Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Never watched the original series much (wasn't alive at the time of the originals, don't recall seeing the reruns), but became a fan of the movies when they started. Fell into things fully when TNG began (watched from the first episode to the last) and still followed those films, though after starting with both Deep Space Nine and Voyager I gave them up fully in late 1995 and never looked back. Have a couple of the, ahem, 'technical manuals' around the place but that's about it -- the other books I've avoided. Have no costumes, have always avoided any kind of conventions general or specific, take cruel pleasure in laughing at Shatner's follies in the fifth movie, as should we all (the fake MST version is the only one to see, frankly).

Unsurprisingly, Picard is my fave (I was actually a Patrick Stewart fan already), but both Avery Brooks and Kate Mulgrew did excellent jobs in their Sisko and Janeway roles. Scott Bakula as Archer just scares me as a concept. TNG cast my favorite ensemble bunch, though I will give it up (oh yes) for George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, Leonard Nimoy, Terri Farrell, Alexander Siddiq, Rene Auberjonois, Ethan Phillips, Robert Beltran and Robert Picardo. Data ist rad. And so forth.

note: star trek: the motion picture looked awful. but all the ones after that were awesome. how much cooler would next generation have been if they had those burgundy uniforms? kirk looked like the motherfucker in EVERY MOVIE wearing that shit.

ned: you think picard is tougher than picard. what. the. fuck. did you see wrath of khan? did you see that shit? he fucking kicked khan's fucking vinyl-chested ass. 'oh, yeah, you have genesis, khan but you don't have me. if you want me, you're going to have to come down here. you're GOING to HAVE to COME DOWN HERE!!!@#@@!$#'. you can say ANYTHING ELSE about kirk vs. picard, picard is smarter and more civil and professional or whatever the fuck, but nobody in their right fucking mind would say that he's tougher than motherfucking kirk. i am actually literally angry about this, so i need to calm down now. christ, i'm such a trekkie.

I thought it was Riker who had the twin. ;-)

that riker transporter twin episode is some stupid shit though.

original series: chekov...maybe, but that's stretching it. he kicks ass in the movies, he's just sort of useless on the show. but the original cast (chekov being a second series addition) is flawless.

next generation: RIKER RIKER RIKER, troi, that doctor who replaced crusher for one year, yar, data (come on, admit it. he's a super-advanced andriod and he can't understand common phrases? he thinks a 'lemon' is a literal lemon for god's sake. i'm sure the writers kissed each other for how fucking cute that was. anyway mudd's women were way smarter). and WESLEY. geordie would get on my nerves if he were played by anyone but le var burton, but he's a childhood icon and can therefore do no wrong.

deep space nine: the only memorable character besides the captain (who is cool) is quark the ferengi (who is also cool). but the rest aren't even fleshed-out enough to annoy me. wait, no, the short-haired chick with the ridges on her nose aggravates the piss out of me. and the doctor, god.

voyager: it has an indian. and an asian guy. and a black vulcan. and the captain is a woman. only as annoying as that new ghostbusters cartoon where one of the ghostbusters was in a wheelchair. like, what the hell?

evidence that kirk is the best captain: all series after that have had kirk ripoffs that are nowhere as good as kirk because they are not as cool as the godly shatner. like riker, or that really forgettable womanizer guy from voyager. i mean, what the hell, don't you just want to punch riker in the face? does anyone not want to? anyone?

All-time favorite episode is "Charlie X," where the Enterprise picks up some teenaged human waif from a planet, who then runs around the ship melting off the faces through telekinesis (?) of various crew members whenever he's teased or horny. What teenager couldn't identify with that?

I remembered TNG being great when I was 12, but I watched a few of them more recently and they were AWFUL, even the later ones. I think I might have quite liked Deep Space Nine later on, when they started having season-long story arcs, but I never saw enough of them to make sense of what was going on.

How come most of the crew are American yet NONE of them are chronically obese? (except Scotty who's - ahem - ""Scottish"")

In the 60s it was a bizarre mix of US military 'might is right' fascism and Hippy-dippy, 'why can't all nations hold hands?' idealism (though still managing to be sexist ~ Uhura the Captains secretary and Yoaman Rand (is that right) the Captains bit of [onboard] fluff. AND THATS IT SISTERS!)

It should have ended there as it ran out of ideas and people stopped watching it. But OH NO, they had to bring it back in the 80s with over-long, plodding bore-a-thon 'Next Generation' episodes that tapped into the touchy-feely / inner-child / New-Age nonsense that was on the go at the time. I mean - Counsellor Troi = WHY? She even sits on the bridge next to the Captain!! the message is in the 25th Century a bloody social worker is one of the most important jobs on a space ship.

