...Is adorable.

Just fantastic.

I can't wait until he gets into DS9.

The fun topical question for DS9 is over how acceptable its view toward guerilla warfare, military occupation, terrorism, and globalization (see: The Federation) is in the 21st century.

This will probably all go over Dan's head but there are more "normal cool guys" punching stuff in DS9. And there's Odo! How could Dan hate Odo? How could anyone hate Odo?

@excitable_misunderstood_genius:

I love Star Trek but for some reason many DS9 episodes are hard to watch. I think I just don't care about the characters. I haven't been able to get to season 4. Only started trying to watch it last summer. And I keep forgetting to stick to it.

@blackout62:

O'Brien!

Sisko!

Quark!

GAREK!

I'm also in the camp that loves Next Generation but just can't behind DS9. The characters and setting don't grab me like they do in NG.

Should I watch the original series or just skip to TNG?

I think DS9 really begins from the end of season 3 onward, just like TNG is suuuuper rough for the first couple seasons

Basically, the Dominion War arc saves the show in a hell of a way. It lets a pretty great cast explore interesting, interconnected stories. Sisko's great, Garak's fantastic, and yes... there's Worf

Too bad Voyager never got anything similar, in either the cast or the plot...

Is Dan starting with the original series or TNG? (I haven't listened to the podcast yet where I assume this info is available) I cannot imagine Dan will like the nerdish prime directiveness of TNG, but who knows!

i think DS9 is awesome, and I think next generation is awesome. Your a monster, A MONSTER, if you dont like both.

Myself, i prefer DS9, because the show is a good mix of episodic and serialized episodes. Also there are character arcs!!!

He's starting out with TNG, following Max Temkin's Star Trek Viewing Guide.

No surprise that Riker is his dude, but his excitement about it (and surprise with his enjoyment) is really fun. Makes me want to go back and watch as well.

@bocam you might want to try following the same viewing guide. They talk about it on today's bombcast.

DS9 is the only star trek series i haven't seen all the way through, which is odd since I def wanted to support the only black captain in the series. I think it came on at a weird time for me as a kid or something.

@bocam: TNG. Maybe go back to the original series later if you actually enjoy Star Trek but it hasn't aged well. You have to have the love for it before you watch it fresh.

Oh, I thought my comment made it pretty clear I was speaking in a meta context. But yeah, those guys hate Odo more often than not.

Dang, is Temkin saying to basically skip a ton of episodes? I'm not exactly a completionist but what's the point of watching a series when you're going to pass over large portions of it? Mind you, I've been stuck on S1 Ep7 for about 18 months, but I have been thinking about taking the dip again.

Well... yeah.

You can always go back. From my limited knowledge of the show I think this approach makes sense. It's getting me to think about going in on it myself. When you trim down the episodes to watch it seems more approachable.

I'm glad Dan is getting into Star Trek.

I was intending to list off more awesome characters, not list people disliking Odo. Although there's sometimes conflict there, yeah.

I think that list is kind of bad. While I generally agree with his choices for the first and second seasons, the majority of the series after that is really good and he's skipping out on some key episodes.

DS9 is bad for all but about 1.5 seasons.

Voyager is hit and miss, I would say it has about 12 episodes worth watching.

Enterprise is pretty boring.

TOS is amazing. I'm hoping Dan goes back and watches a bunch of TOS stuff after this.

I'm probably among the 10 people on this planet that liked Enterprise, I don't understand the hate it gets.

Wait! You're listing cool characters and you skip Kira Nerys!? And Bashir!?

@bocam: I'd probably start with TNG, but TOS is cool as long as you're prepared for the fact that it's a pretty old show. Though, to be fair, the first season of TNG was a bit rough and the show didn't hit its stride until about the third season.

@2headedninja: I'm one of those other 10 people who liked Enterprise a lot. I found it more consistently enjoyable than either DS9 or Voyager.

I want to watch star trek but I decided to watch Farscape instead. How different is star trek from shows such as farscape and battlestar galactica?

Voyager is the only star trek show I've watched and I loved it all. It was on before the simpsons on Sky One Sundays.

