In celebration of Star Trek's 50th Anniversary, here's my guide to every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, color-coded by level of quality, with the titles of essential episodes underlined.
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Thursday, September 8, 2016
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Top 100 Star Trek Episodes (#90-81)
SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers of various episodes of the Star Trek franchise. However, since the last episode aired in 2005, you're a little behind the times.
Hey everybody! In the last few months, I've moved, started a new job, got a new cat, treated that cat for about 60% of every disease a cat can have, and attempted to plan a wedding with my future-wife (only for all those plans to end up thrown out the window for reasons beyond our control). I've also been recording some podcasts with my friend Kory Cerjak of The Fandom Post. Hopefully we'll be doing more of those soon.
In the meantime, I started the giant Top 100 Trek Episodes project and didn't even get to 90 before basically every other aspect of my life got in the way. So I'm sorry for the length gap here. But at least now that things have settled down a bit, I will be finishing what I started.
My introduction to this list last time said basically everything I wanted to say about the franchise in general, so let's just get right back into it, shall we? Here's #90-81 of the 100 Best Star Trek episodes.
Ultimately, the episode is memorable for Dwight Schultz's performance as Barclay (this is the best Barclay episode if only for Schultz's line reading of "No problem, here's how you build it"), and for the story progress from mysterious to heartwarming to funny to dangerous to really, really silly, and then end with heartwarming again.
Did you know that "Bottle Episodes" pretty much started with Star Trek? It's kind of expensive to have to make the sets for a show like Trek. Everyday shows just have to make a typical house or an office, or if a character is rushed to a hospital, they just have to shoot scenes on the set of the medical show being produced by the same network. Star Trek, meanwhile, has to create a convincing (enough) futuristic world every week. So to save money, sometimes TV shows do an episode confined to as few regular sets as possible. After all, sometimes the best way to be exciting is to stick to great characters in a room and see what happens. Other shows do this too, but back in the TOS era, that's when the tradition started. "Bottle episode" comes from the phrase "ship in a bottle," after all.
There are a lot of good bottle episodes in the franchise (some of which are further down this list), but Enterprise's episode "Shuttlepod One" was the last really good one. There were some other ones as ENT went on, but none of them reached the heights of this first season episode. Trip and Reed are stuck in a shuttlepod because they believe Enterprise was destroyed due to Space MacGuffins scraping off part of the ship's hull onto an asteroid. From there, the two officers try to figure out what the hell to do. They're not fast enough to reach anything, they can't broadcast a signal far enough, and it's only a matter of time before they run out of air, food, and fuel. The pacing of the story is right where it needed to be. There's plenty of tension, but it also gets pretty funny watching them both break down over the course of the episode.
The chemistry between actors Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating is terrific, especially given that this was the first time the two of them ever had some real scenes together. Keating in particular provides a great insight into his character, who was pretty thinly drawn until this episode. But after this episode, you really know who Malcolm Reed is: a deeply lonely man.
If there is a flaw to this episode, it's a dream sequence about halfway through that seems there only to overcompensate for viewers who speculated that Reed was gay (he was disappointingly not). Fortunately, the transition from that sequence to the next scene is priceless.
If the end of a mystery is as satisfying as its beginning is unsatisfying, you're looking at a success. Star Trek didn't always do mysteries well, but "Future Imperfect" is a great example of a classic sci-fi puzzle that's grounded in character drama.
After an accident on a planet, Riker wakes up 16 years in the future with no memory of what happened after being down on the planet. That picture above? That's the last image of the teaser, before the title credits play. That's an amazing "WTF?!" hook, and it's now the episode's job to live up to that image. Riker tries to adjust to the situation, but every few minutes it seems like a giant new development is revealed to him. "Okay, so I'm Captain of the Enterprise now. Cool. Oh, I've been helping make peace with the Romulans? Bit of a shock, but good deal, that will really help sustain balance in the Alpha Quadr- what's that? The Romulan we're negotiating with is Tomalak, the guy who flat-out said he'd blow our ship to hell last time I remember seeing him? Well, I guess a lot can happen in 16 yea-I HAVE A SON?! WHO ALSO SUCKS AT THE TROMBONE?!"
