Meh. I just got mad at Weasley Wesley, full stop.

Voted for Picard for many reasons, among them this.

Shaters Kirk was the best in my book i still hate Q for killing Kirk with the ribbon thing.

Kirk gets my vote.

Kirk be feeling the love!

Do you really need a reason to be mad at Wesley?



Now, that's what I'm talking about. How lovable can a character be when the actor who portrayed him can't even stand him?




God, I love Gene's classic line! "In the 24th century, they wouldn't care."




Um, that wasn't Q who did that. The Nexus was just a random space/time phenomenon, and it didn't kill Kirk. Technically, it was Picard's fault for bringing him back out of the Nexus to help him deal with Dr. Soran, who was trying to destroy Random Trek Planet #45762. Picard seemed a little hard up for help at that point; hell, he even asked Guinan, of all people (or the version of Guinan who was in the Nexus, anyway)! If Picard hadn't brought Kirk out of the Nexus, he'd still be alive in there, romancing his phantom girlfriend, riding his phantom horses and doing whatever else he damn well felt like doing with his inter-dimensional "retirement".

I think Star Trek: Genesis is a bit like Star Trek V: it's so bad that it's best to just pretend it never happened. It wasn't a good movie for Kirk, and it definitely wasn't a good movie for Picard. He was a whiny wuss the whole damn film. (Exhibit A: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Coda.) He didn't get all "brainy bad-ass" until First Contact.




No, Kirk be makin' the love!

Kirk got Nexus'ed by Soreen, or some fruity bastard like thst. The cake is a lie Kirk! Its a lie!

The cake is not a lie. The cake is oh-so delicious. World of Warcraft says so. YOU MUST EAT THE CAKE.

Resistance is futile.

I voted for Jean-Luc Picard as TNG was the only Star Trek I ever really watched.

For some, it's the only Trek they grew up with.

I got really excited when I saw the Jihad bit...

But EVEN MORE excited when I saw the Star Trek bit!!!!

I wish I could have chosen Picard, who was the one I watched while growing up (although BBC2 used to run TOS when I were a nipper), but It has to be Kirk. Not because he was the coolest (Picard wins that fight), most bad-ass (Sisko), most attractive (Janeway or Archer, YMMV), but because he was Kirk. Kirk defined Star Trek so greatly that they had to come up with new ways to contrast with him. Picard would not have been the character he was if they hadn't needed to make a break with the Kirk model, while Janeway was basically Kirk with boobs - (notice the whole Kirk+Spock+McCoy dynamic is very similar to the Janeway-Chakotay-Tuvok albeit with some role-switching).

Good eye on that Janeway ref! Same with Archer, if you think about it: take Kirk, strip away some of those regulations he hated so much and make him racist toward Vulcans for a few seasons (and, for some reason, have Sam fucking Beckett portraying him). Take Spock, give him balloon-like breasts and you have T'Pol. Take your charming Southern doctor, ham up that accent like you're a Deliverance cast reject and switch him from Medical (much-needed caretaker of the crew) to Engineering (much-needed caretaker of the ship), and you get "Trip" Tucker. Kirk+Spock+McCoy / Archer+T'Pol+Trip. (Though, by that logic, all of the series Enterprise was a rip-off of TOS:

• Need an alien the audience has never seen before who would wear the blue uniform (if he wore standard uniforms) because of his duties? His name is Phlox.
• How about an asian on the crew? Or a female communications officer? Combine them into one character: Hoshi Sato.
• Diversity is central to Star Trek, so we still need someone black on the crew (who won't get any good lines at all), a youngin' (youngest on the crew, actually) who is often too "green" for his own good... We'll make him the pilot and call him "Travis Mayweather".
• Hmm... We're missing a gunner with a foreign accent. Somebody with an accent from one of the member nations of the United Kingdoms... How about Malcolm Reed?

It's James T. Kirk, folks, captain of the Enterprise. I mean:

-Got the salt sucked out of him.
-Split in 2 by the transporter into a good one and an evil one.
-Spun into an android duplicate.
-Pulled "Corbomite" out of his butt just in time.
-Fought a Gorn. And won.
-Jumps through the Guardian, but oh, Edith Keeler must die.
-Fought Spock. And lost.
-Slips into a parallel universe and deals with evil Spock. (Tranporter again.)
-Gets radiated and gets old.
-Becomes a drill thrull.
-Takes on the Roman empire.
-Surgically altered to look like a Romulan.
-Stuck between dimensions, not that the Tholians cared.
-Threatens to spank the Dohlman of Elas. (Wish they would have done that...)
-Tortured to see if an empath will play ball.
-Body inhabited by an insane woman.

Folks, there's no other captain who would even sniff this kind of crap let alone jump in it and roll around. I'm sorry, but it's Kirk who went where no one went before. Kirk FOREVER.

These made me laugh, but I had to debate 'em, 'cause I'm a bastahd like that (and because I'm still secretly hoping a ton of Picard fans out-vote Kirk at the last second). Buuuuuut...




I call that "inadequate security preparations". That's what redshirts are for. Had security been on the ball, that thing wouldn't have gotten near Kirk to begin with.



And the "good" one was a pussy.



So were Bill and Ted. That doesn't impress me. The best android ever will always be Data.

Come to think of it, wasn't the android Kirk destroyed after doing something very un-Kirk like: refusing a make-out session with the hot female android (who was wearing this at the time)?



