I know it's an overused question in a lot of places, but it hasn't been asked here in quite a while. I'm curious to see what the preferred Star Trek shows are in the group here. Whether you want to just list your favorite show, do a complete ranking of all the shows, or something in between, I'm interested to know!
This is my current top five show list:
- Deep Space Nine
- Star Trek
- Strange New Worlds
- The Next Generation
- Lower Decks
It gets difficult for me to rank past that point, so I usually stop there.
Lower Decks is easily the most entertainment for my time I've had out of Trek in a while. I'm conflicted, since calling this my favorite feels like cheating: it doesn't entirely stand on its own since it riffs on everything else Trek.
In that case, SNW takes the top spot on my list. It's an incredibly well-oiled production and it shows at every level.
Bottom of the list is Enterprise, but that's only because I personally feel the writers squandered a fantastic setting. Star Trek at a lower technology tier just begs for more edge-of-your-seat stakes and problem solving. At the start, it had grit: the ship had no shields, puny weapons, limited warp, a janky universal translator, and everyone was terrified of the transporter. Add to that operating under interplanetary tensions and a fledgling federation that is a relative unknown in the galaxy. Much of this got thrown out in record time, and for what? A temporal causality loop hundreds of years wide, thereby eradicating any agency the crew had, and by extension, our disbelief that they may pull through the next encounter.
You're right, if you haven't watched all of the Trek shows you're definitely not going to get nearly as much enjoyment from Lower Decks! There are even references to things that weren't previously canon, like the Star Trek helmet, so even then you won't get all the jokes.
I really enjoy SNW, it's always pretty high on my list. It's been especially great since this is the first time I've had a Trek show I really like that I'm watching while it's still in production! I have some annoyances with it here and there, mostly due to the fact that it's a prequel, but I can more easily overlook that because most of the rest of it is good.
I really think Enterprise and Voyager both were missed opportunities. Enterprise for a lot of the reasons you mention, and Voyager I felt could have had a lot more continuity. It was the perfect place to have a lot of recurring characters and DS9 style arcs, but they never really committed.
I'm with you on Voyager. A big problem with the story was it's premise: it's kind of hard to run into the same people more than once when you're bee-lining for home every chance you get. So they should have focused more on every last stinking crew member onboard that little ship. Or start a small fleet and do it BSG style. Lots of options, but they're all outside the usual Trek box.
Exactly, I always imagined it focusing on recurring characters within various factions on the ship. They could have had various Maquis characters working on their own agendas and struggling more with being on a Starfleet ship, or maybe they picked up some aliens along the way and are trying to integrate them into life on the ship. They did the second thing to some degree with Seven, but having a group of actual aliens would have been interesting too. Especially if some of the aliens turned out to be planted there to cause trouble.