Show HN: Star Trek DS9 Episodes Worth Watching
tessalt.github.io
tessalt.github.io
For instance, we watched the episode where Picard is kidnapped by the Borg. As a teenager, my drama-IQ was not so low that I entirely missed the major storyline that Riker gets in that story about his career as he is challenged by the up-and-coming Shelby, but I certainly see it much more clearly and with far more nuance now.
So something like this would be especially helpful for TNG, where a) there are a lot of episodes in total, and b) there are no useful rules of thumb or shorthand (such as "skip season X," or "it gets better beyond Y").
Now, the great news about TNG is that it's mostly episodic. Which means she can watch any episode, at random, and enjoy it as a self-contained story. (Aside from the two-parters.) TNG really lends itself to randomized viewing. DS9 needs to be watched in chronological order (at least for the first-time viewer). TNG can be watched in any order.
[1] Some people will find this assessment overly generous, and others will find it overly harsh. That's the beauty of Trek fandom; there's plenty of room for disagreement. :) Just about the only things TNG fans can agree on are that: 1) Riker with beard > Riker without beard; 2) "The Naked Now" is probably the series' worst episode, although it's enjoyable in a kitschy, ironic sort of way; 3) Wesley Crusher sucks (although Wil Wheaton himself is a pretty awesome guy).
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0092455 might help.
As an adult, I still find Wesley annoying (if, ironically enough, less so). Data is still pretty awesome. Riker has grown on me in a way that I don't think I would have been capable of appreciating as an inexperienced kid. He is a nuanced character that you kind of have to have lived a little in order to get. My opinion on Worf is largely unchanged, though his stock benefitted retrospectively from his appearances on DS9. Geordi got better with the benefit of time. Troi still bugs me; I find her one-dimensional with only occasional chances to shine. (Probably not her fault. It seems that the writers just didn't know what to do with her, other than consign her to stereotypical, damsel-in-distress and love-interest tropes. Her mother, by contrast, is a fantastic character, if a bit of a lightning rod amongst fans.) Beverly Crusher grew on me a bit -- especially in contrast to Dr. Pulaski, whose odd, technophobic Data-bashing felt really out of place in the 24th Century. Picard went from being "pretty cool" to being, unquestionably, the best thing about the show.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions.
It seems to me that it is a general problem that a multi-writer show like Star Trek can only carry along certain types of nuance. I suspect there's a lot of writers that, given six or seven episodes to play with, could have done fantastic things with Worf or Troi... but that's not how it works. They also have problems with change... especially in the movies (which I do more clearly remember), they had a real problem with Data. By the time of the movies he'd made a lot of progress and grown a lot as a character, but in a couple of the movies (particularly Insurrection) it's like he's regressed almost all the way back to the first episode of TNG. The "Pinocchio" aspect of the story carried along, but the already-existing nuance had disappeared.
Multi-writer stories are hard.
One of the benefits is, for lack of a better word, scalability. A single writer would take forever to write 100+ cogent, consistently great, full-length episodes of a TV show. Since TV series' fates are always in flux, you can't afford a primetime series with only one writer, who becomes a crushing bottleneck if any changes in volume need to be made. Writing a great TV episode is hard, hard work and takes time. Now imagine writing 12, or even 22 of them on an insane production deadline!
On the other hand, some shows and formats work really well with a single writer/auteur. True Detective is famous for having been entirely written and entirely directed by just one writer and one director. Now, True Detective was a miniseries of only 8 episodes, and at that scale, a single writer is more realistic. I doubt you could have produced a primetime Star Trek series with only one writer and one director.
An interesting hybrid approach is what I'd call a staff structure with a clear "visionary" at the helm. This is sort of like what we saw on Battlestar Galactica: a show with a full writing staff, but one or two writers who basically dominated the process and authored the bulk of the series. MASH is another good example; Larry Gelbart clearly exercised strong, authorial control over the show, even though he didn't write every episode.
This latter approach tends to work the best, in my experience as a fan and as a former TV person. But it can have its difficulties and drawbacks, all the same. Sometimes there are limits to the imagination of even the most creative individuals. If you're relying too much on a strong auteur type, and he or she gets writer's block, or gets sick, or becomes extremely difficult, you're SOL.
