RIP René Auberjonois

News has sadly broken of the passing of René Auberjonois, a veteran of stage, screen and voiceover work but who will be best-known for playing the role of Constable Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He was 79 years old.

Auberjonois had distinguished parents, born to a Swiss journalist who'd been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a French-Italian princess. He was born in New York City but was raised for a time in Paris, returning to New York a few years later after deciding to become an actor. He first appeared on stage and made a habit of travelling between Los Angeles and New York on a regular basis, building up work in both cities. He appeared in both plays and musicals, winning a Tony Award in 1969 for his performance in Coco alongside Aubrey Hepburn. As well as performing, Auberjonois soon became a director and also a teacher at the prestigious Juilliard Drama School in New York.

He first appeared on screen in the early 1970s, most notably as Dr. Mulcahy in the original film version of M*A*S*H* and as a man who gradually turns into a bird in Robert Altman's experimental move Brewster McCloud. His first regular TV role was as Clayton Endicott III on Benson in 1980-86, coincidentally starring alongside future Star Trek alum Ethan Phillips (Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager). Auberjonois built up a substantial record as a guest star in TV shows including Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman, Murder, She Wrote, The Bionic Woman and Frasier.

In 1991 he had his first brush with the Star Trek franchise when he was cast as Colonel West in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Not long after he auditioned and got the role of Constable Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Auberjonois enjoyed playing Odo but initially struggled with the substantial makeup involved in the role. He took heart from his fellow performer Armin Shimerman (Quark) who also had to play under significant prosthetics. Auberjonois and Shimerman, whose characters frequently appeared together, struck up a strong working bond on the series. Occasionally it was mooted that Odo could use his shapeshifting powers to adopt a form that involved less make-up, but Auberjonois shot down the idea as he felt it would damage the integrity of the character, despite his own personal comfort. A consummate professional who won the respect of the cast, Auberjonois relished the writing and acting challenges provided by the series, noting that the writers constantly found new angles to play on the character which meant it never got old. He also directed eight episodes of the series.

In voice-over work he played the villainous Dr. Braxis on Challenge of the GoBots and Darkseid in the mid-1980s Super Friends. He also voiced Janos in the Legacy of Kain video game series and provided multiple voiceovers in Avatar: The Last Airbender, most notably as the Mechanist. He also played Mr. House, the primary antagonist of the video game Fallout: New Vegas.

Auberjonois passed away on 8 December 2019 from lung cancer. A highly talented actor with a formidable body of work, he will be missed.

RIP Aron Eisenberg

News sadly broke this morning that Star Trek actor Aron Eisenberg has passed away at the age of 50.

Eisenberg is best-known for playing the role of Nog in 44 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the nephew of Ferengi bar-owner Quark. Nog was originally conceived as a recurring guest character, a foil and trouble-making partner for Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton). As the show progressed, the writers took delight in exploiting Eisenberg's excellent comedic timing and also his more dramatic side, turning Nog from comic relief into a more serious character. In Season 3 the character expressed a desire to join Starfleet Academy and was accepted (with Captain Sisko's recommendation. Despite Eisenberg's fears he might be written out of the show, he returned several times in Season 4 as part of a subplot about an attempted coup on Earth by Starfleet officers rendered paranoid by fear of the changelings. Nog was stationed back on DS9 in Season 5. The show's final two seasons he appeared more frequently (appearing in half the episodes of both seasons) as a bridge officer on the USS Defiant.

In the Season 7 episode, the DS9 writers broke an unofficial Star Trek rule that had been in place since the third season of The Next Generation, that each episode had to revolve around at least one (if not several) of the named, regular actors whose names were in the lead credits. In the episode It's Only a Paper Moon, Nog, having lost his leg in battle, retreats into a fantasy world on the holosuite a as a coping mechanism and has to be helped through the trauma by hologram Vic Fontaine (another recurring character played by veteran Hollywood star James Darren). The studio were highly dubious of letting an episode ride almost entirely on two recurring guest stars, but the producers did it anyway, resulting in one of the most critically-acclaimed episodes of the series. Eisenberg was praised for his performance in a difficult and very atypical Nog storyline.

Eisenberg continued to act on stage and on screen, and also worked as a stage director. He also returned to Star Trek in the role of Karden in one episode of Star Trek: Voyager. One of his loves was photography, which he made a living from and also exhibited his work several times. With renewed interest in Deep Space Nine in the 2010s, when the show had cemented its critical reputation as the finest Star Trek show, Eisenberg starred with Lofton and several other DS9 actors on the 7th Rule podcast. He also played a role in the DS9 documentary What We Left Behind.

Eisenberg was born with only one kidney, partially functioning, which was cited as a reason for his short height (Eisenberg was 5 feet tall). At the age of 15, he underwent a kidney transplant and at the age of 46 had a second transplant.

Eisenberg is survived by his wife and two children. He had a reputation as a kind man, always laughing and willing to talk to fans, and was popular with his co-stars. He will be missed.

RIP Peter Allan Fields

Veteran and Hugo Award-winning television scriptwriter Peter Allan Fields has passed away this week. Fields enjoyed a 34-year career in Hollywood, but is best-known for his contributions to the Star Trek franchise.

Having trained as a lawyer, Fields switched to television writing and began his career working on The Man from UNCLE in 1965. He went to work on many shows in the 1960s and 1970s, including The Six Million Dollar Man and Man from Atlantis.

In 1991 he began his association with Star Trek: The Next Generation, penning the Lwaxana Troi-centric episodes Half a Life and Cost of Living. In 1992 he co-wrote the episode The Inner Light with Morgan Gendel, which remains one of the most highly-regarded Star Trek episodes of all time (if not the highest-regarded). He won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for his work on the episode.

He also worked on The Next Generation as script consultant for Seasons 5 and 6 but soon accepted an offer to jump ship to work on the spin-off show, Deep Space Nine. His scripts for the series included Duet and In the Pale Moonlight, episodes almost as well-regarded in Trek lore as The Inner Light. After Deep Space Nine ended in 1999, he retired from scriptwriting.

Fields passed away on 19 June. One of the best and most human writers to work on the Star Trek franchise, he will be missed.

Gratuitous Lists: Top Ten SFF Pilots

Five years ago, I talked about the best SFF finales, the shows that stuck their landings with good, rousing endings. Even rarer than a good ending is a good pilot, a great first episode that hooks you into a show for the duration. Many shows take a good 3-4 episodes to bed in and start getting good, so shows which are on fire from the first episode are rarer, and more valuable to networks.

Here is a list of ten of the best show-openers (in no particular order). Note that I have used "pilot" to mean "the first episode of the series" rather than the technical definition (a premiere episode filmed separately to the rest of the series, not always for public consumption).

Battlestar Galactica: The Mini-Series

Aired 8-9 December 2003

Ronald D. Moore worked on the Star Trek franchise over a decade, starting on The Next Generation in 1989 and rounding off the final season of Deep Space Nine in 1999, co-writing two movies along the way. In 2000 he joined the writing team of Star Trek: Voyager in its sixth season, but quickly found his goals for the series being thwarted. He wanted to see Voyager, trapped far from home on the other side of the galaxy, taking damage and staying damaged from episode to episode. He wanted to see more consistent characterisation, the morals of Starfleet being tested in extreme circumstances. Instead the other writers and producers wanted to hit the reset button at the end of every week.