In other words, the pacing keeps Riker and the audience on their toes as things just keep coming. You never lose your excitement as you watch this episode, especially because little things just seem off, on top of all those big reveals. The computer's being abnormally slow, no one seems to know very much about Riker's forgotten-but-is-dead-anyway-so-whatever wife, and his son (named after now-Admiral Picard) is just a little too perfect, even for Gene Roddenberry's "humans are amazing and flawless by the 24th century" universe. The details of this situation are just too sketchy to be believable.
After going through a bit of Inception-like adventures through illusory layers of reality, Riker finally finds out what was at the bottom of all this, why he woke up on a bio bed with gray hair and a different comm badge: a child was alone and needed someone. It seems pretty strange just reading it like that, but with that revelation, the entire episode pieces together. The human element prevalent throughout the time-skip mystery is what makes the resolution so satisfying. All these deceptions and layers of warped reality are derived not from some Romulan scheme or a Space MacGuffin, it's derived from a boy not knowing how to get what he needed, thus using the tactics he was used to.
Kenneth Biller was a Voyager writer that wrote lots and lots and lots of bad episodes. But it's in Biller's best work, "Worst Case Scenario," that we get to see a microcosm of what the Star Trek: Voyager was supposed to be all about. And it only took doing a holodeck episode to make it happen. Torres finds an old holodeck program that tells the story of a Maquis mutiny. Chakotay takes over the ship while Janeway and Paris are negotiating with an alien species, and he makes his intentions abundantly clear to the Starfleet crew members not already on his side: Do the opposite of what Janeway would do.
Now, if the creators of Voyager had any creative courage when they were first starting the show, the story of "Chakotay leads a mutiny to get the crew home faster and safer" should have been somewhere early in the first season. Because that's what the show was supposed to be about - the tension of two groups of people stuck on one ship as they try to get home. Instead, that story became a holodeck program in late Season 3. Fortunately, this 45-minute piece of evidence that VOY wasted its own premise is a lot of fun, so we'll let it go that this could have been much, much closer to the top of this list.
Like "Future Imperfect," this episode works because it keeps the audience guessing on what's to come next, and the answers to questions are rooted in character, not convolution. The revelation that Tuvok wrote the program as a security training exercise (only to not finish it when it was clearly not going to be needed) not only makes complete sense with his character, but adds to VOY's insistence on the crew's lack of conflict in a positive and compelling way. And the plot point of Seska appearing, having rewritten the program long before having been killed off, is the perfect way to revisit the character while staying true to who she was.
"Worst Case Scenario," has a lot of little moments and details to it. Super-observant viewers might have thought Torres wearing the wrong rank insignia on her collar during the opening act was a continuity error (and given that it was VOY, that's not an unreasonable assumption), but it was actually a very subtle clue to what's going on. Neelix's annoying qualities even seem wonderfully executed in this episode, and it's because the writers weren't writing for Neelix, they were writing for Tuvok writing for Neelix. And the second half turns the whole episode from a mystery to an increasingly fun-in-a-ridiculous-sort-of-way comedy, which also serves as a pretty good metaphor for how to write an episode of Voyager. Who knows, maybe it's episodes like this that helped kick off this "EVERYTHING IS META NOW, YAY" era of television.
This is the funniest episode of TV about people trying desperately to keep their technology from killing them that I can recall. The DS9 crew accidentally trips an old Cardassian contingency program, and the station goes apeshit.
This plot is pretty simple (albeit AWESOME), so I don't have as much to say about this episode, but what makes "Civil Defense" extra special was what it added to the Cardassian mythology. Those gray scaly douchebags prepare for EVERYTHING. Every five minutes, Gul Dukat appears on the view screen to adjust how the station is going to kill everyone. Even when Gul Dukat himself shows up to help the DS9 crew, the computer has a contingency for it. As the stakes get higher and higher, the situation gets that much more ridiculous, which just makes it even funnier. Great stuff.
All right, next time, we'll look at numbers 80-71. Hopefully that'll happen a lot sooner than it took this to happen.
Hey everybody! In the last few months, I've moved, started a new job, got a new cat, treated that cat for about 60% of every disease a cat can have, and attempted to plan a wedding with my future-wife (only for all those plans to end up thrown out the window for reasons beyond our control). I've also been recording some podcasts with my friend Kory Cerjak of The Fandom Post. Hopefully we'll be doing more of those soon.
