On watching Star Trek

I make no secret of the fact that my favorite TV franchise is Star Trek, though I’ve written about it very little. I spent the first bit of my life in suburban South Denver, which is relevant for having one of the Paramount affiliate independent stations that aired Star Trek. They managed a perfect schedule, too, by putting it in the time slot after ABC aired M*A*S*H, so my sister and I would watch them back to back. My father looks like the spitting image of Alan Alda, so it was easy to like Hawkeye and get into the show, but it was watching them back to back that really was the beginning of my political awakening, as far back as my tween years.

Both shows have such a strong and persistent sentiment woven through them that people should do the right thing, and organizations make that hard. They go about it in extremely different ways – MASH showing the failures of the system and just how hopeless it can be, which was then a commentary on the US-Vietnam war, even though the show’s setting is the US-Korean war, and Star Trek showing a utopian template of a system that works in a humanist, benevolent way. Both dance close to engaging with communism and socialism in real ways, but both shy away from it, partly out of inconsistent writing, and partly due to needing to not piss off the network executives. Despite this, Star Trek serves as the template for “fully automated luxury space communism”, even though it never really analyzes it deeply, and MASH will always have a place in my heart for giving it the context I started with.

I’ve long said that most science fiction can be thought of as fan fiction for sciences. Stargate is archaeology fan fiction. The Expanse is military science and political science fan fiction. Star Trek is both anthropology and political science fan fiction, as well as in an extremely tangential way, military science fan fiction. Arrival is linguistics fan fiction. Annihilation (and Star Trek: Discovery) are mycology fan fiction among other things.

Star Trek has also always had this strangely bifurcated fanbase: People, mostly men of the “reads books about World War Two” sort, who like military science fiction and some of whom even manage to miss the social critique in the series, and people, often women, who are here for competent people doing what’s right against a backdrop of anthropology, sociology and politics. Star Trek’s early writers had many women among them, Dorothy Fontana among the most influential, and I think it has shaped the series for the better in ways that no other franchise has managed. Not to say the franchise is unflawed, but it’s mostly worthy with its flaws instead of destroyed by them.

A while back I got my husband introduced to my love of Star Trek, finally, after a couple false starts. Some of it required just skipping the bad episodes. Episode guides were very useful:

I can describe why I like it while I give my own suggestions. While I’ll leave delving into the episode level to the viewing guides, I’m going to touch on what’s good and bad in each series as I go, and I’ll give a few spoilers, but since the show doesn’t structurally rely on surprise much, I think that’s fine. There’s a little mystery in Enterprise, but it’s also not the part of the franchise I am going to get into much depth about. Even looking at the episode list tells you whether the Big Bad gets defeated or not, so there’s really little to spoil. Discovering this thing is about seeing how the pieces fit together and, in my opinion, with how it connects with what’s going on with our own world here and now. Science fiction is always about the people writing it.


There are three major eras of Star Trek production: the original series and its followups, The Next Generation and the 90s syndicated spin-offs, and “New Trek” which is designed for streaming.

There are four time periods that the shows are set in. Chronologically, that’s the prequel series “Enterprise”, set over a hundred years before the original series in the 2150s; the original series era, set in the 2260s; The Next Generation era, set a hundred years later in the 2360s and the far future starting in 3188.


Mostly skip the original series (“TOS”). Get a feel for where it all started, but know it’s weird 1960s and 1970s low-budget space silliness: TV in that era was very much still being derived from theatrical performance, and the studio system’s legacy played out in television far longer than it did in movies.

The characters and setting set a lot of the tone for the future series, but it is full of gonzo plots involving greek gods being aliens, psionic powers at the edge of the galaxy, planets that are somehow exactly like one specific time and place on Earth for expository reasons. It features TV’s first interracial kiss, but was bowdlerized by the network. White actors in something like blackface play Klingons, something that carries through to other series, but feels particularly egregious with the low budget of the original series. And there are so many mini-skirts and bare navels.

