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Show HN: Star Trek DS9 Episodes Worth Watching
- robinhoodexe 12y agoAs pointed out, disable your adblock on the site if it's empty.
- halmcelroy 12y agoI'm on an iPad. As far as I know there is no way to install Adblock on it. Still don't see anything on the page.
- elliottcarlson 12y agoI am not using adblock and had the same behavior - refresh fixed it.
- giaour 12y agoAt first, I thought the empty list was the point of the site.
- tedivm 12y agoI don't use adblock and it's still rather broken until I do a refresh.
- tessa_t 12y agoLooking into this and other blank page reports!
- nnnnni 12y agoSurely it's nothing but the Wesley Crusher episodes.
- pessimizer 12y agoAccording to my mother, the best episodes can be judged purely by Sisko screen time.
- ejr 12y agoYour mother is an excellent judge of sci-fi character. I've seen many arguments that the role of Sisko was heavy handed in many ways and there are some truth to that, but with the exception of a few, any episode featuring the brilliant Avery Brooks is likely to be a good one.
- pessimizer 12y agoMy mother's interest in Avery Brooks is probably a bit more base than that:)
- nnnnni 12y agoHmm... There's a lot of Wheaton hate here!
- skrowl 12y agoHow many people clicked it expecting a blank page or "There are none" or something like that?
- jorgeleo 12y ago"Because nobody cares about the Ferengi" MOOGYYYYYYY!!!! Now seriously, the ferengy were supposed to be there for some humor scenes, and they developed the ferengy society considerably. Female liberation, the challenge of the responsability of the first child vs. the youngest. Etc. Sisko accepting that Jake dated a Dabo girl... I disagree that Ferengies are unimportant in the ST universe. They have a role.
- ejr 12y agoI enjoyed "Magnificient Ferengi" in particular. An all Ferengi episode that featured virtually every prominent character of the race except the Grand Nagus. Edit: It seems even on the list, there is Season 3, "The House of Quark"
- ericcumbee 12y ago"I Hate Ferengi"
- tessa_t 12y agoImportant to establish Quark's relationship with that klingon lady though... it comes up later.
- ejr 12y agoAh yes, involving Worf in "Looking for ParMach in all the wrong places".
- Pxtl 12y agoI think DS9 just got a little carried away with Ferengi episodes is all. Seriously, you can tell the team loved working with the Ferengi characters because there are so freaking many Ferengi stories. Some of them are pretty bad and extraneous, just tedious comedy episodes. The overall Ferengi arc is good, and the big key turning points are good, but they're probably the worst episodes for pulling out eye-rolling bad comedy.
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- MattGrommes 12y agoThis is a cool idea. I'd like to see it for more shows. With so many shows available on Netflix/Amazon/etc. it's hard to figure out what I should watch when a show has hundreds of available episodes. In the case of DS9, it's funny that it pretty much matches my experience in that there are very few early episodes then when the big Dominion storyline starts it includes almost all episodes for the last 3 seasons. DS9 became such a great show once Sisko shaved his head and got the goatee. :)
- Tiktaalik 12y agoI agree this would be great for more shows. I think it would be even more helpful for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Lots of early season TNG is pretty bad as well. I'm watching TNG through Netflix at the moment and I'm going on AVClub to remind myself of which episodes aren't worth my time.
- tessa_t 12y agoOnce I'm a little more comfortable with React I'm going to work on making the whole thing easily forkable so anyone could do it for another show by only modifying some json. I'm thinking X-Files next.
- CJefferson 12y agoI've been doing this for Stargate by reading the reviews on Gateworld. On advantage of gateworld which this website misses is that they rate episodes both on quality, and importance to the ongoing plot. I have chosen to watch a couple of episodes which, while rated lowly (mainly because they were disappointments after buildup), are important to the ongoing plot of the show.
