TOS

[Raziel]

I know I'm hardly the only person around here to think that TOS is the only trek worth watching, but I'm interested to hear what everybody else's reasons are.

Kirk Fu? The utter camp? The excellent characters?

[Imperial Federation]

Well, there's nothing compared to the sight of Ripped Shirt Kirk laying down that Kirk Fu on his unfortunate victims (who always have it coming anyway).

But what I really like about TOS is the characters, they're well balanced and are a lot of fun. If you ask me, Spock is the only well potrayed main character Vulcan in all of Trek, he beats all of the cameo Vulcans too, apart from Sarek (Sarek rules).

TOS is truly the greatest Star Trek, that's probably why B&B hate it, they'd never be able to match it.

[Isolder74]

Yes the Original Series was the best star trek. Why, cause the special effects were not the greatest so that forced them to have a good plot and characters. The ACTORS had to make us believe what was going on. My, 2-bits

[jegs2]

Why TOS above other Trek shows?

It is pleasant to watch an entertaining show on TV without the bombardment of every left-wing ideal imaginable. It is pleasant to watch an entertaining show that doesn't blantantly drag the viewer into its political camp and slap on the indoctrination helmet.

TOS was quirky in its political incorrectness and the cheesey sets and costumes. Above all, the shows were original for their time and imaginative. They are just plain fun to watch.

[Cpt_Frank]

I was TOS-infested during the re-run of the series in German TV during the early and mid eighties, when I was still a child and my mind could be easily influenced. I like the actors and the crappy charming special effects.
It was a fun show to watch.

[BioDroid]

I grew up watching TOS, when Next Gen came out it seemed that they sacrificed quality of the script for the special effects budget. Then they betrayed everything that TOS had instilled (The Prime Directive became som catchall law, they put children on the starship---and one on the frickin' bridge for crying out loud, they lost the strong leads that the original cast provided (Patrick Stewart is a fine actor, but his role was completely acharismatic) So I stopped watching it. I gave every series a try and they just seemed to sink lower and lower....

[RedImperator]

Primarily, I think the writing was better. They didn't technobabble their way out of situations, and the characters were more memorable. Consider:

Kirk, Picard, Janeway

Spock, Data, 7 of 9

Bones, Crusher, Holodoc (actually, I liked the holodoc, mostly thanks to Picardo's acting)

Scotty, La Forge, Torres

Out of those groups, who's going to be remembered 10 years from now?

[SirNitram]

Well, the plots weren't -that- good. But they weren't technobabble or political, just human. Sure, we like to think the plots were better because the special effects sucked, but as someone who is watching TOS now, as opposed to in my childhood(My childhood was spent with the Animated Series), I can't see any truly monumental plots.

But it's fun to watch Kirk outsmart gangsters or Nazis or whatever he's facing this time. It's fun, that's the point. It even touches, at times, the fun of Godzilla films.

The worst Technobabble I've seen is the Doomsday Machine, but for the most part it's just fun without the technology getting in the way.

[SCVN 2812]

Once you look past the low budget pre-cgi special effects and the overall production values, there's a great show hiding underneath the campiness. The Kirk-Spock-Bones trio is something I've never really seen successfully duplicated, especially in Enterprise where the attempt to duplicate it is far too blatant. Although personally I think most people's jabs at TNG, DS9 and Voyager are exaggerations (most episodes of each of the series are very watchable and enjoyable, although I will admit the subtle push to be better people that occassionally popped up in TOS became far to preachy in the newer shows.) TOS had some of the best stories and best characters and once these elements were combined with better special effects in the movies, you get the best Star Trek movies that will ever be made.

[Raziel]

All things that I agree with.

Even though I'm a child of the 80s and should have grown up with TNG, my first ST exposure was to the original movies, back before ST6 even existed. I guess it spoiled me, because I watched some TNG a little later and found it... lacking, even by my lax 10 yr old standards.

I thought the characters were lame. Kirk is 20 times the man that Picard and Riker combined could ever be, Kirk Fu notwithstanding. Spock and Sarek were the only Vulcan characters I could find who didn't act like pompous assholes, and Bones with his Georgia drawl and his love of fine liquor craps more character than Bev Crusher ever was.

The special effects were pretty, so I liked that since eye-candy means so much more when you're young.

Something tickled at my mind for a long time until I figured it out... TNG was just... nicer. I didn't know what 'PC' was, but I could tell that TNG was just... gay (no offense to any gay people here) compared to TOS. I didn't like how touchy-feely it was, and I often found myself shouting advice to the television ("You idiot! Stop screwing around with them and phaser a chunk off the bow!").

