A Viewing Order For Star Trek.

TV Well, I tried. With all of television Star Trek materialising on Netflix UK yesterday, I thought it might be an idea to put together a viewing order. Two hours later amid episodes without stardates, faulty memory after having not seen most of these episodes for twenty years and trying to get my head around the business of meshing the three 80s/90s series together I closed my Access databases and Excel spreadsheets and googled Star Trek viewing order in much the same way as people seem to be finding my Doctor Who list.

Happily someone else has done the spade work and utilising much the same methodology I was and would have done, placing Enterprise's These Are The Voyages… with TNG's The Pegasus and smoothing over continuity errors and broadcast dates generally messed up because someone in the Trek office wasn't paying attention to stardates when sending the scripts down to the sound stage or audio recording booth.  You can see the writer pulling their hair out trying to fit Insurrection somewhere in much the same way I did when faced with Doctor Who's Planet of the Dead.

About the only omission is the animated series, which Paramount recently decided is canon after all and I was planning to drop in between TOS and TMP.  It's here that the T in James T Kirk was originally revealed to be Tiberius and it has the brilliant The Lorelei Signal episode in which Uhura, Chapel and the female members of the crew have to take over the running of the Enterprise.  The Wikipedia page reveals a ton of other connections including the news that Manny Cotto was planning to include the Kzinti in a fifth season of Enterprise.  Sigh.

That watchlist also reveals, including the animated show, if you did want to binge your way through all of Star Trek, you're looking at a mountain about 728 odd episodes and movies high which would take two years to work through assuming you're just watching one episode a day.  It took me a year to do Doctor Who, but only because of the month in the middle when I was prepping and then recuperating from my hernia operation so did nothing but watch Doctor Who for two months.  Plus in this instance you're at the mercy of Netflix and just how long they have the rights.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted.  Before Doctor Who, Trek was my franchise of choice (see here) and I still haven't seen the last two seasons of Voyager.  But I'm still ploughing through the tail end of Gilmore Girls as well as a pile of other stuff waiting to go and there aren't enough hours in the day.  But I rewatched TNG's Parallels last night and was engulfed by waves of nostalgia as I remember just how much the teenaged version of me loved the show (and Marina Sirtis) even if some of the acting is just the right side of creaky.  Oh sod it.  Broken Bow, here I come.

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