But it was all so clinical and corperate and soul-less, advocating Pro-conformity and how you should be a good citizen. And too much sanctimonious liberal finger-wagging for my liking.

And it starred Whoopi Goldberg.

And how come all the baddies end up as the Federation's (UGH!) freind, taking tokenistic jobs as Navigators etc?

And why was it always so fucking BORING?

Another Star Trek I had over the other incarnations -- BETTER BACKGROUND MUSIC! Esp. that duh-dum-duh-dum-DUH-DUM-duh-dum theme whenever Kirk's ass was in deep ship.

On the other hand, Troi's mother was AWESOME.

And the original ST's music was Varese-influenced, hey? Hmmmm ... never knew that! Maybe I should go over to that "Who Opened Your Ears" thread in ILM and change an answer or two of mine :-)

Troi's mom was cooler than Troi, not more attractive! Aigh, my eyes!

troi: not attractive.

crusher: nuh-uh.

troi's mom: uh.

that guy who was troi's mom's butler or something and was the guy who played lurch in the addams family movies: mrowr.

question: who liked first contact? it was like a next generation episode, only like, cool. plus, supercool supporting cast with alfre woodard and the farmer guy from babe.

someone start a star wars thread so i can bitch about how much that sucks except for empire strikes back.

hey i just remembered something else i liked in next generation, although it's from that bastard movie where kirk dies (falling off a walkway! the fuck? he's saved the universe like two hundred times and he falls of a walkway and dies? fuck). um anyway, i liked when data said 'shit'.

Andrew L has not mentioned his great expertness in this area, for some reason. I know about it because I very briefly worked under him on a Star Trek magazine!

I did see the Ro fig yes! Apparently you only get her if you do the prerelease purchase, bloody Lego.

In other news, tonight I have idle time so I am watching a curated threefer:

- the First Duty (TNG)
- Lower Decks (TNG)
- The Inner Fight (LD)

For the story continuity! Its fun to do this with eps when one can.

Update: it was a good choice.

Yeah, when I watched The Inner Fight I went back to those TNG episodes, good stuff. Also the LD episode Wej Duj, which introduced T’Lyn and the Klingon back in season 2 (I wish he showed up a bit more).

Heck, the penultimate episode of LD even made me want to go back and watch some Enterprise, thanks to T’pol. Her interactions with Curzon was the highlight of that episode IMO

probably old news to most, but just in case, this is the best social media account of all time: https://bsky.app/profile/nocontexttrek1.bsky.social

Hm!

https://deadline.com/2025/11/star-trek-movie-jonathan-goldstein-john-francis-daley-1236616716/

We rewatched a few of the films in the last week, and dear god, Nemesis is even worse than I remember. But I think it's mainly cos i find Tom Hardy so wooden. I know I'm probably alone in that.

I just watched "Carbon Creek" and it was the first episode of Enterprise that I genuinely liked, without hearing it on a scale!

It's a shame they don't have an alternate, beardless, Riker head for people who want to recreate the first series of TNG. Or an alternative head for Dr Crusher that turns her into Dr Pulaski, for fans of the second series. There must be dozens of people who want to re-enact the clip show! Or the episode with the space African people that no-one remembers fondly.

I'm being horribly sexist but they could have extended Dr Crusher's legs just slightly, by a fraction of a millimetre. Because she had long legs. On the other hand "The Measure of a Man" was in the second series, and that was pretty good.

Will the inevitable LEGO(R) Borg Cube just be six square baseplates with stickers (rrp £450)?

At first I didn't realise you were talking about the minifigs and, well, I had some weird visuals lemme say that much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1wYVdL8FsQ

So, those of you in the US may not have known this but Netflix outside the US has been showing all of TOS, TAS, TNG, VOY and DS9 for years now. It helped me get up to speed!

Now, it's being removed from Netflix next month. I'm not gonna sign up to P+ just for this one show, that ain't happening. Sailing the seas is our usual goto but for 7 26 episode seasons of multiple shows, that is... a lot.

have all of TOS & TNG on blu ray, really wish DS9 was also available :_;

FYI: Pluto TV broadcasts TOS, TNG, and DS9 on their own channels. The ads are horrid and repetitive, but it’s a fine enough way to watch individual episodes. There’s also a sort of “roulette” channel where you only know what you’re gonna get once you click on it.

Right now we’re watching DS9, because it’s the one I have seen the least of.

The ads are horrid and repetitive

i'm at the point of screaming whenever the music heralding the schaub podcast comes on

I am just looking to visibly repair my intestinal lining with Rinvoq, ok

Check out

I was gifted the TNG box set DVDs for xmas, so thats a start :) No idea if they have deleted scenes/commentary (do people still do that?) but its nice to at least own 'em now.

