Whenever I see a conversation along the lines of "what episode should I show my friend/partner/etc. to get them hooked on Star Trek," the suggestions are pretty predictable - your "best" episodes that are regarded to represent the franchise at its peak.
I like to take a different approach, trying to find episodes that I feel are most representative of the series - the "average" Star Trek episode. If you show someone the "best," there's nowhere to go but down, and it can set someone up for disappointment.
In the case of Star Trek, I actually find this pretty difficult, and I don't think I've come up with any that I feel are really good answers, so I'm taking it to the crowd: what are the most representative episodes of Star Trek.
To me, these are the boxes that probably need to be ticked:
- Enjoyable (obviously).
- A conventional structure that doesn't deviate from the norm too much - this is a flexible concept, but I think it excludes things like "Darmok," or "Tapestry," or "In the Pale Moonlight," which are not really conventional.
- Any series is fair game.
What do you think? What are some "normal" Star Trek episodes that would serve as good representation of what the franchise usually is?
My first thought whenever the topic of what episode a person should to introduce Trek to someone comes up is "The Measure of a Man". Though perhaps a courtroom drama, while certainly something Trek dabbles with on multiple occasions, is not typical enough to fall under the umbrella of conventional.
Maybe something like "Children of the Comet" from season one of SNW. There's a strange mystery that's going to spell disaster for a pre-warp civilization, an alien of the week antagonist whom the Enterprise crew needs to figure out how to deal with without getting into a fight, and everything's neatly wrapped up by the end. The biggest mark against it would be the subplot where Pike's dealing with the knowledge that he's going to end up in a beep chair.
I think a little serialization can be a good thing, especially in a series like SNW, where it's baked into the premise.
I don't disagree, but I do believe that when we think about what Star Trek is, what it boils down to is an episodic procedural, despite how serialized it can be at times.
Yeah, and that really underlines the point that the "representative" episode of each series probably has very different properties.