I don’t like zombie movies. I watch Star Trek because I like Star Trek, not zombie movies. For an episode to score the highest reviews, it needs to appeal to a wide range of fans, so I would not expect a take on a different genre to score as well as a traditional Star Trek episode.

I do love a sequel years later out of nowhere! Ship in a Bottle is also a good one for that.

I think I’d struggle to come up with such a list in a way that it’d be a rewarding viewing experience.

Something to keep in mind is that almost all of Star Trek from before the streaming era was made with the assumption that people would tune in and not necessarily have seen any previous episodes. Especially with syndicated reruns, there was no real guarantee of even seeing the episodes in order. At most you would be expected to miss some details if you caught the second half of a two-parter, and those had recaps at the start.

Star Trek only really started to do big plot arcs with DS9 and even then it was still very episodic. The earliest they had a modern BSG-style serial plot was season 3 of Enterprise. So there’s really no need to watch “must-watch” episodes. The episodes were made with the intention that you could watch each one with minimal context and still have a good time.

It is a module. No need to load it if you don’t have an ASUS.

“Oh, good Lord, didn't anybody here build ships in bottles when they were boys?”

He also appeared in Santa’s Summer House alongside fellow martial artist Cynthia Rothrock, as featured on RiffTrax!

Diane Duane wrote some great Star Trek books - The Wounded Sky and Spock’s World are perennial favorites.

I’d also recommend Q-Squared by Peter David. Very ambitious book and does a great job of making some lore connections.

Love this guy! The first and favorite role I saw him in was the scientist in TMNT 2: The Secret of the Ooze, but he’s been in so much and it’s always fun to spot him in something new.

Speaking of Shakespearian actors, in Quest of the Delta Knights he played alongside Olivia Hussey, better known for her portrayal of Juliet in the 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

His double casting in Quest of the Delta Knights was his idea, supposedly. What a guy.

Here’s an example of a themed distro built using ublue: https://blues.win/95/

You can check out their GitHub to see how it’s done.

I still remember the emotional catharsis of Krankor making a surprise appearance in one of the host segments. In that moment, I was as relieved and overjoyed to see him as Mike and the bots.

I love Starcrash! It’s the kind of B-movie I’ll gladly watch un-riffed (and have!)

For validation and/or (de)serialization: pydantic.

Otherwise, dataclasses.

I also like to replace tuples with NamedTuple, but I tend to use tuples a lot in the first place. It’s generally recommended to use dataclasses instead if you don’t specifically need tuple-like behavior.