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King Gendry Baratheon

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This topic is probably better posted in Entertainment and will most likely get moved there.



I am just finishing up a rewatch of Star Trek the Next Generation with my wife and I am surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Patrick Stewart does a ton of heavy lifting for that show.


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I grew up with The Next Generation and that franchise of movies so that's my idea of enjoying it. First Contact is probably my favorite from that franchise. They have the best blend of heart and soul in the characters combined with serialized adventures. And they have the best writing and acting.



Although, I like the original series enough, and almost all of those movies.



I never watched Voyager or Enterprise so I guess I can't compare, but I didn't like Deep Space Nine - the acting and writing was much weaker, the characters not so compelling.



I saw PatStew once in person doing a dramatic stage reading and I was so star struck. He's the most handsome man. His eyes literally twinkle. He twinkles! Locutus of Borg? More like the CUTEST of borg!



Personally I cannot stand the new J.J. Abrams movies. I think the actors looked great for their roles - esp. Chris Pine as Kirk and Karl Urban as Bones - but the movies were just a mess! I really dislike J.J. Abrams in general. You know, he doesn't even like Star Trek! He totally bro-ified the whole thing which is bad considering Star Trek already had just enough of a touch of bro-ishness to its legacy already. But he tipped the bro scales way too far. Harumph.

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I started out watching the TOS movies in the 80s, then finally when I was about 12 years old one of the local stations carried TOS in reruns, which pretty much hooked me on Trek for life.



DS9 became my favorite Trek during its run and remains so to this day. I try to rewatch it (or at least, the big episodes) every few years. I loved all the recurring characters and the Long Game plotlines that weaved throughout the series.



I like TNG a lot, but I also feel it could have been much, much better. It would have benefited greatly from shorter seasons as the purely episodic nature meant lots of filler. TNG also got off to a very weak (nigh irredeemable) start. My opinion of Voyager is very similar.



Enterprise took forever to really get going but I thought seasons 3 and 4 had some pretty compelling storylines. The acting and writing was weak as hell compared to the other series, though.



As for the JJ movies, I thought the first one was a good bit of mindless fun but Into Darkness was just a mess.


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My personal favorite was DS-9 ... I enjoyed the longer story arcs....

First Contact is my favorite movie of the franchise... But I also liked the Voyage Home

I don't hate the JJA movies, but I agree that they were more concerned with action, and it came at the expense of the morality/humanity plot elements that made Star Trek so different from everything else

My favorite single episode was "a Piece of the Action" from TOS

Enterprise was my biggest disappointment ... it should have been great. ... and then, Nazis

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As a kid I really liked watching TOS whenever it came on in syndication. They were always moving it around but I usually watched it the most when it was scheduled at 5pm, usually it'd be scheduled like that in the summer.



I remember seeing Star Trek III on HBO and it was before I saw Star Trek II. I also saw the first and second movies eventually on TV. Loved Wrath of Kahn. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was the first Trek movie I saw in a theater and I thought it was great.



I remember every now and then seeing commercials for these things called "Star Trek Conventions" on television, I always wanted to go to one.



I was about 12 when The Next Generation debuted on TV. I didn't like it at first. I mean season 1 TNG... :ack:


I did watch episodes sporadically. Then in season 3 they had the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" which blew me away, I became a major fan of the series at that point. Then there was "The Best of Both Worlds" cliffhanger...holy shit that was awesome! But I think "Yesterday's Enterprise" just edges out TBOBW as still my favorite TNG episode.



I was so excited for Star Trek V when it came out. At that point as a 14 year old kid, it seemed any movie I saw was never really bad. The bottom level was "ok" and it just went up from there "good", "great", "Awesome!". I mean I saw movies like "Godzilla 85" and "Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend" and still came out saying they were "ok"



Which is why it's pretty sad that Trek V was one of the first movies I came out of and said it wasn't any good.