- BigChiefSmokem 12y agoCall to Arms of course. This is the series where we actually saw the Federation go to war (on-screen). All the episodes revolving around Sisko as Emissary as well. Impressive writing given the religious and philosophical contexts involved. It went over a lot of peoples' head if they didn't follow the series since the pilot. I know this is not a popular opinion but this is my favorite Star Trek series, followed by TNG.
- Pxtl 12y agoIt's hard because the shows both have their own merits. TNG easily had the best cast of any Trek show, but the show is limited by being allergic to continuity and the uniformity of its all-military characters. DS9's writing wasn't really any better than TNG - there were some great episodes and many forgettable bits of filler. But DS9, in spite of its static setting, had more room to grow thanks to being willing to let the story change and develop, plus having a large cast of recurring characters outside of Starfleet/Bajoran military. The characters that made the show great were Winn and Garak and Ducat and Wayoun and Quark - a stellar cast of recurring villains and peripheral characters. The problem is that the show tried to tries to force a Kirk/Spock relationship between Sisko and Dax when they're just plain bad actors. It's a shame since the show was really built around them. Avery Brooks tries to sound intense but he comes off just being a bad ham, and Terry Farrell tries to sound serene but ends up just being wooden. That and I'll never forgive the show for making me hate Worf. Seriously, DS9 Worf is a jerk.
- djur 12y agoDS9's cast was much better than TNG's. Patrick Stewart is the only actor on TNG I'd consistently rate above the bulk of DS9's cast.
- morganvachon 12y agoAs much as I like supporting actors like Rene Auberjonois and Armin Shimerman, who can shine through the makeup and portray their characters realistically, I have to disagree regarding the main casts. I think they are about even as far as acting ability; from TNG you have excellent actors in Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, and LeVar Burton, generally good acting in Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, and Jonathan Frakes, And "good enough" from the rest. In DS9, you had great acting from the above mentioned Auberjonois and Shimerman, though both could ham it up as well. Passing performances by Avery Brooks and Nana Visitor were the norm but they were both known to shine as well as fall flat. Alexander Siddig is an enigma; he was so good at being annoying that one might dismiss him before realizing that he was the perfect choice for the role. Poor Cirroc Lofton, like Wil Wheaton, suffered from the "kid surrounded by grownups" typecasting that often kills a child star's career. Both are decent actors but were never allowed to grow very much with their roles. And again, the remaining cast were neither great nor horrid. In short, both casts had a range of acting ability, and even the best actor can't always rescue a bad script or director. But to say one is hands-down the best compared to the other is, at best, blind favoritism ("I liked one show better than the other so the other cast must suck").
- Tiktaalik 12y agoCool idea. A helpful next feature would be to somehow show the skipped episodes so the user could take some action to peek at the synopsis and rating to see if they really wanted to skip it. Another helpful feature would be to tag all the episodes by character and theme. A user could be a huge fan of say, Jake episodes and Bajor oriented episodes, and if they came across such an episode with a low score, they might decide to watch it anyway.
- joeroot 12y agoI like the idea, however I'd disagree with the heuristic used. DS9 was really the first Star Trek series to introduce story arcs, and as such, skipping the wrong episodes leads to a confusing experience. I'd argue that in order to avoid missing out on important chunks of the arc, hand curation is really the only viable option (maybe text-clustering of plot narratives might work?). Personally, as a huge DS9 fan, I think that you should watch every episode. Each episode adds colour and depth to the series' characters, and in my opinion makes it the most rewarding Star Trek series.
- tessa_t 12y agoI tried to keep story arcs in mind and just skip the "filler" episodes. Also skipped the lame story arcs, like those "the circle" people in S1/S2
- joeroot 12y agoI see, apologies! I thought you had pulled in all episodes with a score > 7. I wonder how easily arcs can be identified. I'll try running the transcripts through a topic model this evening.
- jkaunisv1 12y agoYou say that so casually. As someone with no experience in NLP, do you just have topic model algo's or a toolkit lying around? Going on your website this isn't your field of expertise, have you worked on this stuff in the past or just a hobby?