Three years later, Moore was approached by the Sci-Fi Network (now SyFy) with an intriguing offer. They'd picked up the rights to 1978 space opera Battlestar Galactica and were developing a remake project. A previous reboot attempt, with X-Men producers Bryan Singer and Tom DeSanto, had foundered in the wake of 9/11 and SyFy were now looking for a fresh take. Moore agreed to take on the project on the understanding that he wanted to make it a more gritty and adult show. Although he'd enjoyed the original show, he felt the premise had been under-valued. The destruction of twelve planets and the deaths of billions of people would have left a staggering mental scar on the survivors, not to mention raising extreme ethical concerns of how the military and civilian authorities worked together in such circumstances, not to mention the collective PTSD of having tens of thousands of people trapped in spacecraft with dwindling supplies for months or years on end.

The result was a mini-series, aired on SyFy and then NBC in 2003, which served as a backdoor pilot for a series proper. And it'd be fair to say that Moore and his team knocked it out of the park. The second the mini-series opens it feels different. Director Michael Rymer created a shaky, immediate style of shooting that put the viewer in the heart of the action. Composer Richard Gibbs used a drums-heavy sound to create a very different, military-feeling soundtrack. The actors, a mix of newcomers like Jamie Bamber and Katee Sackhoff and industry veterans like Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, are uniformly excellent. The visual effects by CG studio Zoic are (still) amazing. Over the course of a generous three hours, the mini-series builds the world of the Twelve Colonies and then tears it down, leaving the bewildered survivors to try to escape and build a new life for themselves.

It's not the series at its best - the first episode of Season 1 and thus the next episode after this, 33, may hold that honour - but it does set up the show well and leave you wanting to watch more.

Blake's 7: The Way Back

Aired 2 January 1978

In the late 1970s, veteran TV writer Terry Nation was called in to a meeting at the BBC to discuss creating a new show. A respected writer with a huge amount of experience in the industry, he was still best-known for creating the Daleks for Doctor Who fifteen years earlier, and the BBC were hoping to tap that magic again. Nation had several ideas for crime dramas and other ideas, but the executives he was talking to seemed underwhelmed. Improvising on the spot, Nation suggested a dystopian space opera, with a band of malcontents and criminals reluctantly joining forces to escape a tyrannical government. He left with a commission to write a pilot.

Blake's 7 was developed as a conscious riposte to the relentless optimism of Star Trek; the symbol of the despotic Terran Federation is that of Star Trek's Federation but turned to the extreme right. Nation decided he didn't want to write a children's show, and instead wrote an adult, tough and at times brutal pilot script in which engineer Roj Blake is taken to a clandestine meeting of rebels against the government and learns that he was once a respected military leader, captured by the Federation and mind-wiped to be turned into a model citizen. Blake is horrified and suffers a mild mental breakdown as his real memories come flooding back. His new associates are killed in a massacre and Blake finds himself on trial on trumped-up charges of child molestation. His lawyers discover the truth and embark on a quest to clear Blake's name...with invariably fatal results. Only at the end of the episode does Blake meet some of his other soon-to-be fellow shipmates (Jenna and Vila; Avon doesn't appear until the second episode), as he is carried away from Earth on a transport, vowing to return to destroy the government.

The Way Back is uncompromising and quite astonishingly cynical, landing in tone somewhere between Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Prisoner and a waking nightmare, and light-years from the cowboy theatrics of the then recently-released movie Star Wars. It has money problems - Blake's 7 was commissioned as a replacement for contemporary crime drama Softly Softly: Task Force and given the exact same budget! - but these are mostly overcome by cunning use of industrial wastelands and locations as sets and some quite excellent model work. What remains overwhelmingly impressive is the bleak atmosphere and superb acting, particularly from Gareth Thomas as Blake. Not just a great pilot episode, this is one of the best episodes of the entire series.

Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child

Aired 23 November 1963

The day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the BBC started broadcasting a very unusual drama series. Commissioned as a stopgap between the Saturday sports coverage and an evening pop music show, Doctor Who was a show that combined elements of historical drama, science fiction and educational show. Its long list of creators (Sydney Newman, Anthony Coburn, C.E. Webber, Donald Wilson, Verity Lambert and David Whittaker all played a role in development) shows it was a tough concept to translate to screen, but eventually they succeeded and filmed a pilot episode.

Unfortunately, the pilot episode was a failure. The direction was off, the actors fluffed their lines several times and bits of the set broke off during filming. Unusually (because of the considerable expense), the BBC took the step of mounting a full re-shoot of the pilot, along with a partial rewrite of the script to make the characters more relatable. This time, the team hit it out of the park, crafting a remarkable 25-minute science fiction mystery series that would ultimately launch a franchise that would run for fifty-six years (and counting).

An Unearthly Child sees Coal Hill School teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright becoming concerned about the welfare of one of their students, Susan Foreman, who is quite astonishingly bright and intelligent about somethings (like science and maths) but astoundingly ignorant about others. They are bewildered to discover that she lives with her grandfather in what appears to be a junkyard. Her grandfather, who answers only to the title "Doctor," tries to escape their attention by taking refuge in a police telephone box, but the teachers follow him inside only to discover it is in fact a camouflaged space/time machine, a TARDIS. Shenanigans ensure in which they also learn that both the Doctor and Susan are aliens, exiles from another world, before the TARDIS malfunctions and carries them away from Earth, beginning an adventure that will last a long, long time.

The first episode of Doctor Who has many of the ingredients of later episodes, including a mystery and dramatic revelations, but this time they're about the Doctor himself. This was the first time people had encountered the character, or the TARDIS, and in many cases the very idea of time travel. With some impressive sets (by 1963 BBC standards), good writing and an off-beat atmosphere, not to mention a superlative performance by William Hartnell (the Doctor), which is somewhere between stern and outright threatening, An Unearthly Child sets the scene for all that has followed since.

The Expanse: Dulcinea

Aired 23 November 2015

Bringing James S.A. Corey's series of space opera novels to the screen was always going to be a big challenge, but it's one that the team at Alcon Entertainment rose to with a relish. Dulcinea introduces the setting of the 23rd Century Solar system as vividly as Ron Moore introduced the world of the Twelve Colonies in Battlestar Galactica a dozen years earlier. The attention to detail is amazing, from the lighter gravity in the asteroid settlements to the way the crewmembers of ships not under thrust have to float in zero-g. More important are the actors, with Thomas Jane as a world-weary detective and Steven Strait as the idealistic would-be hero who puts his life (and those of others) on the line to do what he considers to be right.

The result is a vivid and immediately-impactful vision of the future, and a show that starts already in fifth gear and only accelerates from there. Stunning visuals (the effects team on the show deserve all the plaudits for their clear, detailed style, and to be frank the guys creating the murky, often barely-discernible CG on Star Trek: Discovery could learn a lot from them), some excellent music and some terrific directing (the opening imagery of Julie Mao on her terror-stricken ship is now iconic) help propel the story onwards.

The Expanse is the best space opera show since - and possibly including - Battlestar Galactica and this first episode is an important part of the reason why. Remember the Cant!

