The Great Star Trek Ranking Endeavor

Which one of these is not like the other?

If how one spends their free time is a great window into their soul, what does it say about me that I enjoy watching, cataloging, and ranking Star Trek episodes in my free time? Because graduate school can sometimes feel like one giant two year study session, it's important to find some kind of hobby or task that gives you a nice break between prolonged study binges. It's important that the break be long enough to provide a welcome respite, but short enough that it doesn't completely sap the will to study. I have discovered that the perfect study break for me is a 45 min. long episode of Star Trek.

About six months ago I discovered that Netflix instant watch had every episode of Star Trek available for streaming. I watched a few episodes out of nostalgia and enjoyed it. I then scoured Google looking for people's lists of best episodes for each of the series and began to watch those episodes. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that I should try and watch every single episode of each series. Ridiculous right? Well, it would be if I decided to just spend hours and hours every day binge viewing, but what if I took it slow and watched an episode here and there as a study break? It may take years, but why not? As I began to make the commit to the idea, I realized that if I was truly going to do this, I would need to catalog these episodes so I could later quantify, compare, and rank them all. Thus, the creation of my 'Star Trek Episode Rankings' excel spreadsheet. It truly is glorious and wonderful. Check out the video below to see the extreme amount of nerd on display.


If you would like to follow along or just produce your own rankings in private, then you can find a blank Star Trek Episode Ranking document HERE or by clicking the link. I think I made that obvious enough Hopefully, in a year or so, I will be able to produce an incredibly detailed picture of the entire Trek universe, complete with series rankings, season rankings, and episode rankings. I'm so excited.

BLANK STAR TREK EPISODE RANKING FILE - Available through Google Docs

What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts!


For your enjoyment, here Picard and Riker being ultra cool for 10 straight hours

Comments