Aha! I knew there had to be a Trek comparison thread.

I've noticed in the episode threads steady wishes for dialog tweaks. Sometimes just a quick mention in passing (like about the fate of Hayes or Cutler), sometimes a small addition to help clarify an issue (see the current Trip-has-to-write-Taylor's-parents discussion in The Forgotten). So now I'm wondering, has this always been a problem? I guess the TNG episodes were often stand alones so it likely wasn't there. And frankly, I don't remember much of my faithful viewing of every episode of Voyager. So I'm going to guess that DS9 was the master of this kind of dialog. Just last night, in Dramatis Personae, Jadzia told O'Brien that Keiko safely landed on Bajor. He then remarked that he wouldn't want to be the one to take 11 kids on a fieldtrip. In those 2 lines of total throw-away conversation, we knew that Keiko, Molly, Jake, and Nog were all off the station and wouldn't be there to notice the increasingly odd behavior of the Ops staff. Simple. Effective.

Plus a fun look into non-bridge/ops life which I appreciated. I enjoy knowing more about what the characters were doing on their off hours.

I wish they would do this more in Enterprise. It's one of the things I loved about TNG. Maybe because I found Picards many diverse interests pretty, darn...well, interesting. I just can't worked up over [*look of indigestion*] water polo. We don't get those brief glimpses into a personal life on Enterprise. And if we do, it's movie night. Oh, that's illuminating...

I think that is a major flaw of Enterprise. You don't need an entire episode to show a friendship. It's those simple, brief lines that add so much.

I loved that we got to just hang out with the crew of DS9. We saw or heard about their favorite holodeck programs, went to their dinner parties, spent a lot of time at Quark's just talking... Even during the war, those little moments remained. I know Enterprise has less time per episode but I don't think it would take up that much to give the characters a little more personality.

I whole-heartedly agree akg. I'd really like to care about Hoshi or May-whatnot but I just don't – because I don’t know them.

I think that part of the problem with the dialog tweaks is that the writers are simply not paying attention to details. The show has become so focused on blowing things up that the nifty personal details seem to have wandered off to somewhere and managed to get lost.

Why can't TPTB realize that DS9 did plenty of blowing up of stuff and we still got to know those characters intimately? I think even better than those on TNG. Like frenchtoast, I found Picard's outside interests to be great ones, but I still feel like I know more about Quark or even Garek than Picard. Yet the amount I know about Picard compared to, say, Reed is so vastly superior it seems unfair to make the comparison at all.

One thing I noticed last year is that Enterprise was abusing the in media res beginning. We'd come in to the episode, and they've already detected the blah-dity blah that's going to be the focus of the episode. They then fill the episode with scenes that are boring as they drew to the inevitable conclusion.

Compared to TNG or DS9, where many episodes started with the crew engaging in their hobbies, totally unaware of the week's plot about to unfold. There's a bunch of character stuff right there. I know we don't need to see the captain summoned to the bridge, and have someone report what they found on sensors, but the character stuff that preceeded it was always interesting.

I think someone noticed that some of the best episodes started in media res, and decided every episode could be improved by adding such a beginning.

This year, it's a little better. Even an in media res opening isn't so out of the blue, because it usually follows the season's continuity. And tacked-on scenes in the middle usually advance some character continuity.

This is a tough year for adding hobbies, and I don't mind that the characters are focused on "all work, all the time". This year. Next year it might bug again.

I agree Cleo. In fact, I would welcome (if we get another season) less of the unholy tension in the plot and more about truly getting to know the characters. I feel that after three seasons we still don't really know them. If they had done a better job with that in the first few seasons, it would have made observing these characters deal with the current situation much more intriguing and moving.

Do they even have a rec room per se? They have the mess and the gym, sure, but where's the pool table?

Or the Bowling alley - or the pool. Those are places you don't want to be in when the gravity suddenly goes offline.

There was a brief discussion about funny scenes from TNG and it got me thinking that TNG did humor pretty well. I never really faithfully watched DS9 or Voyager, but the episodes that I did catch, the crew seemed comfortable enough to have at least some banter. ENT really suffers from a lack of a sense of humor. Or am I just crazy?

Oh, just remembered fake T'Pol in Doctors Orders. That was funny and it added to the episode. Still, I think the other incarnations of Trek were more comfortable including small bits of humor.

I don't think that ENT does humour badly - Unexpected is still one of the single funniest Trek episodes. I just think that they use humour differently in a darker and more driven context (the 'Try to blow yourself up, I'll wait' line from Chosen Realm is a good example).

DS9 did "joke" episodes which were a necessary reprieve from the dark and serious story arcs. Voyager also had joke episodes, but they were usually unintentionally funny. Warp 10, huh?

