Exasperated Calculator

It’s a bit unfair to treat this as a complete season – it’s shorter even than The Animated Series Season 2 (which I also said it was unfair to treat that way). But I’ll do it anyway.

This is a good experiment that I hope continues. While none of the four first tries are a complete ‘home run’ of an episode, they’re all enjoyable and offer something at least a little novel. With the exception of The Escape Artist all of them had to make what felt to me like damaging compromises to story logic to fit into the time constraint. I wonder if a little bit more time (say 20 to 25 minutes) would help that.

Overall I’d put this little bracket of four episodes towards the middle of the ‘Mixed Bag’ category, mainly for the strength of the production values and the willingness to try something completely new for Trek.

That takes the rankings to:

The very best of Trek:

TNG Season 6
DS9 Season 2

Strong performers:

DS9 Season 5
TNG Season 3
TNG Season 5
TOS Season 2
ENT Season 3
TNG Season 4
VOY Season 4

Mixed bag:

TOS Season 1
DS9 Season 4
DIS Season 1
DS9 Season 1
ENT Season 4
ST Season 1
VOY Season 5
ENT Season 1
VOY Season 1
TNG Season 7

Not good:

DS9 Season 3
DS9 Season 6
VOY Season 6
VOY Season 3
TNG Season 2
ENT Season 2
TAS Season 1

Really just awful:

VOY Season 7
VOY Season 2
DS9 Season 7
TOS Season 3
TAS Season 2
TNG Season 1

Next up, the return of Discovery on January 18 (probably January 19 Australia time).