- joeroot 12y agoEnough to get by! I worked on this throughout university, and now at my startup. I was slightly blasé however! The corpus is tiny (173 episodes: http://www.chakoteya.net/ds9/episodes.htm http://www.chakoteya.net/ds9/episodes.htm), so a topic model is unlikely to yield anything valuable. There are probably around 10-15 arcs, and simple clustering could be better -- but this is purely hypothetical. In this case, it's simply curiosity. If you're interested in tools, Mallet (http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/ http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/) is a fairly good place to start, and the original LDA paper by Blei, Ng & Jordan (http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/BleiNJ03.pdf http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/BleiNJ...) is a great academic starting point.
- jerf 12y agoI'd be interested in a version of this for TNG as well. My wife recently expressed interest in running through TNG on Netflix, but there's several fairly bad episodes and a lot that are pretty tedious with little point. But I sampled a few of the ones I remembered as being good, and seen through eyes with 20 years more experience there's definitely more to them than I remember. So I'm not intrinsically against the idea, but I don't want to walk through the entire series. For instance, we watched the episode where Picard is kidnapped by the Borg. As a teenager, my drama-IQ was not so low that I entirely missed the major storyline that Riker gets in that story about his career as he is challenged by the up-and-coming Shelby, but I certainly see it much more clearly and with far more nuance now.
- corey 12y agoJammer's Reviews are pretty good for that. http://www.jammersreviews.com/st-tng/ http://www.jammersreviews.com/st-tng/
- jonnathanson 12y agoThe problem with TNG is that it didn't necessarily get better in linear fashion, the way one could argue that DS9 got better as it "found its voice" and established a continuous storyline. TNG has some high points and some clunkers in almost every season, though there are slightly more low points in the first two seasons. Having recently rewatched the run of the show, in chronological order, I'd guesstimate that 10% of the episodes are bad, 50% are decent, 20% are great, and 20% are spectacular. [1] So something like this would be especially helpful for TNG, where a) there are a lot of episodes in total, and b) there are no useful rules of thumb or shorthand (such as "skip season X," or "it gets better beyond Y"). Now, the great news about TNG is that it's mostly episodic. Which means she can watch any episode, at random, and enjoy it as a self-contained story. (Aside from the two-parters.) TNG really lends itself to randomized viewing. DS9 needs to be watched in chronological order (at least for the first-time viewer). TNG can be watched in any order. [1] Some people will find this assessment overly generous, and others will find it overly harsh. That's the beauty of Trek fandom; there's plenty of room for disagreement. :) Just about the only things TNG fans can agree on are that: 1) Riker with beard > Riker without beard; 2) "The Naked Now" is probably the series' worst episode, although it's enjoyable in a kitschy, ironic sort of way; 3) Wesley Crusher sucks (although Wil Wheaton himself is a pretty awesome guy).
- dcc1 12y agoThe whole series is worth watching Right now TV is in its "golden age" but there are no good sci-fi tv shows (hell even the word "scifi" is dirty somehow now, see > SyFy-lis). Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Outer Limits all gone replaced by Vampires and all sorts of supernatural rubbish. Dr Who is the only interesting scifi show now worth watching, for the most part...
- chrisgd 12y agoCheck out the 100 on the CW. Seriously
- nitrogen 12y agoIt's not in the same optimistic genre as Star Trek TNG, but the 100 is watchable. It has a younger cast, so it might be better at getting younger viewers into sci-fi. Other current sci-fi, also not in the TNG genre but still enjoyable: Continuum, Defiance.
- pwelch 12y agoDr Who is really the best one right now. Continuum is pretty good but it's no Star Trek/Stargate. Falling Skies is okay but I don't think it's technically Sci-Fi. We could really use some new Sci-Fi shows.
- masmullin 12y agoOMG its terrible.
