10 Best Star Trek The Original Series Episodes

4. The Doomsday Machine

Star Trek The Doomsday Machine 1
Paramount

As far as TV openings go, The Doomsday Machine's has to be one of the most ominous out there.

Investigating what appears to be a distress signal from the Enterprise's sister ship, the U.S.S. Constellation, Kirk orders his ship to warp to their last known coordinates and discovers the ship floating in space, heavily damaged, and with no means of communication.

Following a quick investigation, it turns out that the Constellation had been tracking what can only be described as the forebear to the Death Star. It's been destroying planets left, right, and centre, and the Enterprise - though an equipped vessel - is clearly outgunned. What follows makes for one of the most dramatic, intuitive and tense Trek episodes of all time, as we see the Enterprise engage in a literal David v Goliath encounter with a ship that's ended more lives than a newly de-cloaked Bird of Prey.

This is where Star Trek's bridge dynamic works best, with all the Enterprise crew rallying together to solve a problem on their own bridge in the arrival of Commodore Matt Decker, an unstable maverick determined to bring the Doomsday Machine down even if it comes at the cost of Kirk's allies.

It's just fantastic, and typifies the strengths of the show's characters as much as it does the genius of Roddenberry's concept itself.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.