Star Trek: The Next Generation was one of the greatest TV series ever, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t fall back on certain tropes over and over again. One of its most overused ones was the tendency for every character on the show to describe whatever alien thing of the week they were encountering as “some sort of/some kind of/some type of…” thing.
So just how often did they do this over the show’s seven season run? Quite a lot, as seen in this “some kind of” supercut put together by YouTube channel Ryan’s Edits, which we learned about via Geekologie. You can watch the whole video down below to see just how many times the Enterprise crew fell back on this trope. We won’t spoil it for you by telling you exactly how many times they did it…but let’s just say it’s in triple digit territory and leave it at that.
This video is a response to another YouTube video released several years back, that was a supercut of all the times the characters on Star Trek: Voyager used the very same terminology. And Voyager was even worse about it. The writing staff on that show did it almost twice as many times as TNG did! Of course, both series shared a lot of the same writing staff, so you can see how they just doubled down on what they already knew.
It would be interesting to see if the original sixties series fell back on this writing tick as many times as the more recent Trek shows, but I have a feeling they didn’t do it quite as much. So to the folks over at Ryan’s Edits, we present you a new challenge. There are only 79 episodes of the original show after all, so it shouldn’t take quite as long to dig through them for all of those “some kind of…” moments. We’re dying to find out.
Oh, and if the name Ryan’s Edits sounds familiar, it’s because they are also responsible for the amazing blooper cuts of TNG that delighted everyone recently. If you haven’t checked those out, we recommend you do so at your earliest convenience. They’ll make your day just a little bit better.
Featured Image: CBS