For these reasons, I'm not sure B5 really paid off on its promise and, at best, took a considerable willingness to overlook the weaknesses.
I'll grant you that every sci-fi show seems to have its bad episodes, and many of them occur early on. DS9 was not immune to that effect.
At some point I pledge to give B5 a more serious attempt. But I feel I should do that sooner, rather than later, because the show's looks are not aging gracefully.
The last 1.5 seasons of B5 were a letdown though. They had problems throughout with actors leaving abruptly, imminent cancellation, etc. that threw the plot arch off track a little. It could have been a lot better. The six or seven movies that were produced after the show's run... couldn't get through more than a few minutes of those.
It is worth the initial slog to catch the cross season story arc about the First Ones, the Shadows and the time travel stuff.
I think what puts folks off with B5 is that some of the sets and makeup are a a wee bit iffy, but the story itself is pretty damn good once you get past that.
I do recommend persevering because there is a very good deep story being told in B5.
Seasons 2-4 comprise an outstanding story arc. Londo Mollari, the alien with the upward-pointing hair, goes from Falstaff to Macbeth to redemption, and that's far from the main story.
And the central character -- head of the station -- was changed after Season 1, to a figure who was more heroic and more funny at once.
I thought that while JMS oversaw all of B5 and wrote the broad story arc, he did not write most of the episodes.
Creator and showrunner J. Michael Straczynski wrote 92 of the 110 episodes of Babylon 5, including all 44 episodes in the third and fourth seasons;[63] according to Straczynski, a feat never before accomplished in American television.
I recently went back and watched some TOS and was really surprised to see young her on the show.
I didn't care for Pulaski, but I kind of get her character, in retrospect. In comparison to Crusher, who was the motherly, caring doctor that we all wish we had, Pulaski was the doctor who was in it for the science. She never really seemed friendly, she wasn't especially caring, and she didn't mind if people disliked her, but she was good at the medicine and the science.
I fancy that this was to offer a bit of continuity with McCoy's fear of Transporters.
I do agree that it felt out of place, but having given it a bit more thought: The fact that Data was unique (ignoring the as-yet unheard of Lore) sort of makes everyone else's easy acceptance of him slightly odd. The doctor (with intimate knowledge of the fact that we're all just very complicated machines) should have been Data's lone champion against his numerous naysayers.
Final Mission http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Final_Mission_(episode)
The First Duty http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_First_Duty_(episode)
Other than that he is pretty terrible.
What happened was this: The TNG team had regular meetings where the writers and producers got together and reviewed the state of the series - what kinds of scripts and stories they were looking for and what was in the pipeline and what sort of course corrections they wanted to see. At one such meeting the producers said "we've got this character Wesley but we haven't really DONE anything with him - the audience doesn't know much about him. We'd really like to see some stories that let us connect more with that character." Then the dozen writers all went home with that thought in mind: let's get to know Wesley! And how do you "get to know a character better" on a Trek show? Have him save the ship! So the following week, a dozen writers all submitted their own independent "Wesley saves the ship" scripts.
...and right after that the writers' strike happened and nobody could write any NEW scripts, so to keep the series going they had to film and show any decent scripts they already had handy, far too many of which (by pure chance) featured Wesley saving the ship. If they had had a choice, they would have filmed fewer of those scripts at all, sent a few back for rewrites, and staggered them out much farther apart between runs of episodes in which a little kid DOESN'T manage to make everyone else on the ship look stupid or redundant.
I can refute that in two words: "Fully functional".
Similarly for another worst episode candidate, saved almost entirely by "I am not a merry man".
What fascinates me is that "Naked Now" was only the second episode of the entire series! It's as if the writers just got together and said, "You know what? Fuck the shark; let's just jump it right out of the gate and get it over with." Or, "Sooner or later, some fanfic weirdos are going to launch a heated debate about whether Data can have sex. Let's address that question preemptively, sparing everyone the flame war."
Until we got to the end of the second season, that was fine. Some of the episodes were bad, but not unforgivably bad. Except for the Riker 'clip show' episode. It was awful, and we hopped on out after only a few minutes to move on to Season 3. The series got significantly better at that point, and pretty much every episode after that is watchable (if not 'worth watching').
