Happy
2017!! And don’t worry my friends I promise while the Trek articles
will continue they will not be as many as I did last year. 🙂 So as we
enter a new year I thought it would be fun to rate the pilot episodes of
each Trek series, which holds up the best? And I am not including The
Cage, yeah that was the very first Star Trek pilot but it also didn’t
sell the series. I am also not counting the animated series because,
well, why would I?
A good pilot episode has to introduce the premise, establish the characters, and introduce the elements which will drive the stories. Usually a pilot is less than perfect, with some hardly resembling the final series at all aside from the familiar faces. Others get so close that the pilot’s will often feel like just another episode. Trek has had five pilots, which did it best? Let’s see:
#5
In order to do this list justice, I did something I have never done. I sat down and watched the whole pilot episode, beginning to end. When this first came around in 1995 I hated it, and turned it off! Though I did see the ending there was always a large chunk in the middle I missed. It says something that I missed part of the episode but caught on with no trouble when I tuned back in! So I watched it and……it’s convoluted and boring. As if they tried to mesh three different ideas into one story. But the one big flaw with this is that while the episode does a fantastic job setting up the premise of the series regarding the conflict between the Marquis and Starfleet officers not to mention being out lost in space, the fact the series could do nothing with that premise hurts it. But it’s #5 because I hated this episode so much I didn’t watch most of the first season because of it. And that is not the mark of a good pilot. And here’s a bonus, I finally got to see the scene of Neelix taking a bath! Yech.
#4.
I’m really not sure how to feel about this episode. On the one hand, it’s a solid episode with a good story and a great action finale. But this isn’t Star Trek! Well to put it another way, it’s not the Star Trek I love. It would take another few episodes before the sets, characters, and costumes would be just right. Sulu an Astrophysicist? Why are they standing there like that in that first scene? Where’s Uhura? Spock smiling and yelling? And who is the strange doctor exactly? Maybe it isn’t fair but this is so far from what the series would be it’s distracting. I just could never get into this one. Give Next Gen credit, at least the series felt like the pilot for the most part. Yeah that wasn’t a good thing, but still….It’s no wonder NBC chose to air “The Man Trap” first. But without McCoy and Spock literally being second banana, this feels like the Kirk show. Thankfully this wouldn’t last. Add to that a story that goes to fast and a villain we didn’t get a chance to know before his transformation….it sold the series, guess that’s enough.
#3,
Twenty some years later and Roddenberry still had no idea how to make a pilot. Why is adding action so hard for him to understand? The network execs forced him to do it the first time, and here we get such a boring episode. I’ve talked about this one at length so will not say much here. While this being on was very exciting when it first aired, I think every time I watch it I get more and more bored by it. While structurally it’s the same show (same ship, same characters) it’s also so different from what TNG would become that it’s amazing! The worst is Troi, thank the lord that character changed after the pilot!!
#2.
This episode has a similar to problem to “Where No Man” in that the pilot doesn’t quite reflect where this series would go. It was still a little to “TNG-ish”. But unlike “Where No Man” the look is at least down. Well, except Odo’s make-up which would evolve. And the characters are on target, ok not Bashir so much. When I watch this episode it feels like the starting point of the series rather than a clumsy pilot and it’s a pretty good episode. The action scenes are fantastic, can you tell Gene Roddenberry had nothing to do with this basically? So if it was a solid episode and everything pretty much clicked, why is it #2, even with the awesome Patrick Stewart cameo? Because I didn’t understand it at first. Not the action scenes but all of that wormhole stuff was confusing. After re-watching it, and watching the series develop, I get it. It was a good episode but not enough to make me a regular viewer. You may be wondering if I didn’t become a regular viewer from it then what makes it better than TNG? It didn’t scare me off like Caretaker, but more important I enjoy re-watching the episode, it holds up very well! Unlike Farpoint which has aged, badly.
#1.
Yeah it may surprise some this is so high. I have made it pretty clear my disdain for Enterprise. It was just soooo boring and bad on so many levels. But to be fair, the pilot episode wasn’t half bad! It had action, it did a great job of setting up the characters and premise, gave us some cool new villains who we wanted to know more about (we’d regret that later but I digress). This was a really solid pilot episode! They even made the new Enterprise kind of cool, nice design (there’s an article I never did!!). And the bottom line, after the episode I wanted to keep watching. For a little while.