But after that I was finally able to go to my first convention, a friend took me. After that I started going to them regularly. I officially became a "trekker" in 1991. I saw every episode of either series multiple times, all the movies, read the books, went to the cons. I just never dressed up beyond a com badge. I've seen just about every member of all the casts from TOS and TNG (except Shatner and Stewart) a good lot of the actors from DS9 and Voyager, none from Enterprise. Plenty of guest characters and people who worked behinds the scenes or peripherally on any of the shows or movies.




Deep Space Nine is my favorite Trek series by far. The writing is just wonderful, the stories and arc of the show is just incredible. After that I like TNG and TOS about tied. Then Enterprise - seasons 3 & 4 only, can't stand seasons 1 & 2 and won't watch any of it. Voyager is my least favorite (unless you want to count the cartoon series too) only the episodes with The Doctor and maybe some of the Seven ones are any good, but the rest of the series is garbage.



From Star Trek IV - Star Trek: Nemesis (Trek X) I saw the films in the theater. My favorite film is Wrath of Kahn with The Voyage Home not far behind. I didn't see any of the Abrams Trek movies in theaters. I wasn't too thrilled by the idea when I first heard they were going to do it, then I finally saw the first Abrams one and was surprised at how much I liked it. Then I saw Into Darkness and didn't think it was good at all.




My rankings of the films are:



II


IV


III


VI


First Contact


Star Trek (Abrams)


I (The Motion Picture)


Generations


Into Darkness


V


Insurrection


Nemesis



I'm not as into Star Trek as I was in the 90's, but it's always going to be something that's part of who I am.

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I started watching TNG when I was pretty small, maybe during the fourth season or so. I think the first episode I saw was actually "Qpid", the episode where Q "helps" Picard to see that he's in love with Vash by staging an elaborate Robin Hood/Maid Marion scenario.



TNG was on all the time at that point, so it wasn't long before I was all caught up, and I grew up with it until it ended in 1994. I pretty much loved it and the futuristic optimism. I also remember going to see Star Trek VI in theatres and being scared by the floating pink globs of Klingon blood.



I watched DS9 from the beginning but don't remember really getting into it until after TNG ended and, especially, once the Jem'Hadar and Dominion appeared. It became my favourite series by a long shot, but I'm not sure I felt that way until a bit after it ended.



Voyager has its moments, but overall is something of a failed or simply unrealized premise. I think The Doctor and to some extent Seven are really strong characters that compare to those on any other series. But they also wrecked the Borg as an antagonist, and the characters mostly remained as stagnant as the long-term storylines (to the extent that they existed) did. And Neelix. :ack:



I never really got into Enterprise. It was pretty stale and pretty uninspired. Somehow Stargate: SG1 at the time felt like a much fresher version of "space exploration" and tended to be a lot more fun. There are still a lot of episodes I haven't seen. The last two seasons were definitely better, but it was too little too late and the finale was *awful*.



I've seen most of TOS but apart from a few episodes that really stand the test of time it works better as kitsch. Still kinda fun, and I really enjoy most of the original six movies (well two-thirds of them anyway...).



My movie ranking:


Wrath of Khan


Voyage Home


Undiscovered Country


Search for Spock


First Contact


Generations




Insurrection is okay but nothing all that remarkable. Nemesis is abysmal. The Motion Picture is slow and talky and kinda interesting, but very unengaging. Reminds me of Lynch's Dune without the weirdo acting and interior monologues. The Final Frontier isn't necessarily that bad, but it's hurt badly by a shoestring budget and a fairly confused plot. You can see what they were going for but it never comes together.



As for the Abrahms movies, I liked the first one when I saw it, but it doesn't fare well on repeat viewings. Too superficial, too much bad plotting and nonsensical premises (so, really, how does Kirk go from cadet to captain within the space of a movie?). Into Darkness is a lazily plotted and entirely inferior version of Wrath of Khan. The worst part is the pointless rehashing of Spock's sacrifice. Kirk's "dying" and magical resurrection with magic Sherlock Khan blood is laughable and without any emotional resonance. It's true enough that we get Spock back in Star Trek III, but only at the very high cost of Kirk's son's life and the Enterprise itself. These new movies lack any kind of thematic resonance. Star Trek has always been about "ideas" and what we get in the Abrahms movies is mediocre writing and lens flares.

