Long before Bryan Fuller was announced as the showrunner for the next Star Trek series, and even before he ran other shows (Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daises, Hannibal), he was cutting his teeth as a TV writer on both Star Trek: Voyager and Deep Space Nine. All told, he is already credited with 22 stories in the world of Trek.

Fuller was, and is, a longtime Star Trek devotee. But, despite his love of the series, he sometimes struggled with writing it. This quote from Fuller sums up a lot of the problems that I believe plagued Trek in the '80s, '90s and 2000s:

"I got into writing to become a Star Trek writer. I was a rabid fan. I had shelves and shelves and shelves of action figures in my bedroom that scared away more dates than I care to admit to. So it was really...if back then, you told me 'you're gonna write for Star Trek for twenty years,' I couldn't have imagined a happier career. But after writing for Star Trek for four years and bumping up against the parameters of the storytelling, which sometimes were very restrictive because there was always that magical reset button and you could never carry story arcs over the episodes because they were so heavily syndicated that it simply wasn't allowed, I began to get itchy and wanting to tell stories with a little more emotional depth, because one of the things about the Star Trek universe, especially Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine and Voyager, were that the characters were so much more evolved than we were that they wouldn't be terrified when they're looking at a giant Borg cube about to assimilate them. They would handle their jobs and they would behave responsibly and calmly, and I just had a hard time relating to that after a certain point."

The good news is that TV has changed a lot since Fuller wrote his final episode of Voyager. The less good news is that there are some Fuller-written episodes which ... aren't great. But (and there is an important "but" here), there is still good in most of his episodes, and you can definitely see Fuller's interests and style as a writer taking shape.

So I'm going to rank all of his episodes now. Yes, I am going to make fun of some of these episodes (because that's fun, when you're a mildly sadistic culture critic), but I'm also going to talk about what trends stand out and why, after watching Fuller's early work, I'm more excited than ever to see what he does with Star Trek next.