Regular readers of this page are familiar with how my love
of Horror films began with William Castle’s 13 Ghosts, watching it with
my older sister at the age of five or six.
They know that I stood on line to see the most frightening film I had
ever seen, Jaws, in my eleventh
summer. I saw Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope, when it was simply a little
Sci-Fi adventure called Star Wars. I collected comic books and monster
mags. I built model kits. In short,
I was Geek when Geekdom wasn’t cool.
But my first love, the franchise that made me a nerd long
before it was recognized as a franchise, was Star Trek. My love of the
series began when I saw my first episode, the original series episode Miri,
when it had its initial broadcast on the 27th of October, 1966. I was three month shy of being three years
old, but I can clearly remember being mesmerized by the show, by the children
that figured prominently in that episode, by the bold colors of the uniforms,
and by the starship Enterprise herself, though it would be some time before I
understood that the Enterprise was a primary reason for my love of Star Trek. Even at that early age, I was deeply into
astronauts and all things Space-related—not unusual for children of the ‘60s. It was an easy transition from Mercury and
Gemini to Starfleet.
I’m also inordinately fond of lists. Since childhood, I’ve had a need to sort,
categorize, alphabetize, and itemize all sorts of information. From my favorite Werewolf movies to my top
ten songs of 1976 (sorry, but Muskrat Love didn’t make the cut), I made
a list to memorialize it. It should come
as no surprise, then, that I had lists that ranked my favorite Star Trek
episodes, lists that changed as my tastes grew and matured. By the 1990s, those lists had expanded to
include several movies, as well as new Star Trek series. To be sure not all of these were good, but
all were Trek, and were to varying degrees entertaining. Recently, we were introduced to the Kelvin
timeline, which launched a new Kirk and Spock on an ongoing mission to where no
one needed to go, and the streaming service Paramount+ has been churning out
new Star Trek programming with the regularity of tribbles on Viagra. The result has been nearly 900 hours of Trek,
from the superb to the nonsensical.
The following is the Unimonster’s Top Ten Treks, across all
series and movies, from The Cage to Hegemony, 1965 to 2023. Like all such lists, it is highly subjective,
based on my personal opinion, and is unlikely to match anyone else’s
perfectly. Still, I think most of my
entries would appear on the lists of most serious Trekkers (yes, I prefer the
old-school distinction between Trekkies and Trekkers), and are
some of the best examples of the universe that Gene Roddenberry created nearly
sixty years ago, examples of why this little Sci-Fi show, this “‘Wagon Train’
to the Stars”, has become such a phenomenon.
Without further ado, let’s countdown my Top Ten Treks.
10)
“The Last Generation,” Star Trek: Picard,
Season 3, Episode 10—I must admit, I have not been a fan of Paramount’s efforts
to continue the
Star Trek mythos.
I find their series to be too dark, too woke, and too far removed from
Roddenberry’s vision of what
Star Trek should be.
Stylistically, they’re poorly designed and
executed, and technically, the storylines are weak and uninteresting.
I find
Discovery to be
Star Trek’s
worst series, easily surpassing the previous bottom-dweller,
Voyager.
And
Picard isn’t much better.
The entire series plods along, with little
rhyme or reason, until this, the series’ final episode.
With the Borg having assimilated all of
Starfleet, it falls upon Admiral Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D to
come to Earth’s rescue once again, aboard the rebuilt and curated NCC-1701-D,
liberated from the Starfleet Museum.
This was the ending that
Star Trek: The Next Generation deserved thirty
years ago, and all I can say is better late than never.
This episode reminded me that, when it was
good,
TNG was very good, and when it was at its best, it was among the
best of
Star Trek.
This episode
was, for me at least, among the best of
Star Trek.
9)
“The Ultimate Computer,” Star
Trek: The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 24—I always loved the
episodes that served to expand upon the fact that the crew of the Enterprise, or
Deep Space Nine, or Voyager, did not exist in a vacuum; they were part of a
much larger organization, a Starfleet, tasked with both the exploration of Space,
and the defense of the United Federation of Planets.
I loved to see our crew interact with the
rest of the Fleet, whether casually or in times of crisis.