All the episodes revolving around Sisko as Emissary as well. Impressive writing given the religious and philosophical contexts involved. It went over a lot of peoples' head if they didn't follow the series since the pilot.
I know this is not a popular opinion but this is my favorite Star Trek series, followed by TNG.
DS9's writing wasn't really any better than TNG - there were some great episodes and many forgettable bits of filler. But DS9, in spite of its static setting, had more room to grow thanks to being willing to let the story change and develop, plus having a large cast of recurring characters outside of Starfleet/Bajoran military. The characters that made the show great were Winn and Garak and Ducat and Wayoun and Quark - a stellar cast of recurring villains and peripheral characters.
The problem is that the show tried to tries to force a Kirk/Spock relationship between Sisko and Dax when they're just plain bad actors. It's a shame since the show was really built around them. Avery Brooks tries to sound intense but he comes off just being a bad ham, and Terry Farrell tries to sound serene but ends up just being wooden.
That and I'll never forgive the show for making me hate Worf. Seriously, DS9 Worf is a jerk.
In DS9, you had great acting from the above mentioned Auberjonois and Shimerman, though both could ham it up as well. Passing performances by Avery Brooks and Nana Visitor were the norm but they were both known to shine as well as fall flat. Alexander Siddig is an enigma; he was so good at being annoying that one might dismiss him before realizing that he was the perfect choice for the role. Poor Cirroc Lofton, like Wil Wheaton, suffered from the "kid surrounded by grownups" typecasting that often kills a child star's career. Both are decent actors but were never allowed to grow very much with their roles. And again, the remaining cast were neither great nor horrid.
In short, both casts had a range of acting ability, and even the best actor can't always rescue a bad script or director. But to say one is hands-down the best compared to the other is, at best, blind favoritism ("I liked one show better than the other so the other cast must suck").
None of Q's appearances on DS9 or VOY had nearly the chemistry.
I guess JdL wasn't a "cast" member of TNG though.
... right ? i don't know, i watched only a few episodes of enterprise
I watched all of Enterprise. It...gets better in Seasons 3 and 4. That's about all I can say. The first season is pretty bad. Season 2 has a few good episodes. In Season 3, things start to pick up a bit, and Season 4 is legitimately interesting. The show never quite reaches the heights of TNG, DS9, or TOS. But it gets pretty good. I'd only recommend watching it all the way through if you're ready to wade past the early crap, though.
[1] This is kind of a mixed bag. The explanation for their appearance stems from the events of Star Trek: First Contact, in which a small detachment of Borg drones are left behind on Earth in the 20th Century. So the timeline has been altered a bit, and hence, those remnant Borg show up in Enterprise. On the flip side, you'd think that an early encounter with the Borg would have stuck in everyone's memory a little bit, and that Picard wouldn't have been shocked upon first encountering them. The episode acknowledges the issue, at least, and attempts to arrive at a workaround. The fix is clever, if not entirely satisfactory.
klingon augment virus, got it
DS9 handled the matter much more effectively in "Trials and Tribbleations." Someone asked why the old-school Klingons had smooth foreheads, and Worf replied "We don't like to discuss that with outsiders." Boom. Perfect explanation. Funny, clever, and hand-wavy. Done.
That still doesn't justify Enterprise trying to explain it. If one must insist that there be an in-universe explanation because of the DS9 precedent, just say Q decided to mutate the entire species for a hundred years as a lark.
One episode right at the end, Klingons show up looking de-Klingon'd. "What the hell happened to the Klingons?" Klingons won't say.
Sometimes, the audience just doesn't get to know.
Dax as Spock? I think things started out that way, or perhaps were initially intended to be that way. But she was pretty un-Spocklike for most of the series. Farrell was not a world-class actor by any means. But her performance kind of got better as it went along, and as the writers gave Dax more to work with. And she was a lot better than Ezri Dax by a wide mile. (Not that that's saying much.)
DS9 Worf is a controversial figure. I loved his post-Dax arc. He rose to the occasion and became a true hero. Perhaps my biggest issue with Worf in DS9 is that the show pretty much forgets all of what happened in TNG, and forgets that Worf is half human. It's as if they recast him as 100% Klingon, rewiring all of his backstory and his personality traits accordingly. You get none of the "Which world do I really belong to?" drama that made him interesting in TNG. Instead, he's Alpha Klingon Badass all of the time. It's ironic, because DS9 is the one Trek series that (in my opinion) fleshed out the Klingon race into something fantastic and multifaceted and real. I was never a huge Klingon fan until DS9 came along, and after having seen DS9, I was totally into them.
