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Alright, here we go, what is everyone's favorite TNG space battle?

I liked Best of Both Worlds' and Yesterday's Enterprise's battles.

EDIT: I forgot, disclude movies. It's purely the series.

Wolf 359, even though we didn't get to see it. TNG didn't have very many battles that were very entertaining. Federation vs. Borg Cube in the beginning of STFC was good but the rest of that movie I think was a steaming pile.

Wolf 359, nuff said.

TNG battles were always frustrating slow. Every time I see one, I practically have to shout at the TV, "you've got more than one phaser bank! fucking use them!"

I don't think Wolf 359 can count, since we do not see that battle in "Best Of Both Worlds" but rather in the DS9 pilot, and only a few seconds of actual combat is available. TNG never really wanted to touch the subject of battle all that much, and the number of them which were in the series could be counted with the fingers of a single hand.

With that, I'd say the best TNG battle was definitely at the climax of "Yesterday's Enterprise". From Picard's stirring speech at the outset of combat to the sight of the Enterprise rising on screen and blasting away with all phasers, to Picard's defiant refusal to surrender even as his bridge is beginning to burn around him. That and the entire episode showed what TNG could have been capable of if only dramatic conflict had been allowed in the writing.

Yesterdays Enterprise was the best.

Yesterdays Enterprise and Best of Both Worlds PT-2. YE was good because of how it portrayed them in combat in a desperate situation. BOBW had a kickass battle. It was nice watching them trick the Borg and use such an underhanded approach relying on Locutus to make an assumption of something else. Watching the Saucer seperate, both sections engage, the anti-matter spread, the shuttle launching and the Battle section in the background, the moving around on the Cube to kidnap locutus. All well done.

"Yesterdays Enterprise" by quite a wide margin.

I have never seen a TNG episode with ship-to-ship combat.

Out of the ones we actually see I like the one from All Good Things...
the best. The future version of the E-E blows the shit out of those Klingon ships.

The battle from Yesterday's Enterprise was good too.

Hmm, funny that both of those battles may not have actually happened in TNG chronology.

I would be forced to go with Best of Both Worlds II. The best Trek battle though, is the second space battle in ST II.

RedImperator wrote:TNG battles were always frustrating slow. Every time I see one, I practically have to shout at the TV, "you've got more than one phaser bank! fucking use them!"

Ditto. From the series, Yesterday's Enterprise was... the... best. Period.
It was, I think, the only TNG battle that moved me in any way, shape or form. Including TNG movies, Nemesis was the most gratifying for no better reason than,... THEY FIRED MORE THAN ONE PHASER AT A TIME!!!

Survivors is one of my favorites, if only because they learn how to simultaneously fire phasers and photon torpedoes in rapid succession (the second salvo seems to involve multiple phaser banks, given the origin points of the phasers on the viewscreen). If that level of firepower had been seen in "Yesterday's Enterprise", it would have been a truly kickass battle.

I blame the VFX people more than anyone else for the lethargic battles of TNG. As it is, "Yesterday's Enterprise" is the best TNG battle.

I personally think it's a sad state of affairs when the jumbled mess that was First Contact's space battle is considered the best TNG battle.

I think Wolf 359 should count as it has the Alfred Hitchcock effect, we don't actually see it, we just hear about it and see the end result. 40 ships vs a single Borg cube and then we come to Wolf 359 and find, not a wrecked cube but dozens of wrecked starships. You have to use your imagination until DS9 to imagine what it was like and your imagination always tends to produce something cooler than what a tv show with its budget and technology limitations can put on screen.

"Yesterday's Enterprise," which is also my favorite episode.

I have this nagging suspicion Yesterday's Enterprise is so popular because its one of the few times the E-D gets its ass handed to it and the entire crew dies. Which is pretty dramatic, didn't particularly like the one shot kill on the K'Vort but to each is own.

Hate to jump on the bandwagon, but "Yesterday's Enterprise" is definitely the best. Of course, if we could have seen Wolf 359, that would have been better.

SCVN 2812 wrote:I have this nagging suspicion Yesterday's Enterprise is so popular because its one of the few times the E-D gets its ass handed to it and the entire crew dies. Which is pretty dramatic, didn't particularly like the one shot kill on the K'Vort but to each is own.

I don't know. I also liked the battles for Chintoka, and the one in SoA, but for some reason it was more fun when the battle was between a smaller number of ships; when you could see that there was a difference made with every action by every crewmember.

Edit: Fixed sloppy typo.

Master of Ossus wrote:

SCVN 2812 wrote:I have this nagging suspicion Yesterday's Enterprise is so popular because its one of the few times the E-D gets its ass handed to it and the entire crew dies. Which is pretty dramatic, didn't particularly like the one shot kill on the K'Vort but to each is own.

I don't know. I also liked the battles for Chintoka, and the one in SoA, but for some reason it was more fun when the battle was between a smaller number of ships, when you could see that there was a difference made with every action by every crewmember.

Agreed. That is why the TUC and TWOK battles are considered so good. You aren't having your attention taken by to many ships. Its just a handful duking it out against eachother. That would be why the best TNG battles are "Yesterdays Enterprise", "Best of Both Worlds", and "All Good Things".

Yesterdays Enterprise. Most TNG combat was just the Enterprise firing a couple phaser blasts, or a single torpedo salvo.

The spacebattle in The Wounded, purely shown on the main screen in the tactical menu. The first -and only, IRRC- time TNG Trek seemed to be military-orientated.

All hail Ben Maxwell, the last UFP captain with balls (and now don't come along and say Sisko; Sisko was a selfrighteous idiot)!

Posbi wrote:The spacebattle in The Wounded, purely shown on the main screen in the tactical menu. The first -and only, IRRC- time TNG Trek seemed to be military-orientated.

All hail Ben Maxwell, the last UFP captain with balls (and now don't come along and say Sisko; Sisko was a selfrighteous idiot)!

Jellico was good. Maxwell was unstable and dangerous.

Which still made him better than 3/4 of Starfleet'c commanders. :p

SCVN 2812 wrote:I have this nagging suspicion "Yesterday's Enterprise" is so popular because its one of the few times the E-D gets its ass handed to it and the entire crew dies. Which is pretty dramatic, didn't particularly like the one shot kill on the K'Vort but to each is own.

No, it's one of the few times that anything exciting ever actually happens on the show; in which we see the E-D as a ship with some teeth, and in which we see Picard as he should have been played all along. And no fucking kids on the ship, either.

Posbi wrote:Which still made him better than 3/4 of Starfleet'c commanders. :p

Which is an exaggeration since we've only had a chance to see the tactics and command style of less than 1% of the commanders in Starfleet unless you want to try and analyze the actions of all the misc. ships in DS9 that had screen time measured in the seconds.