So! What did we learn?
Let's start by answering that narrowly, by turning to the results. Deep Space Nine has been undergoing a welcome wave of reappraisals for a little while now, so I can't claim to be among the first to have grabbed a hammer, but it still feels good to add another nail to the coffin containing the theory that its first season disappoints. Not only does no other first season match it, I'm not sure any Trek season at all matches it, save for later years of the show itself (and even that is debatable).
Similarly, the high placement of Voyager isn't much of a surprise. The show’s two major early mistakes were to not quite recognise what made TNG work in its pomp, or what DS9 had done to remix that success to create a classic right out of the gate. The whole point of IDFC was to demonstrate the foolishness of comparing every new show to TNG's imperial phase, which is just a more general way of saying the blog was going to launder the reputation of VOY S1.
Enterprise coming dead last shook me a little more. I'd assumed it would benefit from the same reorienting effect as the two shows preceding it. That turned out to be true for a little while, in fairness, but while TNG figured out enough about how to make its batshit SOP hang together enough to function week by week, Enterprise took the least interesting decision at every point and still couldn't get itself together. In retrospect, it feels entirely right that the sprawling, colourful messes of both TNG and TAS beat Enterprise's grey grimdark gruel. Even if you can make the case that showing what made Trek special by providing a counter-example was a bold and interesting decision to take, the perils associated with messing up the execution on that were much greater than with “What if TNG but no re-supplies”, and the show suffers accordingly.
The biggest shock of all, though, is how high TOS has placed. I know I'd said that I wanted to avoid the easy route of slamming the show every time it reflected how white Americans in the 1960s saw the world - there's no skill in shooting fish in a barrel, even for the subspecies koi klux klan. I was still expecting the background radiation to drown out the signal a little more than it did, though.
Perhaps this is just down to something as uninteresting as the original having a built-in advantage. Even though I was born six years before TNG began, a combination of the original show's cultural cache, battered home-taped VHS cassettes of the first four films, and what must seem to the under-thirties to be an inexplicable and interminable time-lag between something airing in the States and airing on British terrestrial television [1], meant Kirk would always be my first captain.
More than that, though, there's a self-consciousness to everything that followed TOS. Every spin of the spin-off wheel needed to land on something which was the same and different and actually good; you can hear the tension in every spoke of what's being partially reinvented before our eyes. Simply put, a lot of post-TOS shows took a while to sort out their shit together because there was so much shit to sort out. I'd expect the board to look very different at the end of Season 2, but, you know. That's a conversation for a different decade.
That would be a bit of a bitter taste to end this feast on, though. Besides, I don't think the measurements and statistics of the last six years really constitute what I've learned at all. The real story of IDFC, at least for its writer, is how my impression of Trek has shifted. I started this series from a quixotic desire to stab at very specific form of poor critical practice. This franchise was just the example with which I was most familiar, and which provided the greatest number of examples to consider. I was looking forward to revisiting my youth, sure [2], but in the same way most of us revisit our youth – with the knowledge that our memories and our critical faculties are never far from coming to blows.
Trek did indeed set off a series of punch-ups, but it hit differently differently. I’d done these space-lads dirty. I don’t know whether it’s the state of the world, or the fact I’ve gotten older. I don’t even know if that’s a relevant distinction, given this is the only world I had available to get older in, and I did so nursing the tumorous hive of fractal privileges I possess besides. All I can really say is that, at long last, I get it. I understand why Trek, at its best, refuses to let reality drag it down. It does so imperfectly, and frustratingly, and its reputation for doing just about anything first is almost always exaggerated. But it does do it, sometimes, and more often it at least tries to.
And maybe we’re back to my privilege again, but if feels like the sustained effort, in itself, is important. I said this just two days ago, but trying fucking matters, and that’s something baked into this franchise from the start. “They Genuinely Did Their Best” feels like a hell of an epitaph for just about anyone, and there’s a reason the Trek resurgence of the last half-decade almost ran itself aground recycling Trek’s iconography, until it clicked that what needed revisiting was Trek’s ethos. If ’86 to ’05 was about figuring out how much of the wheel needed reinventing, ’08 to ’22 has been about what happens when you assume the wheel must need reinventing entirely, just because of how you perceive the road ahead and behind.