Knowing the characters is useful because other shows make callbacks to them, but if you aren’t feeling any particular episode, skip it. Except The Trouble With Tribbles. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy form an interesting trio as a fictional trope that carries out in other Star Trek and other fiction in general. Delegative but commanding leader, analytical scientist, and hotheaded doctor are a dynamic setup for stories.

The politics are so incredibly incoherent episode by episode: sometimes the Federation uses money and the crew gets paid; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s a more clearly military organization, sometimes it’s not. There’s an ongoing theme of colonization without colonialism, but a lot of stories draw on colonial conflicts for their plot points.


The Animated Series (“TAS”) is mostly even sillier than the original series, being animated. It introduces some species that would have been too hard to do in film on the budget the original series had. Entirely skippable, but if you like the original series and like animation, watch it. Also cels from the animated series turned into widely available and valuable collectors items, so there’s a lot of media generated from them.

The movies are mostly skippable. Some of them are fun. Some are not. There were six and a half movies starring the original cast and crew; none of them are terribly important to the franchise. The even numbered ones tend to be better than the odd numbered ones. I have a soft spot for the first film, which developed the theme music and is very pretty in that early 1980s high budget scifi way. If you liked 2001, watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There’s also a visual callback to it in Discovery that I think is beautiful.

Watch The Wrath of Khan (II), The Voyage Home (IV, “the one with the whales”). Read a spoiler for Generations, it’s not a very good film. The Undiscovered Country (VI) is not amazing either, but starts the series toward grappling with the political effects of a neighboring empire collapsing.


Since I’m talking about how unimportant the movies are to the franchise, there’s a spin off alternate universe Star Trek series of movies, which is widely ignored in canon, and is “What if J. J. Abrams did Star Trek? Would it turn into Star Wars?” The answer is yes, yes it will. Star Wars has always benefitted from its open universe and always having something new and a new weird place characters can go, and lots of action sequences. It’s a Space Western. Star Trek is not: it’s always benefitted from the politics and interplay of races and empires and factions, which a more closed world where you don’t drop plot threads all over the place and never pick them up.


Star Trek really hits its stride in The Next Generation (“TNG”), and there are some excellent story lines and episodes. Maxistentialism’s guide hits the high notes for sure. Picard, Data and Riker form the same trio archetypes as the original series in some ways, but they shake up the formula. Troi is deeply underwritten, as all the women are initially. Gene Roddenberry’s sexism, and worse, Rick Berman’s, leave their marks on the show.

There is a series-spanning theme of “is humanity ready to exist among the stars?”, with a lot of different aspects to it. Are we morally ready? Are we prepared for the disaster that could be out there? Have we grown enough to get over petty squabbles? What about when our neighbors haven’t? What if personal resource constraints are eased? What if societally, there are still limits? What does that do? Are we fit to judge others? How does our sense of right and wrong fit into the universe?

Add to that the franchise spanning concern with what it means to be human – an ongoing concern that defines Spock in TOS, Data in TNG, and later Burnham and Georgiou and Spock in DISCO, and you have some really good storylines develop.


Deep Space Nine (“DS9”) is widely regarded as the best of the franchise for good reason. It has longer plot arcs, excellent writing, fewer dud episodes (And even some of the duds are fun, just not meaningful). All around good watching, and Maxistentialism’s list is solid.

Deep Space Nine was also, arguably, stolen from the plot of Babylon 5. The similarities are more than a little coincidental, and the script for B5 was pitched to Paramount, who turned it down and then went and did DS9 right after. Hmm. Babylon 5 is just as good if more cheaply produced than DS9, watch them both. It’s nice to see two complete riffs on a core idea. Excellent science fiction right there.

It delves into the edges of the Federation, and looks deeply at what recovery from fascist colonialism looks like, and it engages with religion in a way that Star Trek normally does not. It’s set in a space station over a newly-freed planet, and everything is broken and kinda terrible. Starfleet is called in to run the station since they have expertise, but it’s nominally not part of the Federation, exactly. Membership negotiations are pending.

