Ranking Star Trek Series

I already ranked Star Wars, so why not rank Trek too?  This will just focus on Trek TV series.  Discovery and Picard won't be included because I only saw the first episode of each.  On some distant day if I see them in their entirety then I might have to rejigger the list.

6.  Enterprise:  My late father and late sister and not-late sister wouldn't agree but I checked out of this series on UPN/CW after about two seasons.  I like Scott Bakula, but the whole prequel thing just never did much for me.  Like most people I didn't really care for that final episode either.

5.  The Animated Series:  It's really not as bad as you might think.  The animation sucks, but the stories are actually the same quality (if not sometimes better) than the original series.  Probably because many of the episodes were written by the same people, including Walter Koening, who doesn't appear in the series.  I mean since it was animated, why not have an actual alien-looking alien on the bridge crew?  And did you ever realize James Doohan had so much vocal range?  He was like the Frank Welker of that series.

4.  Voyager:  I never really liked this whole Lost in Space concept.  Most of the time it wasn't very realistic that a lone Federation starship could somehow survive in a different corner of space.  And really they rarely seemed to have stories about the real issues such a crew would face, like keeping it running.  Occasionally I guess they did that, but it felt kinda silly that all these Maquis rebels woulde agree to join the crew and wear uniforms and all that crap.  Anyway, I liked The Doctor and obviously Jeri Ryan was hot, but in the final years the show seemed to mostly revolve around them.  Other than Janeway, most of the other characters would only get one token episode a year.  And like any show of this type, you knew they'd never really get home until the show was cancelled.

3.  Original Series:  Of course this was what introduced the world to Trek and all those classic characters we know and love, but some parts of it have not aged all that well.  The effects, the sets, the smooth-faced Klingons are all pretty lame-looking now.  While the series was vocally anti-racist, anti-sexist...not so much.  I mean one of the final episodes was all about how women were too emotional to be captains.  For every great "City on the Edge of Forever" there were probably two clunkers, though perhaps none clunkier than "Spock's Brain."

2.  Next Generation:  At times this series was brilliant, and at others...not so much.  Seasons 1-2 the show was still finding its legs.  Seasons 3-5 are really good but it starts going downhill in Season 6.  Season 7 was far more misses than hits as it was really running out of steam.  Space might be infinite (or close enough) but decent stories are not.  Still, there were so many great episodes like "Best of Both Worlds" and some really well done smaller episodes.  Picard was a different kind of captain than Kirk, but in my universe there's room for both.  Really more than the Original Series, this series was able to develop all of its characters, even Wesley Crusher (unfortunately).  Probably because the syndication model allowed it to last longer than 79 episodes.

1.  Deep Space Nine:  Like TNG, the first couple of seasons of this the show was finding its legs, but starting in Season 3 it really started hitting on all cylinders with the introduction of the Dominion and then the war between them.  More than any other Trek series, DS9 let its characters grow and change over time.  Some like Dax and Odo literally changed when they replaced Terry Farrell in the final season and that brief period where Odo became solid.  Adding Worf in Season 4 at first seemed like a stunt, but he wound up meshing really well, even if I wasn't a fan of the Beauty and the Beast thing with Dax.  (I think mostly because I was jealous of him).  Sisko was kind of the best of both Picard and Kirk in that he could be diplomatic and reasonable, but when the time came to bring the whup ass, he was more than capable of that too.  Really there were no weak characters in that whole cast.  It's hard to even pick a favorite episode because there were so many good ones.

There you go, that's my list.  Wednesday we do the movies!