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Another great thing about Star Trek, especially TOS version, is it's ability to be light-hearted almost comedy and then turn around and go in a different direction with poignant in dramatic.



I love how the best episodes in TOS for most people are either "City on the Edge of Forever" or "The Trouble With Tribbles" and how that's echoed in TOS movies with "Wrath of Kahn" and "The Voyage Home".



Trek is my go to series for "What if" stories that's not an anthology. Time travel, multiple dimensions, strange metamorphoses, thought experiments, Trek will/would explore any of these concepts with the same characters and crew. Some sci-fi series. are strictly about traveling through space, some only do time travel, etc. Which is fine and great. I don't want to see time travel in Star Wars, but in Trek it's set up where anything can go.



I also like the optimism. That in the future humans will be better. Again, I don't always like that in every Sci-Fi show and always want that, far from that, but in Trek I do like it. But I think it's best when it throws every circumstance it can into challenging all those beliefs, even if that's not what Roddenberry wanted it to be, he wanted humankind to never be wrong and absolute in their perfectness, but I always thought it was at it's best when it pushed how far the ideals could hold until they bent or broke and the ramifications of that.


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As for the Abrahms movies, I liked the first one when I saw it, but it doesn't fare well on repeat viewings. Too superficial, too much bad plotting and nonsensical premises (so, really, how does Kirk go from cadet to captain within the space of a movie?). Into Darkness is a lazily plotted and entirely inferior version of Wrath of Khan. The worst part is the pointless rehashing of Spock's sacrifice. Kirk's "dying" and magical resurrection with magic Sherlock Khan blood is laughable and without any emotional resonance. It's true enough that we get Spock back in Star Trek III, but only at the very high cost of Kirk's son's life and the Enterprise itself. These new movies lack any kind of thematic resonance. Star Trek has always been about "ideas" and what we get in the Abrahms movies is mediocre writing and lens flares.

Yeh, I didn't like how they were all rushed onto the Enterprise like that. I was expecting a trilogy and at the end of three movies he's the captain.

The most thing I hated was the casual disregard of canon, star trek geeks and Roddenberry philosophy in general.

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One day I had too much time on my hands (I really miss those days), and there was nothing else on, so I gave TNG a try and got hooked. Now it has become my default or something to have in the background show. Once I got interested in Star Trek, I heard so many great things about DS9 that I had to give it a try, and I fell in love with it.


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I'm pretty sure I grew up watching TOS movies. There has never been a time when I didn't know, by heart, most of Star Trek II and IV. Star Trek VI was the first Trek movie I saw in theaters and before that I watched a smattering of the episodes in syndication. I think I got really into Trek somewhere around season 4 or 5 of TNG, as in, I would watch it fairly regularly. I remember seeing the finale ("All Good Things...") when it first aired and the horrible, interminable waits between the season finale cliffhangers and resolutions of those final seasons. In between, I managed to catch a bunch of the older episodes in syndication.



I remember being really excited when DS9 first premiered and watching it with my parents. Opening the show with the Battle of Wolf 359 was epic to my younger self (even if it was fairly small scale) and the increased focus on the Cardassians made them one of my favorite alien races in the series. The slow build up of the Dominion, the big reveal of the Founders, the focus on the Bajorans and the Cardassians, and the seedier environs of DS9, this wasn't just another TNG, oh no. Apparently unlike some other fans, I liked DS9 from the beginning, but it took a while before I liked it more than TNG. I remember how hyped the season four episode, "The Way of the Warrior," was before it premiered. Worf was back! Some bad shit was going down with the Klingons! The local station that was showing DS9 premiered the episode on a Saturday afternoon in, like one two-hour block. After that, I was invested and I watched regularly up until the very last season or two when, I think, the local channel changed its time slot and I was only able to watch irregularly. I only managed to see those episodes when I bought the DVD sets a few years back, and even to this day, they hold up well.