Troi, on the other hand, was explicitly half-human, although it seems that was only because the telepathy that comes with being full-Betazoid would destroy too many of the plotlines -- nobody remembers her mixed heritage all that much and we keep having to be reminded of it when it becomes relevant.
Even still, I do think he was choosing between two worlds. Pretty much every time he encountered Klingons in TNG, they made comment about his wearing a Federation uniform and serving under humans. And there were several occasions where the derision went the other way: humans (or non-humans) would chide Picard for having a Klingon officer. Whether we choose to call this trope "stranger in a strange land," "choosing between two worlds," or something else altogether, the fact remains that Worf was an atypical Klingon in atypical circumstances, often forced to choose between whether he was to pursue his Klingon heritage and familial obligations to their fullest, or whether he was to be a Federation/Starfleet officer -- the requirements and laws of which often ran in direct contradiction to Klingon ethics. That was, indeed, a major source of drama for Worf throughout his character's appearance on TNG.
In DS9, yes, you could say he chose to be a Klingon. And by the end of the show, he made that choice unequivocally. Even still, it would have been nice to have had some remnant of the conflict remain. If only because that conflicted forces tradeoffs.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's an unpopular opinion. A lot of fans rate DS9 as the best series. They'd be in a minority, but not an outrageously slim minority. DS9's stock has been on the rise pretty consistently, especially since it showed up on Netflix. All the Trek fans who hadn't seen it in its original run, or who might have been put off by some stinkers in Season 1, are now able to see it in its entirety. A lot of them really like what they see. It holds up really well, and I'd put it neck and neck in the running with TNG for my favorite.
Now, if you really wanted to be unpopular? Say that Voyager is the best series. :) You'll have all of maybe two or three supporters on the entire internet to back you up on that claim. Also, the claim would be objectively wrong. Voyager is irredeemable garbage.
Personally, as a huge DS9 fan, I think that you should watch every episode. Each episode adds colour and depth to the series' characters, and in my opinion makes it the most rewarding Star Trek series.
I wonder how easily arcs can be identified. I'll try running the transcripts through a topic model this evening.
If you're interested in tools, Mallet (http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/) is a fairly good place to start, and the original LDA paper by Blei, Ng & Jordan (http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/BleiNJ...) is a great academic starting point.
That said, "Profit And Lace" has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
In the case of DS9, it's funny that it pretty much matches my experience in that there are very few early episodes then when the big Dominion storyline starts it includes almost all episodes for the last 3 seasons. DS9 became such a great show once Sisko shaved his head and got the goatee. :)
On advantage of gateworld which this website misses is that they rate episodes both on quality, and importance to the ongoing plot. I have chosen to watch a couple of episodes which, while rated lowly (mainly because they were disappointments after buildup), are important to the ongoing plot of the show.
MOOGYYYYYYY!!!!
Now seriously, the ferengy were supposed to be there for some humor scenes, and they developed the ferengy society considerably. Female liberation, the challenge of the responsability of the first child vs. the youngest. Etc.
Sisko accepting that Jake dated a Dabo girl...
I disagree that Ferengies are unimportant in the ST universe. They have a role.
Edit: It seems even on the list, there is Season 3, "The House of Quark"
Right now TV is in its "golden age" but there are no good sci-fi tv shows (hell even the word "scifi" is dirty somehow now, see > SyFy-lis).
Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Outer Limits all gone replaced by Vampires and all sorts of supernatural rubbish.
Dr Who is the only interesting scifi show now worth watching, for the most part...
Continuum is pretty good but it's no Star Trek/Stargate.
Falling Skies is okay but I don't think it's technically Sci-Fi.
We could really use some new Sci-Fi shows.
The Vampire Diaries is a good example of what being on the CW does to a show. It started out in the first two seasons as a dark, violent, mostly serious take on the "teenage vampire" trope, and could be enjoyed by both teens and GenX/GenY fans of the vampire genre. It has a pretty good cast (Nina Dobrev's "Katie Holmes v2" notwithstanding). After those first seasons, however, it devolved into the stereotypical teen drama + nonsensical mysticism. Eventually, after seeing a school dance or town festival as the main plot device every two episodes, I had to stop watching it. My wife still watches, but she tends to enjoy the occasional plotless teen drama.