Firefly: Serenity

Aired 20 December 2002

Serenity was the first episode of Firefly to be written and shot, but it was not the first to be broadcast: Fox felt the episode was low on action and pace, so they ordered Joss Whedon to create a punchier opening (resulting in The Train Job) and moved this premiere to later in the run. Of course, as this episode was the one that established what the hell was going on and introduced the characters and premise, this didn't do much but leave viewers extremely confused and switching off in their droves, leading a few weeks later to the show's cancellation.

This was a huge shame (understatement) as Serenity - not to be confused with the movie of the same name - is a splendid pilot, the best Joss Whedon has ever written. It sets up both the world and the worldview of its characters, introduces a relatively large cast and establishes a significant mystery that will run across the season. It also has to tell rollicking good story in its own right, which it does with enviable skill.

Whilst it's hard to pinpoint one reason why Firefly failed, taking it's excellent opening two hours and burying them at the end of the first season probably had a key role to play.

Lost: Pilot

Aired 22 September 2004

Costing almost $15 million, the pilot episode to Lost is still the most expensive TV pilot ever filmed. To sell the crash-landing of Oceanic Flight 815 on a remote island in the South Pacific, ABC shipped a broken-up Lockheed L-1011 to Hawaii, scattered bits of it along a beach and then, after several weeks of shooting, had to carefully remove it again. It was absurdly indulgent, but every second of the expense ends up on screen, resulting in a scene of chaos, explosions and people trying to save one another that grabbed the audience and didn't let up.

J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof's script is intriguing, setting up no less than fourteen regular characters (and several more recurring) and establishing almost all of them with some interesting character work before later episodes would do the heavy lifting of fleshing them all out via flashbacks. Excellent acting and fantastic location shooting in Hawaii added up to that rarest of things, a network TV show that looked as expensive as premium cable.

Lost's pilot shows the value of starting your show with a bang, grabbing the audience's attention, and then not letting it go.

Mr. Robot: eps1.0_hellofriend.mov

Aired 24 June 2015

Mr. Robot began life as a movie script by Sam Ismail which he developed for some time before realising that the story was too big and the characters bursting past the page count, demanding more material. Ismail reframed the two-hour movie as a ten-hour season of television, with the pilot expanding from the first thirty pages of the script.

Mr. Robot's pilot is remarkable, an intense drama blending psychology, hacking, cyberthriller and drama. Rami Malek is perfectly cast as Eliot Alderson, a man suffering from depression and loneliness who relates to people by hacking them online, even his therapist. In doing so he finds out secrets about them that they don't even know, and is able to influence their lives without them ever knowing.

Mr. Robot's pilot also has unusual rewatch value. You can watch it on the surface as the technothriller it comes across as, but after watching Season 1 you can go back with fresh information and see all the events again in a different light. A remarkable opening episode to a very unique-feeling series.

Red Dwarf: The End

Aired 15 February 1988

"Everybody's dead, Dave." The very first episode of Red Dwarf sets up a very strong premise, with Dave Lister, the lowest-ranking crewmember on the five-mile-long mining ship Red Dwarf (because the service robots have a better union than the human maintenance crew), being sentenced to spend the rest of the mission in temporal stasis after smuggling an unquarantined cat on board. This proves unexpectedly helpful when the crew is wiped out by a lethal radiation leak. Holly, the ship's AI (IQ 6,000, "the same as 12,000 traffic wardens"), steers the ship into deep space and waits for the radiation to die down to a safe background level...which takes 3 million years.

Emerging from stasis, Lister discovers his only company is the now-senile Holly, a humanoid lifeform who descended from his pregnant cat and a holographic recreation of Lister's commanding office, the painfully officious and unpleasant Arnold J. Rimmer.

It's a great premise which gets the show off to a good start (arguably the second episode, Future Echoes, is also required viewing as it sets up how the show can move beyond its limited premise), showcases the amazing cast and features some good gags. A 31-year (and counting) journey started here.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Emissary

Aired 3 January 1993

Deep Space Nine is almost certainly the finest Star Trek television series for myriad reasons, from its greater levels of serialisation to its intricate character arcs to its refusal to push the reset button at the end of each episode, but one that is oft-overlooked is the fact that it has the best opening episode in the entire franchise.

The Cage was so esoteric and weird that it put the broadcasters off and nearly killed the original Star Trek, before it came back with the (somewhat) stronger and mostly-recast second pilot Where No Man Has Gone Before; the broadcasters were still unconvinced and ended up dropping in a random early Season 1 episode to kick things off instead. Star Trek: The Next Generation's Encounter at Farpoint was intriguing but clumsily-written, with the characters pale shadows of their later, more fleshed-out incarnations. Voyager's Caretaker was only okay, and Enterprise's Broken Bow started off well by promising a more low-tech approach to Star Trek that it had pretty much broken by the end of the pilot. Discovery took arguably three whole episodes to even finish off setting up its basic premise.

Emissary, though, is a much more successful episode. It opens with a literal bang, with producer Michael Piller finally apologising to fans for having to wimp out on showing the Battle of Wolf 359 from The Next Generation's Borg epic The Best of Both Worlds three years earlier (due to cost). An epic flashback depicts the desperate struggle as the Borg cut through a Starfleet armada of forty starships with contemptuous ease, Commander Ben Sisko losing his wife in the process.

The rest of the episode is fascinating. The Cardassians have withdraw their occupation force from the planet Bajor after forty years of brutal conquest, leaving massive religious and social upheavals in their wake. The Federation has stepped in to help the transition and run an orbiting Cardassian space station, but to the surprise of the Starfleet personnel, they find a hostile reception among those Bajorans who fear they've swapped one oppressor for another. It's all rather messy and a big departure from The Next Generation, where everyone is so civilised and reasonable and solves problems over cups of (Earl Grey, hot) tea and sessions with the ship's counsellor. The fact that the main cast includes a significant number of both Starfleet and non-Starfleet personnel (a first and, to date, last for the franchise) allows for more character and cultural conflict than we'd previously seen on Trek, and fuelled seven full (and mostly excellent) seasons of stories.

The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye

Aired 31 October 2010

The Walking Dead has become such a divisive and polarising show, that it's easy to forget how well-received the first episode (and most of the first season) was. Directed by Frank Darabont (that's Mr. Shawshank Redemption to you and me), the opening episode is a masterclass in slowly building tension and character interplay, particularly the exchanges between Rick and Morgan (so effective that Morgan would return to the series years later by popular fan demand).

The visuals are striking throughout, particularly the closing images of Rick riding a horse into an eerily deserted Atlanta, only to be attacked by a vast horde of walkers and forced to take refuge in a tank. It's rare to see a pilot given this level of production value, scripting and direction, and a genuine pleasure to watch.

Of course, Darabont would be forced off The Walking Dead in -contentious circumstances a year later (with litigation still continuing today), and The Walking Dead would go through so many showrunners, writing staffs and contortions of premise that the show today barely resembles how it started, but this opener remains excellent and compelling viewing.


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SF&F Questions: Did Deep Space Nine rip off Babylon 5?

In our latest SF&F Question we address one of the biggest controversies in the history of science fiction television: did Star Trek: Deep Space Nine rip off its contemporary and "rival"space station show Babylon 5?

The Basics

Deep Space Nine was the second spin-off television series based on Star Trek. It ran for seven seasons and 178 episodes, debuting on 3 January 1993 and concluding on 2 June 1999.

