There are some episodes/movies that are so special, they deserve special recognition. I glanced through episode lists, and found sixteen: TOS—Balance of Terror, The City on the Edge of Forever; TOS movies—The Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country; TNG—Family, The Drumhead, The Inner Light, Lower Decks, All Good Things; DS9—Duet, The Visitor, Homefront, Paradise Lost, Far Beyond the Stars, In the Pale Moonlight, It’s Only a Paper Moon.

It’s not that Voyager and Enterprise are bad; they have a lot of fun episodes, and a lot of good episodes, but not that good. I may have missed some, and there are some great episodes (like “The Best of Both Worlds”) that don’t quite make the cut for me.

These entries will not have synopses. You owe it to yourself to watch them, and if you’ve already seen them, you owe it to yourself to watch them again.

Commentary

Game theory is a domain for insane people. I don’t mean this lightly. If you’ve ever seen Dr Strangelove, the titular character is based on real people, chiefly John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and Werner von Braun. Though A Beautiful Mind exaggerated it, John Nash was schizophrenic.

This is the Cold War in a nutshell. It’s still geopolitics in a nutshell, or at least that was my experience living in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

“Balance of Terror” is about people who know war, and are trapped between duty and—I don’t quite know what. Compassion isn’t right. Maybe it’s regret, maybe it’s exhaustion. This pushes Kirk and the unnamed romulan captain (played, weirdly, by Mark Lenard) into a game they both excel at, and they both hate.

They both know the stakes. If the Bird of Prey makes it back to Romulus, it’ll be justification for war. Neither captain wants that, but they both have subordinates who do. The romulan captain is particularly trapped, since he’s the aggressor. Trapped between the phasers of the Enterprise, and possible execution if he goes home defeated.

I talked about Teller and Nash because, well, Roger Waters put it well: “Hey bartender over here / Two more shots and two more beers / Sir, turn up the TV sound / The war has started on the ground / Just love those laser guided bombs / They’re really great for righting wrongs / You hit the target and win the game / From bars 3,000 miles away / 3,000 miles away.”

“In a different reality, I could have called you friend,” the romulan captain says. “We are creatures of duty, Captain. I have lived my life by it. Just one more duty to perform.”