10 Essential Star Trek: The Animated Series Episodes You Must See

Star Trek: The Animated Series (just Star Trek at the time) has gotten a raw deal over the decades. It has been bumped up and down the canon more times than Pachelbel at a wedding. A lot of the is-it-is-it-not stemmed from the Great Bird of the Galaxy (Gene Roddenberry, not the Aurelian Aleek-Om).

Seeing Star Trek had become a syndication smash hit after its cancellation, NBC looked to Roddenberry to bring it back. A live-action reboot would have been prohibitively expensive and so the network went for the animated option with production company Filmation.

For the legendary D.C. Fontana, returning as story editor/associate producer along with most of the cast and several Original Series writers, this was always the official fourth year of the Enterprise's five-year mission (for StarTrek.com, it's the fifth). But by 1988, at Roddenberry's behest, Paramount officially removed The Animated Series from canon, only to semi-reinstate it for the DVD release in 2006.

Furthermore, if you think The Animated Series is 'just for kids,' it's not, plus you might want to let your inner child out a bit more anyway. Sure, the animation might be a bit dodgy in places, but suspend your disbelief and enjoy some Emmy-winning writing.

These episodes may be unfamiliar to many, so spoilers will be minimised, and an alert given where needed. If you haven't already, here are 10 The Animated Series episodes you really should see.

To quote Julie Andrews whenever she and the kids sit down to binge-watch Star Trek: "Let's start at the very beginning." Not only does it make sense to choose the first instalment of The Animated Series to commence your must-see viewing, it is also a very good episode.

First broadcast precisely seven years after The Man Trap (except in Los Angeles over concerns about screen time regulations for George Takei who was running for office there in 1973), Beyond the Farthest Star is pure sci-fi, and classic Trek, with all the familiar intrigue and action throughout. Adding to this is the scope afforded by the new medium, immediately evident in the spectacular design of the ancient alien craft encountered by the Enterprise. Although Beyond the Farthest Star arguably fails to explore in much depth the ethical and emotional dilemma at its core, leaving its conclusion a little glib, it is most definitely worth a watch.

The episode also notably introduced 'life support belts' to the franchise, an EV device that created a forcefield around the user, along with the first fully alien alien in the guise of multi-limbed Edosian, lieutenant Arex (later joined by Caitian, lieutenant M'Ress). Whilst the use of life support belts over EV suits doesn't seem to have caught on — one power failure in a vacuum and you'd know why — personal forcefields have received nods in live-action, and we've seen the use of individual subspace forcefields in episodes such as Star Trek: The Next Generation's Timescape.