Janeway would be ice cold, fiery hot, then balanced all in the same episode. That's my only gripe about her.
TNG was the first attempt to essentially launch new Trek content that made it on screen (Phase 2 was going to be the first, without Nimoy, but they went with doing movies instead, ultimately) and a lot of the actors were selected with an eye on budget in mind. Most had limited exposure to the public prior to this, with Spiner having a bunch of character actor parts on things like Night Court and Cheers, Stewart being a regular second fiddle in British theatre and period piece/sci fi movies, Burton being in Roots, Frakes being in mostly a bit part guy while working on his directing career, and so on down the line. Pretty much all were budget picks, with Spiner and Stewart ultimately being the ones who were solid actors. Denise Crosby was actually originally high in the running for the Trois part, before losing out to Sirtis, which means if she had sperged out in that role Trois would have gotten gacked and been a footnote instead of a running gag meme. Really, in the early days of TNG it was about getting it off the ground as a purely syndicated series (a new concept at the time) and keeping it cheap enough to avoid cancellation. Thats how you ended up with a lot of no names in major roles.
To be fair, thats one of the things that drew me to TNG. Picard is confident in his ship and his capabilities and his crew, and he tries to hold to the sanctity of all life, even androids and weird crystal energy creatures. Plenty of times he could have just smoked some Romulans or whatever. I like the slower pace and morality plays mixed with the sci fi setting, always cool.
Frenzied Wombat
Thats true and quite honestly there are top tier episodes in all five pre SJWTrek series that rank with the best of Science fiction. Even the normally lean Enterprise had the Through the Mirror Darkly trilogy and Terra Nova. Voyager's best episodes were mostly Doc and 7 centered, but the sleep alien episode and the advanced dinosaurs locked in dogma episodes were brilliantly written and clever. TNG also had arguably three of the best Trek episodes of all time with Best of Both Worlds, Dalmak and Jallad, and Devil's Due which have not really been done before or since. But if I had to pick my top five episodes across the franchise, it would go something like this:
1) City on the Edge of Forever- All time classic hit you in the feels sci-fi.
2) Pale Moon Light- No explanation needed.
3) Balance of Terror- Really a classic submarine movie that established the Romulans for all time (ST2 battle of Mutara Nebula was modelled heavily after this episode)
4) The Corbomite Manuever- Classic story telling of exploration, moral choice, and Kirk just being smart that actually made fun of technobabble in certain ways.
5) Seige of AR-558- The very best critique of human nature made by Quark of all people and confronting the horrors of war vs gung ho patriotism.
pysek
Frenzied Wombat
Yeah if I had to pick a favorite Voyager episode, the museum one would be it. Such a great story about how history gets politically distorted with lots of subtexts to it. And of course Picardo acted his ass off in that one, too.
