Quite a lot of it’s episodic, because linear television was a hell of our own creation. The cold open is usually sufficient backstory. The first few episodes of the original series (sorry, The Original Series) are a little rough, and the first season of Next Generation is reeeal dodgy past the initial two-parter, but both series were jumbled across television for decades. Release order is perfectly fine, and if you skip around, it won’t hurt. At least until Deep Space 9 came out as an answer to Babylon 5.
I have one note that applies to fiction in general. A lot of fan-favorite episodes are wildly unrepresentative. That’s why they stick out in people’s minds. They’ll be wacky explorations of familiar characters in an unfamiliar setting, or one character in an amnesia / apocalypse record / It’s A Wonderful Life setup, or a wild perspective shift to species that are primitive, pre-contact, or only speak in riddles. These are completely ridiculous excursions from the bulk of the show’s story. And they’re great fun. But first we ought to appreciate the episodes that capture the premise within the typical stakes of the series. Before the stand-outs can break formula, there has to be a formula, and it’s usually strong enough to justify the show’s continuing popularity.
That’s great, thank you for the recommendation. I already like to see series completely in order to know about obscure in jokes and appreciate more the wild excursions you speak of.
Cool beans. Just be warned, I’m not joking about the rocky starts. One of the touchstones of TNG is a first-season script that is probably the worst episode in all of Star Trek. As a bonus, it’s also the worst episode in all of Stargate because the same writer rehashed the same sloppy premise for SG-1’s janky first season.
I feel like Lower Decks has the answer to these problems. Like at some point Starfleet had a meeting and was like "ok we really need a fleet of ships that just answer the boring shit"
Space squids fucking near DS7? Just California-class about it.
I gotta wonder if Romulans and Klingons encountered space nazis or giant bullshit like the federation did. Or just all the shit started cause humans were doing batshit stuff so batshit followed them.
We actually got to see how the Klingons and Federation deal with random bullshit differently in the recent "Subspace Rhapsody" episode of Strange New Worlds. The Enterprise triggered an effect that caused them to break into musical numbers, and their reaction was to experiment to figure out what caused them and how many people they could get involved in a musical number at once.
The Klingons sent a fleet to blow up the concept of musicals.
I just saw that episode last night, it was fantastic. it's weird how star trek can make concepts that seem batshit work in a serious TV drama. like discovery, you're telling me the engineer can make the ship warp anywhere instantly by doing shrooms, but only because he GMOed himself with giant tardigrade DNA? and it's not even that silly in context because it's a gritty trauma drama?
The Klingons sent a fleet to blow up the concept of musicals.
This pretty much. When they announced a Klingon ship was poking around I got excited to finally see an instance of how someone like them would handle an anomaly. They had no intention of actually investigating and just wanted it destroyed. :')
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