The Sunday Seven On Monday

Patrick's Sunday Seven is interesting today.

Name your top seven favorite individual episodes of any single television series. If you feel especially enterprising, give a few lines explaining why you think makes your chosen episodes so good.

I'll pick Star Trek. At Christmas, we picked up all three seasons, and I've been picking my way through. Also, I don't think I have an encyclopedic enough knowledge of any other TV show; I couldn't name seven individual episodes of anything else. Except maybe Red Dwarf.

Star Trek episodes, in no particular order, and I'm not feeling particularly enterprising (no pun intended:

1. The Menagerie (both parts). This is the episode with the wheelchair-bound Captain Pike and the telepaths on Talos IV.

2. The Mark of Gideon. This is the one where Captain Kirk finds himself on the duplicate Enterprise on the surface of the extremely-overcrowded planet Gideon. I remember being REALLY scared by this one when I was a kid, by the parts where Captain Kirk can suddenly see green-tinted crowds outside the ship's viewports. All those people, just staring in...scary.

3. The Devil In The Dark. The Horta episode. "NO KILL I."

4. Journey To Babel. Spock's parents.

5. Balance of Terror. The episode where we first see the Romulans.

6. Amok Time. "You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting."

7. The Galileo Seven.

Huh...five basically Spock-centric stories. Interesting. Spock is great.