Star Trek: Discovery

Both are great. Tonally they are very different.

Ds9 is a long war story and there ain't much war in the first two seasons. TNG is kinda like a collection of fables with occasional fan-service episodes thrown in. Edit: ToS is also great, it's basically a space western until the tag end where it gets weird and much too socially aware for its own good. Starts to get preachy rather than entertaining.

Voyager, meh. It tried to be an ensemble and it did have a couple of good characters. But it had more horrible ones. Enterprise didn't last long enough to get interesting, they got bogged down in comic book time travel retardation and shitcanned as they were starting to claw their way out of it.


The first season of Ds9 felt like they were trying to figure out how to "do" star trek from a stationary location. They have a lot of random shit coming through the wormhole for TNGesque fable episodes before they find their stride. They do figure it out

In the Pale Moonlight. Best star trek episode ever bar none.

skalls_sl said:

In the Pale Moonlight. Best star trek episode ever bar none.

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TNG - The Inner Light and DS9 - The Visitor would like to have a word with you.

Noahx_sl said:

About to end TNG.. just a few more eps left. We are pretty sad. Seems people recommend DS9 so we might give it a shot. Not having the TNG cast (Picard, Riker, Data) is going to kill me a little inside.

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Do give it a shot - but as others have said, it starts off rough. I absolutely hated the show until somewhere in the 2nd season, and beyond that it's just great. Really pleased that I decided to stick it out, and currently most of the way through re-watching the series now.

The cast differences took a bit of getting used to, but like the show in general, they came into their own and I started enjoying them more and more. As a bonus, you do get O'brien from the get-go (though I'd say his character becomes more enjoyable when they get into the buddy stuff with him and Bashir), and Worf joins the cast in season 4 (after TNG finished airing). Quark's antics also proved to be a particular highlight.

Noahx_sl said:

About to end TNG.. just a few more eps left. We are pretty sad. Seems people recommend DS9 so we might give it a shot. Not having the TNG cast (Picard, Riker, Data) is going to kill me a little inside.

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as other have said, first 2 seasons are just there to know the characters and prepare the setting for the Dominion war. You will notice hints of the coming war the closer you get to season 3

after that the train never stops

There has been a growing sentiment for DS9, I daresay it may be overtaking TNG in popularity. I am not sure that I can add much more than I have already said about the show other than the tension between Picard and Sisko in the first episode is golden and you will learn to cherish Jeffrey Combs as a Star Trek MVP (Weyoun, Brunt, Commander Schran[Enterprise] ). The ever shifting alliances, political and religious intrigue and the absolute dickery of Gul Dukat keep me coming back every few months.

Pay special attention to Morn, every line he speaks is pure gold. You will be quoting him endlessly.

Io9

If you don't have Netflix Hulu is running every episode of Star Trek for free in celebration of Shatner's 82nd birthday.

IRS paid $60k for a Star Trek themed training video

DS9 is the most satisfying series to re-watch, but TNG gets the most love and really it was the first good TV Trek, minus most of the first season when they were retreading TOS stories and figuring out the Ferengi are awful main villains. Without the holy trilogy of movies (II,III, IV) I wouldn't give a shit about TOS.

I love the Frighteners but I have not seen it since I started to recognize Combs, I have not figured out who he was in that. I expect Arkk to jump in this conversation with something about Re-Animator and I'm going to piss in his cornflakes and post this first.

TNG/DS9 fun fact, Quark was one of the first 3 Ferengi to appear in TNG (as a different Ferengi), they weren't nearly as charming in their first iteration.

How Roddenberry thought the Ferengi were going to be good enough to be the main villains, especially after giving them lasso weapons or something equally as retarded we'll never know.

Thank god he did though and especially that they bombed as hard as they did as villains because DS9 wouldn't have been the same without Quark & co.

does the first Ferengi on the right look at all familiar?

The Inner Light was spectacular and gave us the flute medley and was one of the rare episodes that got callbacks in later stories (TNG not having a continuous drama but being more episodic in nature rarely was self referential as events in each episode rarely influenced later stories)

The Visitor a.k.a. one of 2 episodes where I gave a damn about Jake. The other being the one where he and Nog are bartering for the Baseball card.

Neither holds a candle to In the Pale Moonlight. It's a down and dirty episode in which morals get compromised and it's Garak heavy which is always a pleasant bonus. Shit gets out of hand quickly and Sisko has to live with the consequences of what he set in motion because his deception changed the course of the war and to relieve the burden on his conscious would mean war with the Romulans. Garak gets a rare moment of real pleasure from corrupting the ideals of Starfleet.

I dunno what to say. I recently re-watched the final season of DS9, and I'm not re-watching the final season of TNG. I've always primarily been a TNG fan, but I think this time around I found myself enjoying DS9 more.

Crazy.

Please start drawing the parallels, I am as tired of this old song as I am of the parallels drawn between Firefly and Outlaw star. The similarities are tangential and superficial at best. Babylon 5 was a fantastic show in it's own right, they did an excellent job of setting up a huge story and making it work but DS9 and Bab 5 have very little in common that is not superficial, the focus on a space station rather than a ship, the focus on the religious, and the presentation as an ongoing drama over the standard format episodic content of the previous tv series.

The content and motivations in each of the shows are different enough that they can't be reduced to DS9 ripped off Bab 5. DS9 made their stories work within a history and Bab 5 (very impressively) created a whole new fiction for their story, a fiction good enough we would not see it's likes again until the Mass Effect universe was created. Mass Effect being far more derivative of Bab 5 than DS9 was.