We made a survey about Star Trek. A whopping 47 people responded (including us)! These results are totally scientific and reveal the ultimate truth about who the best and worst characters are and what series is the true fan favourite. You can’t argue with the opinions of a whole 47 people.
Listen via Soundcloud (above) or the fancy “enhanced” video version on our YouTube channel (below) which features illustrative and illuminating image pop-ups a-plenty.
See below for data! Small-d data, not Data. There really should’ve been an episode where the Enterprise was almost destroyed because someone misunderstood which data/Data was being referred to.
Some things missing from the video are the graphs and pie charts compiled from our survey. The first three are boring and you can see why they weren’t included.
A more interesting stat we didn’t mention on the podcast is nearly half (44.23%) of respondents identified as some form of LGBTQ (with one respondent choosing asexual). Only 53.85% identified as hetero. If this is indicative of the sexual orientation of the population at large, Star Trek fans, Nerd Hurdles listeners, or just people who like to fill out surveys that we’re connected to on Facebook, it is inconclusive. This demographic make-up is, however, an interesting lens to view the rest of the survey results through.
Below are the full stats on how people ranked the five (live action) series from best to meh to worst.
For some reason only 43 votes we cast in the Enterprise ranking, where 44 votes were cast in each of the other series’ rankings which throws the accuracy of the percentages off slightly. But based on the above data, the overall rankings are as follows.
When we then asked people to remove nostalgia from the equation and choose the objectively best series, the numbers only change a little.
The Original Series loses 10 points, while The Next Generation remains about the same with Deep Space Nine and Voyager splitting TOS’ losses. Enterprise remains nobody’s favourite or even the series anyone thinks is actually objectively the best. Ouch.