At least TOS's scenes involving infamously-revealing clothing tended towards witty conversation.
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Enterprise is so unintentionally hilarious because of things like the sex airlock, especially the fact that Dr Phlox is banned from it for not being hot enough, so he gets a little window to do his scenes for it. The funniest moment in the entire show is the bit where Hoshi's shirt gets fully ripped off while crawling around in vents for zero reason, or the reveal in the mirror universe episodes with the womens uniforms just having no torso? It really does it to such a severe degree that it makes a rather forgettable show about Star Trek dealing with 9/11 endlessly rewatchable in "So bad its good" way.
Sidenote I always thought the funniest thing in DS9 was Jake motherfucking Sisko running around in the background being a smooth-talking Dom-Jot hustler poet who immediately goes from getting a Dabo Girl girlfriend at like 16 to hitting on Kira the next episode because of Mrs Rodenberry's psychic pheromones.
The decontamination room scenes were unnecessarily sexual, but it was extremely realistic. Until we invent a deus ex machina like the transporter, cross contamination between species is a dire concern. All we have to do is recall how cross contamination affected native American populations during European colonization.
But to quote @buckykat:
I hate Rick Berman I hate Rick Berman I hate Rick Berman
In reiteration: these scenes were unnecessarily sexualized.
If realism were what they were going for there'd be a lot more quarantine time to it. IIRC there was only like one extended stay in the decontamination room in the whole show.
you say that like TOS wasnt constantly horny with the women kirk has sex with in every damn episode. or voyager with that poor woman in that uncomfortable corset-suit.
Oh it was also very horny. They can both be horny. TNG, still kinda horny, but Enterprise was very explicitly horny.
Archer also has a wet dream about T'pol in this episode.
I loved DS9, just finished Voyager, should I bother with Enterprise? I haven't seen TNG or TOS, I should probably just go through those first.
I think this is my second watch through of Enterprise, it definitely has its moments and Phlox is possibly my favorite medical officer. I've watched DS9 5-6 times and Voyager like 3, TNG is probably at 4. I'm a little embarrassed to say I've only watched a handful of TOS episodes but I'll probably give it a go here after I finish this run of Enterprise.
Definitely recommend TNG but the first season is rough and there's really only a handful of good episodes, most of them were scripts that were meant for TOS and the translation was not great. I think part of that made me a little reluctant to try TOS because I assumed planets where the aliens are African coded and have fights to the death was the average episode.
Phlox is possibly my favorite medical officer.
Honestly the episode Dear Doctor shoots that prospect straight out the airlock for me. Condemning a whole species to extinction because it, let me check the notes here, "wouldn't be ethical". Now the living conditions between the Valakians and the Menk are sure as shit not anywhere close to good, that much I can agree with. But let's even get into how the episode states that wouldn't be ethical to cure the Valakians of a genetic disease that they somehow evolved into, the reason given is that the Menk are about to have a 'evolutionary leap' but will only have it if the Valakians go extinct. Yes a straight up appeal to letting nature/god sort it out, and that interfering in a alleged cosmic plan would be oh so horrible a sin to commit. Good god I hate this episode, and I hate how it's the origin story for the prime directive.
If it wasn't any indication, I hate Prime Directive episodes from TNG onwards, especially the ones that seem to make the high ranking characters of the shows all of a sudden afraid of consequences from out of nowhere for no discernible reason.
TOS has some really great episodes - the benefit of just getting actual scifi authors to submit scripts. And then it has, uh, well some of it is probably also due to the scifi authors...
The only Trek shows I'd say to actually skip are Picard and Discovery. Enterprise has its flaws (I hate Rick Berman) but it's still worth watching. After TNG and TOS though, yeah.
