Star Trek: EVERY Season Ranked Worst To Best
ALL 34 seasons - what's essential and what can you skip?
With the announcement that Star Trek is about to venture off in the latest series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it seems a good time to look back on everything that has come before.
However, how does one, for example, compare Kirk's battle with the Gorn against Voyager's struggle with the Vidiians? Or how does Sisko's struggle to live with his guilt rack up against Picard's guilt over losing Data?
It may be that there is no right or wrong answer here, as many will have different preferences to how stories are told. Writing that was done in the '60s will not feel the same as writing that is done in the 2010's. So, it's not so easy to say that the Original Series is far superior to Picard, or that Deep Space Nine flattens the efforts of Discovery.
The nature of the ever expanding franchise is that we are, thankfully, being offered many, many different options when it comes to series and entries. At the time of this article's composition, Lower Decks, Discovery season three, Picard season two and now of course Strange New Worlds have yet to air, so who knows where they will place on a list such as this?
While that may sound like an invitation to join us again once they air (and it is!), it is also a reminder that nothing is set in stone in this franchise.
34. Short Treks - Season 2
Jumping right in, Star Trek Short Treks, Season Two comes in as our first entry. While there are strong moments in this set of episodes, not least the wonderful acting between Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck, the short season doesn't have much of a chance here.
That is not to say that it's bad at all. Q&A is the strongest of the bunch, with Children of Mars coming in second. While this final episode is a beautiful and elegiac tribute the disaster that would kick the action of Star Trek Picard into gear, the fact that it spends its runtime dialogue free, concentrating on characters we don't know stands against it.
The other entries in the season vary from soft entertainment to outright odd. Ask Not is a fine addition, mostly due to the presence of Anson Mount's Pike. Ephraim and Dot is cute, featuring various voice cameos from the original series. The Girl Who Made The Stars feels like a beautiful, but hollow few minutes.
The real issue of the season is The Trouble With Edward. Clearly the aim was attempt slapstick comedy in some way, but Edward is so thoroughly unlikable that we end up rooting for his creations to devour him. The laughs are thin on the ground here.
Short Treks Season Two: Glad to have them, not amazing.