To see not one, but four
Constitution-class
starships sharing the screen with the Enterprise was guaranteed to make me
happy from the first time I saw it.
As I
grew older, however, it was the implication in the aftermath of the episode’s
events that fueled my imagination.
How had
Starfleet explained the loss of one starship, damage to three others, and the
deaths of nearly five hundred officers and men?
Had they told the truth?
Had they covered it up?
It’s the unanswered questions that guaranteed
this episode a place on this list.
8) “
Relics,”
Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season
6, Episode 4—I’m a sucker for nostalgia, even if it’s just blatant fan service.
When Godzilla looked with disdain at his
Americanized ‘cousin’ Zilla, in 2004’s
Godzilla: Final Wars, we who were
long time fans knew exactly what was going to happen—Zilla was in for an epic
asskicking.
When Thor’s hammer flew into
Cap’s raised fist, even Marvel Comics’ biggest detractor—your very own
Unimonster—had to fight the urge to stand up and cheer in the theater.
And when Captain Montgomery Scott, Starfleet,
Retired, recently rescued from the transporter pattern buffer of the USS
Jenolen after seventy-five years, asks the Enterprise holodeck to recreate the
bridge of NCC-1701, “—no bloody -A, -B, -C, or -D,” well, it nearly brought
tears to my eyes.
7) Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
, 1982—On the whole,
the big screen hasn’t been generous to the
Star Trek Universe.
Fans are well aware of the ‘Odd Movie Curse’,
how those films in the series that are odd-numbered have been, to put it
kindly, underwhelming.
However, even
those films that are generally regarded as good have left many fans
dissatisfied, plagued with continuity errors, non-canonical references, and
storylines that were forgotten as soon as the end credits rolled.
The Wrath of Khan managed to avoid
most (though not all) of these pitfalls, and gave fans a good script, great
action, and an emotionally compelling finale.
That it is the best Star Trek film earns it a place on this list.
That it’s not better than it is keeps it from
ranking higher.
6) “The Expanse,” Star Trek: Enterprise, Season
2, Episode 26—Since The Next Generation, there’s been something of a
tradition that Star Trek series need a season or two (or three) to grow
into their potential, to really hit their stride. With TNG, it happened with The Best
of Both Worlds, parts 1 & 2. With
Deep Space Nine, it was the second season episode The Wire. With Voyager—well, when it happens I’ll
let you know. With Star Trek:
Enterprise, though it got off to a faster start than the previous franchise
entries, at least in my opinion, it still took some time to get up to speed. By the end of the second season, however, the
show was beginning to jell. The cast was
becoming comfortable with their characters, the storylines were improved over
the first season, and the series was finding its place in the Star Trek
Universe. With The Expanse, Enterprise
finally had an enemy worthy of the name, in the form of the Xindi, and a continuing
plot that would last throughout the third season.
5) “
Little Green Men,”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,
Season 4, Episode 8—One of Star Trek’s strengths was its ability to examine the
human condition from the outside, by the use of an alien, non-human member of
the crew.
Spock was the outsider in
The
Original Series, as Data was in
The Next Generation.
For
Deep Space Nine, that role was
filled by Quark, the Ferengi owner of a bar on the station’s Promenade, his
brother Rom, and nephew Nog.
In this
episode, our intrepid band of Ferengi wind up back in time, becoming the aliens
who crash-landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
This episode shows off the lighter side of
Star
Trek, something that has always been a part of the various series and
movies, and it’s done very well here.
Episodes
such as this show that, even in a series that was the darkest of
Star Trek,
at least until the Paramount+ era, moments of levity could be very refreshing.
4) “
Yesterday’s Enterprise,”
Star Trek: The Next
Generation, Season 3, Episode 15—As anyone familiar with the Department of
Temporal Investigations can attest, messing with the timeline can have serious
consequences, perhaps none worse than when the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-C was
pulled into a temporal rift, just as it was fighting to defend the Klingon
colony of Narendra III, under attack from four Romulan warbirds.
When it arrived in the time of the Enterprise-D
twenty-two years later, heavily damaged with most of her crew dead or wounded, the
timeline had changed.
The Enterprise-D is
a ship at war, a decades-long war with the Klingon Empire—a war the Federation is
losing.