It bums me out when people trash talk it.

The whole cncept of watching only certain episodes is stupid. Pure mindless stupidity. Its like skipping paragraphed of a chapter and nearly skipping whole chapter of a book.

Even fucking Dan (no offense Dan) seems able to enjoy Star Trek, so why edit out bits just so you can only watch a summery in 48 hrs.

I'm one of the 10 people on Earth that didn't think Voyager was terrible.

@lun49gameon I used to love Farscape back in the day before they lost all funding and every episode was them on Earth. The villains and tech was really cool. That said it's pretty hard to go back to it now..

Star Trek is completely a different kind of beast. Farscape is an action heavy show that follows a very linear narrative throughout. Star Trek episodes are mostly independent of one another and it's a lot slower paced and dialog heavy - lots of people discussing things. Battlestar Galactica is a lot more similar to Farscape actually - it also relies heavily on action and coincidentally is also about finding Earth.

I'd say if you enjoyed Farscape then Battlestar Galactica is a good stepping stone into a similar sci-fi show that is a tiny bit more grounded in reality. You could try watching Star Trek but it is 100% different in every possible way.

I was real excited to hear that Dan was getting into Star Trek and enjoying it. I'm real bummed to hear he might be watching only a handful of episodes. I would flip the list idea around: I would tell him to watch everything, except for a small handful of episodes he can safely skip.

TNG is rarely about cool guy action stuff. Your love for TNG is entirely dependent on your love for the characters. If you're skipping episodes, you're missing out on so many story beats. A fantastic episode like Inner Light isn't going to carry the same heft if you haven't seen clunkers like We'll Always Have Paris. You need to know who Picard is, and how much he regrets never finding time for a family, to understand the significance of Inner Light.

Add that Max leaves off great episodes (like Captains Holiday, Qpid, Conundrum, Starship Mine and Pegasus), and I really hope Dan likes the series enough to keep going with it.

Dam seems like the sort of person who might get into Farscape or Andromeda.

@maedhros925: Theres a character in Captain's Holiday and Qpid that comes back for an episode in DS9. Could be confusing xD

I agree with people saying that he should watch the whole thing and not skip any episodes but some a good chunk of the first two seasons are rough. I'd say from season 3 and onward he shouldn't skip any episodes.

Also, I think the people who like DS9 over TNG are the same kind of people who like Majora's Mask over Ocarina of Time (I'm one of those crazy people).

Voyager was meh and Enterprise was kind of good. Not great thought. I liked it. There wasn't any Trek series that I just couldn't finish. I admit that I skipped a few episodes of Voyager.

Man, Voyager had some of the best (The Doctor, Seven of Nine, Tuvok) and worst(Kes, Chakotay, Harry Kim) characters in Star Trek history.

For 28 years I haven't watched a single episode of Star Trek. After hearing Dan's enthusiasm for it I'll watch since it's on Prime and I feel like I missed out (Yes, I'm a Star Wars guy). I will be using Max's watch guide.

@m1k3: Follow Max's guide for the first two season but for the rest of it, try to watch the whole thing. I think it's worth it.

TNG is really episodic. If you just want to watch the best episodes you don't miss anything by skipping the other ones. It's not like skipping chapters in a book where you would have no idea what's happening because you skipped them.

@teaoverlord: Pretty much yeah. People need to remember that TV back then wasn't really serialized. Each episode was a self-contained story. Video on Demand, DVRs and streaming wasn't a thing back then and they had to make sure that even if you missed an episode, you could jump straight in and get some enjoyment out of it.

I think voyager gets remembered poorly because it has the worst ending in history, but the show wasn't bad at all.

Add me to the 10 because enterprise was great and i was mad it got cancelled right when it was getting good. I mean, they had a fucking swat team instead of sending in every bridge crew member on away missions.

@azrailx: Same here, I like DS9 and Sisko is probably favorite captain so far. Love his combo of really caring and a bit of a hard ass. Dude loves making southern foods, baseball and seems real real old school (as much as you can be in Star Trek). Also DS9 has some of my favorite Star Trek characters like, Quark, Nog and the boss Odo.

