What do you think about Star Trek???

[Pawelk198604]

As a child, I watched the TV series "Star Trek : The Next Generation" when it was still too difficult for me to understand. I grow up my love for this series began again I saw "Star Trek: Enterpise" I still like it, though many fans consider it the weakest of the series.

Which Star Trek is your favorite?

Edited September 17, 2012 by Pawelk198604
Spelling correction

[Nikolai]

I know which Star Trek is your favorite?

It's funny. When I was young, TOS was the only thing out there -- there weren't even any movies. I developed a love for it, since it was the only thing really like itself.

When TNG came out, I was skeptical that another crew could be interesting. And to be honest, the first season kind of confirmed that. (Unbeknownst to me, Roddenberry had decided to rule that there would be no interpersonal conflict among crew members. That, and the fact that a lot of the plots were simple re-hashes of some TOS plots, brought me close to just walking away.) But as the series matured, it really grew on me.

It evidently grew on a lot of people, since they started making other series in the same era: DS9 and VOY. I realized as I was watching it, though, that I missed the feeling in TOS of "We're out here and we have no idea what we're doing" that were in a lot of TOS episodes. By TNG era, they seemed to understand space travel pretty well. In TOS, they seemed to be flying more frequently by the seat of their collective pants.

By the time ENT came around, then, my fandom had wrapped back around to TOS. I tried to get into ENT, but it seemed much more sloppily written to my eyes; your mileage may vary, of course. (Plus, TOS had a sort of campy feel to it that reminded the audience that This Was All Pretend. I'm still a little freaked out when people say, apparently in all seriousness, that Trek represents future history, or that its treatment of science is unparalleled in its accuracy.)

And for my money, Mr. Spock is still one of the most intriguing characters ever to appear in American televised science fiction.

I still enjoy Trek whenever I bump into it; the stories are often engaging, and certainly more thought-provoking than a lot of television. I don't go out of my way to watch it anymore, though.

[Vanamonde]

The writing and cast of the original are still the best, though even I will admit that it was quite uneven, and some of its episodes are downright bad. Next Generation ran hot and cold. I'd say about 70% of it was lousy, though the other 30% can be quite good, and I adore Patrick Stewart. But after that they started just rehashing the same story ideas over and over again, one series after another. Not a single character on DS9 appealed to me, and I've only seen a few episodes because it was just too boring. Voyager started off crappy, then got better, but was never great. And Enterprise was such awful garbage that after the first few episodes, I was too enraged to watch anymore.

[maltesh]

I started watching with TNG about the third season or so when it aired. I watched DS9 as it originally aired, as well as Voyager, and eventually, Enterprise. As I recalled, DS9 wound up being my favorite, followed by TNG, then Enterprise and finally Voyager.

I rewatched DS9, then Voyager, then Enterprise, then TNG at the beginning of this year over Netflix.

Generally, Trek series tend to hit their stride about the third or fourth season. Enterprise had some incredible episodes in its fourth season, which is unfortunate, because that's the season it was canceled. I'd say that "In a Mirror, Darkly" is my favorite Mirror-Universe episode in the entire franchise.

I also liked Voyager a lot better than I'd remembered. "Bride of Chaotica" is the best holodeck episode in the entire franchise. And the alternate versions of Voyager tended to be hilarious. "Living Witness" was an okay episode overall, but the reconstructed Voyager Incident in that episode was a hoot. As was the U.S.S. Vortex in the holonovel in "Author, Author."

On the whole, both were decent shows. Though on the rewatch, I have become absolutely stunned that TNG managed to be renewed after the first season.

[Tommygun]

I personally like Enterprise the most. I think it was the main story line and that the Vulcan government played a bigger role in the series.

[AmpsterMan]

I've only ever seen "The next generation" haven't really gotten into any other star trek.

