Thursday, July 11, 2019

Ranking the Star Trek Series ......

To each his own, I've tried to accept Star Trek: Discovery to the extent that "some" fans like the show, but to me it is a hot mess that needed to percolate far longer before launching. There has been a single aspect of this series that worked well for me and that was Anson Mount as Captain Pike and the TOS-inspired elements related to his portrayal. I knew that he would not be an ongoing part of the Discovery's voyage and apparently there was some abrasion with the actor himself on set, but still Pike made the show worthwhile. A condemnation of the mostly warped parts of a show that had a ton of money poured into it and then wasted it all in their genuinely out of left field style of lore mangling.

The various showrunners did not have to follow everything by rote that had come before, but a lead character as a mutineer who caused a war, getting her ship destroyed and her commanding officer killed in the process and who was another previously undisclosed sibling of a major franchise character was too, too much to absorb. Adding insult to injury at the close of the inaugural season the Federation magically chose to forgive all of that?? Seriously WTF???

However in all fairness I must credit Discovery for still causing me fits of raucous laughter over that! In fact CBS All Access is hardly alone in opting to spin something as a prequel that avoids actually using Captain Pike and his storied tenure aboard Enterprise as the basis of a series, given the earlier Enterprise show on Fox (or was it UPN)?

Well for shits and giggles, here is my ranking of the various Trek shows based upon my own preferences and nothing else. In first place The Original Series for setting such a high bar for those that followed, in second Deep Space Nine and third Voyager, each for daring to boldly chart their own courses often breaking with the in-house perfection mandated by Gene Roddenberry for often too bland The Next Generation (which is why I rank it only fourth place. Followed in fifth place by the unfairly maligned Enterprise which was not as terrible as it has been made out and yet still shares some tendencies with my last place choice. The Filmation animated Star Trek Series ranks a notch higher than my bottom dweller, Discovery for at least featuring original series actors reprising their classic roles.

In fact site unseen, I would rank the upcoming Picard better than Discovery too! For all the resources thrown into CBS All Access Discovery it remains to me a mystery why it even occurred in the first place and I look forward to its eventual passing.

1 comment:

-> Ray said...

Our rankings are similar, except I would reverse TNG and VOY, and the animated series would leapfrog into third place.