year franchise - just gained a new addition courtesy of Strange New Worlds this summer. But I can't help noticing that my list has a certain theme to it - it's full of extremely dramatic, often out-of-the-ordinary stories. Are these really the best episodes of the franchise overall, or do I just have a penchant for the epic?
Spoiler warning! There will be spoilers for the episodes I talk about here, including an episode from Strange New Worlds season 4.
OK, let's start with a clear outline of what we're talking about - here's my entirely personal list of the ten best episodes of Star Trek overall:
9. City on the Edge of Forever (TOS)
8. Amok Time (TOS)
5. Off-Hour (SNW)
4. Far Beyond the Stars (DS9)
3. The Best of Both Worlds (TNG)
2. Year of Hell, Parts 1&2 (VOY)
1. Yesterday's Enterprise (TNG)
Obviously everyone's list will be different, but I have aimed for the episodes I think are the "best," not my personal favourites. If it were a list of my personal favourites, numbers 8, 9, and 10 would be 'Bride of Chaotica!' (VOY), 'Trials and Tribble-ations' (DS9), and probably 'Cracked Mirror' (Prodigy). And although no two lists will be the same, I would hazard a guess that a lot of my list overlaps with a lot of other people's lists - 'The Best of Both Worlds,' 'City of the Edge of Forever,' and 'Far Beyond the Stars' are episodes I would expect to see on a lot of lists of this type even if they were in a different order.
In all the recent conversations about Strange New Worlds, I've noticed that although 'Off-Hour' was popular and a lot of people considered it one of the better episodes of the season, no one else seems to have had such a strong reaction as I did. I immediately placed it among my top ten of all time, but am I just over-reacting to an episode I thought was really good, or will it start to appear on other people's top ten lists as well?
Here's why I thought 'Off-Hour' was such an incredible hour of Star Trek, and how it compares to the other nine stories in my top ten:
Drama
'Off-Hour' is a particularly dramatic episode. Although the story is quite similar to other disaster-themed episodes of Star Trek, especially TNG's simply-titled 'Disaster,' the level of threat is kicked up a notch in 'Off-Hour,' mainly through the extreme extent of Dr M'Benga's injuries. M'Benga's unfortunate situation is a technically plausible scenario that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Signs (or, the Internet tells me, a particular episode of Homicide: Life on the Street). In any non-SF context, this injury means certain death. When the episode started, I actually thought the title was a clever indication that time travel and undoing certain events was going to be involved, as it seemed so impossible that M'Benga - who is in TOS and therefore not likely to die - would be saved in any other way. And although the Enterprise is not destroyed, it comes pretty close. This level of dramatic intensity stands out, especially in a season with quite a few lighter episodes. There are lighter moments, especially Scotty's accent troubles with the turbo-lift, but there is some serious threat here.
My "personal favourites" include more comedic episodes, but my overall top ten "best" tend to combine both comedy and drama. Perhaps I need to unpack my own prejudices about comedy as a genre! But any episode that I consider one of the best overall is likely to include both. 'Yesterday's Enterprise' introduces Worf to prune juice, 'Amok Time' has Kirk and McCoy discussing the sex lives of Vulcans, and 'Living Witness' in particular features substantial sequences that are at least partly comedic in just how different they are from reality (in the episode, a backup programme of the Doctor in the future encounters an alien historian who has not quite understood Voyager properly, though the Doctor amusingly thinks his depiction of Paris isn't too far off!).
So comedy is a key ingredient in the episodes, but they are also extremely dramatic. In two of them, the hero ship actually blows up all together in an alternate timeline, while in three, the Captain is tortured and/or very nearly killed in various ways. If this sort of thing happened every week, audiences would become numb to it, but as an occasional episode, this can make for some of the most intense stories.
Chapel's decision
In the end, everyone on the Enterprise is saved in 'Off-Hour' because Christine Chapel refused to leave her friend to die and kept trying to find a way to save him. Knowing that in real life no one could possibly survive what has happened to M'Benga brings real weight to Chapel's emotional decision to stay in defiance of all the rules of triage, as Dr Boyce quite rightly points out. Chapel's apparently illogical and even selfish actions end up saving not just M'Benga but the whole ship, her refusal to abandon her friend being justified in the biggest possible way. It also ties in to Scotty's story, as both end up being to an extent about hope and faith - believing that somehow, you will make it through despite overwhelming odds.