Then a wormhole – a gateway to new resources in another part of the galaxy – is discovered, suddenly putting Bajor and Deep Space Nine on the map. The whole series unfolds from that, and there are a bunch of mirrors shined on relations on Earth here: relations among species, the nature of colonialism especially when there is a world to be developed and that wants development to some degree adds real complexity.

Rick Berman’s involvement shows in how two of the ongoing characters manage to have an extremely gay relationship on screen without ever acknowledging it as such thanks to his homophobia. There is a lesbian kiss that’s well portrayed, and the behind-the-scenes talk is that it was actually very hard to make happen and people, and director Avery Brooks (who also plays Captain Sisko) spent real political capital to make it happen.


Star Trek: Enterprise (“ENT”) is mostly lousy. Rick Berman left deeper marks on the series and it suffered for it deeply. It’s got some clever retcons and contextualizations of things that happened in other series, and some nice ideas about what the path from “horrible wars on Earth” to “spacefaring civilization” looks like, but they’re not particularly deep. The entire series is skippable without harming understanding of the franchise’s world. The above episode guide hits the good parts, but it’s still among the Worst Trek. Transporters are experimental technology, which is a nice hack to keep them from being the device you have to avoid solving all problems with. Good retcon on that front.


Star Trek: Voyager (“VOY”) is a continuation of the aesthetic of The Next Generation, this time with a woman in command. Kate Mulgrew does a great job at being the steely starship captain, and the premise is that the ship is flung into the far and unexplored (by humans) parts of the galaxy and has to get home, a trip that might take the rest of their life if they don’t find a shortcut.

It was intended to give new life to a now crowded universe, free of the politics that play into the rest of the franchise’s universe, and able to explore and tell those one-off stories again. It worked well enough, but I don’t think it’s the strongest show of the era. I have moral issues with some of the framing of Captain Janeway’s actions as unambiguously right when they really weren’t, and there’s a lot of justifying doing terrible things to others because it seems necessary.

It’s quite watchable, and a good watching guide would help. There are lots of good tie-ins to events in other series, and if you are a completionist you’ll want all of that.


Then there’s “new Trek.” After the hiatus with ENT, and after Gene Roddenberry’s death, the franchise might have well come to an end, but of course we can’t have anything without monetized nostalgia so the franchise engines started up again. Paramount started cracking down on copyright over their characters, got kinda nasty with fan writers and fan filmmakers, and has in general somewhat “Star Warsified” Star Trek. For the core of the franchise itself this has not always been terrible, and I think some of the new shows are the best of the bunch.

New Trek is designed for streaming, not syndication, so skipping episodes is much harder.


Star Trek: Discovery (“DIS” or “DISCO”) is the first new Trek. It got hit with the pandemic so it has some really uneven tones, since actors couldn’t be near each other in groups for a significant part of its run without very expensive and annoying precautions. It held together better on a rewatch for me than I’d remembered, but its first and second seasons are not amazing. It is pretty continuous story though, so it’s hard to skip around. The show is weirdly paced for other reasons, too, because they introduced an instantaneous travel method, which is silly. It presents the same story problems that the transporters do, in that you have to contrive a reason for it not to work over and over again to actually tell a story because if you don’t, your magic device can solve everything.

The first two seasons are the most compromised, the second two are the most interesting. The characters are fantastic, even if the writing is bonkers sometimes. They were trying something new, and if you watched the original series, you know bonkers is a thing that they tried there too.

  • Season 1: they redesigned the Klingons, incoherently, and you could do well to pretend they’re a previously unshown race. Some truly bonkers medical science that makes no sense, but just know that Discovery has even more handwavium than Star Trek usually does and roll with it.
  • Season 2: The big bad is Section 31, the secret intelligence division of Starfleet, gone rogue. I hate Section 31 and it’s the worst concept the writers ever developed. In DS9 it was treated as unambiguously bad. In DISCO, it’s not, and that’s a deep flaw in the show.

