Will Chuck ever explain how he scores his episodes.

[Thebestoftherest]

I would love to see a video on each season with each review score at the end explaining it for each season of Trek.

[SlackerinDeNile]

He's explained it a few times, he rates each episode from 1 to 10 relative to the overall quality of its series. For example an 8\10 episode of TNG might be a 5\10 episode of DS9, but as he disclaims, his reviews are based primarily on his own views and opinion.

With non-Trek shows he tends to rank episodes from 'Pass' to 'Must See' based on their importance to the shows 'lore' or 'myth arc' or just based on how good he thinks they are.

[RobbyB1982]

Chuck has stated that a score of 5 means that the episode is typical for that series. Episodes rated higher than 5 are "above average", and episodes rated lower than 5 are "below average". 10 is obviously the best the series has to offer. He has to make the scores relative to the series, otherwise classic Trek would end up scoring lower because of how dated it is, and DS9 would have a generally higher curve. (When he first start doing reviews even average DS9 episodes were getting 7's and 8's because they were being compared to Voyager. He lowered those scores later.)

Chuck has implied (in his "Twisted" review) that a score of 1 is awarded to an episode so bad that it does the entire franchise a disservice by being associated with it, but is not the worst episode, period, of its respective show. A merely "appallingly bad" or garden-variety racist or sexist episode will usually get a 2; it takes extreme incompetence on the part of the production crew to lose that last point.

A score of zero is awarded to episodes which are not only the absolute worst of their respective series, but do the entire franchise a disservice by being associated with it.

Four episodes he hasn't given scores to.

"Family" because of how non-Trek it was, but noted that this didn't necessarily mean it was bad.
"Genesis": 3.5 (one half-point bonus awarded because "the actors put in pretty good performances")
VOY:
"11:59" Like "Family," he found it to be very unlike Trek
"Mortal Coil" he decided that he couldn't fairly score the episode due to his intense hatred of Neelix.

He didn't rank any of Discovery due to it being ongoing at the time of the reviews, but its pretty clear he didn't enjoy the first season, like most of us.

And if you want to see a complete listing, you can check the tv tropes page.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/SFDebris

[Thebestoftherest]

I mean did he list them all ahead of time, how does he remember if something is a three or a two.

[RobbyB1982]

I mean did he list them all ahead of time, how does he remember if something is a three or a two.

No, he doesn't have them that decided in advance. He decides when he watches them.

He maybe figured out the 0's and some of the 10's at the start, but otherwise there's not much point in deciding ahead of time.

[Beelzquill]

How many 10's are the series allowed to have? Shouldn't 10 be the very best and 9's are great? I remember he said that 1's were so bad that they should be retconned once(I believe in Tattoo of Voyager).

[Darth Wedgius]

I wouldn't say 10 should be reserved for the very best single episode. I imagine there's some episodes he thinks are the very best, and possibly that's changed, but there are probably also episodes that are right next to them, for which a 9 just isn't good enough.

Call it rounding up rather than forcing the man to put all the episodes onto a real number line and decide which episode is the 9.87 and which episode has to settle for 9.86.

[RobbyB1982]

How many 10's are the series allowed to have? Shouldn't 10 be the very best and 9's are great? I remember he said that 1's were so bad that they should be retconned once(I believe in Tattoo of Voyager).

There is no hard limit. If you were talking purely mathematically, a 178 episode series should be allowed to have 17 or 18 episodes that rate a 10, but even TNG which has the most only has 6. (8 if you count both parts of Best of Both Worlds and All Good Things. Surprisingly DS9 only has 4 while Voyager has 5! But... relative to the series after all) He has a few more 9's, but not significantly.

But then you get to the 8's and there's a loooot more of those.

At the other end there's only a few 1's and 2's, but lot more 3's and 4's.

Even accounting for the fact that he's only about 2/3 through any given series, you have to figure the the best and worst episodes are going to be requested before the middling episodes, so he's already done most of the big highlights. There's a lot more things in the 7 and 8 range than anywhere else.

So I think its fair to say Chuck isn't striving to have a perfect average split where when its all done, every ranking is going to have exactly 18 episodes, but is actually treating 5 as a general average and just crediting eps as better or worse than that as appropriate... and only the really bad or the really good get the far ends of the spectrum.

I recall the classic episode The Conscience of the King he gave a 9, and said it was very very good, close to a 10... but the things that were 10s were that much better than it. Classic Trek which only has 79 episodes should have about 8 episodes per rank, but currently only 3 or 4 at the top ranks, but it has a lot of 7's.

[hammerofglass]

Why would it be equal numbers per rank? If 5 is defined as being standard for the series you would expect a standard bell curve where about half the episodes are in the 4-6 range.

[Durandal_1707]

What is with all the questions ending with a period. Is the question mark character really that hard to type. Seriously, what the hell.