Have we talked about Star Trek Intakes here yet? Guy reinserts bloopers into episodes, the results rule:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgPy2kU9nEk

also it seems I'll be going to that bootleg Star Trek immersive experience thing. thanks to this thread I am looking forward to asking for permission to speak freely, and if granted I will voice my reservations with all due respect.

I love those yeah Ive seen them before :)

So, we watched S1E1 of my box set last night. I was not aware that the non-bluray version is basically a direct rip/transfer from the original VHS copies (apparently). Not only is it in 480 SD, it looks like a terrible recording of a TV show from the 80s. *nothing* like the versions I'm used to on Netflix.

I am ropeable, because I know my bf probably spent a lot of money on the box set. Is it all this bad or just S1? Is it my Playstation playing the DVD in a shit way? Is my TV too good? I am sad.

Australia : in a bad temper : ANGRY

ty!

Uh?

“ropeable” iirc

Oh, I guess I didn't actually mean I was angry hah. Just dissapointed/sad that a gift that cost a lot turned out to be kinda cruddy quality. Anyway no one's answered me, is it known its a shit set, does it get better in later seasons!? It looked like an old VHS recording of a Days of our Lives episode.

yeah i'd never heard 'ropeable' before

sorry, no idea about the box set quality. hny tho

There was a really expensive TNG remaster (that didn't sell as well as they'd hoped so that put the kibosh on DS9/Voyager getting the same treatment) that scanned in parts of the original film that people hadn't seen before including boom mics etc... but if your DVD is the original broadcast versions you might have something kind of valuable at least from a purist POV, because they also redid some effects and tweaked the colors etc... though nothing as egregious as what Star Wars fans have been complaining about forever.

There's a good article here about the changes for the remastered version:
https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/observations/tng-r-changes.htm

A lot of them are cosmetic, because the remaster revealed in-jokes on the console screens. Which led to a faintly postmodern state of affairs where the remasterers used actual modern-day CGI to imitate the look of imaginary 1980s imitation-future CGI. And in one case (for "Galaxy's Child", which was an early use of actual CGI) they used modern-day CGI to imitate the look of 1991 CGI. And sometimes they used modern-day CGI to look like modern-day CGI.

But they also recomposited the special effects. From what I can tell all the Blu-Ray editions on sale today are the remastered version, which looks fantastic, and all the DVD versions are repressings of a transfer that was originally done in 2007 that apparently looks awful.

As for streaming, I have no idea! No idea at all. As Mr Nunez points out the remastering cost a fortune and hasn't been repeated. Infamously the producers of Babylon 5 tried to future-proof the show by filming it in 35mm widescreen, but they baked-in the CGI, which was only rendered at TV resolution, so any shots that mixed CGI and 35mm - set extensions, mainly - are TV resolution, despite being shot on 35mm.

i have watched 'enterprise' and i don't even completely hate it (the first two seasons are *dire* tho)

as ever, the best characters are the aliens (t'pol and phlox). and jolene blalock did awfully well despite having her character put in a series of increasingly fucked-up situations

but also archer was a completely garbage captain! (played by a thoroughly mediocre scott bakula!) -- who apparently only got the job because his dad built warp engines! are people actually supposedly clamoring for a series about him as federation president? he sucks!

(the first two seasons are *dire* tho)

tbf there are a tiny handful of decent ones but jfc the one with padma lakshmi! the one where phlox condemns a race to death in the name of non-interference! the one where trip gets (lol!) pregnant! the one where archer bitches about the vulcans treating him like a child (which is all of them, because he acts like a child and they are right to respond in kind)!

Can you recommend a good skip guide? The couple that I found have been uniformly inept at weeding out bad episodes.

I'd first check out Carbon Creek as a test to see how charming you find the more whimsical episodes might be, but a true skip guide might end up saying skip all of it.

I don't know if Enterprise ever really got to a place where it had good episodes, but they found their stride in the last season when they just fully embraced being a fanfic show. The Brent Spiner episodes, the mirror episodes, the Vulcan arcs aren't really "good" but they have a momentum and sense of fun that was missing with all the time war 9/11 stuff.

I was really disappointed by how bland Bakula was in Enterprise, especially since I was a huge QL fan. It feels very much like a Dubya-era show, with characters loudly praising "human" (read: American) ingenuity; I can remember a specific episode which had disembodied aliens talking about how "special" humans are, ick. And the attempts at being "sexy" are mortifying.

It had good episodes though, a personal favourite being "Dead Stop", set on a creepy automated station. And even though they shouldn't have gone near The Borg, "Regeneration" actually made them scary again, maybe for the first time since Q Who/BOBW.

IMDb episode rating/reviews served as a decent ship guide on my recent rewatch (1st since air dates), & in the end I thought it was pretty entertaining. Bakula was wooden and that was a bummer, but he sure liked to give the sweet beagle pup cheese and bounce around a volleyball and polo equipment.

