In My Humble Opinion

I have just finished binge watching Star Trek: the original series, which means I have completely binge-watched, since joining NetFlix, all of the major Star Trek series: TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise. I tried watching Star Trek: Discovery, but found it unwatchable dreck and don’t consider it part of the series. I’ve never seen The Orville, Picard, or Lower Decks either, so none of those are included in this review.
In rating the 5 series of which I’ve now seen every episode, I confess to what is probably unpopular opinion among Star Trek geekdom: The original series is nowhere near as good as any of the others, and Kirk is by far the worst captain.
Sure, it gets credit for being the start of the whole thing, and it was very welcome at the time. The only sci-fi program on TV before that was Lost in Space, and that was so incredibly bad that even sci-fi fanatics like me, who were watching it because it was the only sci-fi on TV, knew it was bad and justified our watching of it by saying ‘it’s so bad that it’s funny.’ But, we yearned for serious sci-fi and when Star Trek debuted in 1966, we were overjoyed.
Looking back on it now, though, it may have been better than Lost in Space, but not by that much. It took them a couple of episodes just to get the uniforms to fit right, and the aliens were amateurish – people today put more work into Halloween costumes than the props department put into the original Klingons. A bit of brown shoe polish and some stringy, fake beards, that was about it. Of course, their computers look ridiculous to us these days, but you can’t really blame them for that.
What you can blame them for is the ridiculous amount of sexism, the cultural stereotyping (Chekhov), and the fact that, even with all of the technology available to them, nearly every episode contains fist fights, which were often quite essential in determining the outcome.
It was landmark television, and it led the way into bigger and brighter Star Trek universes. Today, though, it looks -like the 1960s – very flawed.