In the meantime, I started the giant Top 100 Trek Episodes project and didn't even get to 90 before basically every other aspect of my life got in the way. So I'm sorry for the length gap here. But at least now that things have settled down a bit, I will be finishing what I started.
My introduction to this list last time said basically everything I wanted to say about the franchise in general, so let's just get right back into it, shall we? Here's #90-81 of the 100 Best Star Trek episodes.
90. "Bride of Chaotica!" (VOY, Season 5 Ep. 12)
Star Trek frequently misfired when it came to comedy. Some of the worst episodes in the whole franchise were failed comedy episodes, from DS9's "Profit and Lace," to TNG's "The Outrageous Okona," which actually had the pretensions of deconstructing what made things funny in the first place. But Voyager of all shows managed to put out pretty consistently funny comedy episodes (it was the drama that struggled over on that show). "Bride of Chaotica!" is one of its best.
Voyager comedy episodes tend to get increasingly ridiculous as they progress. The episode starts off with Tom and Harry just playing their B-movie holodeck program (The Adventures of Captain Proton, a sort of Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers-ish parody), but things get weirder when photonic aliens detect the holodeck and try to interact with the holographic characters, thinking they're the real people on the ship, since both the aliens and the holodeck characters are made of light. The villain of the holodeck program, Doctor Chaotica (Martin Rayner, who seems to be better known in the world of theatre), tries to conquer the world of these photonic aliens. Then it's up to Captain Janeway to get involved, forced to take the role as "Arachnia, Queen of the Spider People" to get on Chaotica's good side to get the battle between aliens and holograms to stop. Seeing actress Kate Mulgrew dive into Janeway-playing-Arachnia is great to watch (Mulgrew always manages to make Janeway seem consistent throughout the show, even when the writing is failing abysmally at that), and her interactions with Chaotica make it even better.
On top of that, the episode also acknowledges that Star Trek is often on the same level as a sci-fi B-movie, with plenty of jokes that acknowledge that the biggest differences between the two is the level of sophistication in the prop names. As Paris explains the holodeck program's lingo to Janeway, the writers pretty much say "Phasers, ray guns, it's all the same." There are also some great jokes about the quality of the sets, cultural differences between 20th and 24th centuries, and others. However, it's really the commitment and delivery of the cast that makes the episode really funny. Because so many of the jokes depend on the hammy delivery of the B-movie era, this could have really fallen flat if Mulgrew, Rayner, and others didn't give it there all.
What keeps this episode all the way up at number 90 on the list (besides how many good episodes there are in the franchise) is that eventually the script reaches a point of diminishing returns. I mentioned before that the cast makes the episode, and it's basically because the script itself didn't offer a lot of well-crafted jokes when it came to the holodeck characters. Doctor Chaotica is a funny character, but he really only stays funny because of how Martin Rayner plays him. As for Tom Paris's holographic secretary, she had one joke - the damsel in distress screaming at everything, which stopped being funny before the teaser even ended (though at least the episode was smart enough to basically forget about her after that). Still, the jokes for the main cast combined with said cast's total commitment to the episode makes this a great watch.
89. "Regeneration" (ENT, Season 2 Ep. 23)
With the exception of the best points of the Xindi Arc, Enterprise was at its best when it was doing prequel stories to shows that took place after it. You know, doing what a prequel show is supposed to do. "Regeneration" is the only appearance of the Borg in ENT, and thankfully, this episode not only works as a great story by itself, but also as both a prequel and sequel to the movie First Contact, because the predestination paradox caused by this story that actually manages to fix continuity in the franchise, instead of destroy it (which it easily could've).
The remains of the Borg sphere that got destroyed in the past during the events of First Contact are discovered in the Arctic in the ENT era, including several Borg drones, frozen in ice but still alive. The researchers that discovered them thaw them out in efforts to learn more about them, but they regenerate and assimilate the crap out of the research team, stealing a transport and escaping Earth to presumably head for the Delta Quadrant to contact the Borg of the era. It's up to Captain Archer and crew to stop them. However, nobody here knows what the Borg are, since the Federation didn't officially encounter them until the TNG episode "Q Who." It's a contest between 22nd century Humans and 24th century Borg, who have advantage in all but sheer numbers.
