Today, our second annual Pop Culture References Tournament concludes! This year, the tournament was Favorite Star Trek characters (live action, that is)!
Here is the finale! It was down to Spock versus Picard!
You can use the hashtag #pcrtrekpoll on Twitter to see all of the past polls.
Some observations before I give the results. I talked to my pal, Rich Handley, who is a major Star Trek expert, about the seeds, and after I gave him my initial rankings, we had some back and forth and we settled on a 64 we could agree on (I accidentally left off a character from Star Trek: Discovery, and that character was more significant that Malcolm Reed from Star Trek: Enterprise, so poor Reed missed the tournament entirely. He was a #16 seed against Jean-Luc Picard, though, so I don’t think it really made a difference). A big debate between Rich and I was how to handle some of the newer characters. Generally speaking, the newer characters received lower seeds, but I made sure to make some prominent characters high seeds, and wouldn’t you know it, the rare upsets were mostly of newer characters (like Deanna Troi upsetting Michael Burnham in the second round). So I know some folks didn’t love the seeds for the newer characters, but as you can see, Rich and I tried to take a general overall view of how the fandom viewed these characters and it just so happens that the pre-2000 characters simply tend to be a bit more popular with fans. Heck, it’s not like the Voyager characters were highly ranked, either. And Enterprise probably got the LOWEST ranks of them all, really! But yes, the original series, Next Generation and DS9 were particularly high seeded overall.
Beyond that, Rich and I appear to have seeded everything pretty darn spot on, honestly, as the Elite Eight was basically 1 seeds versus 2 seeds (the highest-ranked #3 seed, Benjamín Sisko, edged out the lowest-ranked #2 seed, Worf), and the Final Four were all #1 seeds.
So, yeah, when it comes to Star Trek, the characters you think are popular ARE the popular ones, so it came down to Spock vs. Picard, and the results were…
FINALS! 1. Spock vs. 1. Jean-Luc Picard #startrek #pcrtrekpoll
— Pop Culture References (@poprefs) April 4, 2023
Congrats to Jean-Luc Picard! I don’t think it hurt that his current series of his TV series has been excellent!
Thanks for playing, everyone! Hope you had fun!