[Pawelk198604]

The writing and cast of the original are still the best, though even I will admit that it was quite uneven, and some of its episodes are downright bad. Next Generation ran hot and cold. I'd say about 70% of it was lousy, though the other 30% can be quite good, and I adore Patrick Stewart. But after that they started just rehashing the same story ideas over and over again, one series after another. Not a single character on DS9 appealed to me, and I've only seen a few episodes because it was just too boring. Voyager started off crappy, then got better, but was never great. And Enterprise was such awful garbage that after the first few episodes, I was too enraged to watch anymore.

You say you watched a few episodes of DS9, it's pity because real action started in the third season, when federation made first contact with Dominium

[nibula]

Star trek is the best

[Nikolai]

I personally like Enterprise the most. I think it was the main story line and that the Vulcan government played a bigger role in the series.

I suppose that's a fair point, but I enjoyed the fact that for a long time, Vulcans were mysterious. Having too much revealed about them was a bit like being disappointed by a recently-released prequel. Until the official people who get to add to the franchise weigh in, it's natural to speculate about your own reasons why certain unexplained things are the way they are... and Hollywood's reasons are never as cool as the ones in your own head.

Having too much told about them also tended to reduce them to the one-note aliens that Star Trek became guilty of in its later incarnations. Originally, they had flawed humans (and a flawed human race) finding other multi-dimensional alien races, and interactions were complex and layered. Klingons could be violent, yes, but they could also be crafty, underhanded, frightened, impulsive, noble, and so on -- just like humans.

After a while, aliens got reduced to a single character trait with glaring and enormous flaws, and it was up to humans to go around and correct them where they had gone wrong. Klingons became space-faring medieval Vikings (where the supreme ruler gets decided by knife fight, for Heaven's sake). Need a greedy character? Look among the Ferengi; no humans like that, nosiree. Need someone cunning and suspicious? Cardassia. Passionate and opportunistic? Romulus. And so on. Even the Borg went from technological scavengers to some kind of hive mind with a queen.

And while Spock's human/Vulcan conflict made sense in the context of the prejudice he had encountered in his childhood, it soon became rare for a hybrid character not to lament their dual heritage -- as if someone could be compelled to act in a certain way in the heat of the moment simply because of the influence of their one-note race's DNA. It began to sound almost like genetic determinism to my ears after a while.

But all this is just opinion. I'm willing to forgive a lot of wrongs in a story if the characters are compelling. A reduction in the complexity of characters felt like a genuine loss. But your mileage may vary.

[Pawelk198604]

Does anyone watched tv series "Secret adventures of Julies Verne"

Watch the ending scene

[AviatorBJP]

I loved the motion pictures with the original cast since I could remember. I had a few members of my family who enjoyed star trek. As I became older, I found bits star trek here and there, but never was a religious tv watcher.

Now, with the advent of netflix, I have been watching episodes of star trek in the order they were meant to be seen.

My favorite bits of writing: the original series

Favorite character: Data, from the next generation

Favorite story arch: the voyager series

[Vanamonde]

real action started in the third season

The "few episodes" I watchd were not in a row. I saw eps from here and there through the run of the series, and was bored out of my mind.

One of the (many) things that enraged me about Enterprise was that they took the logical, dignified Vulcans and reduced them to petty twits who were always acting on their emotions. I will say, though, that I always liked John Billingsley, the actor who played Phlox. I thought he did a lot with a really rather bog-standard ST character.

[Capt'n Skunky]

I prefer TOS for the simple fact that it had to rely on writing and acting (overacting?) to be good. The more recent incarnations and movies leaned too heavily on special effects to cover up the fact that the writing and acting had become so sub-par.

For the record, Kirk would wipe the floor with that tea-sipping pussy Piccard. Don't get me wrong, I love Patrick Stewart and how he played Piccard, it's just that James T. Kirk was the ultimate badass.

Voyager was the worst of the bunch. An absolute abomination. It was like Cub Scouts in space with the Den Mother as captain. Enterprise was next worse. It was obviously going to be bad when they sexualized the on board Vulcan with the big boobs and risqué scenes. Yes, it was titillating, but it was so out of place it killed the show for me within first few episodes.

Arrr!