Babylon 5 was an original science fiction television series which ran for five seasons and 110 episodes, along with an additional six TV movies and its own spin-off show which ran for half a season. It debuted on 22 February 1993 with a stand-alone pilot movie. Season 1 proper debuted on 26 January 1994 and the show concluded on 25 November 1998.

Both shows are set on enormous space stations, which the series is named after. Deep Space Nine is set on a space station near the planet Bajor, which is recovering from forty years of military occupation by the ruthless Cardassian Union. The United Federation of Planets and its space exploration wing, Starfleet, are called in to help run the station and advise the Bajorans on the rebuilding of their world.

Babylon 5's space station (which is considerably larger than DS9) is a sort-of United Nations in space, where representatives from five major governments and dozens of smaller ones meet to discuss important interstellar affairs. The impetus to build the station came from a devastating war between the Earth Alliance and Minbari Federation that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and destabilised the galaxy.

The contention, made directly by Babylon 5's creator and executive producer J. Michael Straczynski at the time, was that Deep Space Nine had ripped off Babylon 5's concepts and ideas, from the broad idea of setting the show on a space station to some specific elements such as having a shapeshifting character (the Minbari assassin in B5's pilot was originally an actual shapeshifting alien) and the presence of an interstellar "gateway" near the station (the wormhole in DS9's case, the jump gate in B5's case).

Wait, Babylon 5 started after DS9. How can it have ripped it off?

It's true that DS9 aired its pilot episode, Emissary, six weeks before B5 aired its pilot, The Gathering, and took a lot longer to get its first season proper on air. In fact, DS9 was halfway through its second season before B5 could begin airing its first. However, this does not tell the full story of the two shows' development; Babylon 5 was created, conceived and outlined almost five years before DS9 was commissioned.

J. Michael Straczynski came up with the idea for Babylon 5 in 1986 or 1987; he seeded a mention of the name into Final Stand, one of his episodes for Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, which aired on 4 October 1987. He developed the Babylon 5 series bible around this time and wrote a pilot script (an early but still-recognisable version of The Gathering), plus a full set of 22 episode outlines for a full season of the show. Concept artist Peter Ledger also provided paintings of the titular space station and its crew. This package was shopped around CBS, ABC and HBO in 1988 to no avail.

In early 1989 Straczynski and his prospective production partners, Douglas Netter and John Copeland, received a boost when they met Evan Thompson, the head of a group of local stations called Chris Craft. Syndication - where a show is sold direct to lots of local TV stations rather than one of the big national networks - was experiencing a renaissance thanks to the success of Paramount Television's Star Trek: The Next Generation (which had launched in September 1987) and Chris Craft was interested in lining up a new show for the syndication market. Babylon 5 fit the bill, they felt, and they hoped a new science fiction show would do similar numbers to Star Trek for them.
To this end Thompson took the Babylon 5 project directly to Paramount Television. He presented them with the pilot script, the 22 additional episode outlines, the outline of a serialised five-year story arc and the detailed production notes which suggested that the show could be made for less money than TNG. Paramount sat on the notes for about eight to nine months and the producers he spoke to were enthusiastic about the project, but Paramount's senior management felt that having a second science fiction/space opera show set in a completely different universe would be too confusing and would cannibalise the Star Trek audience. By the end of 1989 they had formally passed on the B5 project and Thompson was given back the notes, scripts and outlines.

Eventually Babylon 5 found a home at Warner Brothers and their new Prime-Time Entertainment Network (PTEN), an alliance of syndicated stations. The show was formerly announced as being in development in the summer of `1991. Two months later, Paramount Television announced that they were developing a spin-off from Star Trek: The Next Generation, called Star Trek: Deep Space IX (later changed to Deep Space Nine after too many people wrote in asking what a "Deep Space Ix" was) that would be set on a large space station. Straczynski was not slow in calling foul and reminding people that Paramount had had the story notes for Babylon 5 for almost a year and could have cribbed whatever notes that'd wanted from them.

Okay, that sounds pretty plausible actually. So what is Paramount's side of the story?

Paramount's side of the story is pretty straightforward: they themselves didn't come up with the basic notion of DS9. Instead it came in with a new executive to the network who did not have prior access to any internal documents related to the 1989 Babylon 5 proposal.

Backtracking a little: despite risible critical notices, the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation had done gangbusters for Paramount in terms of ratings and therefore advertising profitability. With the third season of TNG, including its epic Borg cliffhanger episode, The Best of Both Worlds, improving the show's critical and commercial success, they wanted to exploit this by developing more shows in the same setting. However, executive producers Rick Berman and Michael Pillar weren't sure how to approach this and, with TNG being a time-consuming show, they put these ideas on the backburner.

The situation changed in 1991. Brandon Tartikoff, one of the most feted and respected television executives in Hollywood, had departed NBC after fourteen years. During his time at the network he had displayed a canny eye for gauging what would work and what wouldn't, making such far-reaching decisions as renewing Cheers and Seinfeld even after the first few seasons of each show brought in terrible ratings and being rewarded when they both became the biggest shows on television. He was also involved in the creation of The Cosby Show, Miami Vice and The Golden Girls, all of which became immense successes despite Hollywood wisdom being set against them.
Tartikoff was asked to join Paramount Television, which was in the doldrums and needed some firing up. Tartikoff accepted the job and arrived in the post of chairman with one firm idea already in place: a new Star Trek television series. One of his first actions was to summon Berman and Piller to his office (they were terrified that he was going to cancel TNG) and presented them with a concept he'd already developed: if the original Star Trek series and TNG were both "Wagon Train to the stars" - a reference to a 1957-65 Western TV show about pioneers exploring the American West - than he wanted the new show to be "The Rifleman in space", a reference to a 1958-63 TV series focusing on a widowed sheriff trying to keep the peace in a fractious frontier town whilst also raising his young son. The new Star Trek show would therefore not be set on a starship but a starbase, one of the planetary bases frequently visited in both Star Trek series, and the show would deal with the problems of being stationary in possibly hostile surroundings rather than being able to roar off at the end of each week's adventure.

Piller and Berman ran with the idea - possibly a bit more literally than Tartikoff had expected - by proposing that a Starfleet base had been set up on a planet recently under hostile alien occupation, with a newly-widowed Starfleet officer assigned to command the base with his son. The officer's wife had been killed by the Borg in the Battle of Wolf 359 and he was suffering issues related to that event. They decided the occupying aliens would be the Cardassians - introduced in the then-recently-aired TNG episode The Wounded - and created the planet Bajor and its spiritual inhabitants as the planet in question. They also mused on using a stable wormhole (an idea introduced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 and further expanded on in the TNG episode The Price, which had aired in November 1989) as a way of revitalising Bajor's economy and introducing strife with the Cardassians, who'd abandoned the planet before the wormhole was discovered.

However, they ran into problems just a couple of weeks later when costing the show. One of the appeals of doing the project was having regular location filming to make the show feel less claustrophobic than TNG and give it a very different look. The problem is that regular location filming would have meant either almost doubling the budget beyond TNG (at that point already the most expensive TV show on the air) or spending many episodes indoors without going outside, which seemed pointless. They decided that moving the show onto a space station made more sense: starbases were established as also being space stations in the original show and having the show set in space would allow for the exploration and space battles that viewers had come to expect. It also allowed them to have outings to other planets (Bajor or new worlds in the Gamma Quadrant beyond the wormhole) or stay on the station as budgets required. Indeed, the show's first official announcement poster indicated they would be using the already-established Spacedock design from the movie Star Trek III for the space station, but they later decided that using a Cardassian station would be more interesting.

