There are many different ways that episodes/stories can be categorized: by quality, by “genre” (comedic vs. action-oriented vs. dramatic), by which character or characters (if any) is featured, etc. What I have attempted here, though, is to sort TNG episodes by “story type”—that is, according to what sorts of events the story revolves around, based on a reasonably concise list of 8 categories that I came up with early on in my process of review-writing. For the most part, each category should at least theoretically be capable of containing strong episodes—though I’ll admit that I do have at least one category (Tech Trouble) with very limited potential for quality. Also, two important notes are in order: First, what I considered in categorizing episodes was not merely the presence of some feature or element that is associated with this or that category, but the extent to which such elements constitute the main focus of the story—i.e., what the episode is fundamentally about, at least on a plot level. Secondly, even considering that, there are many episodes that fall into more than one of my categories, either because they contain multiple storylines of different “types,” or just because many stories inevitably straddle the arbitrary lines that I’m drawing between the types that I’ve identified.
Encounter with a Weird Alien
Enemy Encounter
High-Concept Sci-Fi
Outside the Trek Milieu
Personal/Cultural Encounter
Planet of the Week
Political Intrigue
Tech Trouble
This categorization scheme is inherently imperfect, and honestly, as I progressed through the later seasons of the show in my review-writing I, found myself buying into it less and less. On one hand, “Personal/Cultural Encounter” increasingly became a generic catch-all category; on the other hand, a small handful of episodes didn’t seem to fit plausibly into any of the categories (or perhaps one major storyline/aspect of the episode did, but another didn’t). For better or worse, though, I stuck with the practice of applying one or more of these tags to nearly every episode, right up through the finale. This whole idea began as an experiment, and in the end, I would hesitate to call it an entirely successful one; still, it did yield some insights along the way, or at least provide an interesting framework for story analysis from time to time. Take it for what it is, I guess!