Season 2 is a pretty polarised year. As opposed to Season 1, which was bad with the (very) occasional hint of good, Season 2 seemed to alternate between bad and good. There are some very dreadful shows (The Royale, Shades of Gray), and some of the very best of all time (Q Who, The Measure of a Man).
The average is clearly much much better than the first year. In fact, all things considered I’d say this is the best season of Star Trek since the end of Season 2 of TOS back in 1968.
But there’s still quite a bit of room to grow. The actors have fully settled in, but the writing still relies a bit too heavily on cliched aliens, and easy idiot plots. But the good writing has started to let the characters grow, especially Wesley who, while he didn’t have a lot to do, got away from saving the Enterprise every week and was instead just a very junior officer.
The really positive sign is that when the writing is bad, the characters are starting to feel ‘wrong’, rather than just stupid. That means that all the writers have to do is to come up with interesting situations, and then throw the characters in and see what happens.
That brings the rankings so far to:
– TOS Season 2
– TOS Season 1
– TNG Season 2
– TAS Season 1
– TOS Season 3
– TAS Season 2
– TNG Season 1
To date, that’s 7,151 minutes watched, or 21.61% complete. Next on to Season 3 of Star Trek, where things really started to fire on all cylinders.