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ost_uid0]>> Next Gen seems to be everyone's second favorite Star Trek. <<
In my case (and not surprisingly to anyone, I'm sure), NextGen is my first-place favourite. It improves on the Original Series in many ways while preserving much of the original spirit of TOS. It also benefited from coming along relatively early in Trek's now very long (nearly 40-year) history, so it had the twin advantages of being young enough to be fresh while being old enough to be mature. It also didn't have nearly as much competition from other TV sci-fi shows, since there were few of those at the time compared to today and the recent past.
The post-NextGen shows are enjoyable (I've watched every single episode of them), and in some cases are more daring (DS9 was famous for pushing the envelope), but in some cases came across as repetitive and stilted. We've also seen some serious continuity problems -- for instance with Voyager running into aliens it supposedly left behind several seasons ago (such as the Talaxian colony we saw at the very end), or with, well, a lot of Enterprise. And while I'm hardly a fan of Robert Beltran, he *does* make a valid point when he complains that Voyager was overly fond of showing formulaic battle sequences in which the action consisted of Chakotay counting down what percentage of the shields was left.[/color
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