Image: Me reading this damn list of episodes. via TrekCore
I will be the first person to declare my love of the wildly uneven Star Trek: Voyager above the rest of Star Trek (actually that’s a lie, because my colleague Katharine has beaten me to the punch on this several times). But friends: collectively, we are re-watching far too much Voyager on Netflix.
In celebration of the impending arrival of Star Trek: Discovery, Netflix has revealed an internal study of all the ways we’ve consumed over 536 hours of boldly going where, actually, many people have gone before. Most interestingly, the streaming service tallied up the most re-watched Trek episodes of all time and the results will, for once, make using a “set phasers to stunned” joke totally worth it. Because we’re re-watching Trek in the weirdest damn way.
There’s a few specific criteria here — Netflix counts a “re-watch” as a viewer going back to watch at least 6 minutes of an episode they had already viewed in its entirety, and the first two episodes of a series were culled from the results as they were, unsurprisingly, the most popular by an overwhelming margin. But what’s left after that for the 10 most re-watched episodes after that is a frankly alarming collection of episodes.
Image: Netflix
Some of these are obvious: The Next Generation‘s “The Best of Both Worlds” is widely considered one of the greatest Trek stories of all time. And the overwhelming presence of TNG and Voyager is mostly thanks to episodes that feature the Borg, the franchise’s most iconic villains — or revolve around Seven of Nine. But look at this list. Not a single episode of Enterprise is maybe understandable, but no original series? No Deep Space Nine!? At least that one might be explained by the fact that people are simply watching larger amounts of it given its more serialized nature, instead of going back to revisit one-off episodes. Less explainable is why the hell “Clues” — the TNG episode where the crew passes through a wormhole and realises they have been manipulated by a race of Xenophobic aliens trying to keep their planet hidden from outsides — is here above, like, almost any other episode of TNG.
Remember “Time and Again,” one of the first “proper” episodes of Voyager that saw the crew go back in time to the day before an accident wipes out an entire planet’s civilisation? And that said civilisation probably deserved it because of that one insanely annoying kid and for literally all of their clothing being various shades of orange, mustard, scarlet, and taupe? Apparently you do, because you re-watch it a lot. And who the hell is skipping all the way back to the end of Voyager just to re-view its finale “Endgame” so much? Spoilers: they get back to Earth, you guys. Stop re-watching it.
There is so much Star Trek to revist on Netflix right now — and in a few weeks, a whole new series in the franchise to discover. What we’re apparently choosing to return to instead is a little disconcerting, to be honest.
[Netflix via Business Insider]