Tag Archives: Star Trek

After a thorough review of dozens of science fiction PbtA games, and after hacking the last two TTRPG systems we played quite a bit, I decided to create my own game with exactly the vibe I wanted. Why a new system? Well, I’d just published Reflections on PbtA Design, so it seemed apropos to design a game from scratch rather than just hack up an existing system.

I really enjoy the premise of Enterprise: the first human deep space explorers using the first warp-five starship. It’s a fun era of Star Trek, and they handle many aspects of being a prequel right, even if they went against fan expectations. I get why people think it is one of the worst Treks and don’t want to watch all of it, but I wanted to curate the best episodes.

Planet of the Week is my PbtA homage to shows like Star Trek, Firefly, and Stargate: Atlantis. You’re the away team of the research vessel Endeavor Maru. You’re the first group to land on each new planet, making first contact with aliens, investigating strange phenomena, and giving whatever assistance is needed. Can you stay true to your values as you explore?

Sturgeon’s Law says that “ninety percent of everything is crap.” With 940 episodes of Star Trek so far, assuming 90% are crap, the top 10% would be 94 episodes—but let’s round that up to an even 100. Here are the top 100 highest rated episodes from IMDB, from the nearly one thousand episodes across 49 series of television and the 14 movies (though none of the movies made the list).

Here are the top 10 episodes of Voyager, based on IMDB user ratings but rearranged in chronological order, as I’ve done with other series. However, you may want to start with the pilot (“Caretaker”) for its introduction of the premise and characters, even though it is ranked #73 of 172 episodes (rating 7.4).

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 14 list, arranged in chronological order. Two of the top 14 are from Season 1, and three are from each subsequent season. And the last episode of each season is in the Top 14 (and the penultimate episode of each season is in the Top 14 except for season 3). Why the Top 14? Because I won’t compile a best-of list […]

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 […]