I'm listing characters I expect Dan to think are rad based on what we know of him at this point. Not sure how he'll deal with Kira, and I feel like Bashir will irritate him.

And people that don't like DS9 are confusing to me. It's easily the most modern of the Star Trek shows.

The episode where Deanna Troi was a cake gave me nightmares. Is that on his list?

I don't think it is.

That's a really old really disturbing memory from young EMG's life.

@excitable_misunderstood_genius: The reason DS9 is not widely liked is because any episode pre Defiant were just bad. The Dominion Wars arc was pretty good but the worm hole aliens caused that arc to lose to much suspense, the actual definition of deus ex machina. On top of all that the ending was painful. I liked a lot of the characters, I enjoyed quite a few episodes, and the Dominion War arc was for the most part great. But as a whole TNG is superior and then you get into the whole timing of people growing out of ST at the same time DS9 was on and didn't get into it as much as TNG.

Like others have said DS9 gets amazing from season 4 on, that show was very ballsy for the time.

Nah, there was tons of good stuff before that. There just also was downer material, like any episode that used the word Vedeck too much, or involved The Prophets.

The Circle arc? Totally coolguy actionstuff.

That is exactly how I've felt and I haven't watched Star Trek for 14 years.

As long as you understand the limits of 1960's TV, I think TOS is alright to start with. There were remasters released about 10 years ago where they updated the special effects with CGI, which unlike the Star Wars remasters didn't turn out too poorly.

The original Star Trek certainly has aged, but there's still a great chemistry between the main characters, and there are some really good episodes of that.

Yeah, I enjoyed both Voyager and Enterprise. Voyager had the lowest lows, I think, whereas Enterprise had a pretty mediocre start where they - as Jeff and Brad said on the bombcast - made a bit too many references to the other Star Trek shows despite being set well over a hundred years before them, but later on Enterprise became pretty damn fantastic, but even at it's worst, the episodes are pretty good in themselves, just overly referential.

The worst aspect of Voyager is how quickly they forgot about the really interesting premise of being lost in an unknown part of the universe with limited resources and personnell. In the first few episodes of Voyager they specifically say the limited amount of shuttles and photon torpedoes they have left, but over the course of the series they lose that thread entirely and become extremely wasteful with their ammunition, crash several shuttles seemingly without a way to recover them, and lose a whole bunch of crew members without taking much notice of it.

I am one of the biggest Star Trek fans ever but I could never handle the original series, it was just too low budget for me. Loved the Original Cast movies though.

The guide was great, once you realize that each episode if basically standalone it really makes no difference how you watch them, season 1 is so much different from the later seasons it's absurd. Now I can go back to it only when I really want to rather than sitting through the weakest part of the series for 15 episodes or whatever. I recommend using the guide and then going back in your case because I suspect you got burned out on some of that early stuff.

Now I can catch a Star Trek rerun on tv at random and both know whats going on and enjoy it because often it's one I haven't seen before.

ds9 sucks and totally runs star trek into the star wars extended universe territory of stupidity and no one should ever talk about it or watch it again

Star Trek is awesome except for the mirror universe episodes.

DS 9 has the most 'realistic' characters but a little too much 'fantasy' in the plot and most of the dialogue is wooden and stiff. Garek is one of the best characters ever seen on TV and he keeps getting better and better contrasted to the perfect crew members from the other shows that grow tiresome (Wesley?).

I would suggest Firefly to Dan because it has more action instead than dialogue.

@iceman228433: I'm in the same boat. I tried watching the whole original series after watching TNG and DS9 and found it very hard. I enjoyed quite a few episodes but some of it is just way to campy.

The original cast movies on the other hands or some of the best Sci-Fi in cinema, except maybe for #5.

There's something auspicious in the fact that Dan really enjoyed A Matter of Honor and I remember that as the first episode in the Whiskey Media MLK Day stream.

@justicejanitor: Funny thing is 5 was so bad they made 6 just because they could not end on the crap that was 5 lol.