That I give him props for. Exceptional bluffing skills. Kirk's a good roleplayer. He knows "charisma" isn't just a dump stat.



Awesome as that episode was, Star Trek Online kind of ruins this. I've fought several Gorn. They're pushovers. C'mon, they toss big rocks at you! (Though, it is pretty funny to watch a big Gorn bruiser bend down, rip out part of the floor and hurl it at you.) I give him props for the "makeshift gun", but winning against a Gorn alone isn't that special to me. I'd rather pit Kirk against a Borg cube and see how he'd handle that.



That I definitely give him. Damn good episode, one of the best. Episode gets me in tears every time.



Duh. It's Spock. All Vulcans take a level in "bad-ass". Hell, Ben Sisko lost to a bunch of Vulcans in baseball (his favorite sport; though, he made it look like a victory by celebrating his defeat, thoroughly confusing the hell out of his Vulcan adversaries).



Great episode, but I like watching Kira Nerys "deal" (*snicker*) with her alternate much more.



Lame. Picard went through a transporter accident and got younger. (Granted, it wasn't like he could've gotten any older... Oh. Wait...)



Kinky.



Twentieth century Romans. I give him credit for that. Good episode.



So were Picard, Data and Troi. Once freakin' Troi has done something, it loses its cool (and they were altered to look like the brow-ridged Romulans, too, so I give them extra props for putting up with shitty wardrobe).



Tholians aren't as restricted to one dimension as we are. Check out the follow-up Enterprise episodes explaining what happened to the U.S.S. Defiant after Kirk watched it disappear into the interphase. (Spoiler for ya: it winds up being captured by Enterprise-era Tholians in the Mirror Universe. The Terran Empire manages to get their hands on it and it jump-starts their technological progress by about eight decades and leads to the coronation of a new Terran Emperor. In other words, the events of "Mirror, Mirror" might've gone totally differently for our Kirk, had the Defiant not been lost. Damn Tholians.) Again, this one I give to Kirk.



Really kinky.



Gotta admit, nobody gets tortured like Kirk. Well, except for Picard... (There's just something extra-chilling about a Cardassian torturer who brings his daughter to work with him so she can see what happens to enemies of the state.)



While he inhabited hers, sexually confusing male Trekkies for decades.



Again, I've got to argue that one. Compare what Kirk went through in three years versus some of the shit Picard went through - being accused of being a traitor by a Starfleet conspiracy, assimilation by the Borg (which alone trumps anything Kirk dealt with), having to relive the loss of his last ship and the ensuing court martial, time-travel on multiple occasions (including several times within the same episode), having an alien probe dump an entire lifetime of events into his mind, having one of his favored officers betray him, being captured and tortured by the Cardassians - and Kirk's missions seem to be the norm for Starfleet.

Moreover, Kirk did all this in full denial of the power of death. What do I mean by this? Let's examine Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The entire point of the film was that Kirk had flatly refused to accept death as a possibility during his entire career. He cheated his way out of the Kobayashi Maru because he couldn't deal with that notion; Starfleet gave him props for "original thinking" when they should've tossed him into counseling to deal with that denial. (Notice how the Kobayashi Maru's programmer, Commander Spock, calls Kirk out on that in Abrams' film? Something tells me that had Spock been programming the Kobayashi Maru when Kirk was a cadet in the Prime universe instead of serving under Captain Pike aboard the Enterprise at the time, Kirk probably would've gotten kicked out of the Academy.) Kirk even loses family members during the original series and still lives in denial of death. He doesn't truly face it until Spock sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise from a bloodthirsty genetically-enhanced psychopath with revenge fantasies and a massive superiority complex.

Compare this to Picard. Just before he graduated from Starfleet Academy, Picard got into a barfight with some big, tough bruisers from a race of Predator-wannabes. One of them stabs Picard through the heart from behind, and as Picard starts to die his only response is to laugh. He is just barely saved from death and given an artificial heart (hmm, maybe that explains why he doesn't like children...). Unlike Kirk, he faced death head-on before ever leaving Starfleet Academy, and it shaped the man he would become in dramatic ways. As a Starfleet officer, Picard lived in the moment, never once taking life for granted. When other science officers were happy puttering about in their labs, Picard volunteered for every Away Mission, especially the most dangerous ones. He put himself in harm's way time and time again to get the missions done, and Starfleet rewarded this bravery by offering him command (even after a court martial that nearly ruined his career and had him questioning his place in Starfleet for nine years before taking command of the Enterprise-D). He woke up every day hearing an artificial heart beating in his chest, knowing that he should have died, that any hit to his chest could screw up how his artificial heart works, that any firefight on some random planet or disaster aboard his ship could be his final mission.

Hell, compare both Kirk and Picard to the other Starfleet captains we've seen on screen - Sisko (messiah to an alien race), Janeway (stuck in the Borg's backyard for seven years) and Archer (don't even get me started) - and we see that the abnormal is normal in Starfleet.

And yes, I realize that Kirk came before Picard on television, but big whoop. If NBC had thought better of the original pilot episode, we wouldn't be talking about Kirk at all. We'd all be comparing Picard to Jeffrey Hunter's Captain Pike instead.

All merely re-tellings of the Epics of Kirk....rehash for the youngsters. Classic stories shot-up with steroids. Feh!