The story has some gaping flaws in its foundation and in the story details it has to have to maintain continuity (the Borg are never named in the episode, which makes their standard hail come off more as confusing than menacing), but the episode is saved by a fantastic sense of atmosphere and some great characterization. The story is darkly atmospheric, with composer Brian Tyler's score really bringing out the best in the tense moments and action sequences of the episode, often saving some of the weaker moments of the script. In addition, the main characters are also written like real people (which sadly was a problem in early ENT). Writers Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong were the best staff writers of the series, and it shows here in the way Archer behaves far more rationally than he might have if this were another Rick Berman and Brannon Braga script. We empathize with his hope that he can save the assimilated researchers, and the decision to kill Borgified refugees that sabotage the ship is given just the right amount of weight. And while Doctor Phlox basically comes off as pro-Borg in this story (sometimes to an annoying degree), it's a fitting choice for who is probably the most open-minded character in the entire franchise. The action in "Regeneration" is also some of the best the show's done, especially in the final confrontation, both with Archer and Reed on the Borg ship, and with the Enterprise engaging said Borg ship in battle.
But what's especially interesting with this episode is that it's the first episode in the series to fix a continuity problem in the franchise. With "Q Who," it's clear by the end that the Borg will be coming to invade Earth, but they're so far away that it will take time. Yet they manage to show up a mere year later with "The Best of Both Worlds," with no explanation beyond "Wow, I guess they're just awesome then, huh?" Miraculously, "Regeneration" fixes the problem with the Borg of that episode sending out a message to the Delta Quadrant before being destroyed. It'll take centuries to get there, but it'll get there. With one episode, Enterprise managed to make better use of the Borg than most of their appearances on Voyager, and in the process it fixed problems established all the way back in "Q Who." This formula of stories that go to near-ridiculous lengths to both please the fans and fix continuity would later be embraced by Manny Coto when he took over as showrunner in the ENT's fourth and final season. We'll see more examples of that when we continue counting down the list.
88. "Necessary Evil" (DS9, Season 2 Ep. 8)
What's great about the Changeling Security Chief Odo is that even though he can take on an endless variety of forms and shapes, he as a person never changes. No matter what the circumstances are around him, Odo remains Odo. That's especially fascinating in this episode, where we learn that Odo is Odo not only during the present, but during the Cardassian Occupation that took place before the start of Deep Space Nine.
This is a sort of "how everybody got together" episode, exploring through flashbacks how Odo eventually became Security Chief of the station, and the circumstances under which he first met Kira Nerys. Evidently it was Gul Dukat (pictured above on the left, looking like a thousand prostitutes are displayed before him) who got Odo started investigating crime on the station, back during the Occupation. Odo comes to suspect Kira, but eventually he only ends up discovering Kira has been up to something wildly different.
I'm leaving out a lot of the details of this episode's plot, but what's important here is the relationship between Odo and Kira. Kira, especially during the Occupation, sees everything in black and white. You're with the Resistance, or you're a collaborator. By not doing anything to help, you are part of the problem (a concept I'm sadly all too familiar with). Odo, meanwhile, sees everything in gray. He isn't on anyone's side, all he's concerned about is the truth. Fast forward a few years and Kira's grown up a little. Odo, meanwhile, his goal hasn't changed. Justice is priority. Icing on the cake is seeing a TV villain actually hatch a scheme and get away with it.
Episodes of television revolving around a concept like suicide are incredibly risky, and they don't always work. For every "Mortal Coil," there's a "No Reason" from House, M.D. "Mortal Coil" pulls it off not only by fully embracing the tragedy of Neelix, but also by making that tragedy intimately quiet. The drama here is so often understated when it could have easily been too big. All in all, it's episodes like this that keep me from despising Neelix 100% of the time.
Fun Fact: This episode was primarily written by Bryan Fuller, a Voyager writer who later went onto create Pushing Daises (another show about the dead coming back to life), and most recently, Hannibal.
