A few years ago, I started a regular routine with the rowing machine. This left me with an indefinite number of hours of TV viewing to fill. After some rewatching pegged to my book, I settled into Next Generation. But I soon decided that rather than cycle through the other shows in order—something I had already done before—I would try a more challenging experiment: a chronological rewatch, from an in-universe perspective. And today marks a major turning point in this project, because “Chains of Command” was the last Next Generation episode to air prior to the debut of Deep Space Nine. For the foreseeable future, I will be alternating between series that took place “at the same time” within Star Trek’s fictional universe.
There is of course a limit to how much attention I am willing to give this project. When multiple Trek series aired simultaneously, they would often have staggered schedules, starting at widely separated dates or having one go on hiatus while another continued to run. Trying to stick strictly to airdate order would quickly become cumbersome. And for practical purposes, since I generally watch two episodes over three half-hour sessions a week, I want to minimize the amount of fiddling with the remote I need to do during that transition between two episodes on the middle day. Thankfully, the fan consensus is that, apart from the debuts of the new series, the shows are not actually very synchronized. Hence I plan to simply alternate week by week after I hit those debut points.
There are still a few potential sticking points. For instance, many installments involve time travel. Would those episodes be sorted based on the year visited? For simplicity’s sake, I chose to stick with the date from which they travelled back in time—otherwise I would constantly be shuffling between series. Less crucially, the date of the film Insurrection was left intentionally ambiguous by the production team. When would I watch that masterpiece? I opted to treat its release date relative to the other series as its in-universe date for my purposes. What about Short Treks? With one exception, I’m leaving them out as too cumbersome (and too boring) to be worth bothering with in the context of my exercise routine. Finally, what about the Kelvin Timeline films? That’s a few years off, and I’m currently treating them as optional. But given their impact on Picard, I think it makes the most sense to peg them to the elder Spock’s departure from the Prime Timeline rather than squeeze them into the TOS era.
I started in the middle, with Next Generation, and wound up going “out of order” and rewatching the original cast films during a week My Esteemed Partner was travelling, but I’d say you can jump in anywhere. After all, the whole thing is structured as a circle now, since the finale of Discovery ties in directly with the temporal meddling in Enterprise. At my current pace, though, that’s a long way off.
So here, without further ado, is my comprehensive rewatch plan:
Enterprise (all seasons)
TOS: “The Cage” (original unaired pilot)
Discovery seasons 1-2
Strange New Worlds (all seasons)
The Original Series (all seasons)
The Animated Series (all seasons)
Original Cast Films
Next Generation seasons 1-5
TNG season 6 through episode 11 “Chain of Command”
Alternate: Deep Space Nine season 1, remainder of TNG season 6
Alternate: DS9 season 2, TNG season 7 (starting and finishing TNG first)
DS9 season 3 alone up through episode 11 “Past Tense”
Generations
Alternate: Voyager season 1 (start with first 6 episodes), DS9 season 3
Alternate: VOY season 2, DS9 season 4
Alternate: VOY season 3 (up to episode 9 “Future’s End”), DS9 season 5 (up to episode 8 “Things Past”)
First Contact
Alternate: rest of VOY season 3 and DS9 season 5
Alternate: VOY season 4, DS9 season 6 (starting and finishing VOY first)
Alternate: VOY season 5 (up to episode 6 “Timeless”), DS9 season 7 (up to episode 9 “Covenant”)
Insurrection
Finish DS9 season 7
Continue VOY season 5, finish seasons 6-7
Nemesis
Lower Decks (all seasons)
Prodigy (all seasons)
(Abrams films?)
Picard (all seasons)
Discovery seasons 3-5
Though I haven’t included Short Treks on this list, I would recommend tracking down “Calypso,” not only because it’s so good, but to sharpen your outrage at how bad and thoughtless Discovery’s final scenes were.
This is so cool.