TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

Ranking the Star Trek Films (Again)

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An update to my last attempt at doing this back in 2009. I originally posted this to Mastodon back in April after watching Star Trek: Section 31, and after realizing I hadn’t cross-posted it here, am doing that now. Also somewhat prompted by a friend sending me this ranking from Den of Geek, which is close, but not identical, to mine; I do broadly agree with their summaries of the various films.

I gave it some thought, and while the exact placement of any of these might vary slightly depending on time/mood/etc., I think this is a pretty good stab at my personal Star Trek film ranking, best/favorite to worst/least favorite:

  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  • Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
  • Star Trek: First Contact
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture
  • Galaxy Quest
  • Star Trek (2009)
  • Star Trek Beyond
  • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
  • Star Trek: Generations
  • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
  • Star Trek: Section 31
  • Star Trek: Insurrection
  • Star Trek: Nemesis
  • Star Trek Into Darkness

A few more details:

The first three (TWoK, TVH, TUC) are essentially a three-way tie for first. At any given point, the order could be shuffled around and would probably be acceptable.

TMP remains in that place whether it’s the theatrical, TV extended, or directors cut, but of the three, the director’s cut is definitively the best.

Some purists might be surprised at the two Kelvinverse films ranking that high, but for all the faults, the casting was so good at embodying the characters without slavishly copying or parodying (intentionally or not) the original actors, and I think both films are a lot of fun.

Christopher Lloyd’s Kruge almost pushes TSfS higher, but…not quite. But it does mark the dividing line between “films I can put on at just about any time and enjoy” and “films I’ll watch when there’s a reason to” (chronological rewatch, someone else wants to watch one, etc.).

S31 is barely Star Trek. It’s a generic sci-fi spy film that someone spritzed with synthehol and Starfleet emblems; it ranks as high as it does because it’s an acceptable generic sci-fi spy film, entirely suitable for having on in the background and occasionally paying attention to. Michelle Yeoh (and Georgeau) deserved better.

Into Darkness…I just have so many issues with it. I will be quite unpleasantly surprised if they ever make a Trek film that knocks it out of the bottom spot on this list.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock The Making of the Classic Film by John and Maria Jose Tenuto

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Book 51 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The third in Titan Books’s series of Star Trek films “behind the scenes” coffee-table art books, and the second from the team of John and Maria Jose Tenuto. It’s always fun to see all the production art, photos of models and setups, and all the skill that goes into the films. As with the prior books, much of the information I knew, but there are always some gems and stories that I hadn’t come across yet.

Me holding Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: The Making of the Classic Film.

Weekly Notes: September 1–7, 2025

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  • 🇺🇸 Monday we recognized Labor Day by heading into Seattle to participate in one of the local protests. It was a small but enthusiastic group; my one slight disappointment was that though held on Labor Day, it was more generally anti-Trump than specifically pro-labor/union. (Not that anti-Trump is bad, of course. It just seemed to dominate the sentiments, and the day itself was just relegated to being a convenient day to protest because some people had the day off of work.)

  • 📷 I did post an album of photos of the day’s adventures, before, during, and after the protest. I had fun playing a bit with these; the only lens I brought was a Pocket Dispo, a disposable camera lens mounted in a 3-D printed fitting. It gives the images a fun bit of distortion. Definitely not an everyday lens, but fun to have in my kit for when it feels right.

  • The rest of the week was a pretty standard week, with no particular stories of note.

📸 Photos

A metal firefighting hose pipe fitting on a brick wall, with sticker graffiti that says, 'destroy monotony write on walls'.
Somewhat ironically, this is sticker graffiti, not written.
A curved grey brick wall with graffiti that reads, 'those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won't teach them to love society', surrounded by more graffiti of cat heads and text that says, 'bigots beware' and 'trans hearts run this park'.
I’m kinda digging how the Cal Anderson Park gate house has become a point of trans solidarity and resistance.
A woman sitting on a brick wall and smiling, holding a sign that says, 'Palantir is how Númenor fell'.
The intersection of geeks and political protest always results in some great signs.
A crowd of people, many hoding protest signs and some holding U.S. flags, gathered in a brick plaza and watching people speak.
Some speakers were better than others, but our current state Attorney General Nick Brown spoke well and was the highlight of the rally. At this point, he seems good. Of course, our former AG, Bob Ferguson, was great in that role as well, but has not been nearly as impressive as Governor, so…who really knows?

