Tag Archives: Star Trek

If—like some of my friends—you bounced off the first few episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, but are willing to give it another try, I offer this Top 10 11 list. These are from the first four seasons, arranged in chronological order. Two of the top 10 are from Season 1, three from Season 2, three from Season 3, and two from Season 4. And the last episode of each season is in the Top 10. I cheated and include the #11 episode, The Inner Fight, because it is my […]

Here is a curated list of the Top 15ish episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in roughly chronological order. I’ve flipped the order of “Q Who” and “The Measure of a Man” because the entire series starts with a Q episode (“Encounter at Farpoint”) and ends with a Q episode, so it seems fitting to bookend this best-of list the same way. And “Q Who” has two of the essential antagonists of the TNG series. I also think it is good to encounter Data in another way before “The Measure […]

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery premieres Thursday in the U.S. After compiling the Top 10 Episodes of Star Trek Lower Decks, in Chronological Order, I struggled with how to do something similar for Discovery. The series is a puzzle-box show, with season-long story arcs where episodes collect puzzle pieces to assemble. (Alas, sometimes the final picture doesn’t match what was on the box.) Given the show’s structure, I don’t think it would make much sense to watch the Top 10 episodes of the show in chronological order: […]

I first played Star Trek Panic in 2018, playing it twice, and I loved it so much I bought it for my father for his birthday, as he was a fan of Star Trek when it premiered. Well, neither he nor I ever got around to playing the game until I visited him recently. I’ve now played it six times total, working through all the missions twice. Star Trek Panic is a cooperative game where each player is one of the main characters from Star Trek: The Original Series—Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scott, Sulu, or Chekov. […]

Embarrassingly, my number one album this year was Subspace Rhapsody, the soundtrack to the Strange New Worlds’ musical episode. (Last year it was We Are.) After seeing my top songs from the album, I was curious about what others thought. I crunched the numbers for listener stats from Spotify and viewer stats from YouTube. The top three for Spotify were “Status Report” (the first song sung by the crew), “I’m the X” (Spock’s solo), and “I’m Ready” (Christine Chapel’s song). The top three for YouTube were “We are One” (the finale), “How Would […]

I recently rewatched Strange New Worlds, in prep for the new season, this time watching it with my son (his first time). The series is well regarded (the average episode rating is 7.9, compared to 7.7 for TOS’s best season), optimistic, and embraces episodic television, covering a wide range of genres. That said, the series does suffer from prequelitis, repeating those problems common to prequels. Here are four types of issues that I noticed. Continuity Issues Prequels often struggle to maintain consistency with the established lore, characters, and events of […]

As part of my ongoing rewatch of Star Trek in chronological order, I watched Star Trek: The Animated Series for the third time and realized that the Animated Series did try to go where “no live action Star Trek has gone before”: Of course, it all too often went where the original series had gone before. Sequels: Reskinned plots: In general, the IMDB ratings show a decline from TOS: In fact, only one episode scores above the average TOS rating of 7.4: “Yesteryear”, by D.C. Fontana, at 8.0, about Spock’s […]

Growing up in the 1970s and excited by the space program, I found Star Trek to be a promise of a bright future for humanity, often advocating for nonviolence and empathy in the face of conflict, while embracing diversity. I watched the episodes so frequently that I could often name the episode by the opening shot. I loved the characters but watched uncritically. Starting last July, after wrapping up Discovery seasons 1 and 2 and Strange New Worlds as part of my goal of re-watching Star Trek chronologically, I began […]

Here is one possible chronological viewing order of Star Trek, arranged in roughly chronological order within the fiction. In September 2021, I decided to start a multi-year quest to rewatch all of Star Trek in roughly fictional chronological order. Roughly, because I’m not going to interleave TNG and DS9, and DS9 and Voyager, for instance. And roughly because new prequels like Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, which I watch as they air, mess up the order. And finally, roughly, as well, because time travel complicates everything. I’m not starting […]

When I first met Rick Dakan, one of the creators of City of Heroes, we talked about a class he’s teaching at Ringling College of Art and Design in the spring, “The History of Game Art.” The class starts with Spacewar! in 1962 but to my surprise doesn’t cover some of the BASIC games of the timeshare era (circa 1964 to 1976). Yes, some have “art” (in fact, some are only art). BASIC Computer Games, the first computer book to sell a million copies, is thought of as a collection […]