This isn’t about how difficult it is to capture lightning in a bottle. It’s about recognising what that first thunderbolt was able to power. One of the advantages of our lofty 2020s perch is that we can see all of these shows as artefacts of history. There are no longer just two periods labelled “Shatner” and “Now”. Almost two decades after Enterprise ended, we’ve come far enough to take in the whole vista at once. From that vantage point, it becomes clear that while TOS is the most reactionary and exclusionary of these six seasons, it’s also the show which pushed hardest against the limitations imposed on it by its historical context. There’s a willingness to outrage the right-wing arseholes of the day - even as a few of those arseholes were allowed to write a smattering of episodes – in a way its successors frequently shied away from. That’s why TOS was singled out for praise by Dr Martin Luther King Jr, while TNG was singled out for praise by Jim Davidson. Maybe that's the real explanation for TOS’s high placing, actually. And that’s not a swipe at everything which followed from "Encounter At Farpoint". The softly-softly approach has its place. It’s just worth remembering that portraying a post-sexist, post-racist society is really only the start. A damn good start, but still just a start.
As timid and tangled and occasionally treacherous as Trek has been in trying to show us how to be better, though, the effort bears fruit. IDFC has produced its ranking for these half-dozen different years of television, but everything we’ve covered is Trek. Not even Enterprise, with its focus on how political differences and competing interests can poison the noble intentions this franchise wants to embody, lacks that spark - or at least, its darkness is a conscious reminder of how difficult keeping that spark from fading to nothingness really is.
Like I said; the hits hit differently now. I came into this project wanting to know which Trek had the best beginning. I’ve come out of it realising the sheer importance of it having begun at all. It’s been a six-year mission of realising how much I’d missed the point. One more person whose mind was changed by Trek.
Maybe this journey has changed your mind too. Either way, I hope you enjoyed it. Those were the journeys. This is Trek, though. There’s always the hope that one day in the future, we’ll return once more to the stars.
[1] I completely get why people are so furious about Paramount’s chicanery meaning those of us in the UK struggle to see new Trek episodes on anything like a reasonable timescale after Twitter thoroughly deconstructs them. Even so, the less worthy portions of my brain can’t keep help reading the whipper-snappers’ tweets about the delays, and remember the dark days in which Brits were lucky to see an episode of US sci-fi within eighteen months of its US broadcast.
I know, I know. You sweet summer children, get off my damn lawn.
[2] I stopped watching Trek regularly once I started university, though at the start of my thirties I bought all of DS9 on DVD, for reasons I assume are obvious.
Utterly Untenable Total Ordering
1. The Great
Duet Past Prologue Emissary In The Hands Of The Prophets A Man Alone The Arsenal Of Freedom Balance Of Terror The Last Outpost Yesteryear More Tribbles, More Troubles Symbiosis Progress Encounter At Farpoint Terra Nova The Menagerie (Part 1) The Conscience Of The King Eye Of The Needle The Naked Time The City On The Edge Of Forever Prime Factors Shore Leave The Magicks Of Megas Tu
2. The Good
Cathexis The Time Trap Battlelines Vortex The Forsaken The Storyteller
Strange New World The Galileo Seven Captive Pursuit
Dax The Devil In The Dark Arena Heart Of Glory Dramatis Personae Too Short A Season Babel The Nagus Phage Where No Man Has Gone Before Haven The Corbomite Maneuver Heroes & Demons Return Of The Archons Court Martial Faces The Squire Of Gothos We'll Always Have Paris Vox Sola A Taste Of Armageddon Parallax Fallen Hero Tomorrow Is Yesterday Ex Post Facto Dagger Of The Mind State Of Flux Errand Of Mercy The Big Goodbye The Cloud
3. The Enterprise Mesopelagic Zone
Broken Bow Beyond The Farthest Star The Battle Breaking The Ice The Jihad Two Days And Two Nights Detained Shockwave (Part 1) Operation: Annihilate! Acquisition Datalore Fortunate Son Shuttlepod One Desert Crossing Rogue Planet The Slaver Weapon This Side Of Paradise The Infinite Vulcan One Of Our Planets Is Missing Emanations Shadows Of P’Jem Lonely Among Us
Civilization Cold Front Sleeping Dogs
4. Curate's Eggs
If Wishes Were Horses
11001001
Fight Or Flight
Q-Less
Jetrel
Caretaker
The Man Trap Coming Of Age
The Andorian Incident
What Are Little Girls Made Of
Where No-One Has Gone Before
5. Curate's Omelettes
Hide And Q Once Upon A Planet Conspiracy Oasis Home Soil Angel One The Terratin Incident The Menagerie (Part 2) The Survivor The Neutral Zone
6. The Unthinking Depths
Space Seed Silent Enemy The Alternative Factor Miri The Passenger Justice When The Bough Breaks Move Along Home Unexpected Time And Again Charlie X Fusion The Ambergris Element The Eye Of The Beholder
7. Burn The Master Tapes
Mudd's Women Skin Of Evil Learning Curve The Enemy Within Dear Doctor The Lorelei Signal The Naked Now Code Of Honor Mudd's Passion