📚 Reading

Read one Star Trek novel, Gene DeWeese’s Into the Nebula.

📺 Watching

  • We finished our rewatch of Scrubs; our first time watching all the way to the end, including the Scrubs: Med School ninth season/spinoff. The first few seasons of Scrubs are definitely the best; much of the latter seasons are very hit-and-miss, but generally still at least amusing.

  • We also watched Murderbot, which was a really good adaptation of the first book in the series, and even got my wife, not as much of a sci-fi fan as I am, invested and enjoying (most of) the show. The one disappointment was a section in the final episode that fills in a period of time that’s skipped in the book, and which was tonally very different from the rest of the show, enough so that we skipped forward through a chunk of it. Still, overall, really good, and I’m looking forward to the second season when it shows up.

🔗 Linking

  • Micah Lee: Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater: “Joshua makes strong claims about the security and privacy of his app without backing any of them up with technical details. Many of his claims are false. He also chose to target only iOS, and not Android, because of a misunderstanding about how Android push notifications work. And even worse, during the Q&A, he made it clear that he didn’t understand terms like ‘warrant canary,’ ‘reverse engineering,’ or ‘security through obscurity,’ which doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  • Jason Aten at Inc.: After 18 Years, This Is Still the Most Useful macOS Feature You Probably Forgot Existed: “…one of the most underrated features in macOS is also one of the oldest: the Guest User account. It’s been around for more than 18 years, first appearing in Mac OS X Leopard in 2007. Yet most Mac users barely remember it exists.” It’s a very clickbait-y headline, but honestly, I’d not thought about the Guest User account in years, and it’s worth keeping in mind.

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio

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Book 47 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ordered this just after it won the Best Graphic Novel Hugo award this year. The combination of choose-your-own-adventure plotting and Lower Decks humor works really well. Lots of humor and various Trek callbacks, but with some surprisingly dark moments as well, all leading to a fittingly Trek-ish end. Much fun!

Me holding Warp Your Own Way.

Balance of Power by Dafydd Ab Hugh

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Book 33 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️

This is the third book I’ve read by Ab Hugh, and the third to get two stars. It’s obviously supposed to be comedic, but isn’t funny (the conceit of a Ferengi who speaks entirely like it’s “talk like a pirate day” may be hilarious to some; to me, it was increasingly annoying), there are numerous typos and inconsistencies, and it was just a slog. Not looking forward to when I get to more by this author (though I’ll read them, because I’m a stubborn Trek completist).

Me holding Balance of Power

Weekly Notes: May 26–June 1, 2025

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  • ♿️ Officially launched the Accessibility Liaisons project at work on Tuesday, to help train more people and distribute the work of improving digital accessibility across the college. This was just a “soft” launch to introduce the program, with things kicking off more comprehensively in the fall, but it was good to get it started.

  • 🌏 Yesterday we went to Kent’s annual International Festival. Got some good food from food trucks, learned a little bit about some of the many cultures represented in Kent’s population, and saw some good music and dance performances. My favorites were a kids group doing traditional Sri Lankan dance, and kids from the local School of Rock.

  • 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Happy Pride Month, all. Or if not that, have a well-focused Wrath month. Stonewall was a riot of queer and trans people, after all. And my occasional reminder that I describe myself as “statistically straight“, which allows for some variations in the trend line.

📸 Photos

A rock group of seven teens and pre-teens performing on an outdoor stage as people watch.
The School of Rock kids performing; I think here they were doing Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.
Social media post by Claire Willett saying, "for pride month this year can straight people focus less on 'love is love' and more on 'queer and trans people are in danger'".
A rainbow-colored unicorn with a skull face striding through a black and grey landsdape with flames at its hooves, trailing a banner that says, "we called off pride, now it's gay wrath month".