Capt'n Skunky

[Vanamonde]

when they sexualized the on board Vulcan

Oh cripes, I'd forgotten about that. There was that semi-nude scene in the first(?) ep, and I thought, "What have these bad people* done to Trek?!" It didn't help that Jolene Blalock looks kind of weird to me. To be fair, I would have complained a lot less if it had been Jeri Ryan.

TOS for the simple fact that it had to rely on writing and acting

Everybody jokes about Shatner, and he did kind of go off the rails as the show wore on, but I think that this universal subject for jokes is unfair to the really fine acting of Nimoy, Kelley, and early Shatner. And the writers for that series were, went on to be, and/or still are big names in TV and science fiction writing.

*Sorry for the salty language folks!

Edited September 18, 2012 by Vanamonde

[thorfinn]

I liked TOS as a kid (reruns of reruns) and loved almost all the old movies ("It's not just the whales…it's the water!" ) I had a bit of a trekker phase, tried to get into TNG but it lasted very little actually. Oh, and I loved Enterprise. I loved the first two seasons, actually.... Shocking, I know.

Liked them because it was Trek not taking itself seriously, a thing that was extremely needed after Voyager.... laughed and cheered a lot because there finally was a crew of rookies, in the first true voyage of exploration for Earth, looking awestruck at almost everything they met, making mistakes and getting humiliated by half the galaxy's ships in terms of speed The self-aware humour, the haughty Vulcans ("When logic fails you, you raise your voice? You've been on Earth too long" :D ) and poor T'Pol trying to rein in this bunch of troublemakers and her government at the same time were much more interesting than the usual technobabble-infused scripts for me. Oh, and I'd rather serve under captain Archer than that insufferable, infallible know-it-all Picard

(I also have this sensation that the first two seasons were also subtly political... everybody disagrees, but they haven't managed to convince me yet.)

Edited September 17, 2012 by thorfinn

[Vanamonde]

finally was a crew of rookies, in the first true voyage of exploration for Earth, looking awestruck at almost everything they met

That might have gone over better for me if it wasn't so much stuff that the timeline of the other series said they shouldn't be encountering for decades or centuries yet to come. >:-( It was like watching a Civil War movie in which somebody flies over the battlefield in an F-117.

[AmpsterMan]

I suppose that's a fair point, but I enjoyed the fact that for a long time, Vulcans were mysterious. Having too much revealed about them was a bit like being disappointed by a recently-released prequel. Until the official people who get to add to the franchise weigh in, it's natural to speculate about your own reasons why certain unexplained things are the way they are... and Hollywood's reasons are never as cool as the ones in your own head.

Having too much told about them also tended to reduce them to the one-note aliens that Star Trek became guilty of in its later incarnations. Originally, they had flawed humans (and a flawed human race) finding other multi-dimensional alien races, and interactions were complex and layered. Klingons could be violent, yes, but they could also be crafty, underhanded, frightened, impulsive, noble, and so on -- just like humans.

After a while, aliens got reduced to a single character trait with glaring and enormous flaws, and it was up to humans to go around and correct them where they had gone wrong. Klingons became space-faring medieval Vikings (where the supreme ruler gets decided by knife fight, for Heaven's sake). Need a greedy character? Look among the Ferengi; no humans like that, nosiree. Need someone cunning and suspicious? Cardassia. Passionate and opportunistic? Romulus. And so on. Even the Borg went from technological scavengers to some kind of hive mind with a queen.

And while Spock's human/Vulcan conflict made sense in the context of the prejudice he had encountered in his childhood, it soon became rare for a hybrid character not to lament their dual heritage -- as if someone could be compelled to act in a certain way in the heat of the moment simply because of the influence of their one-note race's DNA. It began to sound almost like genetic determinism to my ears after a while.

But all this is just opinion. I'm willing to forgive a lot of wrongs in a story if the characters are compelling. A reduction in the complexity of characters felt like a genuine loss. But your mileage may vary.