And yes of course this is all in good fun. It isn’t really fair to judge any pilot for any show to harshly.
A good pilot episode has to introduce the premise, establish the characters, and introduce the elements which will drive the stories. Usually a pilot is less than perfect, with some hardly resembling the final series at all aside from the familiar faces. Others get so close that the pilot’s will often feel like just another episode. Trek has had five pilots, which did it best? Let’s see:
#5
In order to do this list justice, I did something I have never done. I sat down and watched the whole pilot episode, beginning to end. When this first came around in 1995 I hated it, and turned it off! Though I did see the ending there was always a large chunk in the middle I missed. It says something that I missed part of the episode but caught on with no trouble when I tuned back in! So I watched it and……it’s convoluted and boring. As if they tried to mesh three different ideas into one story. But the one big flaw with this is that while the episode does a fantastic job setting up the premise of the series regarding the conflict between the Marquis and Starfleet officers not to mention being out lost in space, the fact the series could do nothing with that premise hurts it. But it’s #5 because I hated this episode so much I didn’t watch most of the first season because of it. And that is not the mark of a good pilot. And here’s a bonus, I finally got to see the scene of Neelix taking a bath! Yech.
#4.
I’m really not sure how to feel about this episode. On the one hand, it’s a solid episode with a good story and a great action finale. But this isn’t Star Trek! Well to put it another way, it’s not the Star Trek I love. It would take another few episodes before the sets, characters, and costumes would be just right. Sulu an Astrophysicist? Why are they standing there like that in that first scene? Where’s Uhura? Spock smiling and yelling? And who is the strange doctor exactly? Maybe it isn’t fair but this is so far from what the series would be it’s distracting. I just could never get into this one. Give Next Gen credit, at least the series felt like the pilot for the most part. Yeah that wasn’t a good thing, but still….It’s no wonder NBC chose to air “The Man Trap” first. But without McCoy and Spock literally being second banana, this feels like the Kirk show. Thankfully this wouldn’t last. Add to that a story that goes to fast and a villain we didn’t get a chance to know before his transformation….it sold the series, guess that’s enough.
#3,
Twenty some years later and Roddenberry still had no idea how to make a pilot. Why is adding action so hard for him to understand? The network execs forced him to do it the first time, and here we get such a boring episode. I’ve talked about this one at length so will not say much here. While this being on was very exciting when it first aired, I think every time I watch it I get more and more bored by it. While structurally it’s the same show (same ship, same characters) it’s also so different from what TNG would become that it’s amazing! The worst is Troi, thank the lord that character changed after the pilot!!
#2.
This episode has a similar to problem to “Where No Man” in that the pilot doesn’t quite reflect where this series would go. It was still a little to “TNG-ish”. But unlike “Where No Man” the look is at least down. Well, except Odo’s make-up which would evolve. And the characters are on target, ok not Bashir so much. When I watch this episode it feels like the starting point of the series rather than a clumsy pilot and it’s a pretty good episode. The action scenes are fantastic, can you tell Gene Roddenberry had nothing to do with this basically? So if it was a solid episode and everything pretty much clicked, why is it #2, even with the awesome Patrick Stewart cameo? Because I didn’t understand it at first. Not the action scenes but all of that wormhole stuff was confusing. After re-watching it, and watching the series develop, I get it. It was a good episode but not enough to make me a regular viewer. You may be wondering if I didn’t become a regular viewer from it then what makes it better than TNG? It didn’t scare me off like Caretaker, but more important I enjoy re-watching the episode, it holds up very well! Unlike Farpoint which has aged, badly.
#1.
Yeah it may surprise some this is so high. I have made it pretty clear my disdain for Enterprise. It was just soooo boring and bad on so many levels. But to be fair, the pilot episode wasn’t half bad! It had action, it did a great job of setting up the characters and premise, gave us some cool new villains who we wanted to know more about (we’d regret that later but I digress). This was a really solid pilot episode! They even made the new Enterprise kind of cool, nice design (there’s an article I never did!!). And the bottom line, after the episode I wanted to keep watching. For a little while.
And yes of course this is all in good fun. It isn’t really fair to judge any pilot for any show to harshly.
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