It feels very much like a Dubya-era show, with characters loudly praising "human" (read: American) ingenuity

Yup. There's a recap podcast, Temporal Culture War, and this is very much their main take on that show.

I have seen Carbon Creek and really enjoyed it! But it's been the only one episode so far that's risen above tolerable. The last episode I saw was the Hoshi one that's a worse option version of Next Phase (Geordi and Ro become ghosts).

I'll give that a listen Daniel thanks. One thing that really gives the show's mentality away is the opening sequence. I do like it, and don't even mind the theme song, but it's ALL American stuff! I wonder if they considered including Von Braun in that montage....

Weren't there some caravels in there at the start? But yeah, mostly otm.

quick/dirty review of notable episodes from enterprise's first two seasons:

• s01e01 broken bough (actually kind of decent for a trek premiere; temporal cold war is silly tho)
• s01e07 the andorian incident (vulcans: c/d?)
• s01e11 cold front (stupid temporal cold war but decent episode)
• s01e19 acquisition (bad, but maybe you like ferengi episodes)
• s01e21 detained (guest stars dean stockwell)
• s01e24 desert crossing (guest stars clancy brown)
• s02e02 carbon creek (flashback vulcan/pittsburgh content)
• s02e04 dead stop (nice horror episode)
• s02e05 a night in sickbay (worst episode of the entire series just in case you want to hatewatch)
• s02e06 marauders (cheap seven samurai ripoff)
• s02e07 the seventh (solid t'pol episode, guest stars bruce davison)
• s02e11 precious cargo (second-worst episode of the entire series just in case you want to hatewatch; guest stars padma lakshmi and wow is she bad)
• s02e12 the catwalk (crew has to bunker down in the nacelles due to a radiation storm; pretty decent)
• s02e13 dawn (the inevitable ENEMY MINE episode; no worse than the geordi TNG version, better than the ortegas SNW version)
• s02e16 future tense (our heroes try to salvage a spaceship from . . . THE FUTURE?!?! makes no sense but i liked it)
• s02e19 judgment (klingons put archer on trial; j.g. hertzler is his lawyer. okay, but hertzler is of course great, and maybe you're into klingons)
• s02e22 cogenitor (trek--specifically trip--takes on gender in interspecies relations, fails horribly)
• s02e23 regeneration (oh no the borg! this was good, actually)
• so2e26 the expanse (not great but sets up the entire next season; rip florida)

season four is better if you like Intense Fan Service. hardly necessary but probably worth watching

archer was such a crap character (they apparently made him captain because he was a good test pilot and his daddy built warp drives?) and bakula was so wooden playing him that it's astonishing to me people are trying to stir up a Federation President Archer series. yet another job he's unqualified for

hoshi/merriweather are barely acknowledged (with one nice exception in s04)

reed: annoying af. trip tucker: bland, fine, whatever . . . except for the relentlessness of his made-up accent

best characters, as ever, are the Others: t'pol and phlox. and man, the shit they made jolene blaylock do is absurd

Did they deliberately pick an actor (Trip) who looked like George Bush?

Maybe you have to be from the UK, but I didn't mind Reed, having some leftover warmth from watching him in "Desmond's"

Scott Bakula is very "we wanted Mark Harmon but he said no"

Overall, at the time anyway, as a Trek family who enjoyed Voyager, we totally noped out of this show after the pilot

Agree it just felt too AMURRICAN in a way Trek never felt before

i wonder if you wouldn't mind awfully if i could sacrifice myself for the good of the crew, captain

I don't actively like Reed but still prefer him to Trip.

The skip guide I was following recommended Congenitor but then when I looked at its IMDB page immediately knew it would not be for me.

See I never had a issue with Bakula's acting in ENT. Also, I liked the whole temporal cold war story. I especially liked that it got tied later on to Discovery!

Also ENT wins purely for this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OKWmtQCde0

i feel like the temporal cold war *could* have been good, maybe? but it never made any sense! why does silik sometimes help the humans and sometimes attack them? who is his boss, the mysterious future guy who can't actually time travel but can nevertheless fuck with silik's genetic enhancements? feel like it simply never went anywhere before petering out

imo the SNW ep with la'an and alternate-kirk going back to toronto did that sort of thing much better

also that voyager ep with bruce mcgill

oh raffi

https://i.postimg.cc/zXMkqcMt/bafkreihqiazkskrbfg4wxh2w36kla76rt2f2pdgwnmyohccuywi2z33yzi.jpg

(still better than the other raffi tho)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0sjDkoNgfY

Academy premiere is free on YouTube (at least in the US).

‘Arry Potter you’re an Ensign

Ok that was actually really good!