I’ve been rewatching DS9 and man, the early seasons were so full of OMGWTF moments I can totally understand why I stopped watching. However, unlike when it aired, I’m giving it a full rewatch and patiently await the point in which it becomes “good”. 
Most of my favourite episodes were TNG and TOS episodes, and so far I haven’t seen anything for DS9 that would have replaced any of them. Once I finish DS9 and start rewatching Voyager we’ll see if that continues to hold true or not.
If I had to choose a DS9 episode as ‘good’, I’d pick ‘In the Pale Moonlight’, which brought the Romulans in on the side of the Feds in the Dominion War, through some truly Machiavellian maneuvering by Sisko (aided and abetted by Garak, of course).
" And all it cost was the life of one Romulan senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer."
I would also add Explorers and The Visitor (which strangely enough are all about father son relationships) also Duet. Always Duet.
yeah, but it’s a 6th season episode.
My impression is that a lot of shows really hit their stride by the third series/season. But for any series, you need that flash of brilliance even earlier than that.
S1E19: Duet (see…always Duet)
I liked Janeway fine. The problem with Voyager for me was how flagrantly they disregarded their premise. Travelling along trying to get home for years, but apparently every alien in the delta quadrant has nothing better to do but follow them wherever they go and all managing to keep up somehow or other. Always resetting to the baseline like TNG, but without the “and here we are back from weeks of repairs at starbase” excuse.
I think I prefer ST:TNG mostly for the nostalgia, but I’ll happily watch Voyager if it happens to be playing. I don’t think it’s nearly as terrible as some people seem to remember it being.
Because no one else will join you, not even to deliver supplies.
J/k, I like Voyager actually. For me it’s TNG>Voyager>>DS9>TOS
The problem with several of the S1/S2 episodes like Duet is the pacing. there’s no time left for reflection after the event. In Duet, the “big ending” happens and then the credits roll. That’s not how you do character development, and to me strikes as one of the biggest differences between, say, DS9, and the other station show of the era, Babylon 5, that was focused in those early years on character development. I also suspect that’s what happens when you have a single writer versus both staff writers and presumably spec scripts, the latter of which, from what I understand, were far less common in later seasons of DS9 than they were at the beginning.
There are too many crazy things that happen on station (for example, Quark being caught - twice - aiding Terrorists to either take over the station, or supply weapons through the station in Seasons 1/2) where the thread was just dropped without even reflection on those events after the fact- they’re just not mentioned again.
TNG had this problem as well early on, but they did a better job with the epilogue than DS9 in seasons 1/2.
In a way voyager is weak the same way the first few seasons of ds9 were weak.
They tried to run it like TNG, getting into random adventures each week, but the station never goes anywhere. It needed to look more deeply at its situation. Voyager needed to look more deeply into its isolation and vulnerability.
DS9 eventually figured it out, and used staying in one place to build a long story ark.
Voyager just deus-ex-machina’d out of its predicament.
To me, the ending of Duet needed nothing more. Kira’s final line was all that was needed. That and it opened the door on her entire series long arc of dealing with Cardassians.
Its really a subjective thing, but I personally liked DS9s pacing. It set it different from TNG enough (but was still ST) and allowed the Federation to live in the greyer world that TNG always suffered from being too black and white.
I hear you on the Quark issue. They wrote him into too many corners and then had no issue with it the next day.
I’m close to that line up, tho i didn’t hate enterprise as much as every else.
Voyager just edges out TNG just for the female leads alone.
Don’t get me wrong I love me some Beverly and Deanna.
But I will never forgive them for this:
A few years ago I decided to watch every episode of every Trek show in order, no skips (I watched them show-by-show, instead of trying to bounce between TNG, DS9, and Voyager when those were overlapping each other). With the exception of The Episode That Shall Not Be Named and the series finale, whose script I assume the producers stole off of Fanfiction.net at some point, I agree that Voyager was better than people tend to give it credit for, but I wouldn’t rank it as the best. I really enjoyed Janeway as captain, and the Janeway/Seven/Doctor dynamic in the later seasons was super good, but the writers’ inability to commit to the core premise of the show gave it a real tonal problem week-to-week.
Overall I think TNG and DS9 tended to pass the “best show” ball back and forth between each other, and Voyager came in behind them. As much as I like it though, I can’t really put TOS on the same scale as the other 24th century-era shows. It’s from such a different period of television that it’s hard for me to weigh it against the 90s stuff.
Enterprise, on the other hand, was… a thing, yeah. I just do not get the Trek writers’ fascination with time travel. Most of the time it’s such a garbage trope*, so centering an entire show’s core narrative arc around it just boggles my mind. That said, I thought the show’s more exploration-oriented episodes were fine, if occasionally too goofy (also Jeffrey Combs’s Andorian character was great, fite me). The real slog started in season 3, when they doubled down on the time war nonsense and tried to get Real and Dark and Gritty in that ugly, awkwardly nationalistic post-9/11 way by blowing up Florida and sending the Enterprise off to commit war crimes. Were it not for my bull-headed dedication to get through the whole thing simply for the sake of doing so, I would have called it quits. I will never understand anyone who says the show got better in seasons 3 and 4, and I kind of hate that of all things, the Abramsverse couldn’t retcon that out of existence.
*TNG’s time travel episodes were pretty much all better-than-average, especially for Trek. All Good Things was fabulous, and Time’s Arrow was fun with the exception of whatever it is they were thinking when it came to Mark Twain’s character. Honorable mention to Yesterday’s Enterprise and TOS’s City on the Edge of Forever.
I really like DS9, but I’ll be honest, I found the theme so sleep enduing, it would actually kill some of my binge watches because I had to weigh seeing another episode against having to sit through the theme again.
I think even DS9 felt that way, because they practically doubled the tempo of the theme around season 3 or 4, and added a lot more visuals.
No love for Tapestry as a time-travel episode?
S3 got the theme/opening change. Once the Defiant (best little ship in the fleet ever) joined the show became a different thing and the change was required.
Totally agree. I remember seeing somewhere that Kate Mulgrew had decided to play Janeway as if she was unstable, because nobody ever figured out how to make her character consistent. The show was (imho) supposed to be more like Battlestar Galactica ended up being, but there was pressure for it to be the next TNG, which is how we got the Magically Self-Repairing Ship.
As an aside, I feel like the BSG reboot represents every problem I had with Berman-era Trek. I love Ronald D. Moore as a story writer, but turning a main character into a religious figure ain’t Trek.
