Introduction

I first generated a list of the top 57 episodes in 2023 for the 57th anniversary Star Trek, which had its debut on September 8, 1966. There are other lists out there, but I felt called to make a list that reflected the sensibilities of people like me. This list is now updated to be the top 60 episodes in honor of the 60th anniversary in 2026.

A few quick notes:

• SPOILERS AHEAD!
• “S” means Season, and “E” means Episode.
• The title of each episode links to a synopsis page at trekcore.com or Memory Alpha.
• The series ranked are the original series (TOS), the animated series (TAS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space 9 (DS9), Voyager (VOY), Enterprise (ENT), and Strange New Worlds (SNW).
• No multi-part episodes are included.

Note: I am grateful to the site PubMeeple for helping me rank all of these episodes.

What follows is a longer description of why and how I made this list and other stuff like that. If you want to skip that and just see the list, go to page 2.

My History with Star Trek

I first saw Star Trek in 1966—it was the episode The Corbomite Maneuver. My mom had seen the description of it in the TV Guide and thought it looked interesting. After that, she was hooked, and we three kids were allowed to watch it with her every week. We got to eat dinner in the living room, and we ordered Chicken Delight delivery—both special treats! The only rule was that we could talk only during the commercials. I really liked the show, and when it came back in re-runs, I would watch it every day after school. My mom got the Blish novelizations of the episodes, and I read them all, and eventually got my own copies. When I got to college, we had an informal Star Trek club that would meet in my dorm room to watch the afternoon re-runs. We knew all the titles by heart and would try to steer conversations to make each other say the title of an episode. When we were on the film board, we got some of the episodes on film and would have the special treat of seeing them full-size on the big screen. Over the years, I have acquired several reference books about Star Trek, including the Star Trek Concordance.

When Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out in 1979, I saw it at least 17 times in the theater! I loved it and the emotional journey that Spock went on. When Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, I eagerly watched and recorded the episodes on video tape. I fell in love with Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise as they were released. I recorded them all and watched them over and over again.

As you can see, I have a long-standing relationship with Star Trek. I’ve only been to one convention—it wasn’t my kind of scene. I do love to analyze the episodes. The podcast Mission Log caught my interest, and I started listening and actively interacting with them. They analyze each Star Trek episode and movie in release order—just my kind of thing! Starting with TOS, I watched each episode and movie a few times, taking copious notes. I’d write up my analyses and email them to the podcasters. They would often mention my comments, and they interviewed me for the podcast to wrap up the TOS episodes. I eventually had to quit participating and listening because it was taking up too much of my time, but I loved doing that very much.

The Ranking Process

For the most part, I have not enjoyed the newer Star Trek series, and that’s why most of them are not included in the list. I do like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, so the first three seasons of that series are included in this list.

I used the tool PubMeeple to do a sort of bracket comparison of all the episodes against each other. In other words, I was only asked to compare two episodes at a time. It was interesting to me to see how I chose which episode I preferred between two that were close. I like it when an episode makes me cry, so that’s one criterion. If it makes me feel really good, that’s also a point in its favor. I also prefer episodes that make me think about something bigger than me. Some choices were so hard that I started asking myself, if someone asked me which one to watch, which would it be?

First, I ranked the episodes of each season of a series. Next, I took the top episodes of each season and ranked those against each other to get a list of the top episodes of each series. Finally, I took the top episodes of each series and ranked those against each other. I calculated the percentage of top episodes to rank by getting the percentage of episodes each series represented in the total number of Star Trek episodes I was including in the entire process. Then I took that percentage of the top-ranked episodes from each series and included that number in the entire ranking process. For example, the original series 79 episodes were ten percent of the total of 755 episodes in the process. So that would mean including 8 episodes in the final ranking process. It sounds complicated, but it was fun! I was surprised at how many episodes from the last list fell off and what new ones were added. A lot depends on how I felt that day when I was ranking, and what I felt when I had last watched the episode. The last page gives you the previous list and how the ranking changed.

One thing I wanted to note is how often my favorite episodes follow something that Hitchcock said. He said that every story has plot holes; it’s just the nature of storytelling. You cannot include every single bit of information to make a story complete. To keep the viewer from noticing the plot holes, you need a relationship (or relationships) that gets you so involved that you don’t have time to notice the plot holes. You may notice that many of the images I selected to represent an episode are of a couple of people. That often shows the relationship that pulled me in and got me to “feel the feels.”

Since the idea is to find the best episode, I found that two-parters and arcs of episodes did not make the list because you must watch more than one episode to take in those stories, and therefore a multi-parter cannot be the best episode.

I hope you find this list interesting and thought-provoking. Enjoy!

Episodes New to Top 60 List

Here is a list of the episodes new to the Top 60 list, that is, they were not in the Top 57 list. See the last page for the full list of the episodes in the Top 57 list.