I'm leaving out a lot of the details of this episode's plot, but what's important here is the relationship between Odo and Kira. Kira, especially during the Occupation, sees everything in black and white. You're with the Resistance, or you're a collaborator. By not doing anything to help, you are part of the problem (a concept I'm sadly all too familiar with). Odo, meanwhile, sees everything in gray. He isn't on anyone's side, all he's concerned about is the truth. Fast forward a few years and Kira's grown up a little. Odo, meanwhile, his goal hasn't changed. Justice is priority. Icing on the cake is seeing a TV villain actually hatch a scheme and get away with it.
87. "Mortal Coil" (VOY, Season 4 Ep. 12)
Neelix is the worst regular character in the entire Star Trek franchise (yes, even worse than Wesley Crusher). As much as Ethan Phillips tried to do his best, he could only do so much with the consistently awful material he was given to work with. The problem with the character is ultimately that the writers chose to make him a comedic character instead of an intensely dramatic one. Neelix had all the elements to have been one of the biggest badasses in the franchise: a tragic past with very little to live for, but with extensive knowledge about the area that can help Voyager. All they needed was a different actor and cooler-looking makeup and Neelix (okay, maybe also a name change) could have been everyone's favorite character. But instead, they made Neelix, one of the last members of his species, the plucky comic relief. And it just didn't work. The writers even had endless opportunities to get rid of him, but they didn't, and as a result, an episode in which Neelix is NOT annoying is something of a minor miracle. For example, this episode, "Mortal Coil," Neelix's finest hour.
Neelix is killed on an away mission. Ordinarily, this would be a cause for celebration, but it happened in the teaser, so there's no way it's going to last. And sure enough, Seven of Nine is on the ship at this point. And since her early characterization whenever she wasn't the focus of an episode was that she was a sonic screwdriver with breasts, she's able to use her leftover Borg technology to bring him back to life. Except during the several hours Neelix was dead, Neelix experienced nothing. Neelix was taught that he would go to a very specific place when he died: The Great Forest, his species' afterlife. The fact that Neelix is one of the last of his species is extremely significant here. If Neelix was dead and he didn't see any great forest, then his people really are gone. He'll never see them again. This brush with death doesn't cause Neelix to appreciate the life he got back, it causes him to question it.
Fun Fact: This episode was primarily written by Bryan Fuller, a Voyager writer who later went onto create Pushing Daises (another show about the dead coming back to life), and most recently, Hannibal.
86. "The Nth Degree" (TNG, Season 4 Ep. 19)
Lt. Barclay is apparently the only human crew member of the Enterprise-D that isn't a perfect specimen of humanity and all that is good. He's understandably nervous, and if he had the confidence to speak up with his often-intriguing ideas, maybe he'd be further along in his career. So when a mysterious probe hits him a MacGuffin Beam, it's exciting for us to see him progress so rapidly. It's not just another sci-fi problem to solve, it's one of the most sympathetic characters on the ship finally realizing what he was capable of.
Nobody can grow that fast, however, and soon Barclay's uber knowledge takes him over, to the point that he takes over the ship. What's great about this, though, is that despite what's happening, the rest of the Enterprise crew doesn't just reduce Barclay to being the bad guy. The angriest Picard gets about not having control of his ship is saying "This is an intolerable situation."
Nobody can grow that fast, however, and soon Barclay's uber knowledge takes him over, to the point that he takes over the ship. What's great about this, though, is that despite what's happening, the rest of the Enterprise crew doesn't just reduce Barclay to being the bad guy. The angriest Picard gets about not having control of his ship is saying "This is an intolerable situation."
Ultimately, the episode is memorable for Dwight Schultz's performance as Barclay (this is the best Barclay episode if only for Schultz's line reading of "No problem, here's how you build it"), and for the story progress from mysterious to heartwarming to funny to dangerous to really, really silly, and then end with heartwarming again.
85. "Shuttlepod One" (ENT, Season 1 Ep. 16)
Did you know that "Bottle Episodes" pretty much started with Star Trek? It's kind of expensive to have to make the sets for a show like Trek. Everyday shows just have to make a typical house or an office, or if a character is rushed to a hospital, they just have to shoot scenes on the set of the medical show being produced by the same network. Star Trek, meanwhile, has to create a convincing (enough) futuristic world every week. So to save money, sometimes TV shows do an episode confined to as few regular sets as possible. After all, sometimes the best way to be exciting is to stick to great characters in a room and see what happens. Other shows do this too, but back in the TOS era, that's when the tradition started. "Bottle episode" comes from the phrase "ship in a bottle," after all.
