Thoughts on Star Trek: The Original Series · 5:01am Aug 5th, 2017
TL;DR: I finished watching all of Star Trek: The Original 60's Series. The 90's series is better. But the 60's one has probably left the bigger cultural impact. And I offend every Trekkie I know with uncultured opinions.
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I've been sick for a week, which has been very strange. I'm not used to being this unproductive, or this lethargic. Even playing a video game seems too strenuous right now.
Basically that meant the only "productive" thing I could do was binge watch something on Netflix. And that meant I got a chance to add something to my "fandom portfolio." I'm sure everyone has several fandoms they're a part of. But my absurd personal goal is to join as many fandoms as possible. I always prefer to have a shallow knowledge of a lot of different fandoms, rather than getting absurdly deep into just one fandom. Well anyway, this was a prime week to slowly continue my crawl toward watching all of Star Trek.
I want to add "Trekkie" to my fandom portfolio but there's just so much content. Fandoms with an absurdly huge archive are always the hardest to get into.
Okay, so here are my impressions after binge watching all of Star Trek: The Original Series at 2.5x speed.
Kirk or Picard
Ever since watching that White and Nerdy video by Weird Al, I've wanted to be able to honestly answer this absurdly nerdy question: Favorite captain, Kirk or Picard? I watched all of The Next Generation last year and now I can finally compare them.
Picard is so superior in every single way. I mean—why is this even a question!? Picard is a consummate, efficient diplomat. Kirk, while wonderful in his own right, does not hold up next to Picard at all. (I haven't watched Voyager or DS9 to comment on those captains).
Girl of the week
Instead of a monster of the week, it feels like Trek would often have a "girl of the week." They go to some planet and surprise, there's a girl for one of the main cast to instantly fall in love with. Mostly Kirk. It's honestly really ridiculous. I don't think that happened nearly as often in TNG (The 90's series). Binge watching it all made it ever more annoying by how often it would happen. The sexism in general was aggravating.
Humanity has gotten SO much better at storytelling in 50 years
Y'know the 10,000 hour rule? That it takes 10,000 hours to become world class at something? It all boils down to that whole: "Practice makes perfect" aphorism we're all used to. Well, looking at a 50 year old TV show is an exercise in understanding that humanity builds off of each other. We read/watch other stories and we take that knowledge and create better and better stories. Humanity is constantly evolving to become better at storytelling.
That's basically a very nice way of saying that Star Trek: ToS is... a bit of a chore to watch. It has all these Sci-Fi ideas that I really enjoyed, but packaged in a slow... rather clunky shell that made it hard to watch. I probably should have just read the wikipedia synopsis at a certain point and that would have been sufficient. It's like... like reading the Old Testament. Lot's of good stuff in there, but packaged really oddly and I never want to touch it again.
Reset buttons
Nothing changes on the Starship Enterprise. At the end of each episode, everything magically resets to where it was before. It makes me really appreciate Silverquill's shouts of "CONTINUITY!" for MLP episodes. Things change! And it's awesome!
Star Trek is not meant to be binged, but I'm going to anyway
For the time period that Trek was made for, episodes would come on TV in an almost random order. So having a series where the season premiere and finale were completely ordinary episodes made it so anyone could watch it without any background. And there really is no need for background. If I had known this earlier in life—that any episode of Star Trek can be watched in any order—I probably wouldn't have waited until my mid-20's to watch any of it.
And I think that's the best way to watch Star Trek, an episode here, an episode there. It's designed to be picked up anywhere, not binged. The "binge" is definitely a modern experience, and our entertainment has twisted to accommodate that style of watching. But for this older stuff, it's probably meant to be watched slowly.
I love the philosophy
Star Trek is mostly a show about philosophy. A fantastical problem shows up and a great deal of the dialogue is about how the problem should be addressed morally as well as logically. I LOVE that! It's a show that asks the viewers to think alongside the main characters.
Cultural Impact
As a member of the Fandom Fandom, Star Trek has been on my mind for as long as I can remember. It's been referenced to, poked fun of, and everything in between. It's SO NICE to finally be able to pinpoint where all that cultural milieu was coming from. TVTropes alone feels a good 3% more readable now that I know where all those tropes come from.
And I can definitely see why Star Trek was perfect Fandom fuel. There's a lot going on, and a whole lot left unexplained that just begs for fanfiction to be written to explain it all.
Interesting stuff. 
And now begins my slow crawl toward my next Star Trek series... probably Deep Space 9.
DS9 can't be watched in any order. You have to go beginning to end.
I feel like if you want to get really deep into sci-fi tropes, you should read some of the golden age authors like Asimov.
I watched most of DS9 when it aired. I think I was too young to really appreciate it. I rewatched it, mostly in order, a few years back, and it really is quite good. I didn't quite binge it, but close, I think that helped me pick up the ongoing story lines. It is willing to deal with topics that the other series wouldn't, most notably long term consequences. There are a lot of secondary characters to keep track of though.
Now you've unlocked Where No Pony Has Gone Before! (Which is a fun love letter to the original series).
I love TNG, absolutely adored it growing up, but Deep Space Nine is my favorite and, I would say, the best-written of all Treks. It looks slow and dull at first... at first. But as silvadel said, you definitely do have to watch it from beginning to end. Also Sisko is best commander.
You may also like to check out SFDebris, who's been doing Trek video reviews for years, and is very amusing and insightful. Quite often, his reviews have made me see episodes that I didn't like in a new light, and helped me to enjoy them more.
Don't worry. I'm sure they won't make that mistake again.
There was very little continuity in TV shows before, I dunno, Hill St. Blues? Ricky and Lucille had a baby, and Opie Taylor got older, but that's all I can think of right now... except when actors left a show, like on MASH. Continuity was for soap operas.
I think the VCR made continuity practical. People could tape shows. Before that, if you missed an episode of a show that had continuity, you might not be able to make sense of it. They couldn't have aired "Lost" or "Breaking Bad" before the VCR.
I've never been able to make it through an episode of TNG. It comes off as too pretentious and serious and full of itself for me to sit through it. Also, cringy 90s tension and such. I appreciate continuity, but dang if the rest of it isn't good...
Also, original Enterprise (ncc-1701) is way better looking than next upgrade Enterprise.
It says a lot about TOS that when the episode is about mafia like gangsters on another planet or Nazis replete with swastikas, no one in my family blinks an eye. Did they get away with stuff like that in TNG?
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TNG can be definitely be a bit pompous in the first couple of seasons, but fortunately it moved away from that (and most of the heavy-handed allegory/moralizing) early on. (It even named the trope!). It's nowhere near as hokey as some of the nonsense in TOS.
My favorite thing about TNG, really, is the fantasy of living on an enormous futuristic space ship, in a future where most of life's problems are solved, being part of a crew exploring the unknown, or even just dealing with ship life. It's utopian, and naive to be sure, but that was the draw for the younger me. TNG presents an uncynical future of humanity, and has some excellent high-concept sci-fi storytelling and also I just really like spaceships and lasers
DS9 would later come along and present the more "gray" side of Trek, by showing what the Federation looks like when you're not actually in it. :)
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Maybe that is the case for American TV, but British series like The Prisoner, and to some extend Dr. Who, aired back in the 1960s, and they are certainly meant to be watched in order.