1. has to have at least two established theories (cosmological or otherwise) in it
2. they must combine to create a dramatic plot issue
3. in a fashion which doesn't involve a time-loop paradox
...or not
I don't mind that the Sonic Screwdriver is a psychic Scotty in a stick ( ;) ), but the fact that the Doctor and friends don't get shot in the face (especially once he reveals who he is) more often is getting almost absurd.
Star Trek certainly has it's share of that kind of writer-armor for characters, but many more of them are less overt. As in, the Romulans/Klingons aren't going to just kill Kirk or Picard for $Reasons, or $Treaty.
Many seasons start with a great potential, only to fall on their face. It can create such nice ideas... and then destroy them by reusing and abusing them. (Weeping angels)
It also doesn't know how to 'scale'. In the first (2005+) episode with the Dalek, you see how terrible and brutally efficient they are. Fast forward a few episodes/seasons, and now you must have an entire army to show how things are 'bad'.
Did you notice how many times the overall arc changes? Or rather, how it isn't described at all so the writers can come up with whatever they want?
SPOILERS
"Bad wolf" ---> "Oh I've just taken these words and sent them myself in the past." Yeah, right.
"Silence will fall" ---> So it's an event? Eh... no... it's a species that make you forget when you watch them? Almost... It's a religious movement! There! Phew, we almost had to plan something!
I, too, am not one for the likes of SyFy's scary ("alien"!) monsters stuff.
More seriously, though, I'm so glad In The Pale Moonlight is ranked as one the top episodes (three episodes are ranked 9.5). I think it's one of the best episodes of television and Star Trek in general, and it's certainly one of my favorite episodes of DS9.
(in case anyone doesn't remember, it's the episode where Sisko gets the Romulans into the war with Garak's help, and has a final monologue in lines with "I can live with it" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-YyL7X4CWw)
Which such good stuff such as ST, there are not enough episodes. I wish there were more. "It's the journey that matters!"
Re BSG, you DO NOT want to skip episodes, there's even a "right" order: http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/battlestar-gal...
"Disagree with my choices? Fight me irl. Or submit a pull request."
A helpful next feature would be to somehow show the skipped episodes so the user could take some action to peek at the synopsis and rating to see if they really wanted to skip it.
Another helpful feature would be to tag all the episodes by character and theme. A user could be a huge fan of say, Jake episodes and Bajor oriented episodes, and if they came across such an episode with a low score, they might decide to watch it anyway.
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/3641/what-is-the-vi...
I wanted to point out that (after just now checking) Netflix isn't consistent with their two-part show listings as they relate to Netflix's episode number. For example, the two-parter of S01E01-02 and S04E01-02 are listed as one episode on Netflix. S02E20-21 are listed as two separate episodes. It gets out of sync with the guide. Not a huge deal, just need to make sure to pay attention to episode title as opposed to episode number.
There was a move away from continuity after DS9, which given the larger pace of television since then looks downright silly today.
Well, we're in a phase where much of the better television is indeed very arc-centric. I'm not convinced that's an unalloyed good although it's a fairly natural outcome of a variety of factors including on-demand viewing and serial TV being something that can 't really be replicated in movies (for the most part). On the other hand, there are certainly examples of historical TV SF that haven't been serialized and, in the case of The Twilight Zone, were purely anthologies.
Then I watched Voyager hoping it too was better than I remembered. It was not.
As an aside, I've been enjoying the youtube series "Star Trek Continues." They've done a great job of capturing the aesthetic of the original. I'm hoping they'll have some new episodes soon.
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html
The "P5 rating" for each episode tends to be a very reliable indicator of its quality. That said, B5 cannot be watched out of sequence, and there are very few episodes which one can skip, due to the nature of the story arc.
And don't forget Crusade! A sequel series that got cancelled after one season because Fox showed the episodes out of order, like Firefly.
I've seen many arguments that the role of Sisko was heavy handed in many ways and there are some truth to that, but with the exception of a few, any episode featuring the brilliant Avery Brooks is likely to be a good one.