Top Ten Treks

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 27^th 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.