"A Piece of the Action" is the name of that second or third season episode of the original series. A very popular one with me and Scruffy. A great story that puts our heroes right in the middle of a local turf war between gangsters on another planet. Luckily Kirk gets into the swing of things and takes charge towards the episode's climax.
Well it seems everyone here is too young. My generation. We were not raised on STAR TREK. Some of us weren't even born when the first STAR WARS movie came out. Most of my generation was raised on video games and high tech. My mom said that the problem with us is that all the magic is gone. All is high tech now. Maybe she is right judging from the responses. She's a Trekker. For her Trek and the OUTER LIMITS were very intelligent shows. I guess you have to look at it from the standpoint of people who were our age 30 and 40 years ago. I personally have no problem with STAR TREK. My favorite of the 5 shows is TNG. That was the most intelligent and intellectual of the shows.
We have to remember one thing... that ENTERPRISE was created to capture the flavor of the 1966 show. It is suppose to be the show before Kirk, Spock and McCoy. I feel that is a mistake. The "head" of the 1960s isn't there. The feel isn't there. And of course the major component of all is gone... Gene Roddenberry.
The reason why TNG is far superior to the succeeding Treks is because Roddenberry had full control of it. Full control. He did the show exactly like he wanted to do the classic Trek but couldn't. Studio interference. But Paramount gave Roddenberry total creative control and that is why the show was a smashing success. DS9 was created by Berman and Braga. VOYAGER is also their creation but alot better in some ways than DS9. In some ways DS9 involved alot of religion and conflict around taht religion. VOYAGER was an exploratory ship that got pulled into the Gamma Quadrant of the Galaxy and was trying to get home. That's all. It too was an excellent show and Berman and Braga did their best to stay with the spirit of Roddenberry. A sad ending though. 🙁
All in all, Trek was not a kiddie show. I guess having parents who are very much into Trek helped me see it more clearly.
But roddenberry only had any real control over the first series of TNG, considered by fans to be the worst. TNG was good because the conceopt was fresh enough and it was never afraid to experiment with new plots. DS9 half-saved itself by having a proper background plotline but nothing saved Voyager from being just the same thing again.
Enterprise COULD break the mould but it seems to have stopped trying. Mind you, whilst that Borg episode is bad for continuity it was a 100x better than the Voyager ones.
The Borg became the villians of the week after their initial TNG appearances. That is what I think ruined Voyager when they brought them in midway through that series. Seven of Nine was an obvious ploy to get racier subplots so as to attract young male viewers like myself. Ds9 sucked until the Dominion threat and Worf were added into the storylines.