Your auto-compliment: You’re so interesting, you’d make a good afternoon tea companion.

Introductory Star Trek?

So a friend of mine has never seen Star Trek. My immediate thought on this is that it’s a fixable problem :-)

The question is, where to begin? There’s a lot of Trek Universe out there, and as any fan knows, there are a fair number of stinkers (Angel One, anybody? Or Spock’s Brain? I might elect for removal of that episode from my brain).

Anyway, I pored through some episode lists and put some thought into it, and this is what I came up with for a Star Trek introductory program. I’m curious about the thoughts of any Trekkies in the crowd.

The top five: get hooked

  1. TNG: Darmok
  2. TNG: The Inner Light
  3. VOY: Death Wish
  4. TOS: City on the Edge of Forever
  5. TNG: Tapestry

These are, in my opinion, the most succesfull examples of storytelling in Trek, and illustrate some of the ways that Trek uses clichéd situations: the two leaders trying to understand each other, restoring the “proper” timeline, Q. (I think everyone needs to see Tapestry, and understand that Q can be used well, before seeing Encounter at Farpoint, where Q is much more annoying.)

The next five: strongest character stories

  1. VOY: The Year of Hell
  2. VOY: Living Witness
  3. TOS: Balance of Terror
  4. TNG: Who Watches the Watchers?
  5. VOY: The Haunting of Deck 12

These are, I think some of the best character studies in Trek, as well as showing off the diversity of storytelling that the episodic format offers.

The rest

If one is successfully hooked by those ten episodes, this is how I think I’d recommend watching the rest:

  • TNG (in airing order)
  • TOS (in airing order)
  • Movies 1-9 (The Motion Picture through Insurrection)
  • Voyager (in airing order)
  • Movie 10: Nemesis
  • Enterprise (in airing order)
  • Movie 11: Star Trek (2009)
  • DS9 (in airing order)

What do y’all think? DS9 isn’t intended to be marginalized by its placement at the end, it’s just the most serial and the most standalone of the series, in my opinion.

Permalink | May 25th, 2009

Posted by Dan Hallock | Filed under Uncategorized

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2 Responses to “Introductory Star Trek?”

  1. syd Says:
    May 26th, 2009 at 04:14

    1) I like the auto-compliment. 2) As one of the people who hasn't seen Star Trek… uh… hm. What're the three-letter-acronyms? and, 3) Where does one find Star Trek episodes?

  2. Dan Hallock Says:
    May 26th, 2009 at 13:35

    Oh, sorry. There are five Star Trek series. The original, just called Star Trek, is now known as The Original Series or TOS; and then there's Star Trek: The Next Generation (1988-1994) (TNG), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) (DS9), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) (VOY), and Enterprise (2001-2005) (ENT).

    The three-letter acronyms started with TOS and TNG; it was an established way to refer to the different series by the time Voyager and Enterprise came along, so they got shoehorned in.

    Oh, and I forgot about TAS: The Animated Series. There was a 22-episode run of an animated continuation of the original series in 1973-74. (That one was also just called Star Trek, TOS and TAS are add-on names used by fans.)

    (Re the auto-compliment: have you gotten the monocle one yet? That's my fave so far. :-) )

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