Paramount's defences to the charge of ripping off Babylon 5, therefore, are that 1) the person who came up with the basic idea of DS9 hadn't been working at Paramount previously and arrived with the concept already in place before he'd seen any documents; 2) the B5 documents were all returned to Evan Thompson before 1989 was over and no copies were made (and indeed, it would been legally dubious to do so); 3) the original concept was for a planetary base and was only moved to a space station for budgetary reasons; and 4) that many of the concepts used in DS9, including the wormhole and even the original space station design, predated B5's original genesis by years.

More common sense arguments can also be made: a space opera TV show is going to be either set on a spaceship, a space station or a planet, and with Star Trek already having a starship-set show on the air and with the planet option eliminated by budgetary requirements, a space station was the only setting left.

Right. So what about the shapeshifting alien?

Straczynski's original 1987 The Gathering draft had a shapeshifting alien trying to kill Ambassador Kosh and being defeated. Visual effects limitations would have required this alien to have shifted form with some kind of blurry effect or even off-screen. It should be noted that this alien was only ever intended to appear in the pilot episode.

Deep Space Nine, on the other hand, was pretty much ordered by Paramount to include a shapeshifting alien to cash in on the craze for "morphing". This CG technology had been pioneered by the 1988 movie The Abyss by James Cameron but had exploded in the public consciousness with Cameron's film Terminator 2: Judgement Day, released in July 1991. The T-1000 android's ability to shift shape was accomplished by cutting-edge computer technology and it led to an insane craze for both TV shows and films to use the same software (as well as music videos, such as Michael Jackson's "Black or White"). Paramount wanted a shapeshifting alien as a regular character on DS9 to cash in on this craze, not because an unused TV outline from two years earlier had such a character as a one-off villain.

Okay, that sounds pretty convincing from their perspective. So why is this explanation not more widely known?

J. Michael Straczynski was a pioneer in the use of the Internet for discussing his work and his TV shows: he was sitting on chat groups as early as 1990 talking about the series. Most people in the United States didn't even know what the Internet was until circa 1995 and the Star Trek team were slow to start using the Internet as a means of communicating with fans. As a result, the full story of the creation of Deep Space Nine and Brandon Tartikoff's involvement was not publicly known until the publication of The Deep Space Nine Companion in 2000. Tartikoff himself passed away in 1997 and Michael Piller in 2005, so neither are still with us to comment on the situation. On the other hand, Straczynski was discussing it loudly and publicly from 1991 onwards, so his version of events became dominant in the media.

It should be noted that, many years later, Straczynski also withdrew his suggestion that DS9 ripped off B5, saying that he did not believe Rick Berman nor Michael Piller (whom Straczynski knew) would knowingly rip off another writer's material. He left open the idea that a Paramount executive may have "steered" some discussion with material from his notes, but no evidence for this has ever been produced.

Okay, but did the shows have an impact on one another during production and transmission?

This is clearer. For example, the Cardassians were supposed to have a clandestine intelligence agency known as the "Grey Order", introduced in Season 2 of DS9. One of the production staff pointed out that Babylon 5 had a "Grey Council" (the rulers of the Minbari Federation) and the Cardassian name was changed to "Obsidian Order" to avoid any confusion.

Ron Thornton, the creator of Babylon 5's cutting-edge CGI, also claimed in 1996 that the introduction of the White Star (a warship the B5 crew could use to get around in) was directly inspired by the introduction of the USS Defiant on DS9 a full year earlier, a claim furiously denied by Straczynski who pointed out that the show simply needed a ship bigger than the standard fighters and shuttles to take the fight to the enemy. It should be noted that the relationship between B5's producers and its CGI team at Foundation Imaging was breaking down at this point, so it's unclear if Thornton's comment was meant seriously or in jest (and Ron Thornton passed away in 2016, making it difficult to clarify further).

The acrimony between the two shows resulted in furious flame wars between their respective fandoms on the Internet, becoming notable enough that Straczynski dialled down his criticisms of DS9. This thawing of tensions may have also been down to the fact that Straczynski was good friends with Jeri Taylor, executive producer on Star Trek: Voyager, and wanted to cool things down. To this end he also convinced Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (Number One, Nurse Chapel, Lwaxana Troi and various Federation computer voices on multiple Star Trek shows) to guest star on Babylon 5 during its third season.

Answer: Deep Space Nine did not rip off Babylon 5, despite the fortuitous timing and some very superficial surface similarities which do not withstand detailed scrutiny. A spin-off from the very successful Next Generation was a natural progression for the franchise and a space station setting was a logical extrapolation once a planetary setting was ruled out. There is also no evidence Paramount made (highly unethical, if not illegal) copies of the B5 notes or passed these onto the DS9 producers, and the charge was later withdrawn by B5's executive producer.

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Happy 25th Birthday to STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine turns 25 years old today.

Deep Space Nine hit screens on 3 January 1993 with its feature-length pilot episode Emissary. The first spin-off from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the series was the first (and, to date, only) instalment of the Star Trek franchise not to be set on a starship. Instead, the show was focused on one location, the enormous Cardassian-built space station Deep Space Nine.

Inspired by the then-ongoing crisis in the Balkans and the collapse of the Soviet Union, DS9 did a number of things differently to the Star Trek shows that had come before. The premise was that the Cardassian Union had withdrawn from the Bajoran homeworld, which they had brutally occupied for forty years. Starfleet was invited to take charge of the abandoned Cardassian space station in orbit and advise on the rebuilding of Bajor. The series balanced a number of tensions against one another, particularly with those on Bajor who were fearful that they had swapped the militaristic yoke of the Cardassians for the much friendlier but still imperialistic fist of the Federation. These tensions were exacerbated in the opening episode when a stable wormhole between the Bajoran system and the distant Gamma Quadrant of the galaxy was found, leading to Bajor's economic boom and constant threats from the Cardassians to reclaim the system.

Early seasons revolved around Bajoran religious and political tensions, the rebuilding of the DS9 station and the attempts by Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) to hold his crew together whilst he's been proclaimed a religious figure by the Bajorans. At the end of the second season a new threat was introduced: a powerful alien empire in the Gamma Quadrant known as the Dominion. Fed up with interlopers from the Alpha Quadrant, the Dominion infiltrated the Alpha Quadrant over the course of several years, using shapeshifting agents to ferment war between the Klingons and Federation and to destablise the Federation, Cardassian and Romulan governments. Eventually this led to the outbreak of full-scale war, with the Cardassians siding with the Dominion in a major conflict that lasted over two years.

What made Deep Space Nine work wasn't the space battles, explosion or (relative) cynicism compared to other Star Trek shows, but its consistency, its thematic coherence, its serialisation and, most of all, its characters. No other Star Trek show had such an eclectic crew of dysfunctional individuals, or so many non-Federation characters in the regular cast. Most successful amongst these were greedy Ferengi barkeep Quark (Armin Shimerman), order-obsessed shapeshifting sheriff Odo (Rene Auberjonois), and the grumpy-but-loyal engineer O'Brien (Colm Meaney), a transfer from The Next Generation. Later seasons also saw the arrival of Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) from TNG, who immediately found a new level of character development on the (somewhat) darker and more adult show. Deep Space Nine also accumulated a massive cast of recurring and returning characters played by outstanding actors, such as Dukat (Marc Alaimo), Winn (Actual Oscar Winner Louise Fletcher) and the incomparable Garak (Andrew Robinson) and Weyoun (Jeffrey Combs), probably the greatest assortment of villains and antiheroes in the history of Star Trek.

