Best Trek episode

[AllanO]

Haiku is a forgiving art form, but if you don't have 17 syllables you at least need to attempt to use three phrases...

I am pretty sure he meant you take the thread title as the first line of the poem. In which case you get 5-7-5 as long as you pronounce franchises with three syllables (fran-chis-is versus fran-chisz).

----

Not sure what my favourite episode would be maybe Trials and Tribulations? I am a bit of a sucker for comedy.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Haiku is a forgiving art form, but if you don't have 17 syllables you at least need to attempt to use three phrases...

I am pretty sure he meant you take the thread title as the first line of the poem. In which case you get 5-7-5 as long as you pronounce franchises with three syllables (fran-chis-is versus fran-chisz).

----

Not sure what my favourite episode would be maybe Trials and Tribulations? I am a bit of a sucker for comedy.

I've never heard it pronounced the latter way

[Durandal_1707]

As I explained, for Deep Space Nine, most of the great episodes, in my opinion, are the key movers during the Dominion War arc and, so, have a habit of blending together in one's recollection and aren't necessarily that great as stand alone stories.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I'm not sure how they'd rank relative to each other, but I'm sure that "Duet", "Necessary Evil", "The Wire", "The Visitor", and "Hard Time" would all be somewhere on my list, and none of those are necessary arc-heavy episodes.

Also I have to disagree with you about Improbable Cause / The Die is Cast, because that's the two-parter that got me into DS9 in the first place. Yeah, I didn't know what the Dominion was, but you didn't need a lot of context to appreciate this simple Season 1-ish Odo murder mystery morphing into a giant galaxy-spanning epic.

So, the others I mentioned are some of the early morality plays (Tribbles notwithstanding - a really fun bit of ... fun) that I enjoyed but, again, none I'd consider genuine contenders for "best episode". I do imagine I rate "Melora" quite a bit higher than most, however.

It's been years since I've seen it, but my memory is of not liking that episode much at all. To each his own, I guess.

[Simplicius]

Also I have to disagree with you about Improbable Cause / The Die is Cast, because that's the two-parter that got me into DS9 in the first place. Yeah, I didn't know what the Dominion was, but you didn't need a lot of context to appreciate this simple Season 1-ish Odo murder mystery morphing into a giant galaxy-spanning epic.

Yes, I may have been a bit too harsh on the serialisation aspects. Obviously, I can't really know how the big episodes would play to someone without context. My favourite two-part episode is definitely "In Purgatory's Shaow / "By Inferno's Light".

Either way, it wouldn't change my opinion of "In the Pale Moonlight" and none of the episodes I listed were meant to be taken as coming close to it (perhaps a flaw in the way I constructed my answer).

It's been years since I've seen it, but my memory is of not liking that episode much at all. To each his own, I guess.

It's got an early TNG feel to it, definitely not a good example of the sheer greatness DS9 had to offer but I enjoyed it.

[bronnt]

I do imagine I rate "Melora" quite a bit higher than most, however.

Going back to binge DS9 a bit, and I just saw that one recently. The biggest problem it has is that's it's a Bashir-centered episode before Bashir's character got toned down. The character journey in the episode also doesn't really go anywhere, except for the guest character, who promptly fucks off and is never mentioned again.

And one big thing that bugged me is that Bashir apparently had never experienced a low-G or zero-G environment before. I know that artificial gravity is the most damned reliable thing Starfleet has-I think the only time it ever failed was The Undiscovered Country, and that was on a Klingon vessel-but it's hard for me to imagine that you can choose a life in space without at least minimal training for zero-gee work. Even if it was just a 1 hour seminar. It wouldn't be at all difficult to set up that training, there's always space stations and spaceships around, they just have get on board and turn the gravity off.

[Yukaphile]

Again, as I'd said, I love "The Devil in the Dark." It was a great subversion of the typical "monster attack" so prevalent in the 1960s, and ties into the wonderful humanism Trek often displayed. That even after it'd killed 50 of their workers, they can understand they were just as wrong, and come to an agreement. Of course, making buttloads of money probably helped in the end, lol. Plus the Horta was as alien as life you could get, not just a man with some play-doh on his head.

But that's TOS. I'd probably say, excluding two-parters and longer story arcs, for TNG and DS9? Probably, um... "The Inner Light" and "The Visitor." I'd also say "The Thaw" for Voyager. I'd normally say "Death Wish," but that's part of a larger story arc, so forget that.