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

Finished Andor. That was really good. Easily among the best of the modern Star Wars shows and films (that I’ve seen, at least, not having seen them all).

🔗 Linking

  • Eric Wilkinson at King 5: AI stepping up as backup for short-staffed PenCom dispatchers (which was headlined “AI now takes some calls for help on Olympic Peninsula” when I bookmarked this): “AI listens for keywords that may indicate crime or violence. It even picks up inflections in the caller’s voice to sense trouble. If any of those criteria are met, the call goes directly to a real person.” Yeah, I can see no way in which this could go wrong…

  • Helen Smith at King 5: The Cascadia Subduction Zone looks a little different than researchers thought. Here’s what that means for ‘The Big One’ (which was headlined “New research reshapes ‘The Big One’ tsunami risk” when I bookmarked it…what’s with King 5 renaming headlines?): “New findings show that tsunami risk may be different, though not less, in places along the subduction zone. This is due to the absence of a ‘megasplay fault,’ which was previously believed to run from Vancouver Island down to the Oregon-California border.”

  • David Friedman at Ironic Sans: Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe: Fun interview with Star Trek fan and researcher Jörg Hillebrand.

  • Technology Connections on YouTube: Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind. Half an hour, but a fascinating look at how closed captions are encoded into analog video, how it works with the digital video of DVDs, and why modern players and Blu-ray disks are falling over with their closed caption support. Some of the basics here I knew from my subtitle projects, but a lot of the technical details were new to me and neat to learn about.

  • Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal: They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back. (archive.is link): “Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it. ¶ It’s called a blue book.”

  • Nadira Goffe in Slate: The Controversy Surrounding Disney’s Remake of Lilo & Stitch, Explained: I don’t have any interest in watching the remake (big fan of the original, though), but as a non-Hawaiian white guy, reading about the political undertones in the original that have been stripped out of the remake was really interesting, as it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know.

  • Anil Dash: The Internet of Consent: “The growing frustration around “enshittification” is, in no small part, grounded in a huge frustration around having a constant feeling of being forced to use features and tools that don’t respect our choices. We’re constantly wrestling with platforms that don’t respect our boundaries. And we have an uncanny sense that the giant tech companies are going behind our backs and into our lives in ways that we don’t know about and certainly wouldn’t agree to if we did.”

  • Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty: “As an organizer, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gulf between what many people believed they would do in moments of extremity, and what they are actually doing now, as fascism rises, the genocide in Palestine continues, and climate chaos threatens the survival of living beings around the world.”

  • Chelsey Coombs at The Intercept: “Andor” Has a Message for the Left: Act Now: “‘Andor,’ the new series set in the universe, doubles down on its anti-authoritarian roots, focusing on the creation of the revolutionary Rebel Alliance. In the process, it gives us a glimpse into the messiness and conflict that often accompanies building a movement on the left, as activists fight over which political philosophies and strategies work best.”

  • Yona T. Sperling-Milner at The Harvard Crimson: Come At Me, Bro: “I propose an alternate strategy: I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success.”

  • Suyi Davies Okungbowa: I Call Bullshit: Writing lessons from my toddler in the age of generative AI: “Software is as limited as the individuals, systems and institutions that define and prompt it, and as of today, mimicry is its highest form. But as you can see above, mimicry is not a significant endeavour. A human baby can mimic. A chameleon can mimic. Mimicry is basic.”

Toward the Night by James Swallow

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Book 29 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We haven’t gotten an Ortegas-centric episode of the show yet, so it’s fun to get a bit more of a peek into her and her background through this adventure. A mysterious alien artifact, a dangerous planet, ornery Klingons…all in all, quite the fun Trek adventure.

(Very mild spoilers: The only flaw for me wasn’t actually a flaw with the book, but a happenstance of my reading: I’d just read the TOS ebook novella Miasma, so this made for two Trek stories in a row with a landing party trapped on a rainy, muddy planet being chased by swarms of hungry giant bugs while cut off from all communication with the Enterprise. I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t quite as derivative as it seemed.)

Me holding Toward the Night