Deep Space Nine dealt seriously with topics including religion, politics, racism, refugee rights and warfare. It also developed alien species such as the Ferengi, Bajorans, Trill, Romulans and Klingons in far greater depth than on The Next Generation, and it also introduced its own great roster of villains and new races, most notably the three species that make up the Dominion: the Jem'Hadar, Vorta and Changelings. So successful was the Dominion that Star Trek: Enterprise tried to repeat the idea with the Xindi, although this was less successful. DS9 was also confident enough not to lean on the Borg, which ended up being over-used on Star Trek: Voyager to the point that they lose all of their original, formidable menace.

DS9 was also, easily, the funniest Star Trek show, with several outright comedy episodes that were very successful (most notably In the Cards, bus also several James Bond pastiches and 1950s pulp SF homage Little Green Men) and a great line in knowing humour. It even allowed Worf to lighten up and deliver some serious masterclasses in deadpan delivery. DS9 even took the mickey out of Star Trek itself, noting that its utopian society, although laudable, was perhaps both a little bland and at times a unfocused.

Jake: "I'm human! I don't have any money!"
Nog: "It's not my fault your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favour of some philosophy of self-enhancement."
Sisko: "Hey, watch it! There's nothing wrong with out philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
Nog: "What does that mean, exactly?"
Jake: "It means...we don't need money."
Nog: "Well, if you don't need money you certainly don't need mine."

Most importantly, Deep Space Nine was very consistent in quality. The first season could be a little bland but it didn't have any outright-terrible episodes and had at least one stone-cold classic in Duet. By the end of the second season, DS9 was firing on all cylinders and somehow kept getting better. This contrasts with The Next Generation and Enterprise (Discovery is too new to see which way it's going to go yet), which both took at least three seasons to really find their feet, and Voyager, which never really settled down at all. Its worst episodes were nowhere near as awful as those of the other Star Trek shows and it's finest hours - Far Beyond the Stars, In the Pale Moonlight, The Visitor, Duet, Trials and Tribble-ations - are right up there with the very best the franchise has to offer. Recent years have seen a re-appraisal of DS9 that has moved it up from being the ugly stepchild of the Star Trek franchise to frequently voted its finest incarnation. It also has the best finale episode of any Trek show (despite stiff competition from TNG's All Good Things).

DS9 also gave us another classic TV show that followed in its wake: four years after DS9 ended, producer-writer Ronald D. Moore regrouped with writers David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, Michael Taylor, Jane Espenson and others to create the revamped Battlestar Galactica, which delivered an even bleaker take on war, spirituality and technology.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary, a new DS9 documentary is in the works. What You Leave Behind will feature interviews with the creative team behind the show, the actors and many fans and appreciators. The documentary will be released later in 2018 and will also feature the first sequences from the show remastered in full HD, with the hope the rest of the series may follow.

Happy birthday, Deep Space Nine. Maybe one day we'll see a Star Trek series being as bold and innovative once again.

DEEP SPACE NINE fans crowdfund a new documentary

Fans of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine have crowdfunded a major new documentary about the series.

Ira Steven Behr, the executive producer, showrunner and lead writer on the show from its third season through to its end, has created a new documentary called What We Leave Behind (named after the DS9 series finale). The film will delve deeply into the show's origins, writing and creation and will feature contributions from all of the major players on the creative team and all of the actors, bar Avery Brooks (possibly for availability reasons).

One of the most interesting things about the film is a related, separate roundtable with the DS9 writing team, including Behr and Ron Moore, where they brainstorm a theoretical eighth season of the show.

Behr and his team asked for $150,000 to help finish and edit the film. They've now raised £215,000 and added extra stretch goals, including a live musical score and the possibility of adding extra interviews (hopefully including Brooks).

It's also been pointed out that the level of interest in the project this crowdfunding exercise raises could be used to bolster the case for remastering Deep Space Nine in high definition. CBS has so far remastered The Original Series, The Animated Series, all of The Next Generation and several movies (Enterprise was made in HD in the first place), but has held fire on DS9, citing disappointing sales of the TNG remasters. However, if the documentary raises a very large sum of money, that might convince CBS to take a look and may test-remaster a few select episodes (like they did ahead of TNG).

Gratuitous Lists: The Star Trek TV Series Ranked

The philosophy of the Gratuitous Lists feature was to have lists of stuff that are unranked, because frankly if you're talking about the 12th best thing of all time or the 9th best thing of all time, the differences are going to be pretty minor. In the case of the Star Trek lists, however, that's kind of pointless because there's way too few things to put on the list. So for these ones I'm ranking them and people can argue away to their heart's content. So let us proceed:

The cast of Voyager: Lt. Harry Kim (Garrett Wang), Seven-of-Nine (Jeri Ryan), the Doctor (Robert Picardo), Neelix (Ethan Phillips), Captain Katherine Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran), Lt. B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson), Lt. Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) and Lt. Commander Tuvok (Tim Russ)

6. Star Trek: Voyager

Created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor • Produced by Rick Berman, Jeri Taylor, Michael Piller and Brannon Braga • Aired 16 January 1995-23 May 2001 • 7 seasons • 172 episodes

Timeframe: AD 2371-2377

Premise: The Intrepid-class USS Voyager is dispatched on a mission to apprehend a vessel belonging to the Maquis, a terrorist group. Both ships are inadvertently transported 70,000 light-years to the remote Delta Quadrant of the galaxy. Captain Janeway is forced into an uneasy alliance with the Maquis commander, Chakotay, so that both crews can return home to Federation space.

Assessment: When Voyager started in 1995, it had a lot of promise to it. Fans had been criticising The Next Generation (and, to a lesser extent, the original series) because it spent an awful lot of time flying between starbases rather than genuinely going "where no one had gone before". By dumping a Federation starship on the far side of the galaxy with no Federation, no Starfleet, no Klingons and no Romulans, the hope was to create a completely new set of heroes and villains, with the incredibly isolated ship in genuine danger.

None of that really happened. Voyager remained in pristine condition despite not being able to resupply or get repaired. Continuity was minimal, with the reset button being hit at the end of every episode. Its new, original races were cheesy stock races which didn't vary from the Star Trek standard, and it wasn't long before the show was (rather desperately) trying to shoehorn in Klingons, Romulans and the Ferengi. The most prevalent new enemy race, the Kazon, were soon thrown out for being dire and the show settled on The Next Generation's most memorable foe, the Borg, as their main enemy, as well as reintroducing staple TNG villain Q.

The show moderately improved in the fourth season, with the introduction of Jeri Ryan as "saved" Borg drone Seven of Nine. Seven provided an able foil for Captain Janeway, with their on-screen antagonism giving way to mutual respect fuelled by the actresses' off-screen antipathy to one another. Rapidly improving CG effects technology also resulted in some visually impressive episodes late in the show's run. However, a largely indifferent and unchallenged cast, some awful writing and a lot of pulled punches made Star Trek: Voyager excruciating most of the time and just plain dull the rest.

