[samwiseb]

This was the year when I think DS9 proved itself as TNG's successor for me. We would screen the episodes in the science auditorium on campus, and for the first time since TNG S4 I would get that giddy nervous anticipation of waiting for the show to start. Of course the auditorium would fill up toward the end of the show, with people noisily showing up for TNG which followed. But for me it was flip-flopped. I just couldn't feel as psyched about a show that was in its seventh season. I had already gotten the main course of my ST fix for the week.

'Necessary Evil'... pretty sure that played back-to-back with either 'Force of Nature' or 'Attached', depending on exactly where the dates of that year divided into syndicated broadcast weeks. Either way, what a sharp contrast.

[kevin]

True.

As I've said before, for all I love TNG (in that way of loving it despite it's issues) I can never strongly defend seasons 6 and 7 too much as they contain my fewest percentage of favourite episodes and even the ones I do like often fall into the unbelievably silly category (Sub Rosa) anyway. It really felt like it was going through the motions by then.

But in fairness, that happens to most shows/franchises that develop their own procedural components.

[samwiseb]

Unquestionably. Same thing I think happened with Buffy seasons 6-7.

However it's next to impossible for me to separate these series from the experience of when I first saw them. S2 still seems to me to be the strongest season for DS9, and I think that's because of its sharp contrast with TNG by that point. Would a DS9 marathon today really show S2 to be the strongest? Probably not. But this was the year DS9's place in the franchise felt cemented.

I do need to watch it all again. Everytime I start, I get sidetracked. I mean I have the sets, have had them for years. But I look at a thread like this, and I think "Yeah... that was the year."

[kevin]

Oddly, I would say with Buffy that Season 7 of the show I find is one of my favourite seasons (after season 2 which I think was it's best) overall. Season 6 had a lot of problems that were more I thought down to struggling to fill it's 22 episode quota that season, bar the final three (or four) episodes of it after the shooting.

Yeah, I have got to redo DS9 as well. My favourite season of it was probably S6 overall. But I don't know if that would stay the same on rewatching it.

I had redone seasons 1 - 2 of VOY but stopped for a bit to do some other TV shows I wanted to catch. But I would rather go back and finish VOY first before starting DS9.

[samwiseb]

I'll need to make another pass at VOY too to finalize my list of 'watchable' eps. The good news is I'll have already narrowed it down from last time I burned out on it it (which was 2006).

I also missed a lot of latter-day DS9 as I just no longer had time for TV in my final years of college. I think I'm fair in my assessment of the serialized nature of the show, which seemed sort of haphazard and arbitrary next to something like B5. However I'm confident there are at least a few nuggets in there I have not seen yet. So whenever I do resolve to marathon DS9, I seem to alternate between going the whole S1-7 vs just starting with S4-7. S4-5 I caught most of on the initial pass, however there's enough continuity that I wouldn't want to just jump into re-watching S6.