Too hard for me to pick. But I haven’t seen Discovery or Enterprise.
Of the ones I have seen, I loved the first series of TOS, but the second and third weren’t as good.
TNG and Voyager kept it fresh by changing things up throughout. I liked how Voyager pivoted away from doing the story arc thing when it clearly wasn’t working, and went back to strong episodic content with more focus on the core cast members, and the addition of 7 of 9.
DS9 has strong characters and a few really great episodes, but I didn’t like the series as much as the others. The attempt at story arcing failed, IMO, as it was the episodic content that worked best. The war stories were borderline retarded - they really shouldn’t have leaned so heavily into it because Star Trek writers have no clue how to write a military show; making a novice like Sisqo an expert at everything and all the hardened admirals incompetent was frustrating, to say the least. And all the weird culty Bajoran stuff was dumb and boring. It‘s like an uninspired and unresearched ripoff of Babylon 5. That said, I did like the characters a lot in DS9, but the show needed a lot more to feel like a quality Star Trek.
Speaking of Babylon 5, THAT’s how you do a story arc. That’s also how you do a space station show correctly. I also liked how the series was basically the Silmarillion meets the Cold War in space except the whole time you think Earth is an analogue for the US or the West, and you eventually realize that it’s more like one of the third world countries being manipulated by the higher powered alien races (in this case, kind of like a Cold War between the Space Valar and Space Morgoth/Angband). Essentially, one side believes the universe will advance via order and building, and the other side via chaos and destruction - a bit Darwinistic because their theory is the strong will adapt and win while the weak will perish and make room. The whole conflict between the two powers basically ends with the war of wrath, which in the Silmarillion involved millions of troops, and ridiculously sized dragons against ridiculously sized eagles and gods/heroes flying through the sky, and destroying a large part of Middle Earth. Babylon 5 also has some Lord of the Rings references too, and some of the characters are based on the story arcs of Lord of the Rings characters... If you can’t tell, I REALLY like Babylon 5 =P
My apologies to DS9 fans, I don’t hate the show, I watched it twice, but I also know too much about the topic they are trying to cover to really enjoy it. I also saw Babylon 5 before I saw DS9, so that really impacted my opinion of the show. While Babylon 5 didn’t have the production value of DS9, it did have the vastly superior storytelling. It also felt like a real place, I kind of felt like DS9 just kept inventing new parts of the station when they needed it for something.
One more complaint, DS9 felt very small on the inside compared to B5 (despite looking as big on the outside). On top of that, on B5 there was always a sense of knowing where you were on the station in most scenes, especially after series 1, but I never understood where anything was in relation to anything else on DS9 and I doubt they ever had a plan.
Last edited by Jumpin - on 29 September 2020I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