There are a lot of good bottle episodes in the franchise (some of which are further down this list), but Enterprise's episode "Shuttlepod One" was the last really good one. There were some other ones as ENT went on, but none of them reached the heights of this first season episode. Trip and Reed are stuck in a shuttlepod because they believe Enterprise was destroyed due to Space MacGuffins scraping off part of the ship's hull onto an asteroid. From there, the two officers try to figure out what the hell to do. They're not fast enough to reach anything, they can't broadcast a signal far enough, and it's only a matter of time before they run out of air, food, and fuel. The pacing of the story is right where it needed to be. There's plenty of tension, but it also gets pretty funny watching them both break down over the course of the episode.
The chemistry between actors Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating is terrific, especially given that this was the first time the two of them ever had some real scenes together. Keating in particular provides a great insight into his character, who was pretty thinly drawn until this episode. But after this episode, you really know who Malcolm Reed is: a deeply lonely man.
If there is a flaw to this episode, it's a dream sequence about halfway through that seems there only to overcompensate for viewers who speculated that Reed was gay (he was disappointingly not). Fortunately, the transition from that sequence to the next scene is priceless.
84. "Future Imperfect" (TNG, Season 4 Ep. 8)
If the end of a mystery is as satisfying as its beginning is unsatisfying, you're looking at a success. Star Trek didn't always do mysteries well, but "Future Imperfect" is a great example of a classic sci-fi puzzle that's grounded in character drama.
After an accident on a planet, Riker wakes up 16 years in the future with no memory of what happened after being down on the planet. That picture above? That's the last image of the teaser, before the title credits play. That's an amazing "WTF?!" hook, and it's now the episode's job to live up to that image. Riker tries to adjust to the situation, but every few minutes it seems like a giant new development is revealed to him. "Okay, so I'm Captain of the Enterprise now. Cool. Oh, I've been helping make peace with the Romulans? Bit of a shock, but good deal, that will really help sustain balance in the Alpha Quadr- what's that? The Romulan we're negotiating with is Tomalak, the guy who flat-out said he'd blow our ship to hell last time I remember seeing him? Well, I guess a lot can happen in 16 yea-I HAVE A SON?! WHO ALSO SUCKS AT THE TROMBONE?!"
In other words, the pacing keeps Riker and the audience on their toes as things just keep coming. You never lose your excitement as you watch this episode, especially because little things just seem off, on top of all those big reveals. The computer's being abnormally slow, no one seems to know very much about Riker's forgotten-but-is-dead-anyway-so-whatever wife, and his son (named after now-Admiral Picard) is just a little too perfect, even for Gene Roddenberry's "humans are amazing and flawless by the 24th century" universe. The details of this situation are just too sketchy to be believable.
After going through a bit of Inception-like adventures through illusory layers of reality, Riker finally finds out what was at the bottom of all this, why he woke up on a bio bed with gray hair and a different comm badge: a child was alone and needed someone. It seems pretty strange just reading it like that, but with that revelation, the entire episode pieces together. The human element prevalent throughout the time-skip mystery is what makes the resolution so satisfying. All these deceptions and layers of warped reality are derived not from some Romulan scheme or a Space MacGuffin, it's derived from a boy not knowing how to get what he needed, thus using the tactics he was used to.
83. "Worst Case Scenario" (VOY, Season 3 Ep. 25)
Kenneth Biller was a Voyager writer that wrote lots and lots and lots of bad episodes. But it's in Biller's best work, "Worst Case Scenario," that we get to see a microcosm of what the Star Trek: Voyager was supposed to be all about. And it only took doing a holodeck episode to make it happen. Torres finds an old holodeck program that tells the story of a Maquis mutiny. Chakotay takes over the ship while Janeway and Paris are negotiating with an alien species, and he makes his intentions abundantly clear to the Starfleet crew members not already on his side: Do the opposite of what Janeway would do.