In the first two seasons, ENT's attempts at humor usually involved T'Pol or Vulcans. In the third season, when the story suddenly became much darker, I think TPTB were frantically trying to come up with an interesting story and forgot about the humor along the way.

Frenchtoast, I think you're right about the comfort level of the crew. In all three seasons of ENT, the focus has been on Archer, T'Pol and Trip. We haven't gotten a chance to see the other crew members become comfortable with each other.

DS9 was also good at having the A story be intense and the B story be fun and kind of silly. Having just watched Treachery, Faith, and the Great River, obviously I find that to be a good example.

But I do agree with Silja that Enterprise isn't entirely lacking in humor attempts. They are just different from what we've seen before.

That does seem to be the case. There are bits of somewhat darker humor, but it doesn't seem to be the gentle ribbing that we saw on TNG and I miss that.

This stemmed from remembering Q and Picard in the episode Tapestry. There were some really funny lines and scenes in that epi which added to the episode. And thinking back to ENT, I couldn't really find that level of humor. And people also mentioned Rascals and Troi being drunk in FC. These types of scenes really improved the entire episode (or, movie as the case may be).

My memory just needed to jogged a little. I just remembered Malcolm asking Maj. Hayes if he thought they were dismissed after Quantum chewed them out for serving Corned Beef Slash. It's there, it's just buried under the furrowing.

Drunk!Troi is one of my favorite Trek moments of all time.

So what is the funniest episode of all the series'? I'm sure I'll change my mind 50 times after reading all ya'lls votes but I'll start it out with Take Me Out to the Holosuite. Between Miles infusing his gum with Scotch and all of Worf's lines, I can't make it through without hitting pause so I can laugh my ass off.

We will destroy them.

Death to the opposition.

Find him and kill him.

I guess it just depends on your sense of humor. I think Enterprise has a lot of humorous moments. Besides the eps already mentioned, I also found Shuttlepod One hysterical. The "romantic" interaction between Trip and T'Pol has also been played comedically.

For me, Voyager is the most humorless Trek. Neelix was supposed to be funny but usually he just made me cringe.

I think DS9 was the most consistently funny in that stuff that was meant to be funny actually was. I think it's because DS9's characters were so well developed that the humor came naturally out of the characters and didn't have to necessarily rely on putting characters in specifically humourous situations (though they were good at that too).

My favorite funny Treks are:
TOS: "Trouble with Tribbles"
TNG: Robin Hood ep -- Worf: I am NOT a merry man! That still cracks me up.
DS9: Tie between the ball game ep and "Trial and Tribbleations"
VOY: Um... none stand out.
ENT: "Unexpected" and "Shuttlepod One"

But he was Scotty. SCOTTY. I mean he wrote probably half the engineering manuals that Geordi wrote. Not to mention setting the standard for Chief Engineer. Sure Scotty was probably getting in the way, but damn. Show some respect for the guy who had been there, done that, and made your present day job 100% easier by doing it first.

This, I think, says it all. Geordi had a job to do. If he didn't finish, what was he going to tell Picard. "I'm sorry Captain, but I was giving Scotty a tour." Picard would have had his ass in a sling, and rightly so. There is a time and place for everything and it was neither the time nor place for Geordi to to baby Scotty.

But he was a total dick to Scotty even outside of Engineering. And there is a time and place for everything, just as there's a time and place for some damn respect and honoring the fact that the man was a pioneer in the field.

In my Star-Trek-and-humor frame of mind, the episode Relics that jyd76 mentions makes me think of Data describing the contraband alcohol that Guinan gave to Scotty. When Scotty asks what it is, Data looks at it a little quizzically and then says, "It is green." Even though it was done for the yuk-yuks, it still makes me giggle.

It was also a direct quote of Scotty from a TOS episode.

By Any Other Name, for those scoring at home. And more power to you. I am enough of an obsessive fan that the setup was anvilicious, but in a good way.

So now they're recapping TNG eps - wonder if there will be any more. Good, cause there's plenty of material there. What about that episode, can't remember which, with Paul Winfield as the alien that spoke in allegory?

Reminds me of the way we TWoPPers can be sometimes:

"Gilligan, on the island, with the Globetrotters."

"Paulie and Chrissy in the Pine Barrens."

or

"Picard as Locutus."

Those would fry any translation matrix that wasn't set to "American Pop Culture".

I've had a half-baked theory for a while that "Darmok" is about just that; people's who speak entirely in movie or tv quotes. :)

The Q on Voyager (Reacting to a bad pickup line)

Garak and Bashir at Deep Space Nine (their TWoP's term for HoYay)

Yeah, some fun can be had with this.

ST:TOS--the original and still the best. Cap'n Quantum should get down on his knees and kiss Kirk's boots (those were awesome boots, btw; where can I get a pair?).

