<story><title>Show HN: Star Trek DS9 Episodes Worth Watching</title><url>http://tessalt.github.io/ds9-episodeguide/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnathanson</author><text>The problem with TNG is that it didn&amp;#x27;t necessarily get better in linear fashion, the way one could argue that DS9 got better as it &amp;quot;found its voice&amp;quot; and established a continuous storyline. TNG has some high points and some clunkers in almost every season, though there are &lt;i&gt;slightly&lt;/i&gt; more low points in the first two seasons. Having recently rewatched the run of the show, in chronological order, I&amp;#x27;d guesstimate that 10% of the episodes are bad, 50% are decent, 20% are great, and 20% are spectacular. [1]&lt;p&gt;So something like this would be especially helpful for TNG, where a) there are a lot of episodes in total, and b) there are no useful rules of thumb or shorthand (such as &amp;quot;skip season X,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;it gets better beyond Y&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;Now, the great news about TNG is that it&amp;#x27;s mostly episodic. Which means she can watch any episode, at random, and enjoy it as a self-contained story. (Aside from the two-parters.) TNG really lends itself to randomized viewing. DS9 needs to be watched in chronological order (at least for the first-time viewer). TNG can be watched in any order.&lt;p&gt;[1] Some people will find this assessment overly generous, and others will find it overly harsh. That&amp;#x27;s the beauty of Trek fandom; there&amp;#x27;s plenty of room for disagreement. :) Just about the only things TNG fans can agree on are that: 1) Riker with beard &amp;gt; Riker without beard; 2) &amp;quot;The Naked Now&amp;quot; is probably the series&amp;#x27; worst episode, although it&amp;#x27;s enjoyable in a kitschy, ironic sort of way; 3) Wesley Crusher sucks (although Wil Wheaton himself is a pretty awesome guy).</text></item><item><author>jerf</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d be interested in a version of this for TNG as well. My wife recently expressed interest in running through TNG on Netflix, but there&amp;#x27;s several fairly bad episodes and a lot that are pretty tedious with little point. But I sampled a few of the ones I remembered as being good, and seen through eyes with 20 years more experience there&amp;#x27;s definitely more to them than I remember. So I&amp;#x27;m not intrinsically against the idea, but I don&amp;#x27;t want to walk through the entire series.&lt;p&gt;For instance, we watched the episode where Picard is kidnapped by the Borg. As a teenager, my drama-IQ was not so low that I entirely missed the major storyline that Riker gets in that story about his career as he is challenged by the up-and-coming Shelby, but I certainly see it much more clearly and with far more nuance now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glenra</author><text>By way of a friend-of-a-friend being one of the TNG writers, I was given a pretty cool explanation for what happened with Wesley. Upshot: It was the writers&amp;#x27; strike.&lt;p&gt;What happened was this: The TNG team had regular meetings where the writers and producers got together and reviewed the state of the series - what kinds of scripts and stories they were looking for and what was in the pipeline and what sort of course corrections they wanted to see. At one such meeting the producers said &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ve got this character Wesley but we haven&amp;#x27;t really DONE anything with him - the audience doesn&amp;#x27;t know much about him. We&amp;#x27;d really like to see some stories that let us connect more with that character.&amp;quot; Then the dozen writers all went home with that thought in mind: let&amp;#x27;s get to know Wesley! And how do you &amp;quot;get to know a character better&amp;quot; on a Trek show? Have him save the ship! So the following week, a dozen writers all submitted their own independent &amp;quot;Wesley saves the ship&amp;quot; scripts.&lt;p&gt;...and right after that the writers&amp;#x27; strike happened and nobody could write any NEW scripts, so to keep the series going they had to film and show any decent scripts they already had handy, far too many of which (by pure chance) featured Wesley saving the ship. If they had had a choice, they would have filmed fewer of those scripts at all, sent a few back for rewrites, and staggered them out much farther apart between runs of episodes in which a little kid DOESN&amp;#x27;T manage to make everyone else on the ship look stupid or redundant.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Star Trek DS9 Episodes Worth Watching</title><url>http://tessalt.github.io/ds9-episodeguide/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnathanson</author><text>The problem with TNG is that it didn&amp;#x27;t necessarily get better in linear fashion, the way one could argue that DS9 got better as it &amp;quot;found its voice&amp;quot; and established a continuous storyline. TNG has some high points and some clunkers in almost every season, though there are &lt;i&gt;slightly&lt;/i&gt; more low points in the first two seasons. Having recently rewatched the run of the show, in chronological order, I&amp;#x27;d guesstimate that 10% of the episodes are bad, 50% are decent, 20% are great, and 20% are spectacular. [1]&lt;p&gt;So something like this would be especially helpful for TNG, where a) there are a lot of episodes in total, and b) there are no useful rules of thumb or shorthand (such as &amp;quot;skip season X,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;it gets better beyond Y&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;Now, the great news about TNG is that it&amp;#x27;s mostly episodic. Which means she can watch any episode, at random, and enjoy it as a self-contained story. (Aside from the two-parters.) TNG really lends itself to randomized viewing. DS9 needs to be watched in chronological order (at least for the first-time viewer). TNG can be watched in any order.&lt;p&gt;[1] Some people will find this assessment overly generous, and others will find it overly harsh. That&amp;#x27;s the beauty of Trek fandom; there&amp;#x27;s plenty of room for disagreement. :) Just about the only things TNG fans can agree on are that: 1) Riker with beard &amp;gt; Riker without beard; 2) &amp;quot;The Naked Now&amp;quot; is probably the series&amp;#x27; worst episode, although it&amp;#x27;s enjoyable in a kitschy, ironic sort of way; 3) Wesley Crusher sucks (although Wil Wheaton himself is a pretty awesome guy).</text></item><item><author>jerf</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d be interested in a version of this for TNG as well. My wife recently expressed interest in running through TNG on Netflix, but there&amp;#x27;s several fairly bad episodes and a lot that are pretty tedious with little point. But I sampled a few of the ones I remembered as being good, and seen through eyes with 20 years more experience there&amp;#x27;s definitely more to them than I remember. So I&amp;#x27;m not intrinsically against the idea, but I don&amp;#x27;t want to walk through the entire series.&lt;p&gt;For instance, we watched the episode where Picard is kidnapped by the Borg. As a teenager, my drama-IQ was not so low that I entirely missed the major storyline that Riker gets in that story about his career as he is challenged by the up-and-coming Shelby, but I certainly see it much more clearly and with far more nuance now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkohari</author><text>Hey, when I was 12, Wesley was pretty awesome.</text></comment>