Voyager I also remember getting a pretty big hype treatment before it came out. I watched the pilot when it premiered and I liked it. I watched for a few years and I liked it. I mean, yeah, Voyager had some weak stuff, but so too did TNG and I really liked TNG, but, when I think back on Voyager now, I think what it lacked were the big moments or the really great episodes that just stand out above the others, yah know the "Yesterday's Enterprise," "The Inner Light" or "Duet" type episodes. I think I stopped watching Voyager around season 5 I think? Not out of some active choice, but I simply lost interest. To this day, I still haven't seen the end of the series.



Enterprise I haven't seen much of. I saw two random episodes on television once and both were so fucking horrible and shitty that I had no desire to watch any more of the show.



The reboot movies are okay. Each one is big, dumb, and loud, but kinda fun with a good cast and some decent acting. Full of action and flashy but lacking in substance. Like a really sugary piece of gum, those first few moments are really intense, but the flavor doesn't last. I have no desire to watch either of those movies again regardless of how fun they may have been.



My rankings:


DS9


TNG


TOS


Voyager


...


Enterprise I can't really rank having only seen two episodes



Wrath of Khan


The Undiscovered Country


Voyage Home


Search For Spock


First Contact


The rest of them


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I've been watching the animated series recently; it's surprisingly good. The animation can be a bit lacking (eg using black silhouettes of the crew in long shots), but the background art is often quite attractive. And the faster pace gives it an advantage over the live action TOS episodes, many of which can drag a bit. It would be nice to see it redone with better quality animation, in the same spirit as the new CGI effects for the HD remastering of live action TOS. Also, a new spinoff series starring Captain M'ress.



DS9 is of course the best Trek series, and the JJ movies are abominations.


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Wow, I am surprised that so many others here are on the DS9 ship. I Love all Star Trek ( even ST:E, at least the last 2 seasons -minus the final ep) but so much of DS9 more of the best parts of ST, while not being tied down by all the rules other ST were stuck with.



JJ has done a good job with almost everything, and has a really great cast, but I wish they would do something completely new/different from the ST:TOS and movies. Hell they could bring in the Borg a 100 years earlier, or redo/reimagine the Mirror/Alt Universe in a completely different way.


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~snip~

Your history with Trek sounds almost identical to mine except for the part about conventions (never had any of them close to where I lived) and Voyager (on the whole I liked it more than you did). The episode that got me back into TNG after that horrid start was the BoBW cliffhanger, which I just happened to catch one afternoon at random.

Since everyone else is doing this - my rankings:

Series:

DS9

TNG

TOS

Voyager

Enterprise

Movies:

Wrath of Khan

Voyage Home

Search for Spock

First Contact

The Undiscovered Country

Star Trek (Abrams)

Generations

The Motion Picture

Into Darkness

Insurrection

Nemesis

The Final Frontier (honestly one of the shittiest things I've ever tried to watch. The fact that it was Trek added insult to injury)

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I've always been an avid Star Trek fan. I grew up on the TNG, DS9 and Voyager pretty much. While certainly the franchise has had it's ups and downs, it still never fails to entertain me even to this day. Without a doubt DS9 is my favorite series. It pretty much broke the trope of boldly going to meet a new alien of the week and actually explored the cultures, characters and stories of the established races. While other shows may have had better characters, DS9 used theirs to their fullest potential to tell some awesome stories and the stationary setting allowed for an excellent supporting cast.



So without further adieu, my list:



Series


1) DS9


2) TNG


3) VOY


4) TOS


5) ENT



Movies


1) Wrath of Kahn


2) Voyage Home


3) Undiscovered Country


4) First Contact


5) Search for Spock


6) Generations


7) Insurrection


8) Star Trek(09)


9) Nemesis


10) The Motion Picture


11) The Final Frontier


12) Into Darkness


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