You know, I believe that is just an inevitability sad to say. TV tropes has a nice page on it here. If you scroll down to live action tv it has a nice part on star trek. Not that I am saying that they have absolute authority on this matter but it is an interesting discussion on the matter.

Honestly, the only piece of fiction that I can recall that has somewhat avoided that is Mass Effect with it's very intricate personal relationships.

As far as star trek goes, I thought TNG was pretty good. It held my attention for 170ish and I thought the actors were superb. The relationships between the characters was pretty amazing too.

Edited September 18, 2012 by AmpsterMan

[Nikolai]

TV tropes has a nice page on it here.

You should warn people before linking to TV Tropes!

One troper on the page you linked to mentioned that a Trek novel posits that different alien races had wars that tended to homogenize the population before the race developed interstellar travel, and humans simply managed to avoid escalating things to that point before taking to the stars. I wonder if there's a strange kind of peaceful homogenization taking place on Earth, though, even so. I've heard that a handful of languages are on their last generation, for example, because the native populations that speak them are being absorbed into the larger culture that surrounds them. As media travels ever more quickly and becomes even more widespread, will national differences become blurry and largely disappear after a few generations? It's an intriguing thought, if somewhat chilling (I rather like the diversity of humanity).

On the other hand, since geographical separation seems to deepen cultural differences, perhaps becoming a spacefaring race will merely cause the diversity of the human species to show itself more deeply along different lines -- Earth's differences will be closer to, say, the differences between modern-day provinces than between modern-day countries, but the cultural differences between Earth and Mars will be much more readily noticeable. It's also interesting to observe that certain physiological traits tend to crop up in geographically isolated populations (e.g., red hair). Some people even claim to be able to pick out nationalities based on facial characteristics. As genetic pockets in different regions of space develop, I wonder if certain physiological traits will be emphasized in certain populations, and what those might be. ("She's obviously from the Moon. Did you see her neck?")

Finally, I think there's a certain element of natural selection in human societies. Unfortunately, the rate of change is very slow; radical ideas that might work are rarely implemented (and rightly so, given all the lives at stake). Perhaps traveling to other planets/comets/asteroids/moons/whatever is an important step in learning how to do society right. Each one of those habitats is going to need some form of governance; we'll be able to try out a lot more ideas, and ones that don't work will (for the attentive ones) be selected out, leading to (it would seem) much more robust societal models as the ones that manage to survive. Maybe spacefaring is what a species needs in order to develop really good, strong societies, since it really opens up the adaptive landscape.

I'm rambling again, aren't I? Sorry about that.

[EvilotionCR2]

Voyager Rock!!!

[RedDwarfIV]

For me, my favourite Star Trek series had to be Enterprise. Sure, when put alongside the others it probably is an appalling piece of scrap, but if I say it had more of a KSP feel to it than the others you may get what I mean. If we wanted a serious game designed to be as realistic as possible, we'd all be playing Orbiter. But we're not - we're playing the scrappy, gritty, non-serious little-green-men-exploding game where no mission is certain to go right and one of the best recognised Kerbonauts is best recognised for not giving a smeg when everything is going to hell.

Enterprise, for me, was like NASA 200 years in the future and having adopted Navy procedures instead of airforce - so there's some ammount of layman's realism - but the technology is far less advanced and a lot less reliable. [Then again, if the technology was reliable in series set later, less bridge consoles would violently explode.] Stuff goes wrong, transporters are only cargo rated until an emergency forces them to send a person through, transporter accidents can be attributed to the fact that the theory has only just been put into practice, and the warp drive is slow compared to other series.

Next favourite would be Voyager - not because it's good, but simply because whenever it was on Virgin 1 [back when Virgin 1 was a channel] I tried to watch it. None of the other series but Enterprise managed to catch my eye strongly enough that I wouldn't flip over to Dave for Top Gear or QI or something.

Next would be The Next Generation, I liked it enough that I watched most of the interesting sounding episodes from TV-Links. Patrick Stewart did good there.

After that, DS9. Again, not because it's good. This time, simply because I have watched some DS9 episodes. I didn't follow it much.

