Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Essential, and the best Star Trek series, which is now close to consensus and was a minority view for twenty years. It is not, however, a starting point. It assumes The Next Generation, shares characters with it, and spends its first two seasons quietly assembling a situation that the last five pay off.

The premise inverts everything the franchise was built on. There is no ship and nowhere to go: the crew are administering a space station beside a planet recovering from a fifty-year occupation, dealing with the people who collaborated, the people who resisted, and a religion that regards the commanding officer as a figure from prophecy. Nobody can fly away from the consequences of last week.

What follows is the only genuinely serialised Star Trek of its era, running through a long interstellar war in which the Federation is losing, makes compromises it cannot defend, and is shadowed by an intelligence service that the franchise's optimism is not supposed to permit. The episode in which Sisko walks through exactly how he arranged to bring an empire into a war, and concludes that he can live with it, is the single best hour of television the franchise has produced.

It is uneven early and there are filler episodes throughout. The usual advice is to accept the first season as setup and judge it from the second half of the second. The final ten episodes were written and shot as one block and land properly, which almost nothing else here manages.