrunning skills during that time on VOY left a lot to be desired, his writing record was almost flawless. Fantastic episodes and story ideas one after another - Scorpion, Year of Hell, Prey, Living Witness, Hope and Fear, Drone, Timeless, Dark Frontier, Someone to Watch Over Me, Lifeline etc etc.
I genuinely don't think he wrote a single bad teleplay in season 4-7 of Voyager except for "Unimatrix Zero" and that was with Mike Sussman who I suspect wrote the majority of it. Yes, Endgame was a terrible finale but it was a pretty decent script, I put the terribleness down to the showrunning decisions that were made to end it like that.
After Voyager, most of his stories and scripts left a lot to be desired although I do like Enterprise and it was the show that got me into trek. Compared with Moore, I find that more of Braga's episodes excite me as the stories he came up with were more distinctive even if the episodes were less will written and he wrote quite a lot more bad episodes than Moore. I do feel that Ronald D Moore was the superior writer though and
judging by their post Trek work, Moore definitely "wins" for me.
Joe Menosky seems to be a writer that is sometimes a bit invisible compared to his peers and a bit more difficult to evaluate since he was partnered so much with Braga in Voyager. I do really like him as a writer however and feel that he came up with quite a lot of stories that really impress me in their creativity. I liked all his work on TNG bar his season 7 disasters Emergence and Masks. His VOY work wasn't perfect but a large number of episodes he was involved in are ones I really love. He wrote a few stinkers like The Fight and False profits but he was also involved in a lot of episodes that I thought were fantastic. He came up with the stories and wrote the full teleplays of Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy and Muse which are episodes that I absolutely love both the scripts and the story ideas. And he was involved in a ton of episodes that I find to be extremely memorable and of a high quality like Latent Image, Blink of an Eye and lots of episodes co-written with Brannon Braga.
The next person on my list was Renee Echevarria who I think wrote quite a lot of really good episodes on both TNG and DS9 although he wasn't as consistent as Moore. Nonetheless TNG stinkers Birthright Part II, Second Chances and Descent Pt II are more than outweighed by exemplary episodes like The Offspring, I Borg, The Mind's Eye, Lower Decks, Preemptive Strike/ His DS9 work wasn't always amazing but he wrote a host of very good if not amazing episodes including some of my favorites Trials and Tribbleations, Children of Time, Equilibrium and Statistical Probabilities.
Besides those people who appeared on my list, I also really am impressed by the Ira Steven Behr/Robert Hewitt Wolfe writing team that wrote SO many consistently good episodes and helped power the story of DS9 along instead of just writing whatever random adventure they felt like.
So who are your favorite writers on the show?
I had a look at my 30 favorite episodes list and tallied up the writers and found there was a 3 way tie between Braga/Moore and Menosky who all had 7 episodes each.
Looking at the complete lists of episodes on memory alpha, I'd have to Ronald D. Moore was definitely the most consistent by far. He only wrote a few episodes I'm not that keen on, namely Aquiel and Descent which is quite a feat considering his volume of work. And of course he wrote a lot of really fantastic episodes that number among my very favorites such as Trials and Tribble-ations, Improbable Cause/The Die is Cast, The Defector, and Change of Heart. On the other hand, a lot of episodes weren't necessarily story ideas that really drew me in, he tended to focus on character pieces and loved Klingons (who I got fed up with halfway through DS9) so while I enjoy most of his episodes and find them to be extremely well written, quite a few don't necessarily excite me and make me want to watch again.
Braga and Menosky of course worked a lot together so its somewhat hard to separate them but I'll try my best.
I feel Braga gets a bit TOO much flack, with too many people acting as if he was a *total* hack. I agree that he was a bad showrunner for both VOY and ENT - he should have tried to turn VOY around a bit and make it more cohesive/realistic but was too happy to just have it steam along and be totally overly episodic. And ENT was aimless, the fact Braga and Berman set up the temporal cold war with no idea of what they were going to do with it was unforgivable
Nonetheless, before Enterprise, Braga wrote a shit ton of episodes that I love. His TNG work could be a bit patchy although I don't feel he wrote any real major stinkers and his creativity really shone through in episodes like Frame of Mind, Schisms, Cause and Effect, Timescape and Phantasms - he definitely became an extremely distinctive addition to the cast of writers. I also find it really hard to say someone who could write "Ode to Spot" is a bad writer.
On VOY his work started off a bit shaky, brilliant episodes like Phage, Deadlock, Projections and the Thaw being mixed in with a lot of dreck in the first three seasons like Threshold, Non Sequitur and Cathexis. But whatever happened starting at the end of season 3/beginning of season 4, Braga's writing started to become incredibly consistent and although I feel his showrunning skills during that time on VOY left a lot to be desired, his writing record was almost flawless. Fantastic episodes and story ideas one after another - Scorpion, Year of Hell, Prey, Living Witness, Hope and Fear, Drone, Timeless, Dark Frontier, Someone to Watch Over Me, Lifeline etc etc.
I genuinely don't think he wrote a single bad teleplay in season 4-7 of Voyager except for "Unimatrix Zero" and that was with Mike Sussman who I suspect wrote the majority of it. Yes, Endgame was a terrible finale but it was a pretty decent script, I put the terribleness down to the showrunning decisions that were made to end it like that.
After Voyager, most of his stories and scripts left a lot to be desired although I do like Enterprise and it was the show that got me into trek. Compared with Moore, I find that more of Braga's episodes excite me as the stories he came up with were more distinctive even if the episodes were less will written and he wrote quite a lot more bad episodes than Moore. I do feel that Ronald D Moore was the superior writer though and
judging by their post Trek work, Moore definitely "wins" for me.
Joe Menosky seems to be a writer that is sometimes a bit invisible compared to his peers and a bit more difficult to evaluate since he was partnered so much with Braga in Voyager. I do really like him as a writer however and feel that he came up with quite a lot of stories that really impress me in their creativity. I liked all his work on TNG bar his season 7 disasters Emergence and Masks. His VOY work wasn't perfect but a large number of episodes he was involved in are ones I really love. He wrote a few stinkers like The Fight and False profits but he was also involved in a lot of episodes that I thought were fantastic. He came up with the stories and wrote the full teleplays of Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy and Muse which are episodes that I absolutely love both the scripts and the story ideas. And he was involved in a ton of episodes that I find to be extremely memorable and of a high quality like Latent Image, Blink of an Eye and lots of episodes co-written with Brannon Braga.
The next person on my list was Renee Echevarria who I think wrote quite a lot of really good episodes on both TNG and DS9 although he wasn't as consistent as Moore. Nonetheless TNG stinkers Birthright Part II, Second Chances and Descent Pt II are more than outweighed by exemplary episodes like The Offspring, I Borg, The Mind's Eye, Lower Decks, Preemptive Strike/ His DS9 work wasn't always amazing but he wrote a host of very good if not amazing episodes including some of my favorites Trials and Tribbleations, Children of Time, Equilibrium and Statistical Probabilities.
Besides those people who appeared on my list, I also really am impressed by the Ira Steven Behr/Robert Hewitt Wolfe writing team that wrote SO many consistently good episodes and helped power the story of DS9 along instead of just writing whatever random adventure they felt like.
So who are your favorite writers on the show?
