Trekkies Can't Agree on the Best 'Star Trek' Theme Song

There’s nothing a bunch of Trekkies love more than arguing about the intricacies of the generations-long Star Trek series, and the best theme song is no exception.

Recently, a Star Trek.com fan poll asked Trekkies to vote for their favorite theme song out of the five exiting live-action Trek TV shows and the results were shockingly close.

Which Star Trek theme is the best anyway? Is it Voyager, with its cinematic horns and sweeping orchestra? Maybe the bouncy and adventurous The Next Generation theme? Or maybe, for the purists, it has to be Alexander Courage’s iconic theme from The Original Series.

Despite a relatively small sample size of only 5,000 fans, every series theme song came in with at least 10% of the votes, and though The Next Generation won, it hardly ran away with the win with only 33% of the votes. Second place went to Voyager with 20%, followed by The Original Series (19%), Deep Space Nine (16%), and Enterprise in last place with (12%).

Notably, fans couldn’t vote for the theme song of the Animated Series, nor any of the feature films. All told, it was a pretty close race. But in the end it was the two Jerry Goldsmith-composed themes that nabbed the first and second place wins. Though the Voyager theme is really popular among fans, it’s not terribly surprising that TNG landed itself in the top spot in the end. There’s something quintessentially Star Trek about it, plus it has the advantage of originally being composed by Goldsmith for the first Star Trek movie in 1979. While the Voyager theme is really damn majestic and regal, it’s the TNG theme that kind of screams “adventure!” and gets to the heart of Star Trek.

It’s also not terribly surprising that “Faith of the Heart” — the Diane Warren penned/Russel Watson sung theme song for Enterprise — came in last, though it’s maybe a little surprising that it managed to even get 12% of the vote. Infamously, “Faith of the Heart” was the only Star Trek theme song with aired vocals, which bizarrely was not even commissioned for the show. (Rod Stewart sang a different version of the same song in the movie Patch Adams several years prior.) It’s not a bad song, per se, but it did kind of feel like reliving Aerosmith’s “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” in Armageddon every single week.

The fact that the poll was close reflects just how different the themes are, and how they’re all strong in their own ways. Yeah, probably even Enterprise. It also has us wondering where the theme for the upcoming Star Trek: Discovery series is going to fit into mix.