- morganvachon 12y agoActually it's a great premise, but it is overshadowed by the "cool teen" factor which plagues other shows on the CW (though Arrow has mostly been able to escape that..for now). The Vampire Diaries is a good example of what being on the CW does to a show. It started out in the first two seasons as a dark, violent, mostly serious take on the "teenage vampire" trope, and could be enjoyed by both teens and GenX/GenY fans of the vampire genre. It has a pretty good cast (Nina Dobrev's "Katie Holmes v2" notwithstanding). After those first seasons, however, it devolved into the stereotypical teen drama + nonsensical mysticism. Eventually, after seeing a school dance or town festival as the main plot device every two episodes, I had to stop watching it. My wife still watches, but she tends to enjoy the occasional plotless teen drama.
- EGreg 12y agoMy favorite part of the site is: "Disagree with my choices? Fight me irl. Or submit a pull request."
- TheRealPomax 12y agoThis is great for the less popular star treks... got one for Voyager, too?
- ghaff 12y agoVoyager is actually a pretty good example of a show that was... flawed... in many ways but which nonetheless had some pretty good episodes that could be enjoyed in relative isolation. For some reason, some of the time travel mini-arcs worked pretty well for me--perhaps because they existed somewhat outside of an overall story arc that never completely clicked for me.
- danielweber 12y agoA lot of the greatest hits of Voyager outright contradicted each other. "Blink Of An Eye" is a wonderful piece of sci-fi, but it totally doesn't fit in the Trek world. There was a move away from continuity after DS9, which given the larger pace of television since then looks downright silly today.
- ghaff 12y ago>There was a move away from continuity after DS9, which given the larger pace of television since then looks downright silly today. Well, we're in a phase where much of the better television is indeed very arc-centric. I'm not convinced that's an unalloyed good although it's a fairly natural outcome of a variety of factors including on-demand viewing and serial TV being something that can 't really be replicated in movies (for the most part). On the other hand, there are certainly examples of historical TV SF that haven't been serialized and, in the case of The Twilight Zone, were purely anthologies.
- Nux 12y agoThe right way to watch Star Trek is to go through all of it.
- ghaff 12y agoWell, the point is that--for most shows and most people--the idea of jumping into a previously aired series requiring a 100+ hour commitment to work through is daunting, to put it mildly. Given the amount of TV hours I budget, I know it's a non-started for me; I still haven't made it all the way through the Sopranos. There are a lot of shows--even many with well-defined arcs--that lend themselves to a "20 hour version" or so approach capturing both the overall flow and feel of the series. I'm not sure it works for everything--not sure about BSG or Lost for example--but I think it works pretty well for most of Star Trek.
- Nux 12y agoWell, we definitely have different ways of watching stuff. Which such good stuff such as ST, there are not enough episodes. I wish there were more. "It's the journey that matters!" Re BSG, you DO NOT want to skip episodes, there's even a "right" order: http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/battlestar-galactica-viewing-order.html http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/battlestar-gal...
- gwy 12y agoThe Graph TV for DS9 might accomplish a similar goal, just using a different ratings dataset (IMDB) and visualization. http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0106145 http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0106145
- wmil 12y agoI find using SFDebris' score works well for all Trek series. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/SFDebris http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/SFDebris
- tessa_t 12y agoThese do look better. I just chose TV.com because the data seemed easiest to scrape.
- dobbsbob 12y agoDS9 gets good as soon as Sisko has the goatee. TNG post beard as well. If you watch DS9 Ep 04x02 you'll notice a familiar phrase shouted by the hilarious klingon guy 'we do not forgive, or forget' which was played in a raid chatroom back in 2004 and soon afterwards appeared in call to arms threads
- angersock 12y agoI wish somebody would do something like this for Babylon 5--shame they only made four seasons and no movies.
- nkoren 12y agoFive seasons and a number of TV movies: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html The "P5 rating" for each episode tends to be a very reliable indicator of its quality. That said, B5 cannot be watched out of sequence, and there are very few episodes which one can skip, due to the nature of the story arc.
- angersock 12y agoYou can skip most of the first season without too much detriment, maybe up until the last six episodes. It had a lot of onboarding, and honestly served mainly to get audiences used to the style of the universe and that things were not just rubber-mask villain-of-the-week nonsense (the passing of Ivanova's father, for example).