The show wasn't a complete wash, however, with Robert Picardo's excellent performance as the ship's holographic doctor gradually attaining sentience providing a lot of humour and, surprisingly, pathos as the show continued. However, the show's greatest success may have been annoying long-term Trek writer Ronald D. Moore so much with its unfulfilled promise that he later went off and put most of his ideas into practice on the far superior Battlestar Galactica (2003-09) reboot instead.

Check Out: Scorpion (Parts 1 & 2), Year of Hell, Message in a Bottle.

Avoid at All Costs: Threshold, Fair Haven, Endgame and, to be frank, any episode that doesn't revolve around the Doctor or Seven-of-Nine.

The cast of Enterprise: Dr. Phlox (John Billingsley), Chief Engineer Charles "Trip" Tucker (Connor Trinneer), Ensign Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery), Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), T'Pol (Jolene Blalock), Ensign Hoshi Sato (Linda Park) and Lt. Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating.

5. Star Trek: Enterprise

Created by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga • Produced by Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and Manny Coto • Aired 26 September 2001-13 May 2005 • 4 seasons • 98 episodes

Timeframe: 16 April 2151-55 (the final episode takes place in 2161)

Premise: In 2151 Earth launches its first Warp 5-capable ship, the NX-01 Enterprise, under the command of Jonathan Archer and the watchful eye of the Vulcan "advisor" T'Pol. Earth faces rising tensions between neighbouring worlds like Tellar, Vulcan and Andora, not to mention navigating the dangerous first contact with the Klingon Empire. But the Enterprise's adventures will eventually set the scene for the birth of the United Federation of Planets itself.

Assessment: When Paramount demanded that Star Trek uber-producer Rick Berman create a new series to follow up Voyager, he was dubious. He felt that the series was suffering from "franchise fatigue" after shooting twenty-one seasons in fourteen years and recommended resting the show for a while. But Paramount wanted the new series to start immediately. Reluctantly, Berman and co-writer Brannon Braga complied.

And they did try to be original. They decided to make the new show a prequel, set a century before the original series. Their aim was to gradually build to the founding of the Federation. The decision to have a ship called Enterprise which had never been mentioned before was cheesy, but they did at least attempt to justify it. They also made clever use of ever-more-impressive effects technology and the casting was much better than Voyager's, with the actors feeling more engaged and excited by the project. But too often in the first two seasons the writers fell back on stock Star Trek ideas and situations rather than doing the premise justice.

In Season 3 they abruptly course-corrected. They brought in a talented and imaginative new writer, Manny Coto, and began engaging in more serialisation. They also dropped the ill-advised "temporal cold war" story of the first two seasons (a pointless attempt to keep touching base with the post-Voyager timeline) and focused more on interstellar politics and tensions, laying the seeds for the foundation of the Federation. This culminated in the Coto-helmed fourth season which saw a dramatic upswing in quality. Unfortunately, when the series was cancelled they decided to go out on a truly diabolical note. These Are the Voyages... is the worst Star Trek finale and one of the worst episodes in the franchise's history, and soured both fans and cast on the show. Still, there are some great episodes to be found and if Enterprise was one series too far, at least it tried to be original and ambitious.

Check Out: Demons, Terra Prime, The Forge, Babel One, The Andorian Incident.

Avoid at All Costs: These Are the Voyages..., A Night in Sickbay, Two Days and Two Nights.

The cast of The Animated Series: Lt. Nyota Uhuru (Nichelle Nichols), Commander Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Commander Montgomery Scott (James Doohan), Lt. Arex (James Doohan), Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Lt. M'Ress (Majel Barrett), Lt. Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) and Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett)

4. Star Trek: The Animated Series

Created by Gene Roddenberry • Produced by Gene Roddenberry and D.C. Fontana • Aired 8 September 1973-12 October 1974 • 2 seasons • 22 episodes

Timeframe: approx. 2269-70

Premise: Continuing the five-year mission of the USS Enterprise under Captain James T. Kirk. Only in two dimensions.

Assessment: Given The Animated Series's relative obscurity (until its recent re-release) and the fact it's animated on a low budget, it's actually surprisingly decent. The writers (many returning from the live-action series) clearly revel in the fact that they can depict truly alien beings and planets and the TV show actors all return to voice their characters, which adds a lot of credibility to the show. The show has also been surprisingly well-suited to modern social media, with both Swear Trek and Starcher Trek generating a lot of laughs based on it.

Check Out: Yesteryear, The Time Trap, More Tribbles, More Troubles, The Lorelei Signal.

Avoid at All Costs: Mudd's Passion

The cast of the original series: Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan), Ensign Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett), Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Lt. Nyota Uhuru (Nichelle Nichols), Commander Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Lt. Hikaru Sulu (George Takei)

3. Star Trek: The Original Series

Created by Gene Roddenberry • Produced by Gene Roddenberry, Gene L. Coon and Fred Freiberger • Aired 8 September 1966-3 June 1969 • 3 seasons • 79 episodes

Timeframe: approx. 2265-68 (the pilot episode takes place circa 2255)

Premise: In the mid-23rd Century, Captain James T. Kirk commands the Constitution-class USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisations and to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Assessment: For a show made in the 1960s, the original Star Trek has withstood the test of time far better than you'd expect. The regular actors are on top form throughout and some of the episodes remain genuinely inventive, powerful and surprisingly topical. Other episodes are poor, particularly most of the third season when the network replaced Gene Roddenberry with hack writer Fred Freiberger, but the seeds of Star Trek and the reason the franchise has lasted fifty years are clearly in place.

The original show probably has the strongest set of characters in terms of archetypes, but it's actually startling how little most of the characters bar Spock, McCoy and Kirk get to do. Given there's 79 episodes, you'd expect Chekov, Sulu, Uhura and Scotty to have at least a few dedicated episodes apiece but nope. They'd have to wait until the films and the reboot movies to get a bigger slice of the action.

Still, the original series still packs an impressive emotional wallop in episodes like The City on the Edge of Forever and Amok Time, whilst episodes like Space Seed and Balance of Terror are effective, tense action stories and The Trouble with Tribbles is a splendid comedy piece. This is where it all started, and it (mostly) still holds up well.

Check Out: The City on the Edge of Forever, Space Seed, Amok Time, Balance of Terror, Mirror, Mirror, The Trouble with Tribbles.

Avoid at All Costs: Spock's Brain, The Way to Eden, Turnabout Intruder.

The cast of The Next Generation: Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Counsellor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner), Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), Lt. Commander Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton), Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) and Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn)

2. Star Trek: The Next Generation

Created by Gene Roddenberry • Produced by Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor • Aired 28 September 1987-23 May 1994 • 7 seasons • 178 episodes

Timeframe: AD 2364-71


Premise: Almost a century after Kirk's time, Captain Jean-Luc Picard commands the Galaxy-class USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) as it defends the Federation, explores new planets and undertakes cutting-edge scientific research.

Assessment: Bringing back Star Trek was an obvious move, but employing a whole new cast and set of characters and putting them on a new (and, at the time, rather weird-looking) Enterprise a hundred years further in the future? Paramount made a massive gamble with Star Trek: The Next Generation and one that at first didn't look like it had paid off. Although ratings were strong, most of the show's first two seasons were torn apart by critics. It wasn't until deep in the second season that classic episodes started appearing.