Another thing that bothers me now is how sissified humans become between TOS and TNG. I've seen discussion about how our balls dropped off between the two series and I couldn't agree more. I LIKE TOS's attitude, that humans have faced some pretty tough situations and come out on top through our cleverness, strength, and sheer will. It gives me a nice feeling to think that humanity really IS capable of carving a chunk out of the galaxy. In TNG the Federation shrinks geometrically and seems much less eager to conflict with its neighbours over territory... I mean c'mon, in TOS (I forget the name of the episode) the Feds and the Klingons nearly go to war over a single planet! The only thing that stopped them was a deus ex machina, the Organians. And I wonder what would have happened if Picard had been in command of of the E-nil in 'Balance of Terror'...

Sulu: Direct hit!

Scott: Shields are collapsing!

Sulu: Permission to fire NOW, sir?

Picard: No! (stands up, performs the OTHER PM) Open hailing frequencies! We can still nego- *Enterprise becomes a massive fireball*

Romulan Commander (who looks like Sarek): Fool humans. They were hardly a challenge.

So many more things that make TOS superior, but I think I can sum them up in one sentence: Brannon and Braga had nothing to do with it!

[BioDroid]

Something tickled at my mind for a long time until I figured it out... TNG was just... nicer. I didn't know what 'PC' was, but I could tell that TNG was just... gay (no offense to any gay people here) compared to TOS. I didn't like how touchy-feely it was, and I often found myself shouting advice to the television ("You idiot! Stop screwing around with them and phaser a chunk off the bow!").

I think you stated in that one paragraph something I've been trying to (unsuccessfully) articulate for years!

[Mr Bean]

TOS
Sir they look a little Annyoed
*Kaboom! Red-Shirt Dies

BASTARDS! FIRE THE TORPDOES! HIT EM TILL THEY STOP MOVING! AND THEN A FEW MORE TIMES TO BE SAFE!

TNG
Sir they look a little Annoyed
*Kaboom! Red Shirt Dies
Transmite in all Frequencys, We Surrender

Its like the Producers where replace with French Generals inbetween the Series...
Wait is Picard French?

[Singular Quartet]

Yes, Picard, even with his british accent, was French. Explans a lot, doesn't it?

[Mr Bean]

Yes, Picard, even with his british accent, was French. Explans a lot, doesn't it?

TNG makes Sense now, The Tecnobabble, The fear of using Weapons, It was not a screw-up of what Roddenberry wanted NO, Rather it was placing a Frenchman at the Helm of a Ship of War!

[jegs2]

TOS
Sir they look a little Annyoed
*Kaboom! Red-Shirt Dies

BASTARDS! FIRE THE TORPDOES! HIT EM TILL THEY STOP MOVING! AND THEN A FEW MORE TIMES TO BE SAFE!

TNG
Sir they look a little Annoyed
*Kaboom! Red Shirt Dies
Transmite in all Frequencys, We Surrender

Its like the Producers where replace with French Generals inbetween the Series...
Wait is Picard French?

Very good example; reminds me of an old joke:

Why do the hedgerows in Normandy grow so high?

So the German armies can march in the shade...

[TheDarkling]

The Federation presidents offices are located in Paris, Im sure the locals affect Federation policy.

[SCVN 2812]

I will say it again, not all TNG or DS9 or even Voyager is bad or even weak, but the really good, strong episodes are fewer in number than TOS but to say the whole series is crap just because a couple of times a season they forget subtlety and start almost openly preaching and they've got captains who might want to just try and resolve the situation without blowing another ship away and possibly starting an interstellar war before blowing away another ship is a generalization. I could use that line of reasoning and say Star Wars is too childish just because of Anakin and Jar Jar or Threepio is obviously gay because he doesn't like being shot at.

[Imperial Federation]

You know, generally, if the other ship starts shooting, they're the ones starting a war.

[Darth Yoshi]

TOS was good, because the plots weren't the same episode to episode. The plots were original, and it depicted humanity in a realistic light. Besides, the Kirk-Spock-Bones interactions are funny.

[TheDarkling]

The problem is that trek shows have gone from being mostly good to being mostly bad.

In TOS a weak episode was rare and unwatchable one unseen.
TNG was mostly ok (took time to find its feet) was one or wo unwatchables.
DS9 prety much the same.
Voyager - A handfull of good, a few ok, many weak and a portion of unwatchable.

I cant really comment on enterprise yet since it is its first season, I just hope they start up the earth Rmoulan wars at some point.

[SCVN 2812]

I haven't seen but a third at most of Enterprise. The only station that plays it here scheduled it when I usually go out with my family. What I have seen is somewhat of an improvement on Voyager in terms of good/bad episodes but the stories are weak and the characters aren't that good, but still well within first season suckiness allowances.

Voyager did have a lot higher bad episode per good episode ratio than any other series.