A really great episode of Star Trek will generally feature key character moments that drive the plot, or that bring some kind of big emotional resolution. Something I notice about my personal list is that emotion is at the centre of key decisions in quite a few of them - Guinan insists that there is something wrong with the way things are and Picard trusts her while Tasha looks for a meaningful ending; Janeway stays on her ship and takes her enemy down with her; Picard makes a connection to Data despite his assimilation. In other cases the big moment requires someone to overcome a strong emotion, like Kirk letting Edith Keeler die, or it's simply a moment of emotional catharsis, like Benny Russell's outburst or Spock's huge cheesy grin and cry of "Jim!" when he finds Kirk unexpectedly alive.
Playing with the format
'Off-Hour' takes place almost entirely in real time, specifically in the last hour of Alpha Shift's duty shift on a Friday night. This by itself wouldn't make the episode great without other factors, and in fact Season 4 of SNW has been criticised (frequently and repeatedly!) for not actually having much of a standard format and playing around with different genres and "gimmicks" throughout the entire season. In fact, 'Off-Hour' is one of the least gimmicky episodes of the ten! But when a shake-up to the format is done well and fits the story being told, it can be really effective, and a real-time story about a race against the clock to save everyone's lives makes perfect sense.
Looking at my list, a lot of my top ten are unusual episodes. Three are two-parters, which used to come along two or three times a season but are not the norm. 'Far Beyond the Stars' takes place in an entirely different time and place with everyone playing different characters from their usual. The first half of 'Living Witness' is an alternate history in which Voyager's crew have been seriously misunderstood. 'Yesterday's Enterprise' takes place in an alternate timeline. 'City on the Edge of Forever' takes place almost entirely on 20th century Earth. Only 'Balance of Terror' and 'Amok Time' are more typical episodes, done very well. Like the high drama of these stories, if you do this every week audiences quickly get tired of it, as Season 4 of SNW has proved. But done really well every now and again, they tend to be the most memorable stories.
Truly ensemble stories
'Off-Hour' is a truly great ensemble story in which just about everybody gets a moment to shine, to Do A Thing that moves the action forward and gives their character a moment in the sun. (Like the aristeia of a Homeric hero, a sequence in ancient poetry in which a particular warrior is given the spotlight for a short section of the poem).
Not everyone gets an equal amount of time, which would be difficult in just one hour; Chapel clearly gets the most to do, followed by Scotty and then M'Benga. But Pelia has a nice moment helping Scotty become the Enterprise-loving engineer we know he will be, Una has a hero moment of physical strength and La'an has a similarly heroic sequence rescuing Spock, Spock gets a lovely foretaste of his own later death from Star Trek II and gets to mind-meld with his ex, Ortegas is briefly in the Captain's chair, and when Pike wakes up he is forced to eject the ion tube, possibly with Spock still in it. Only Uhura doesn't have much to do, but she is still present and given lines in plenty of scenes.
Not every episode on my list is a fully ensemble piece, as two of the three TOS episodes, like a lot of TOS, are really just about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, and some others are missing characters (Worf is not in the alternate timeline of 'Yesterday's Enterprise,' and B'Elanna is not in 'Living Witness' because Roxann Dawson was giving birth that week!). But most of them do feature a lot of the ensemble, even if some people have more to do than others. 'Year of Hell' and 'Far Beyond the Stars' are probably especially strong on that point.
What makes a great Star Trek episode?
Obviously, a lot of this is down to my own personal taste - you can see pretty quickly which are my favourite Star Trek shows! Time travel stories are also a bit over-represented (3 out of 10, which is quite a lot considering how many episodes of Star Trek there actually are) and poor old DS9 is represented by an episode is which no one is playing themselves. When I try to think of more episodes that other people might put on their top ten lists, some match my criteria better than others. Quite a few are two-handers, oddly enough - an old Variety list put DS9's 'The Visitor' at number 1, and other very popular episodes include 'Duet' and TNG's 'Darmok.' As two-handers, these aren't great for the ensemble! Another very popular episode is TNG's 'The Inner Light,' which is another case of the entire episode being the Captain's vision, but doesn't use the rest of the cast the way 'Far Beyond the Stars' does.
For me, I stand by my list. I might wibble a bit on the exact placement, or on which exact episodes are included on the bottom half. I'm also starting to think I need an entirely separate list for funny episodes, because it's just not really possible to judge comedy on the same criteria as drama, and Lower Decks is entirely disadvantaged here! But I stand by my love of 'Off-Hour,' which I think is a truly great hour of television, and my general criteria for a great episode of Star Trek, which needs intense drama, an emotional core to the story, a bit of playing with the format, and something for everyone in the ensemble to do.
What do you think? And what's your list of the top ten episodes of Star Trek from across all branches of the franchise?
Juliette Harrisson is a writer and content creator. Check out her books here, or her Patreon here.
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