Post
by willpell » Wed May 14, 2014 6:35 am
Somehow I pictured Guilt Vader as being grey rather than black. I don't know how I came up with that.
Personally, B5 > DS9 > TNG > Enterprise > Voyager > TOS. (Buffy and Angel are on an entirely separate continuum.) I care about special FX a lot, and TOS was only three seasons, and never developed its supporting characters. Voyager was awful most of the way through, but their season-premiere episodes were usually good, as were the first season of 15 episodes and about the last 6 or 8 episodes at the end. Enterprise's first two seasons were bland, and the last one was a mismash with various highs and lows (often in the same episode), but Season 3 alone redeems it in my eyes, being essentially a more compressed version of everything good about the Dominion War (which was when DS9 really got good, although it covers almost the entire run of the show, so I figure I can count the show as a whole as if it was all that).
Next Gen is a special case, because all of the others I'm recalling from when they were on TV originally (except for TOS, obviously; that I saw in syndicated reruns at about the same time DS9 and Voyager were new). I'm groping for vague memories which are telling me approximate and possibly inaccurate things, so my opinion of those shows is just a gestalt, and probably not an entirely correct one; I might well change my mind if I saw them again today. But TNG, I have rewatched a few early-season episodes of, which paradoxically made it both better and worse in ways. The writing is really transparently awful, and the SFX haven't aged well, yet there's a vibrancy to the characters which absolutely shines. Picard is as awesome as ever, Troi doesn't seem nearly as much of a new-agey emo cliche as I remembered her, Tasha Yar is pure badass (except in one terrible episode where she stands around crying for no damn reason), Crusher and Geordi and Riker all have depths I didn't remember, and even Wesley shows glimmers of potential underneath the overwhelming Marty Stuness that the writers inflicted on him - the only characters which I maybe have lower opinions of now are Data and Worf, probably just because both were heavily overexposed in later works. Anyway, watching these TNG episodes again, I could sort of rewrite them in my head to be better (which I think I was doing as a kid when they first aired as well, but obviously I'm better at it now), and this enables me to take the good aspects and ignore the bad. Thusly, while I would probably have ordered the series the same way before this rewatching, the numerical "value" of TNG has increased considerably on that scale, because of my more tangible knowledge of it.
And B5 of course just blows everything else out of the water.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.