You are right about the shooting Darkling, but Picard usually did shoot back even if he did tell Worf just to disable the other ship so there actually would be somebody left to ask "why the hell did you just start shooting us?!"

[Patrick Degan]

You know why TOS was so damn good? The people were real.

I think you know the sense in which I mean that —they all acted like real flesh and blood people putting up with real flesh and blood problems on a day to day basis. They were on a functional spaceship and not the Love Boat. The Enterprise had few luxuries, only what was needed to sustain the ship and crew through the mission. The living quarters, while larger than you have on any contemporary warship, weren't hotel suites like we see on Picard's ship. The crew on Kirk's ship were well suited to the privations of life aboard a battlecruiser.

If they were hit with a challenge, the crew didn't piss and moan about having a problem, they didn't waste time in interminible discussion and theorising. They got to business and SOLVED THE DAMN PROBLEM. And by the most economical route available.

An excellent example is from "The Doomsday Machine", after the planet-killer reapppeared and attacked the Enterprise, leaving Kirk and his boarding party stranded aboard the wrecked Constellation:

KIRK "We're stuck, blind, and deaf."

SCOTTY "And paralysed. No power."

KIRK "Scotty, you've got to get me some engine power."

SCOTTY "I can't repair warp drive without a spacedo—"

KIRK "Then get me impulse power! Half-speed, quarter-speed, anything! If we can get this hulk moving..."

SCOTTY "Aye... the impulse engines aren't too badly off. I may be able to do something with them."

KIRK "Then get going."

And there's TOS in a nutshell. No matter which situation they were in, the Enterprise crew tackled any problem they were called upon to face, and improvised their way out of danger with any tools they had at their disposal.

In every other way, they acted like regular people as well. Probably because the writers were hands-on practical people in real life themselves. Half of them were war veterans and all of them children of the Depression. They grew up in a world where survival depended upon practical common-sense thinking and action. That's where they drew their characters from and that's why they seemed so damn real. It helped that their backgrounds were not entirely in the world of Hollywood as well and that their craft was built from sources other than what they've seen on TV all their lives. Qualities which I think are noticeably lacking in the current writing teams hacking away on the Franchise plantation.

It also helped that the people they cast in the series and the episodes were very much veteran actors with at least a good ten years on them and who had been in several dozen other shows by the time they ever got around to Star Trek. They were well-known faces. The present shows are populated by a nebulous collection of nonentities with maybe one or two persons who have something in their backgrounds from a past TV show or two. All method actors too, who don't know how to really get into character and seem not to think that it's important to do so either.

Every TOS episode, even the bad ones, had at least one solid core idea underpinning the story. Take "Spock's Brain", one of the silliest episodes of the series. But it has at its basis the concrete concept of control and dependence. Even if it has nothing else going for it, there is the Idea. Sometimes, it was conceptual, sometimes mechanical, sometimes a historical analogy, or sometimes mythic. But the Idea provided the support for the entire script and that's why even the goofiest episodes are watchable on some level. The comparatively few really good TNG episodes also have this quality to them, as well as the even rarer good DS9 episode. Nothing sense then, however, has even come close.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

TOS-most were quite good, only a handful of bad ones. Some great eps.
TNG-some were good, though not as good as TOS. A lot more poor ones. A few great ones.
DS9-mostly above.
VOY-Ugh. Most were bad, a few good ones.
ENT-Ugh. I find almost all of them boring.

[Raziel]

Very good example; reminds me of an old joke:

Why do the hedgerows in Normandy grow so high?

So the German armies can march in the shade...

I like it.

Another is, what's the battle cry of the French army when fighting the Germans?

"We surrender!"

[Darth Wong]

Patrick, that was a superb summation of what was lost after TOS. I would also like to add that their interactions with other races were sterile in TNG because the other races didn't behave like real people either.

How many times in TNG did the enemy attack and then mysteriously back off so that the bridge crew could hold interminable meetings in Picard's boardroom? How the hell can any intelligent human being suspend disbelief when the entire bridge crew of a starship wanders off to hold meetings in the middle of an emergency and the enemy mysteriously holds off long enough for the meeting to conclude? How many times can you invoke flimsy plot devices to allow this writing convention?

The writing on TNG and DS9 and Voyager seems very mechanical in many ways, and part of it is that the writers fell into conventions, in which a number of the same set-pieces and scenes tended to occur in most episodes. Any Trek viewer could watch and say "oh yes, this is where they'll hold a boardroom meeting and try to work out a technobabble solution to their problem", or "oh yes, this is where a difficult working relationship between two bickering crew members will be resolved by them working together to solve a crisis". Eventually, you don't want to bother watching, because every episode is just a kit-bash of pieces and parts of previous episodes.

This didn't really happen in TOS in large part because they would take scripts from anybody. There were a lot of people who wrote just one script for TOS.