Picard (“PIC”): A retrospective on Captain Picard from TNG, and leans into all of my least favorite things about how the character was written. It’s well acted, but the plots are not strong, some of the things they introduced are just not great for the world, and didn’t even make good commentary on our world. This series is very much about the incoherence of our time in our world right now, and it has no better answers or stories than we do right now. It’s stupid because humanity is stupid. There’s some very nice fan service in the show though. I could skip it. The key pieces: the synthetics rebellion is a weak commentary on colonialism and slavery. But not in an interesting way. They leaned into the Romulan homeworld having been blown up and it’s a weak commentary on fallen empires and maybe on climate change induced migration and homelessness. But it’s not good commentary. Romulans have become Space Elves.


Back to DISCO. The second half of the show’s run is overall excellent: the lots of fun new technology, lots of fun new visuals, and lots of fun new constraints, thanks to events that have transpired in-world between the end of the previous era and this new look at the far future.

  • Season 3: Flung into the future (3188) and looking at a Federation that has crumbled. Not a look at our own world right now. Nuh-uh. Certainly not. Some bad plot decisions. Solid season and really showing what New Trek is. Some of what happened in PIC is now actually being dealt with, 600 years later. Now that is how it’s supposed to be done. The overarching theme of questioning and rebuilding institutions that have been corrupted or destroyed and recovering the good parts ring very strong here.
  • Season 4: Meet new aliens. Good callback to the visuals of the original series. More bad plot decisions. Please stop blowing up my favorite planets as plot device. It was stupid in the movies, it’s stupid here. You can have smaller stakes than that if a character cares about the outcome. Come ON. All in all a solid season, and the theme continues.
  • Season 5: Calls back to some of the 1960s science fiction concepts about gods and time and civilizations of unimaginably long ago or even unimaginably outside our universe, all while continuing those themes. It’s good, and a good place for the show to end.

Strange New Worlds (“SNW”): this is the crown jewel of Star Trek if you ask me. Anson Mount was an amazing choice for captain. This is the five year mission before the original series, with the previous captain. The storylines are a little more episodic, but connected nicely in an arc. Same quality of storytelling as DS9. Just as good character dynamics as Discovery. Production values are off the charts. The design of the Enterprise actually feels like the original series only with a high budget. A truly amazing feat. Watch it all. It’s one of the best shows on the net.

One thing you have to know about both DISCO and SNW is that it’s gay. It’s really really gay. It’s not particularly explicit about it, but this is a crew full of ‘moes. There’s an explicitly trans character, and while I don’t love the plot about that, it’s nice to see anyway. There’s a gay couple, who end up being space dads to a younger queer prodigy. The way it’s acted, you’d have a hard time convincing me any character is particularly straight. Most of the time they don’t make a big deal of it and it pretty well works.


The one place where my opinions do not align with anyone else’s is that I don’t like the animated Lower Decks (“LD”). I think it is cynical, a little boring, and rooted in cheap fan service. There are some high points and they tell a few good stories, and the crossover with SNW is fun, even if it’s not good. It’s The Office and Futurama only it’s Star Trek. The whole show is skippable. Fun if you like the fan service, but skippable.

Every other Trekkie I know loves it, but I just can’t.


And then there’s the one everyone ignores and shouldn’t. Star Trek: Prodigy (“Prodigy”) This is a kids show, like Star Wars: Rebels. It starts off dumbed down. The first four episodes are Kid TV. Good kid TV, but it’s the sort of things parents have to sit through, not enjoy.

But then.

The rest of the show is very Star Trek and it is some of the finest writing. It’s still a kid’s show, so it keeps a light tone and solves a few things too easily, but it hits a bunch of great character notes, fills in the universe a little, introduces a new species coherently, talks about the dangers of cultures coming in contact with each other, unintended consequences, regret, shame, destiny. It’s excellent and well worth watching. It’s a little preachy in places, and it’s not particularly subtle, but it’s good.

The show is set in the nearer part of the Delta Quadrant, where Voyager came near. You watched Voyager right? Captain Janeway is back, and this show is a great reason to have watched Voyager. It lands some great tie-ins to the plot of Voyager without compromising into mere fan service.


I don’t have a point to end this with other than “Star Trek is good and worth watching”, and it’s been a super meaningful part of my life since I was a tween. It’s a show with a lot of richness, and I like it a lot.