It took Gene Roddenberry's retirement and the bringing-in of hungry new writer-producer Michael Piller to really let things take off. In particular, the writers Piller brought in like Ronald D. Moore and Naren Shanker soon really began making the show work by writing to the strengths of the characters. New enemies like the Borg were introduced, old races like the Klingons and Romulans were explored in greater depth and, most importantly of all, the show employed the formidable skills of some extremely talented actors like Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner.

The Next Generation is easily the most popular incarnation of Star Trek, its ratings dwarfing that of the rest, but it's also the most important. It showed that Star Trek can still work when you move away from the Kirk-Spock dynamic and that the universe can have numerous different kinds of story in it.

However, it's not the best. TNG is somewhat inconsistent in tone, with almost half the run of the show being blighted by weak episodes. At its best with episodes like The Best of Both Worlds, TNG is absolutely untouchable, but its worst episodes are horribly-written, badly-conceived and even outright racist (Code of Honour put off future Trek writer Brannon Braga from even watching the show). In addition, although TNG does pay more attention to continuity than the original show (or even Voyager), it still hits the reset button and avoids exploring the consequences of major character moments too easily.

Check Out: The Measure of a Man, Q Who?, Sins of the Father, Yesterday's Enterprise, Deja Q, The Best of Both Worlds (Parts 1 and 2), Family, The Inner Light, Tapestry, All Good Things, most of Seasons 3-6.
 
Avoid at All Costs: Code of Honour, Justice, Up the Long Ladder, Genesis, Sub Rosa, most of Seasons 1, 2 and 7.

The cast of Deep Space Nine: Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn), Lt. Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell), Chief Engineer Miles O'Brien (Colm Meaney), Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig), Quark (Armin Shimmerman), Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), Security Chief Odo (Rene Auberjonois), Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) and Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton).

1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller • Produced by Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Ira Steven Behr • Aired 3 January 1993-2 June 1999 • 7 seasons • 176 episodes

Timeframe: AD 2369-75

Premise: After forty years of brutal occupation, the Cardassian Union has withdrawn from the planet Bajor, leaving it exhausted and devastated. The Federation agrees to provide assistance, directing relief efforts from an abandoned Cardassian space station, Terok Nor, which they rename Deep Space Nine. When a stable wormhole linking Bajor to the remote Gamma Quadrant of the galaxy is discovered, Bajor and Deep Space Nine become the most important locations in Federation space. When a hostile alien government in the Gamma Quadrant, the Dominion, stages an invasion of Federation space, it also becomes the flashpoint for the most devastating war in the Federation's history.

Assessment: When Deep Space Nine started in 1993 it was seen as The Next Generation's slightly crazy spin-off. That hasn't entirely changed in the quarter-century since then. It's the only Star Trek series not predominantly set on a starship, it doesn't feature too much boldly going where no-one has gone before and the cast is the most eclectic, oddball collection of characters ever assembled for a Trek series. It also had a perceived rivalry with another space station-set SF show, the conceptually bolder Babylon 5, which at the time it was felt that DS9 had lost.

History, on the other hand, has been much kinder to Deep Space Nine. The fact it's set on a space station is something it turns to its advantage, gradually accumulating a very large cast of secondary and recurring characters that really makes its corner of the Federation feel like a real, lived-in place. It explores the themes and ideas of the Star Trek universe in exacting - even uncomfortable - depth. It even has a cast of recurring, brilliantly-realised villains in the last couple of seasons. It takes a long look at the ideals of Star Trek, tests them, but often finds that they are still valid. Deep Space Nine is, indeed, the "darkest" incarnation of Star Trek but it is still full of hope and optimism, even at the bloodiest heights of the Dominion War in Seasons 6 and 7.

This is also the most mature and progressive installment of Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry liked to talk up a good fight, how he was going to be more inclusive and show gay people and stronger female characters in the Star Trek universe, but he always retreated from doing it. Deep Space Nine faced an uphill battle to even include two women kissing briefly, but at least it made the attempt. It also tackled issues like racism and social inequality head-on, never more powerfully in stories like Far Beyond the Stars.

No other Star Trek series matches DS9 for its organic, beautifully-played character growth across the series. There was also the attitude it took to entire races. It explored the spirituality and religion of Bajor, it made the Klingons a little scarier and more alien again and it rehabilitiated the Ferengi, whose sexism and misogyny had been played a little too much for laughs on TNG even when it got uncomfortable.

But for a show that could be the most serious Trek series it is also the most hilarious. Trials and Tribbleations (in which Forrest Gump-style technology is used to integrate the DS9 crew into footage from the original series) is hands-down the funniest episode of the entire franchise, with scenes including Worf's deadpan description of the genocidal war launched by the Klingon Empire against the tribbles, Bashir urgently trying to convince O'Brien he should sleep with a woman in case she's his own great-grandmother and he needs to ensure his own existence, and Dax throwing tribbles out of a storage compartment to hit Captain Kirk on the head. In the Cards is a more subtle episode which gently takes the mickey out of the Federation's hippy ideology ("We work to better ourselves, and all of humanity," "What does that mean, exactly?" "It means we haven't got any money!"). Little Green Men posits Quark as being the Roswell alien and somehow makes it work. Our Man Bashir has Dr. Bashir posing as a James Bond-style spy in a holosuite adventure that goes badly wrong.

Finally, Deep Space Nine has the finest space battles, some of the finest lines and some of the greatest moments in the history of Star Trek. It needed The Original Series and The Next Generation to lead the way and blaze the trail, of course, but for now Deep Space Nine remains the crowning achievement of the Star Trek franchise on screen.

Check Out: Duet, The Jem'Hadar, The Way of the Warrior, The Visitor, Little Green Men, Our Man Bashir, Trials and Tribbleations, In Purgatory's Shadow, By Inferno's Light, In the Cards, Call to Arms, Sacrifice of Angels, Far Beyond the Stars, In the Pale Moonlight, The Siege of AR-558, What You Leave Behind and most of the entire show (but especially Seasons 3-7).

Avoid at All Costs: Profit and Lace, Let He Who Is Without Sin.


The question now, of course, is where the new TV series, Star Trek: Discovery, will fit into the list.

All of STAR TREK now available on Netflix UK

The Star Trek franchise recently disappeared from the US version of Amazon Prime, along with many of the movies from Netflix, as it is all moving over to CBS's inhouse on-demand service, CBS All Access. It is likely that the remaining TV series and movies will follow suit from other streaming services as their contracts expire. CBS All Access will also be the home of the new, still-unnamed Star Trek series which will debut at the end of January. However, the UK (and Irish) version of Netflix has picked up the slack.

As of yesterday, all 30 seasons and 725 episodes of Star Trek across all of its different incarnations are available. For the count, that's:

• All 79 episodes of the original series.
• All 22 episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series.
• All 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• All 176 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
• All 172 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager.
• All 98 episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise.

In addition, all of the original series, The Next Generation and Enterprise are available in HD as well as standard definition. I strongly recommend watching the HD version of ST:TNG, as they job they've done on it is absolutely phenomenal. DS9 and Voyager have not had the remastering treatment (yet, and possibly ever), but The Animated Series has also been transferred to HD. It's unclear if that version will also be available after it's released on Blu-Ray in the next few weeks.

In addition, Netflix UK is negotiating with CBS to bring the new Star Trek series to the on-demand service at the same time it launches (or, at most, a day later) in the US.