A Dedicated Thread For Talking About Star Trek Episodes

[Ben X]

Perhaps your list should have just comprised the 20 best episodes of the final two seasons..!

 

I'm going to watch your fave Trek episode ever and a couple of others, but unless there's a huge step up in quality from season 5 to season 6, I think I'm best off manning the escape-pod.

[mikemariano]

Yeah, hello is anyone going to make an Enterprise list for us? Come on!

 

I can't even imagine watching an episode earlier than Season 4.  I know Season 3 only has a single plotline of "Bakula hunts down the terrorists while Blalock gets addicted to Vulcan drugs," and what little of that I watched was terrible.  Earlier seasons have low-stakes plots like "Minefield" where a mine gets stuck to the Enterprise as well as frivolous-sounding episodes like this:

 

Archer faces an enemy that doesn't respond to hails while Hoshi tries to find what Malcolm's favorite food is to surprise him for his birthday.

 

Swap the names and this could be the TNG Season 8 parody account.

 

I don't know if this counts as a "recommended" list , but I'm going to list the only episodes of Enterprise I watched and didn't regret watching.

 

Home — 4x03 (The first episode I watched straight through.  The crew recuperates on Earth after fighting alien Nazis.)

 

Borderland — 4x04 (3-parter.  This one has Klingons and Orion slavers and Khan-esque supermen and Brent Spiner!)

Cold Station 12 — 4x05

The Augments — 4x06

 

The Forge — 4x07 (3-parter.  How did the lame Vulcans of Enterprise become the Vulcans as we know them?)

Awakening —4x08 (Actually gives Bakula something important-seeming to do.)

Kir'Shara —4x09

 

Babel One — 4x12 (3-parter.  A spiritual sequel to Journey to Babel.  And it has Jeffrey Combs!)

United — 4x13 (Fun with inertial dampeners.)

The Aenar — 4x14

 

Affliction — 4x15 (2-parter.  Klingons!  Uncle Phil!  And John Schuck!)

Divergence — 4x16 (It seems like this entire season is about retconning; here's the biggest one.)

 

Terra Prime —4x21 (This is actually the second part of a 2-parter, but the first episode "Demons" is terrible.  This is the de facto final episode of Enterprise.)

[Ben X]

Cool, thanks Mike!

 

Any Enterprise fans want to do a more traditional "10-20 best eps" list?

[Roderick]

Another classic TOS episode came by: The Trouble With Tribbles. Once again I was hugely surprised by how good it was. The Tribbles are widely known for their goofiness: quirky fluff balls that reproduce. I was expecting an equally fluffy episode, but it turned out to be really interesting, with a Klingon threat on a space station, some good villain subterfuge and a pretty fun bar room brawl scene with good comedic timing. Color me surprised!

[Ben X]

I'm still chugging through. I enjoyed the three remaining DS9 eps that I watched - the Kingon one, the sci-fi magazine one and the captain's log one. I'm generally enjoying the Voyager list, too. I just watched Living Witness and it was absolutely fantastic.

[JonCole]

It's been a while since I saw Enterprise, but I can give the whole 20 highlight episodes a shot later tonight. I can definitely agree that Terra Prime was one of Enterprise's best, Peter Weller makes his character one of the most memorable incidental characters in the series.

[SecretAsianMan]

I'm still chugging through. I enjoyed the three remaining DS9 eps that I watched - the Kingon one, the sci-fi magazine one and the captain's log one. I'm generally enjoying the Voyager list, too. I just watched Living Witness and it was absolutely fantastic.

 

I liked Living Witness for it's method of employing the evil twin without actually using twins, clones, goatee wearing mirror universe counterparts, or other equally cheesy sci-fi tropes.

[Ben X]

Yeah, it's a brilliant spin on that with an added satirical edge.

 

Looking forward to your list, Jon!

 

SAM, I keep meaning to mention this: thanks to your comments about how you identify with Harry Kim, I can't help but think of him as being you transplanted into a fictional work somehow.

[SecretAsianMan]

SAM, I keep meaning to mention this: thanks to your comments about how you identify with Harry Kim, I can't help but think of him as being you transplanted into a fictional work somehow.

 

How did you get a hold of my fanfic... I mean I have no idea what you're talking about.

[Salacious Snake]

 

 

I am sad. Rewatching along with a friend, I don't think season six has a single bad episode in it, although One Little Ship is to taste, and has the two best episodes Star Trek has ever produced. I really really hate people saying, "Stick with X until Y, that's when it gets good," so please please quit when you aren't getting any enjoyment out of it, but I will be sad still.

I'm still chugging through. I enjoyed the three remaining DS9 eps that I watched - the Kingon one, the sci-fi magazine one and the captain's log one. I'm generally enjoying the Voyager list, too. I just watched Living Witness and it was absolutely fantastic.

 

 

Yeah, I'm glad you at least got to see those. Far Beyond the Stars and In the Pale Moonlight are as good as Trek gets in my opinion.

[BigJKO]

I'm going through Season 5 of DS9 and it's so far been a blast! The two-part In Purgatory's Shadow and By Inferno's Light was excellent, exciting stuff. Everything's much tighter. The characters are getting better. There's less of Major Kira, my least favourite character. Lots of Dominion stuff. It's good!

 

Garak remains the favourite and Odo and Quark together are always a delight.

 

Trials and Tribble-ations was also pretty hilarious and the compositing of old vs. new was excellent.

