Welcome to my trekkie blog!

The tournament has ended, and we have our winner!

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1st place: Year of Hell

2nd place: Night

3rd place: The Killing Game

4th place: Scientific Method

5th-8th place: Deadlock, Resolutions, Counterpoint, Relativity

9th-16th place: Threshold, Macrocosm, The Q and the Grey, Future’s End, Worst Case Scenario, Scorpion, Timeless, Bride of Chaotica!

17th-25th place: Meld, Death Wish, The Thaw, Coda, Waking Moments, Message in a Bottle, One, Latent Image, Equinox

26th-44th place: Caretaker, Parallax, Eye of the Needle, Prime Factors, Emanations, Resistance, Dreadnought, Day of Honor, Concerning Flight, Living Witness, Dark Frontier, Course: Oblivion, Barge of the Dead, Blink of an Eye, Child’s Play, Muse, Shattered, Workforce, Endgame

45th-80th place: The Cloud, The 37’s, Projections, Twisted, Persistence of Vision, Alliances, Prototype, Innocence, Tuvix, Flashback, The Chute, Remember, Alter Ego, Blood Fever, Distant Origins, Real Life, Displaced, The Gift, The Raven, Random Thoughts, Hunters, Demon, Drone, Extreme Risk, Once Upon a Time, Thirty Days, Nothing Human, Tinker Tailor Doctor Spy, Riddles, Memorial, One Small Step, Collective, Life Line, The Void, Lineage, Friendship One

81st-160th place: the rest of the episodes :)

Kira Nerys and Ensign Ro commission

I've been obsessed with making Star Trek blingees these past couple months. here are my favs (a lot of the GIFs are sourced from Tumblr, which I believe I've reblogged or liked. If you want me to credit your GIF or graphic let me know. screencaps mostly come from trekcore.com or me taking them myself. The character sprites are from the Star Trek Timelines game and are available at sttwiki.org and the graphics are from PicMix where I made these. very much inspired by jadenvargen's star trek blingees.)

Deep Space Nine is such a weird show for me because I love the characters, and it has fantastic episodes, but for a long time I didn’t love the show. I fell in love with TOS, Voyager and Prodigy immediately, and I fell in love with TNG after The Measure of a Man. From listening to other Trekkies, I was sure I would fall in love with Deep Space Nine in season 3, but even though I loved some episodes the show still didn’t click for me. Season 4 is supposedly even better than Season 3, so I was excited to start watching it. *spoiler warning*

The Way of the Warrior was a disappointing start to the season… I don’t like the new intro song (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it), and the beloved double episode was just fine in my opinion. Yeah, Worf arrives and there’s a war etc but honestly I don’t really care that much about all that. After watching The Way of the Warrior, I had a sinking feeling that I might never love Deep Space Nine as much as I love other Star Trek shows, even though there’s so much about the show that I love... and then I watched The Visitor.

Most of it, I think, is that the show was established enough by then that they were willing to start doing riskier stories.

I think another really important element is the Defiant. I mean, yeah, cool spaceship go brrrr, but the actual thing about it that contributes to the quality of the show is its size. Previous to the Defiant, you could get maybe four or five of the core cast off the station for a story at a time, and those stories were generally limited by the things you could plausibly make a runabout do. By being larger and more capable, the Defiant provides a (literal) vehicle for stories where nearly the whole ensemble cast goes and explores a cool scifi planet or something. Suddenly, you have a reason for everybody to be bouncing off each other in plots that explore more than just the station, and it drastically changes what those off-station plots feel like.

Of course, at the end of season 6, it starts to get a little wobbly, imo. There are some... Choices. Made by the showrunners for some shitty irl reasons, and they really damage the potential of the show. Season 7 does its best, but a huge part of its first half is spent stitching up the holes left by season 6's ending, and that process injects a really strong thread of continuous, arc-driven storytelling. Those multi-episode and seasons-long stories had already started by then, but season 7 doubles down on them and it conflicts with the more traditionally trekkish episodic format, so that season 7's isolated one-off stories, whether they're excellent or mediocre, feel very much like side quests.

Ultimately, ds9 season 7 is part of what leads us to modern trek, with its season-spanning stories. That's partly because those big, long story arcs, especially in the run up to the finale, are engrossing and very, very cool, but that level of episode-to-episode continuity is kind of a big switch after 6 seasons of problem of the week star trek. It can be kind of a big ask. I will say, though, that no modern trek does that continuity anything like as well as ds9 season 7. It's not exactly my cup of tea, but they really did nail the concept.

Ultimately, I think some of the best of modern star trek takes some heavy cues from ds9 seasons 4, 5, and 6. Lower Decks is at its best when it's gesturing vaguely at the big plot before allowing the episode at hand to do its own thing, for example, and snw does well when it takes itself seriously but injects a little silliness and humanity into its plots and characters.

God forbid someone say that you shouldnt really eat oreos or little Debbie snacks, especially for political reasons. Be those political reasons health (because access to health *is* political, and, quite frankly, involves participation--side note, my biggest motivator to get to the gym or go for a run are those videos of buff women saying something like "thinking about skipping a workout today? A fascist didnt" or something thereof. So like, go for a run because a fascist did today, and you dont want them to beat you) or those political reasons be that, well, big food is terrible and the biggest thing you can do on a day-to-day basis to fight them is not buy from them.