Was just discussing, briefly, the TNG episode Family and it inevitably made me think about the recent ENT episode Home and how disappointed I was. Home seemed forced and rushed whereas Family, while seeming slow, really developped and enriched the characters. TNG was great at telling two, or three in the case of Family, stories without seeming rushed.

The ENT writers don't seem to have the same respect for the viewer and so take the easy way out rather than exploring the characters on ENT more fully. (Nookie in the mountains, I'm looking at you) It would make it such a better show if we were able to see them as people. Of course, this is a complaint that has been oft repeated in this thread.

Actually, thinking about it, have we ever seen Archer break down? I mean, really just lose it. They showed Picard break down, not just in Family[\i] but [i]Chain of Command, II and even in the movie Generations. He was human, we could relate to him. Archer's just one big furrow.

Now, I'll just have to start buying up the DS9 DVD's so I can make some comparisons there too.

The...I was going to say "humanity" but that doesn't apply in all cases...the reality of the characters on DS9 really make that the best of the series for me. Even the tertiary characters had rich back-stories, believable motivations, and consistent characterization. Except for some of the recurring Ferengi, I never thought of these as caricatures or even as "characters". They were just the people on this station. It was a great mix of acting and writing in almost all cases across the board.

Fav. series: TNG
Fav episode: Message in a Bottle (VOY) - great humour, I liked it more than the other TNG/VOY/ENT eps - didn't watch TOS and too little of DS9 to know much about those.
Fav moment: When the Vulcans entered Cochrane's den and he turned on the boogie rock music and the Vulcan stood up.
Fav movie: ST:FC

I like TOS. I would rather have Kirk watching my back than any other Captain other than Sisko. I for some crazy reason really liked Voyager as well. Voyager would of been better if Sisko was the captain.

This, to me, transcends good sci-fi and is just good television. The only two series I've watched consistently are TNG and ENT. And without a doubt TNG comes out on top, for the reason stated by lis. It didn't underestimate the intelligence of the viewer, the acting was usually decent (though Patrick Stewart was just magnificent at times) and they did try to develop most of the characters. It didn't always succeed and induced some eye-rolling, but at least they tried. ENT seems to have abandonned that entirely and is focusing solely on pretty pictures. And failing at that. Some of the CGI this season has been horrendous. I'd rather the matte paintings to that crappy CGI.

I'm probably going to be run out of the forum, but... ::: very deep breath then she jumps ::: I found the first couple seasons of TNG to be beyond boring, to the point of painful. (Thank God it got better.)

TOS, for me, has remained the best. They hit the ground running and you immediately got a sense of the characters, which is quite amazing, when you think of it.

I'd put ENT way above VOY...as for DS9, I haven't seen enough of those episodes (they didn't show DS9 in my market when they originally aired, and it seems that every single time it's on Spike, I'm out of the house). Yes, there were VOY episodes I enjoyed, but ENT has given us Twilight, Sim, etc....I rarely cry at TV shows, but I blubbered like a baby at those.

Actually I thought this viewpoint was basically the consensus. I personally hate most of TNG's first two seasons, though there were a handful of gems like 11001001, Q Who?, The Measure of a Man, and Elementary Dear Data. TNG didn't really start to pick up until the third season. In fact, all Trek series, with the exception of TOS, had mediocre to bad first seasons. Interestingly, in their roundup of the best TV shows on DVD, EW said that Star Trek had one of the best first seasons of any show in history.

TOS also had some really good, although undervalued, actors. Who but DeForest Kelley, for instance, could have made Dr. McCoy, basically a background character to start with, such a driving force for the whole thing? Could you imagine the show being nearly as good with, for instance, the guy who played the doctor (whose name escapes me) in the first pilot? Leonard Nimoy has a way with restrained characters - the only acting misstep I've seen him in was an old episode of "Dragnet" (from their B&W days), when he was playing an abusive husband. His highly-emotional scenes just seemed so forced. Even Bill Shatner, for all his taste for a well-prepared piece of scenery and disregard for his fellow actors (from which, thankfully, he seems to have recovered), did a pretty fair job of turning an overgrown Boy Scout into a fully-realized adult male human.

Contrast this with VOY. We had a starship populated by soap-opera-level actors, who wouldn't know subtlety if it sidled up behind them and bit them (ever so subtly, of course) on their butts! Everything had to be all-out, over-the-top, life-or-death, "My God, man! Give him space! He has to decide what's for breakfast!" level crap. The writing didn't help either, of course, but while good acting can help bad writing (see "A Piece of the Action", or "The Immunity Syndrome"), bad acting just helps point up how lousy the bad writing is.

I would tend to agree. Because I'm anal, I took the star-ratings of Jammer's reviews (since in general, I agree with them-- if anything, he's a little more critical than me, in a fair way. But I think they're solid numbers.