Finally, TOS. Never seen it, except for the first ten minutes of that movie with V'ger in it that I found too slow to start so gave up, although I did watch 'the one with the whales' the whole way through - I liked that one for it's comedic value.

Nuclear wessels.

[Kobayashimaru350]

I was always a fan of TNG, mostly because I grew up watching it. Though I like the movies with the original crew the best(most of them at least).

[Deltac]

I grew up with Star Wars, but after I got a DVR, I started watching TNG and Voyager reruns. Also have TOS season 1 and 2 on DVD. Seen all the movies (again, thank you DVR). Gotta say, I fell in love with Star Trek. I even bought Star Trek Online back in the day x3 (Free to play now O:)

I haven't watched Deep Space 9, Seen most of Enterprise (LOVE IT), Seen most of TNG and Voyager (love the ending to voyager, made me tear up), Seen most of TOS, only one ep of the animated series (tibbles).

So, I'm in love with Star Trek and Star Wars. May the stars be with you :3

[royalkingofgames]

love star treck watched every episode of voyager ds9 enterprise half of tng and a bit of kirck

and im twelve. im going to the science convention in london in october

[royalkingofgames]

For me, my favourite Star Trek series had to be Enterprise. Sure, when put alongside the others it probably is an appalling piece of scrap, but if I say it had more of a KSP feel to it than the others you may get what I mean. If we wanted a serious game designed to be as realistic as possible, we'd all be playing Orbiter. But we're not - we're playing the scrappy, gritty, non-serious little-green-men-exploding game where no mission is certain to go right and one of the best recognised Kerbonauts is best recognised for not giving a smeg when everything is going to hell.

Enterprise, for me, was like NASA 200 years in the future and having adopted Navy procedures instead of airforce - so there's some ammount of layman's realism - but the technology is far less advanced and a lot less reliable. [Then again, if the technology was reliable in series set later, less bridge consoles would violently explode.] Stuff goes wrong, transporters are only cargo rated until an emergency forces them to send a person through, transporter accidents can be attributed to the fact that the theory has only just been put into practice, and the warp drive is slow compared to other series.

Next favourite would be Voyager - not because it's good, but simply because whenever it was on Virgin 1 [back when Virgin 1 was a channel] I tried to watch it. None of the other series but Enterprise managed to catch my eye strongly enough that I wouldn't flip over to Dave for Top Gear or QI or something.

Next would be The Next Generation, I liked it enough that I watched most of the interesting sounding episodes from TV-Links. Patrick Stewart did good there.

After that, DS9. Again, not because it's good. This time, simply because I have watched some DS9 episodes. I didn't follow it much.

Finally, TOS. Never seen it, except for the first ten minutes of that movie with V'ger in it that I found too slow to start so gave up, although I did watch 'the one with the whales' the whole way through - I liked that one for it's comedic value.

Nuclear wessels.

voyager +kirk on cbs action virgin media channell 192

[phoenix_ca]

Enterprise, hands-down. I've known people who much preferred the techno-babble of the other series, but I liked Enterprise because they weren't nearly as haughty and holier-than-thou, and especially the third season, as it posed many interesting points of ethical debate. That, and it having been structured as a whole season with a general arc a la Babylon 5, or Stargate(ish), and in that they get their asses thoroughly handed to them, made it much more interesting. (The only episode of Voyager that I remember for it's narrative like this was the Omega-particle one. The others were pretty cut-and-dry, we have our perfect moral principles in the Federation and will stick to them stuff.)

Then maybe DS9, for some of the narrative on religion, the point at which religious zealotry meets scientific inquiry, etc. That and that Sisko is far from the ideal or perfect StarTrek captain. He was much, much more pragmatic, and certainly willing to beat the crap out of you, compromise his ethics, and more, if it was in the service of greater good, or at least as he could assess at the time. (Garak was certainly a point at which these ethical dilemmas emerged quite often.)

Still, I'd watch Babylon 5 before Enterprise.