#I prefer the early seasons to the later ones too but it's the retro effect there. I am an 80s/90s fan.

[castlebyersafterdark]

Ohhhh

I loveeeeee Friends!!! Friends is my favorite series of all times and stranger things is my second favorite ❤️

What’s your favorite character and couple??

In male is Chandler and in female is Rachel. My favorite couple is Mondler and after mondler is Rochel. Ahahahahaha I loveeeee themmmm

My favorite character was Rachel or Phoebe. I thought Rachel was always the most interesting one and she was pretty funny. Even when she was making frustrating choices, her storylines were always the most engaging to me. THE 90s cool girl and also kind of a mess at times? I loved her. My original "I just think she's neat" kind of character. (Back when I was pretending to be straight - she was my go to "crush" - Jennifer Aniston. Like how Noah had Zendaya hahahaha)

Pheeeebs is always fun, what you see is what you get. Chandler I also think was actually maybe the funniest one, even political incorrectness aside, but he was complicated and interesting and entertaining! This is maybe sacrilege but I never had a favorite couple? I think because I watched so so young, by the time I cared about actively paying attention once jokes and plot wasn't flying over my head, I already knew how everything played out so it wasn't like I was rooting for anyone over another. I liked how everyone ended up. Rachel and Joey was the worst thing ever though, ughhh. Cringe.

[tanadrin]

I've never watched any Star Trek (except for one of the movies a few years ago and a couple scattered halves of TOS episodes) but I've always kind of wanted to get into it and you've been making DS9 sound really good; do you recommend starting with it or some other series? If some further aesthetic preference information is needed, I really like everything I've read of your writing.

DS9 is often considered the Best, for a lot of reasons. I think some of those are that it has long, multi-episode arcs, especially later in the series, and explores some pretty complicated political and moral themes around insurgency/occupation/war--all this for a series that debuted in 1993, no less--and was able to do more with developing a recurring set of characters and locations because the cast wasn’t off to a new planet every week. Also, TNG, especially in its early season, was still a little too constrained by Roddenberry’s creative control, and some of the things the writers were clearly ready to explore already in TNG were shot down by Roddenberry who had a couple of very specific things he didn’t want to make part of his version of Star Trek. Roddenberry wasn’t super interested in war stories or interpersonal conflict for its own sake (and considering some of the shit that gets passed off as Star Trek now, between the Nu-Trek movies and Discovery, that second point looks pretty smart in retrospect), but more in super-high-concept hour-long stories that stood on their own. That was fine as far as it went, and I actually think TNG has some of the best episodes of TV SF of all time: (Inner Light, Darmok, Frame of Mind, and--I realize this is an extremely controversial choice for some--Masks. But if that’s not your bag, TNG is probably not for you. Like, TNG is very much TOS, with a slightly tweaked concept and better effects, but it’s filling the same niche in the genre.

TNG and DS9 are both really good, and I think you’d do well to start with either if you want. Their biggest flaws are things that are common to all 90s TV--they feel a little dated, the sets are small, the shots are framed in specific ways, they don’t have the huge effects budgets of modern TV, and DS9 sometimes struggled to show the big space battles that were important to its plot as a result, and so on. TNG also does the planet-of-the-week premise better than its successor in that regard, Voyager, which had really uneven quality. Plenty of great episodes; Year of Hell is a fantastic two-parter, with a Moby-Dick style alien captain who’s really interesting and, for once, a plot about time travel technology that doesn’t suck ass; Course: Oblivion is a SUPER bleak episode with an ending that is 10000% my jam; but also plenty of stinkers: Threshold, infamously; and the Kazon were super irritating recurring villains that never worked, as was Seska; some characters like Janeway, Kes, and Seven of Nine were played by great actors but the writers didn’t always write them consistently, and in the case of the latter two, sometimes it seemed like they didn’t even know what to do with them at all).

Enterprise struggled to figure out what it wanted to do with the Star Trek format, and at first tried to follow in the vein of TOS/TNG/Voyager, and didn’t really get its footing until season 3, and didn’t get really properly good until Season 4, and then got cancelled, and Discovery... sigh. Discovery can’t stop reminding the viewer at every turn THIS IS STAR TREK! and the dialogue is bad, and the high-concept SF elements are rushed and sloppy, efforts to deal with the encrusted years of continuity are dealt with hamfistedly, and it’s pretty to look at, but other than the cool ships and the way Anson Mount’s ass looks in that TOS uniform, there’s not much to appreciate relative to older Star Trek.

If you actually enjoy retro SF, not merely “can appreciate it on an intellectual level,” I would start with TOS. It’s fun, it’s kinda campy, and the sets are cheap, but it’s clearly lovingly crafted, and genuinely well-acted. I think a lot of people think they know TOS because they’ve osmosed it from the culture generally, but I think the genuine article is always going to be more interesting, Kirk especially [insert your own link to the Kirk Drift essay here]. But if that’s not your cup of tea, or you’re more interested in newer entries, the choice of TNG or DS9 is down to whether you want high-concept planet of the week SF, or less high-concept (though it still has its share of godlike aliens and energy blobs), more character driven (in the original sense of “has really interesting characters,” rather than what it has come to mean now, “an endless churn of juvenile-ass high school-type drama and bad dialogue;” cf. Discovery) stories.

If you’re going to watch Star Trek movies, the general consensus is: avoid Nu-Trek like the plague, and only watch the even-numbered ones. That order holds up once you get into the later movies only if you include Galaxy Quest as a Star Trek movie (which it is, obviously), and I want to particularly recommend Wrath of Khan because I re-watched it recently and there really is no substitute for Ricardo Montalban hamming it up with his waxed pecs lovingly displayed.