Question #6. Which is best, Star Trek or Star Wars?

This is an easy one. Star Trek is better. The end.

Alright, Jeez! I suppose I'll have to go through the why as well. Why do I think that Star Trek is better then Star Wars. Let's get a couple of things straight first then. I like both of them but, Star Trek is better than Star Wars FOR ME. Maybe not for you or for other people but I prefer Trek over Wars.

By the time I had first seen an episode of Star Trek it was already dated. I would have been watching it in the 80s, Star Trek premiered in the 60s.  I recall seeing Captain Kirk and his crew facing off against a giant space creature that was quite clearly the magnified image of a microbe of some kind. I was somewhat bemused as to how this was considered passable television content and how we were expected to suspend disbelief. I dismissed the original series of Star Trek as nonsense. When Star Trek The Next Generation premiered though it was captivating. The Enterprise had been redesigned and it looked awesome, it was bigger, faster, and it looked like it had in fact been transported from the future. The interior of the ship has been updated, the ship controls were all touchscreen computers and they had holodecks, spacious corridors, a bar! It all seemed perfectly feasible and the SFX were incredible. I was definitely going to be a Trekkie/Trekker, whatever it was we were called at the time. A Star Trek fan.

The X-Wing fighter.

Star Wars however was something that I could really get on board with as a child. The films, the toys, and... Well that was it at the time really. But it was great, the X-Wing fighters were my favourite of the ships and Luke Skywalker was my favourite character (I have always favoured the heroic protagonist of any story and still do). He was like a ninja, wizard! And his enemy was like a robotic, black knight, ninja, wizard! It was brilliant.
The Empire Strikes Back is my favourite of the original trilogy. As a child it was Return of the Jedi. Empire has a more involved story and ends on a cliff hanger after a major plot twist/reveal. Jedi concludes the trilogy and has some great moments but it has too many inconsistencies to be the best one for me now. 

Stormtroopers. They're badasses!
Unless you throw a stone at them.

Even as a child though I wondered why the stormtroopers were being beaten by sticks and rocks when they are covered in armour, and how such a carefully laid out plan to rescue Han Solo could go so wrong so easily, what that entire debacle on Endor was about, and if shooting electricity from his fingers was the only thing that the emperor could do since he uses the force for nothing else and is unable to stop himself from being picked up by a one armed man or prevent himself from plummeting to his death even though he a master of the dark side of the force which is supposedly stronger.

How are you gonna get out of this one!?

I know that Star Trek is also guilty of certain sins. Captain Kirk is lauded as a master tactician but in order to demonstrate this he is put in situations that could have easily been avoided in the first place. Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan for example. The starship Reliant has been commandeered by Khan. This information is not known to Kirk and his crew of academy cadets. They only know that there is something wrong at the station they are approaching, a garbled message implies that someone is taking the genesis device, and that the message was being blocked at the source. The two ships approach each other, Enterprise hails but Reliant remains silent. Saavik quotes regulation to kirk at this point as regulation requires Kirk to raise shields but he does not.

The USS Reliant closing on Enterprise.

Bearing in mind the information that Kirk already has, I'd be raising shields. I'd be suspicious of Reliant and even if Reliant wasn't acting suspiciously by approaching Enterprise without communicating, it would still be very prudent and very wise to raise shields as there is something strange going on in the area. Kirk is commanding a ship manned with cadets. If questioned about it, Kirk has no good reason for not raising shields. No good reason at all. It is because he doesn't raise the shields that the ship and crew end up in the situation that they do. He does a similar thing in Star Trek III The Search For Spock. Suspicious situation, Kirk suspects a cloaked ship in the area, he doesn't raise shields. The Enterprise gets destroyed in that one.

Star Trek. The USS Enterprise 1701-D

Comparing the flaws of each leads to the same conclusion, they're both flawed in some way. Revisiting both Trek and Wars as an adult however produces different results. Wars is leaving me cold a lot of the time but Trek excites me almost as much as as it did during The Next Generation days. The flaws in Wars appear glaringly obvious now, even in Empire Strikes Back. Twice Leia shouts to Luke "It's a trap!" in the cloud city. What does he do? Nothing. The Trek Flaws, I can let slide since they're more charming than anything else. The new Wars trilogy (episodes 1-3) leave me even colder than the original trilogy and they don't make sense to me as prequels. The end of episode 3 does not tie in with the story we were told in episode 4. 

Quite honestly, "Your Father was killed by Darth Vader." is not even a little bit close to the truth of "I sliced your Father into little pieces and left him to burn to death in a pit of lava before you were born but he got out somehow, had robotic limbs attached, had to have a scary looking mask and helmet fastened to him with a breathing apparatus fitted, he turned to the Sith because the Jedi failed to recognize the problems he was having, offer any support when they found out he was having problems, help him in any way or protect his family. but they didn't have any qualms about stealing his twin children without him knowing but that's not so bad because the evil emperor got us off the hook with that one and told him that he killed them in his rage.  He's had a pretty rough time and the Jedi only made matters worse to be honest with you, there's little wonder why he had them wiped out. After all of that mind you, he had already accomplished more by the end of episode 1 than you will by the end of episode 6."

Fans cry out for a new Trek series.
Star Trek Titan is one of the more popular fan campaigns.

The new Trek films, the remakes, those I quite enjoy. It's not quite the Trek from the television series but it's almost the Trek that I sometimes wished the films would be. As much as I enjoyed the Star Trek films, the TNG films in particular always felt like they were just long episodes of the television series. I wanted them to be more than that, I wanted them to show the Enterprise and it's crew facing galactic problems and kicking it's ass! The new films kind of deliver that and in the absence of a new Star Trek television series the films put new Trek on screens. It would be brilliant if a new Trek series was made but it's not likely. We will have to make do with the films. The new Star Wars films that are being made I'm not so bothered about. 

Space. The final frontier.

After the lacklustre prequels I'm not holding out much hope. I kind of rambled on but to summarise, ever since I saw Star Trek TNG I was a Star Trek fan. Even The Original Series is afforded a charming classic retro status. Star Wars, whilst I do enjoy it, I feel it is better suited to a younger audience and the prequel trilogy to a younger audience of a younger generation.
Live long and prosper.