[Ben X]

Course: Oblivion – 5x18

 

Dammit, man, Course: Oblivion is episode 17, not 18. I just accidentally watched The Fight. The Fight, for heaven's sake!

[SecretAsianMan]

It's episode 18 on the wiki, but that's using the assumption that the two parter Dark Frontier has 2 separate numbers, which was not always the case.

[Ben X]

Well, I need someone to blame for me having to watch The Fight...

[Roderick]

I have begun the final, third season of TOS. Captain Kirk shows a group of children pictures of their dead parents. Doc McCoy joins him on the bridge and sees the younglings: "They're crying, Jim. I don't know how you did it, but it's good to see!"

This show.

[Salacious Snake]

Haha! That is a rotten clunker of an episode. Hold onto your butt, 'cause season 3 is one heck of a bumpy ride.

[Roderick]

The differences between episodes is staggering. The one before was a tension-filled heist plot where Kirk and Spock engage in a dangerous gambit to steal a cloaking device from aboard a Romulan ship in the neutral zone. Then, traumatizing a bunch of kids under the influence of a fat ghost in a dress.

[BigJKO]

Season 6 of DS9 is off to a very good start!

[Ben X]

Just watched the end of DS9.

 

 

As someone who has barely been watching it, that seemed like some pretty goofy, cheesy shit! First the Republic Serial stuff with Sisko and the prophet god dude, then all those badly-put-together flashback sequences! Also, that final shot tracking away from the window seemed really off-scale. But really, as I say, it didn't mean much to me as I haven't been invested in this series. How do the DS9 fans here feel about it?

 

EDIT: Just watched the cold open for the Voyager episode "Relativity", and it's a very similar set-up to LOST's

 

opening of Season 5

[Gormongous]

Just watched the end of DS9.

 

As someone who has barely been watching it, that seemed like some pretty goofy, cheesy shit! First the Republic Serial stuff with Sisko and the prophet god dude, then all those badly-put-together flashback sequences! Also, that final shot tracking away from the window seemed really off-scale. But really, as I say, it didn't mean much to me as I haven't been invested in this series. How do they DS9 fans here feel about it?

 

I honestly like it a lot, to the surprise of no one. The callbacks to Far Beyond the Stars initially left me cold, because I wanted that episode to stand on its own, but the way everything gets pulled together in the end, albeit in a Lord of the Rings sort of way, is really satisfying to me. So many arcs find grounding in those last few episodes, so I guess it really is just a matter of emotional investment. I also liked the stakes of the final episode, which is what keeps it from being more Lord of the Rings than Lord of the Rings.

[Ben X]

I keep meaning to post - Seven Of Nine's uniform is fucking ridiculous, whatever exoplating excuses they want to come up with ("you're used to having big clunky armour on, so you'll probably be most comfortable getting sewn into a skintight one-piece"). Her tits take over every scene she's in, it's really distracting and feels pretty seedy.

[Gormongous]

Her tits take over every scene she's in, it's really distracting and feels pretty seedy.

 

Embarrassingly, this is the exact reason I got into Star Trek. It was the summer before my seventh grade year, PC Gamer used the excuse of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force coming out to do a pin-up edition of Seven of Nine, and my hormones demanded I watch a show with such a nice pair of tits in it.

 

I actually think Jeri Ryan's quite good, but they don't give her much to work with except in scenes with the Doctor.

[Ben X]

...and then print media died.

[SecretAsianMan]

I enjoyed the ending of DS9 for it's sense of epicness (I hate that word but it's appropriate).  It was different from all the other Star Treks, much like the series itself was.  Yes, Picard saves humanity at the end of TNG, but the entire show and ending focuses on the Enterprise crew so you feel like they're really the only ones in any actual danger.  Voyager is also just focused on Voyager.  DS9 involves the entire quadrant really, so you get Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans, Vulcans, Ferengi, Breen, and of course Humans all in the mix, not to mention the Dominion.  The one thing I really can't stand about the end of DS9 was the Pah-Wraiths.  That was the most forced, pointless thing.  Basically, it seemed like they needed to give Sisco a reason for existing besides just being the guy in charge.

 

As for Jeri Ryan, yes, she was initially brought onto the show to attract a male audience but surprise surprise, she was actully quite good.

[Ben X]

Yeah, she plays the emotionless Vulcan/android/drone Trek type well , and she was good in the one episode I've seen so far where she had more to do (where everyone's in status for a month). Has anyone actually gone on record as saying she was brought in to attract a male audience? It always felt to me more like a sop to existing Trekkies to raise their interest in Voyager, probably because to me she isn't as good-looking as an Evangeline Lily, say; I figured they'd got a good actress in but decided to pretty her up as much as possible (with a little non-obtrusive bit of plastic stuck on her face) and as she fortuitously had big knockers they high-fived and put her in a body-sculpted catsuit. If they really wanted to attract a new male audience they could have cast Yasmine Bleeth or something. But maybe that's just me - it worked on Gormongous at least! Well, it's far from the first time that Trek had dollied up its female cast, but it's a shame they didn't leave that behind along with Troi's miniskirt. At least they don't have her doing a T'Pol and "decontaminating" by getting down to her undies and covering herself in lube, or indeed simply stripping down to her undies for the camera, as in Into Darkness.

 

Anyway, just watched Equinox, and I see what you guys mean by Janeway being so uneven - she's gone completely mental! Does this get followed up on at all, or just forgotten? Her actions are incredibly heinous in this episode and seem to have been forgotten about by the end of it because she pulled a sad face when SPOILER that captain died.