A Suggested Order for Watching TOS with Your Kids
When I started at Clarity Innovations, the company culture interview question was “Star Trek or Star Wars?” Until recently I had leaned more toward Star Wars, but having grown up watching The Next Generation and the Star Trek movies, I was very much also a Star Trek fan.
So naturally, my answer was “they are not mutually exclusive because one happens in this galaxy and in the future and the other happened a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.”
I wanted to start watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my kids, as that is my favorite series, but first, I wanted to give them a good canon of The Original Series so they could have a better appreciation of Star Trek as a whole. Knowing the best resource for this would likely be my own coworkers, I asked some folks at Clarity about the best order to watch TOS.
I got a fantastic, well-thought-out response from Dale:
In general, I would rank the initial three seasons of ST: TOS in the following way: Season 2, Season 1, and Season 3. Season 1 has some wonderfully written episodes based on intriguing scenarios, but Season 2 is where the cast was really “owning” their characters. Season 3 has some good episodes, but got pretty silly at times.
The following is the list of episodes and the order in which he recommended they be watched.
The agreed-upon order
- The Doomsday Machine (s02e06)
- City on the Edge of Forever (s01e28)
- The Enterprise Incident (s03e02)
- Amok Time (s02e01)
- Mirror, Mirror (s02e04)
- Balance of Terror (s01e14)
- Devil in the Dark (s01e25)
- Arena (s01e18)
- Journey to Babel (s02e10)
- Space Seed (s01e22)
- The Tholian Web (s03e09)
- A Piece of the Action (s02e17)
- The Trouble with Tribbles (s02e15)
The list, in detail
The Doomsday Machine
A giant alien weapon – think a massive cone that eats planets – is cutting a path of destruction through Federation space. The Enterprise finds a sister ship adrift with its crew dead and its commodore barely alive and completely broken. That commodore then steals a shuttle and flies it straight into the machine. It’s a tense, well-paced episode that feels like a submarine thriller.
City on the Edge of Forever
This one is widely considered the best episode of TOS, and it earns it. McCoy accidentally injects himself with a stimulant, goes a little crazy, and jumps through a time portal back to 1930s Depression-era New York. Kirk and Spock follow to fix the timeline. Kirk falls in love. It doesn’t end well. Harlan Ellison wrote it and fought with the studio over it for decades.
The Enterprise Incident
Kirk suddenly orders the Enterprise into Romulan space and then appears to lose his mind. It turns out to be a covert mission to steal a Romulan cloaking device. Spock has to charm a Romulan commander to buy time, which he does very effectively. There’s a fun bit of spy tradecraft in this episode that you don’t usually get in TOS. Season 3 gets a bad reputation but this one holds up.
Amok Time
Spock is acting strange. Turns out Vulcans go through a mating cycle every seven years called pon farr, and if he doesn’t get to Vulcan, and have sex, he’ll die. Kirk takes the ship to Vulcan against direct orders. Once there, Spock’s betrothed pulls a legal maneuver that puts Kirk and Spock in a fight to the death. This episode introduced Vulcan culture and the iconic fight music.
Mirror, Mirror
A transporter accident during an ion storm swaps Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura into a parallel universe where the Federation is a brutal empire and everyone has a dark streak. Evil Spock has a goatee. It’s a fun, well-constructed episode – you get the evil versions of the crew while the real crew deals with their evil counterparts back on the regular Enterprise.
Balance of Terror
The first appearance of the Romulans. A Romulan ship with a cloaking device has been destroying Federation outposts along the Neutral Zone, and Kirk has to hunt it down. It plays out like a submarine cat-and-mouse story and it’s one of the most tightly written episodes in the series. There’s also a subplot about a crew member who distrusts Spock because Romulans look like Vulcans, which the episode handles well.
Devil in the Dark
Miners on a remote planet are being killed by something that can move through solid rock. The creature turns out to be a silicon-based lifeform called a Horta. It’s been destroying equipment because the miners were unknowingly destroying its eggs. Spock mind-melds with it and relays its distress. It sounds absurd written out like that, but this is one of those episodes that does exactly what good science fiction is supposed to do – it makes you reconsider what counts as a monster. “It’s life Jim, but not as we know it!”
Arena
The Enterprise chases a ship that attacked a Federation colony. An alien species called the Metrons stops them both and drops Kirk and the Gorn captain on a barren planet to fight it out. Kirk makes a cannon from raw materials he finds on the ground. It’s a ridiculous setup that’s also completely earnest and somehow works. The Gorn has become one of the more iconic images from TOS. This episode must be watched to fully appreciate one of the best lines from Galaxy Quest.
Journey to Babel
The Enterprise is ferrying a bunch of Federation ambassadors to a conference, including Spock’s father Sarek. Sarek and Spock haven’t spoken in years. Then someone on the ship gets murdered, an Orion spy ship starts tailing them, and Sarek has a heart attack. Spock refuses to leave the bridge to donate blood for his father’s surgery because Kirk is hurt and Spock is in command. It’s a good family drama wrapped around a solid mystery.
Space Seed
The Enterprise picks up a 200-year-old ship adrift in space carrying a crew of genetically engineered humans in suspended animation from Earth’s eugenics wars. Their leader is Khan Noonien Singh. He wakes up, immediately starts taking over the ship, and has to be stopped. Kirk understands him and takes pity on him. Instead of putting him in prison, he maroons him on a planet to give him the opportunity to build his own civilization. This sets up what is considered to be the best of the TOS movies, Wrath of Khan, which you should watch after you’ve done this list.
The Tholian Web
Kirk gets trapped in an interphase between dimensions while investigating a dead ship, and starts flickering in and out of visibility. The Tholians, aliens who do not negotiate, start spinning an energy web around the Enterprise to trap it. Meanwhile Spock and McCoy have to figure out how to get Kirk back while managing a crew that’s slowly losing their minds from the dimensional stress. It’s a good episode where Kirk is mostly absent, which forces the rest of the cast to carry it.
A Piece of the Action
A Federation ship visited this planet a hundred years ago and accidentally left behind a book about 1920s Chicago gangsters. The whole planet built its culture around it. Kirk and Spock have to negotiate with mob bosses and eventually decide the best approach is to just out-mob them. It’s deliberately comedic and it works. There’s a scene where Kirk tries to drive a stick shift car that’s worth watching just for that.
The Trouble with Tribbles
Tribbles are small, round, warm, and purr when you hold them. They also breed fast enough to become a serious problem. The Enterprise stops at a space station where a shipment of grain bound for a disputed planet is stored. Klingons show up, tribbles multiply, and eventually the tribbles do what the Enterprise crew couldn’t and sniff out a Klingon agent. It’s a ridiculous but fun episode. There’s a reason it’s the one everyone remembers.
The verdict
After watching these, I have to say, it is a good order. I don’t have the Trek expertise to argue with any of Dale’s picks, but I can say the list worked. My family got a solid foundation in what Star Trek is, and we’ve since been able to jump into the movies and The Next Generation without anyone feeling lost. And when my kids are old enough, they’ll have all the context they need to enjoy Galaxy Quest with my wife and me.