From a Usenet post by Michael Urban:

As a result, the two best Star Trek movies in the last ten years
have been “Galaxy Quest” and “Master and Commander”. There’s
something wrong there.

I must admit I haven’t seen Master and Commander, but GalaxyQuest is a darn fine movie.

On a personal aside, I was a little suspicious of the “last ten years” reference, since I liked Star Trek VI a lot. Then I looked it up, and realized that said movie premiered just a few months shy of fourteen years ago. When did I get so old?

BTW, I watched the first half of “Encounter at Farpoint” today. I was prepared for the first few episodes of TNG to be a little raw and unpolished compared to the show at its stride, but I was completely shocked at just how bad this episode seemed.

Over the past few months, I’ve been having Netflix send me Star Trek: The Original Series on DVD, which I’ve been watching, at the rate of about one a day. This morning, I watched the final episode (“Turnabout Intruder”), and put it in the mail.

It was interesting to watch the series. I haven’t seen any episodes of the show in a long time; I used to watch them in reruns sometimes when I was little, but once they moved to cable channels I don’t subscribe to, I ceased seeing them. There are also a lot of episodes I had never actually seen, although of course I had read all the episode descriptions back in my days as a teenage Star Trek fanatic.

I was surprised at how dated some of the series felt; some of the attitudes displayed about sex and race felt very out of place compared to modern day. It was also interesting to see how inconsistent the series was in terms of characterization and writing quality. A lot of the aspects that come immediately to mind when I think of Star Trek appear only briefly, but were probably intensified by pop culture references and the feature films.

Next up, Star Trek: The Next Generation.