- sp332 12y agoVery funny, but I liked all 5 seasons. (But the movies were really awful.) And don't forget Crusade! A sequel series that got cancelled after one season because Fox showed the episodes out of order, like Firefly.
- krapp 12y agoI used to feel terrible about Crusade - I was a huge B5 fan when it came out. Then, I watched it (what there was of it) again recently... it really wasn't that good. I don't know that showing the episodes in the proper order would have saved it, although maybe it should have gotten a chance to find its footing either way.
- pwang 12y agoThe "karate moves in space" was really kind of unwatchable.
- arkaeologic 12y agofight me irl.
- whosbein 12y agoThanks! I was looking for a new show to binge-watch on Netflix. I wanted to point out that (after just now checking) Netflix isn't consistent with their two-part show listings as they relate to Netflix's episode number. For example, the two-parter of S01E01-02 and S04E01-02 are listed as one episode on Netflix. S02E20-21 are listed as two separate episodes. It gets out of sync with the guide. Not a huge deal, just need to make sure to pay attention to episode title as opposed to episode number.
- smorrow 12y agoSome, not all, two-part Star Trek episodes get remade as one ninety-minute thing, which might be what's causing that.
- DevX101 12y agoIf you want to do this for the X-Files and follow the story arc while skipping all the 'Monster of the Week' stuff, you can do so with this episode guide: http://x-files.wikia.com/wiki/Mythology http://x-files.wikia.com/wiki/Mythology
- AndrewBissell 12y agoThe problem with that approach is that the MotW episodes include some of the X-Files' very best, and the Mythology became very weak and incoherent in the later seasons. I think you'd at least want to mix in some of the best MotW eps, and probably all the Lone Gunman ones as well.
- IgorPartola 12y agoThe remade Battlestar Galactica series had one horrible episode: "Black Market". I think everyone agrees that it's not good. However, if I was a first time watcher and someone told me to skip it, I would not have done so. I guess I like to watch the entire show and form my own opinions.
- smorrow 12y agoJust watch all of them. Yes, the first two seasons are weak... not as much as the first two of TNG or Voyager though...
- yurisagalov 12y agotldr; season 1 and 2 are weak, and then they find their pace and things are amazing. More seriously, though, I'm so glad In The Pale Moonlight is ranked as one the top episodes (three episodes are ranked 9.5). I think it's one of the best episodes of television and Star Trek in general, and it's certainly one of my favorite episodes of DS9. (in case anyone doesn't remember, it's the episode where Sisko gets the Romulans into the war with Garak's help, and has a final monologue in lines with "I can live with it" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-YyL7X4CWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-YyL7X4CWw)
- aenean 12y agoThis reminds me of a similar exercise to find the optimal viewing order of Battlestar Galactica episodes, movies, web-series, deleted scenes, extended episodes, etc. http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/3641/what-is-the-viewing-order-of-the-re-imagined-battlestar-galactica http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/3641/what-is-the-vi...
- bjourne 12y agoYou can safely skip all the episodes where Kiera is an evil vixen in a weird parallel universe. Also those where O'Brien gets tortured again. Those are just cringe-worthy.
- dbg31415 12y agoBest Star Trek.
- peatmoss 12y agoAt the time, I thought it was utterly forgettable and stopped watching after the first season. I netflixed it a couple of years ago and was surprised to find myself very pleasantly surprised at how good the writing was. I'm inclined to agree with you, even if the original series holds a special campy place in my heart (no, I'm not old enough to have seen it in its first run). Then I watched Voyager hoping it too was better than I remembered. It was not. As an aside, I've been enjoying the youtube series "Star Trek Continues." They've done a great job of capturing the aesthetic of the original. I'm hoping they'll have some new episodes soon.
- el_fong 12y agotessa thanks so much for creating this. i grew up loving ds9 and have a crush on Morn. thanks again tessa
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]