TOS: The Original Series. Captain James Kirk and his "radically" diverse crew (including one alien and two token women in minor roles, one of whom doubles as the token black) explore the Final Frontier on a five-year mission that was cut short when the show was cancelled in its third season.

I: Star Trek, the Motion[less] Picture. The retrofitted Enterprise is sent out, very slowly, to investigate an immense cloud of energy barreling toward Earth, and the gigantic starship named V'Ger at its heart.

II: The Wrath of Khan. One of Kirk's many former girlfriends and their son want to test out the prototype of the Genesis Device, which can terraform a lifeless planet in minutes. But the planet they pick is inhabited by a crazed genetically-engineered superman and his followers, who have tamed a species of mind-controlling parasite . . . sort of.

III: The Search for Spock. Admiral Kirk steals the Enterprise to go see if the Genesis Planet has resurrected Spock. Big surprise: it has! . . . sort of.

IV: The Voyage Home. Humpback whales have built-in radios, apparently. Therefore a giant interstellar probe wants to talk to them, and is beating up our planet over it because humans killed off the whales in the twentieth century. So Kirk has to travel back in time and find some in the year 1986. In my opinion this is the best of the Star Trek movies, and yes, I thought that even before I became obsessed with environmental issues.

V: The Final Frontier. Spock's evil twin takes us to meet God. This movie was so bad that Gene Roddenberry himself decided to excise it from the Star Trek canon.

VI: The Undiscovered Country. Kirk hates Klingons (who are clearly standing in for Soviets circa 1989), but somehow he gets over that when he realizes that other people are even more warlike than he is, and will stop at nothing to maintain the (cold) war even though, thanks to an exploding moon (a.k.a. Chernobyl), the Klingons are now doomed without Federation assistance.

TNG: The Next Generation. Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the Frenchman with the British accent, is the coolest captain in the Star Trek universe. Most of the crew of the Enterprise D, however, is fairly lame. (Yes, there were an Enterprise A, B, and C and they all get mentioned at one point or another.) Data the android and Worf the Klingon are the major exceptions.

VII: Generations. Picard and company must stop a mad doctor's plans to destroy several planets in order to return to a heavenly alternate dimension called the Nexus, where Kirk has been trapped for over seventy years. Beautiful special effects shots and gigantic plot holes ensue.

VIII: First Contact. The Borg go back in time with the intent of preventing first contact with the Vulcans and conquering Earth. In the process of foiling their plans, Picard and company break the Temporal Prime Directive up, down, and sideways (just like in all previous time-travel episodes), but in this case the Time Police have an excuse for lying down on the job: being a 29th-century offshoot of the now-assimilated Federation, they've temporarily ceased to exist.

IX: Insurrection. A mysterious energy field grants immortality to the population of a planet in a remote nebula. Picard is saved from making up a lame excuse for why we shouldn't exploit this resource, because the exploiters quickly reveal themselves as cookie-cutter villains.

X: Nemesis. Picard's clone, raised by Romulans and Remans to hate humanity, somehow builds a giant spaceship with a planet-killing superweapon. This movie, like Final Frontier, should be crossed off the list of real Star Trek films.

DS9: Deep Space Nine. Station Commander Benjamin Sisko, a.k.a. the Emissary of the Prophets, presides over a space-age soap opera that manages to have the highest consistent quality of any Star Trek series. Virtually all of the regular and recurring characters are well-drawn, and the extended story arcs, both interpersonal and galacto-political, are mostly handled very well (in marked contrast to Voyager's). Just don't watch the last several episodes.

VOY: Voyager. Captain Kathryn Janeway and her crew have the bad luck to be flung across the galaxy by an advanced alien being, so they have to work their way back through vast expanses of unknown space, which seriously strains the imagination of the Star Trek scriptwriters.

ENT: Enterprise. Wait a minute—Kirk's ship wasn't the original starship Enterprise? In this low-quality prequel, Captain Jonathan Archer leads the first human expedition into interstellar space on the Enterprise NX-01. It's surprising that this series took a whole four seasons to die.