Guinan believes that the
Enterprise-C is the cause of the war, or rather her disappearance from 2344 caused
the war.
To restore the timeline,
Enterprise-C must return to her hopeless battle with the Romulans, in the hope
that her certain destruction in aid of a Klingon outpost will foster respect
and trust in the Klingons, leading to a peace that will negate twenty years of
history.
In my opinion, this episode marked
the first time that
TNG became more than just a sequel to
The
Original Series, and revealed the greatness it could achieve when it tried.
3) “Favor the Bold / Sacrifice of
Angels,” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 6, Episode 5-6—Okay,
maybe I’m cheating a bit by picking two episodes with one choice, but it is a
two-parter, and it’s impossible to enjoy one without the other—at least, in
this Unimonster’s opinion. The Dominion War
was the defining arc of DS9’s final three seasons, and was the first
time we truly saw full-scale warfare in the Star Trek Universe. Not ship vs. ship, not small-scale
engagements, but massive fleets meeting each other in pitched battles. We only saw the aftermath of the Battle at
Wolf 359, and while the Battle of Sector 001 certainly qualifies as a major
engagement, it, like Wolf 359, was against a single Borg cube. Never before, or since, has Star Trek
taken us closer to the Federation’s destruction. That’s what made DS9 so special, and
why I believe it to be the best Star Trek series of them all.
2) “Balance of Terror,” Star Trek: The Original
Series, Season 1, Episode 15—As one might quite easily surmise from the
previous entries to this list, I love action, and this allegory on Cold War brinksmanship
definitely qualifies on that score. It
was based on Dick Powell’s popular 1957 movie The Enemy Below, which
featured Robert Mitchum and Curd Jürgens as the
commander of a US Navy Destroyer Escort and his counterpart, the commander of
the Nazi U-Boat he’s hunting. The
episode serves to introduce the Romulans to the Star Trek universe, with
the cloaked Romulan Bird-of-Prey serving as an analog for the German Submarine,
and Mark Lenard, who would soon be brought back for the far more enduring role
of Sarek, Spock’s father, as the Romulan commander. Like Jürgens’ Kapitän zur See von Stolberg,
he is a man who differs with his government’s policies and plans for conquest,
and like von Stolberg, he is too dedicated and professional to let his personal
feelings interfere with the performance of his duties. The result is one of the most memorable episodes
of Star Trek, and my favorite Original Series episode.
1) “
In the Pale Moonlight,”
Star Trek: Deep Space
Nine, Season 6, Episode 19—
Star Trek has frequently been criticized
for many reasons, some valid, many not so much.
However, when
Star Trek’s best writers put their minds to the
task, they could create greatness, with stories that helped to define the
series for the fans, and explored the meaning of humanity in the future.
Episodes such as
TOS’
City on the
Edge of Forever,
TNG’s
The Measure of a Man, Family, and
The
Inner Light, and DS9’s
Far Beyond the Stars had already established the
benchmark for quality in
Star Trek, though in my opinion none could
compare to this, the finest forty-odd minutes of
Trek that I have yet to
see.
Exploring themes of just how far
one should be willing to go to win a war that must be won, and whether one’s
personal sense of honor is a worthwhile sacrifice to that cause, the episode
focuses on Sisko’s efforts to bring the Romulans into the war on the side of
the Federation and its Klingon allies.
He
turns to Garak, a former operative in the Obsidian Order, the Cardassian
Intelligence service, to help him accomplish that task.
Garak’s knowledge of covert operations, as
well as the inner workings of the Cardassian government, would prove invaluable
to Sisko’s mission.
However, he soon
realizes that the price of success might be a personal one.
The story is told to the viewer in the form
of flashbacks, as Sisko speaks directly to us, breaking the fourth wall as he
records a private log entry.
Though the plot
is fascinating, it’s the performances of Avery Brooks and Andrew Robinson that
really sell this episode.
In all of
Star
Trek, I find it to be incomparable.
I find it to be the best of
Star Trek.
So here it is. A
lifetime love of Star Trek condensed to its ten best examples—at least, in my
opinion. Yours may differ, and that’s fine—but
unless you’ve been watching it longer than fifty-seven years, don’t tell me I’m
wrong. Oh, and … Live long and prosper.