Now, if the creators of Voyager had any creative courage when they were first starting the show, the story of "Chakotay leads a mutiny to get the crew home faster and safer" should have been somewhere early in the first season. Because that's what the show was supposed to be about - the tension of two groups of people stuck on one ship as they try to get home. Instead, that story became a holodeck program in late Season 3. Fortunately, this 45-minute piece of evidence that VOY wasted its own premise is a lot of fun, so we'll let it go that this could have been much, much closer to the top of this list.
Like "Future Imperfect," this episode works because it keeps the audience guessing on what's to come next, and the answers to questions are rooted in character, not convolution. The revelation that Tuvok wrote the program as a security training exercise (only to not finish it when it was clearly not going to be needed) not only makes complete sense with his character, but adds to VOY's insistence on the crew's lack of conflict in a positive and compelling way. And the plot point of Seska appearing, having rewritten the program long before having been killed off, is the perfect way to revisit the character while staying true to who she was.
"Worst Case Scenario," has a lot of little moments and details to it. Super-observant viewers might have thought Torres wearing the wrong rank insignia on her collar during the opening act was a continuity error (and given that it was VOY, that's not an unreasonable assumption), but it was actually a very subtle clue to what's going on. Neelix's annoying qualities even seem wonderfully executed in this episode, and it's because the writers weren't writing for Neelix, they were writing for Tuvok writing for Neelix. And the second half turns the whole episode from a mystery to an increasingly fun-in-a-ridiculous-sort-of-way comedy, which also serves as a pretty good metaphor for how to write an episode of Voyager. Who knows, maybe it's episodes like this that helped kick off this "EVERYTHING IS META NOW, YAY" era of television.
82. "Civil Defense" (DS9, Season 3 Ep. 7)
This is the funniest episode of TV about people trying desperately to keep their technology from killing them that I can recall. The DS9 crew accidentally trips an old Cardassian contingency program, and the station goes apeshit.
This plot is pretty simple (albeit AWESOME), so I don't have as much to say about this episode, but what makes "Civil Defense" extra special was what it added to the Cardassian mythology. Those gray scaly douchebags prepare for EVERYTHING. Every five minutes, Gul Dukat appears on the view screen to adjust how the station is going to kill everyone. Even when Gul Dukat himself shows up to help the DS9 crew, the computer has a contingency for it. As the stakes get higher and higher, the situation gets that much more ridiculous, which just makes it even funnier. Great stuff.
81. "The Next Phase" (TNG, Season 5 Ep. 24)
Like "Future Imperfect" and "The Nth Degree," this episode works because of its emotional and thematic core grounding the high-concept sci-fi plot. "The Next Phase" uses the SF trope of cloaking technology as a way to pit two viewpoints against each other: Faith and Science. And the subversion of tone in those viewpoints is incredibly fascinating.
Geordi and Ro are in an accident that results in them basically being ghosts. Well, the kind of limited budget TV ghost where no one else can see them and they can pass through things, yet can still breathe air and walk on the floor and whatnot. When they realize no one can see them and people are passing right through them, the two officers clash over what to do next. Geordi wants to figure out what happened so they can find a way to reverse the effect. Ro, on the other hand, thinks they're both dead, and have to accept what's happened to them so they can let go of this world and enter the afterlife.
Ordinarily in this kind of story (because on a basic level, this story is nothing new), the point of it all is that the invisible character really is a ghost, and needs to atone for something or set something right so he/she can accept their own death and move on. The skeptic character is the one the audience feels sorry for, because he/she just can't let go. But Star Trek has never thought like that, and not just because it's a SCIENCE fiction franchise. Here, it's Geordi's rational scientific perspective that ultimately proves to be the two officer's real salvation. Yet despite this, both sides of this argument are given their fair weight. In the end, Geordi ends up being right in this situation, but not before Ro has her own arc about her beliefs. Star Trek handles religion and spirituality best on Deep Space Nine, but Ronald D. Moore's script manages to make it clear to audiences that Ro isn't flat-out wrong for thinking the way she does.
Despite this being a pulp-y science fiction story that also deals with death, "The Next Phase" also has some pretty funny moments, with Geordi's frustration with Ro (and the crew members he can't explain the situation to), Ro's annoyance with her own religious customs ("Please, not the death chant"), and Data's task of putting together the memorial service for the two of them. Sometimes death is funny.