Anyway, in the per-season average, S3 and S4 of Enterprise beats every season of Voyager. Every season of DS9 beats both Voyager and Enterprise, though. However, the lowest-rated season? Enterprise's second.

Best series: ST:TOS (Kirk rules!)
Best production values & Best consistent quality: ST:TNG (Captain Picard, we love you!)
Best Tin-Plated Dictator with Delusions of Godhood: Quantum.

Now with 100% more poll!

I voted for DS9 because overall I like the series the best even if TNG had some of the best eps of all the series. I just liked DS9 so much once the overall story arc of the Dominion War was set. The characters were complicated and we got much less of the Federation is the great things since slice bread stuff.

I can understand the argument that DS9 was deeper than TNG. Part of why I voted for TNG is because it was my introduction to ST and I loved it. I wouldn't necessarily disagree that DS9 was better, but I prefer TNG. Besides. If I'm at home, I can watch an episode of TNG without any concerns of knowing what proceeded it or if I was going to miss the resolution on another episode. DS9 got way too arc-y. (Although I liked the characters a lot)

Of course, I'm also a person who seriously considered voting for Voyager. Yeah, I liked it. Got somethin' to say about it?! [/false bravado]

I think DS9 did a remarkable job of story arcs and character development.

But my heart belongs to TNG. Because Picard was the captain of my TV boyfriends. And Guinan. And Worf. TV shows come down to the characters for me. They were also able to write some good morality plays, one of scifi's strengths, wherein the characters were themselves, and not adopting a position out of left field. And because the Borg, before they became 'human' were scary shits (I'm looking at you, too, Replicators).

The original series deserves all the credit for realizing a truly optimistic future in a Cold War world filled with science-fiction dystopias. Deep Space Nine will always have my respect and devotion for its multi-layered blending of politics, religion, and social drama.

But TNG is IT. The central question of TNG, from seasons 1 through 7, was What makes us human? As shown through Jean-Luc Picard, the question of human identity came up again and again, as his own identity was stretched and distorted, sometimes beyond recognition: joining with the gaseous entity in S1; Borgified in S3; living another man's life in The Inner Light; and tortured to the edge of madness in Chain of Command.

Who are we as a species? Where are we going? Q asked the question as an outsider to start and end the series, and the question still holds my imagination. Nobody's answered it better than TNG. Awaiting the next generation's response...

I voted for TNG. I love DS9, I really like Voyager, but TNG is the "Trek-est" of them all. It's not as cheesy as TOS, and it really embraces the optimism and ideas of the Federation as a force for good much more than DS9 and Voyager. I also like Picard the best of all the captains, I think, although I do have a soft spot for Janeway as the first female captain.

Of course, this is just my opinion today. Tomorrow I'll go off and watch "In The Pale Moonlight" or something and have to change my vote.

Well, I voted for TNG, but I'm wishing I could change my vote now, because Enterprise hasn't got a single vote and Voyager has 1. Oh well. I have a soft spot for Enterprise because it brought me here, and I thought it was a whole lot better than Voyager.

But I voted for TNG because it was the series that made me a Trekkie. It may not have been the first, but it set the tone for what Star Trek was to become. And of course, because it brought us Q.

Best ever? Babylon 5!

*running away*

sorry, had to.

as for the topic, VOY is the show I have watched most episodes of, so that would necissarily be on top, even if it wasn't that good. Maybe if SAT1 (constantly running StarTrek but frequently interchanging series and messing up the order) been nicer to me, I'd have watched more DS9 and come to appreciate the arc-story, which is what I usually do when it's done well and most of you seem to think so. Picard never got to me. I watched the pilot of Enterprise and dismissed it as dumb, so that was that. Some of the ToS episodes were fun, though.

I voted DS9, although I've found something to like in all of the series.

TOS was my first love, and I'll always have a fondness for it, but DS9 is my grand passion. I had to give up on VOY (that crazy love/hate relationship just wasn't good for me), TNG was a nice long-term relationship that ended well, while ENT is a mild crush that really won't go anywhere.

I voted TOS, because it's the one what brung me. I still love it fiercely. I dislike Voyager, love TNG, like DS9 ok, love Enterprise, but TOS is the one that most feels like home. The sight of Kirk, Spock, those bright colors, & those mid-century modern sets all trigger a comfort mode.

TNG, I was eight when it debuted, I grew up with it. And for that, regardless of it's problems, I'll always treasure it.

.

As a long-time soap addict and a hard-line 'Niner, I just can't agree with that assessment of DS9. The storylines and the acting were far, far superior to any soap on the air. Of course, if arcs aren't your thing and if you define "exploration" as ship-based, then DS9 would certainly not be your cup of tea.