Ordinarily in this kind of story (because on a basic level, this story is nothing new), the point of it all is that the invisible character really is a ghost, and needs to atone for something or set something right so he/she can accept their own death and move on. The skeptic character is the one the audience feels sorry for, because he/she just can't let go. But Star Trek has never thought like that, and not just because it's a SCIENCE fiction franchise. Here, it's Geordi's rational scientific perspective that ultimately proves to be the two officer's real salvation. Yet despite this, both sides of this argument are given their fair weight. In the end, Geordi ends up being right in this situation, but not before Ro has her own arc about her beliefs. Star Trek handles religion and spirituality best on Deep Space Nine, but Ronald D. Moore's script manages to make it clear to audiences that Ro isn't flat-out wrong for thinking the way she does.
Despite this being a pulp-y science fiction story that also deals with death, "The Next Phase" also has some pretty funny moments, with Geordi's frustration with Ro (and the crew members he can't explain the situation to), Ro's annoyance with her own religious customs ("Please, not the death chant"), and Data's task of putting together the memorial service for the two of them. Sometimes death is funny.
All right, next time, we'll look at numbers 80-71. Hopefully that'll happen a lot sooner than it took this to happen.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Top 100 Star Trek Episodes (#100-91)
The Star Trek franchise, while not without its flaws, is easily the most influential television franchise of all time. The show inspired invaluable scientific and technological achievements, it has been a symbol of hope for people of every race and background, and it has been an incredible influence for televised storytelling of all kinds. While there's no question that classics like The Andy Griffith Show or M*A*S*H (just to name a few) were great, wildly influential shows, those shows didn't contribute nearly as much to the real world that Star Trek continues to do today. If Hollywood really wants to change the world, it should be putting out more things like Star Trek.
None of this is to say that Trek is the be-all end-all of television, but its contribution to the world beyond just being great pop culture is astounding. It inspired the development of MRI technology, space and air travel, multipurpose handheld devices, computer interface technology, nonlethal weapons, communications technology, moving objects with beams of light, defying the lightspeed barrier, and more. It's also predicted a number of things like cell phones, voice interaction, genetic engineering, and even hypochondriacs using WebMD to bug the crap out of doctors. Star Trek's technology seems magical at times, but given how much of that technology we have now, those devices in the show are feeling less and less like magic and more like challenges from the franchise's writers. "This is possible. Figure out a way to do it."
Every series contributed something great, even if some contributed far more than others. The Original Series (TOS) gave us a sense of charm, adventure, and teamwork. The Next Generation (TNG) found compelling drama in cerebral ethical dilemmas, unafraid to ask big questions. Deep Space Nine (DS9) doesn't get credit for it, but it's that show (and Babylon 5, which aired around the same time) that really paved the way for the serialized, morally ambiguous dramas everyone is all over today. Voyager (VOY) not only put a woman in a position of authority, but showed that female characters could be compelling without just being Bruce Willis with boobs or by being motivated by a handsome prince. Enterprise (ENT) provided an accessible bridge from today's society to the general Utopian society of TOS and beyond, while also exploring interesting ideas in its own right. Each of these series has episodes on this list. And while I'm not including The Animated Series on this list, even it contributed good things, continuing TOS's adventures through a medium allowing for even stranger new worlds and life forms.
There are over 700 episodes in the Star Trek franchise, and there are many good episodes that I won't be including in this Top 100 list. There are also some absolute failures. But now that we've already looked at the franchise's worst moments, it's time to look at the very best it has to offer. These 100 episodes aren't all perfect, but I'm a firm believer that everything can always be better, and being just "amazing" instead of "super fucking amazing" is nothing to frown on.
I'll be covering 10 at a time until we've reached the top 20. I'll then post both 20-16 and 15-11 separately, and then each episode in the Top 10 will get its own completely in-depth post. Obviously, this is going to take a while, both because there is so much to cover and because, as you can already tell, I ramble like crazy. Some episodes I'll have more to say about than others, but we'll see when we get to them. So without further ado, here's number 100-91 of what I consider to be the 100 greatest episodes of Star Trek.
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