Sci-fi TV shows like The Expanse and Star Trek: The Next Generation have a funny way of getting under our skin, embedding ideas into our minds and creating new worlds we want to explore. While their opening title sequences exist to credit the actors and creators, they can also help get us in the mood; immersing us in the atmosphere with visuals, music, and sometimes narration. The best of these intros offer something beyond names and a title card, becoming microcosms of the series they precede, the mere sound of which is enough to instantly transport us.
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Often as iconic as the shows themselves, these are sequences that have made a permanent mark on the zeitgeist and become calling cards for the genre as a whole. A few contain infinitely catchy earworms, and others spooked us as kids when they aired late at night. Yet regardless of how they impacted us, these are the ones we’ll never skip, even if every streaming platform now gives us the option.
10) Firefly
Joss Whedon’s Firefly only lasted 14 episodes, but its opening credits live on in the fandom’s memory. Subverting the usual future-forward electronic score, the series leaned into the “space cowboy” vibe with a twangy, bluegrass-inspired ballad sung by Sonny Rhodes. The lyrics, “You can’t take the sky from me,” were written by Whedon himself, perfectly capturing the renegade spirit of Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his ragtag crew aboard Serenity. Paired with wide shots of the ship flying across alien skies, it established Firefly as a Neo-Western as much as a space opera.
While most sci-fi shows up to this point had leaned on orchestral grandeur, Firefly’s intro let us know this was a story about outlaws, drifters, and misfits surviving in a new frontier. Equal parts homespun and cosmic, the gritty country opening influenced many shows that came after to experiment with their credits sequences. Though Firefly was short-lived, “The Ballad of Serenity” remains instantly recognizable to fans who still wake up humming it decades later.
9) Westworld
When HBO revived Westworld in 2016, the show flashed its prestige TV badge immediately with an elaborate, modern opening sequence. Created by Elastic (the same studio behind Game of Thrones’ opening), the credits depicted 3D printed ligaments, robotic horses, disembodied hands playing piano, and the slow assembly of the humanoid hosts, all floating through a sort of monochrome liminal space. It’s so abstract, you could almost say, “It doesn’t look like anything to me.” Ramin Djawadi’s haunting piano score tied the whole thing together with an atmosphere of melancholy and menace.
The sequence was the product of months of careful design by Elastic’s Patrick Clair, Paul Kim, and Raoul Marks, who worked closely with Djawadi and show creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Production stretched across five months, from early 2016 right up to the series premiere, with even the player piano photographed and recreated in CGI. Other imagery, like the skeletal horse and a synthetic recreation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, spoke directly to the show’s themes of creation and control. The Season 1 sequence itself was a labor of love and a visual essay on playing god.
8) Farscape
The opening of Farscape immediately set itself apart from other late-’90s sci-fi. Instead of a stately march, we got an uncanny extraterrestrial theme punctuated by drums and chanting. The narration by protagonist John Crichton (Ben Browder) explained his accidental journey through a wormhole and crash-landing into conflict on the far side of the galaxy. Accompanied by a now-endearingly vintage montage of Moya’s crew, it established the show’s uncategorizable nature.
Just like the series itself, the opening credits are visually distinctive and largely underrated. Across its two slightly different variants, the Farscape theme introduced our main characters and, most importantly, gave us a taste of the aliens designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The narration, fast editing, and almost gothic melody were a beautiful entry point into the colorful, anarchic universe where survival means adapting to the strange.
7) Neon Genesis Evangelion
Anime fans know exactly what’s coming the moment the celestial vocals of “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” kick in. Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion remains one of the most beloved anime of all time, and the J-pop opening song performed by singer Yoko Takahashi has become legendary. Accompanied by striking imagery, flashes of biblical and occult symbols, cryptic text, and rapid-fire cuts of mecha battles hinted to viewers about the show’s deeper meaning from Episode 1.
Most sources note that theme song lyricist Neko Oikawa was tasked with writing something “philosophical.” She completed the song in just two hours, drawing inspiration from things like Hegel’s notion of the Thesis (which influenced the title) and Moto Hagio’s manga A Cruel God Reigns. The lyrics took on an oracular tone, urging the listener to “become a myth” (shin wa ni nare). Combined with occult imagery, including the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the song amplified NGE’s esoteric and existential themes. For casual fans, it may feel like nonsense symbolism, but for those willing to dig, it’s the opening clue that Evangelion is about far more than just giant robots.
6) Babylon 5
Each season of Babylon 5 reinvented its opening credits, but Season 3 is the clear winner, according to fans. Narrated by Claudia Christian’s Susan Ivanova, the opening prologue detailed the show’s growing themes of war, sacrifice, and destiny. The line, “The year is 2260. The place: Babylon 5,” became a mantra for fans, grounding the sprawling political and spiritual conflicts in a specific time and place. Christopher Franke’s electronic score hit a new dramatic high, swelling with urgency.
Season 3’s opening credits went way harder than they had any right to. The opening line is nothing short of iconic: “The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace… It failed.” Initially, a subtle foreshadowing, the starfuries blasting each other in the credits somehow didn’t undermine the surprise of the civil war to come. The hammer strikes synced to the synth stabs in Christopher Franke’s score create a driving urgency that immediately gears you up. Excellent in its day, it remains a mid-’90s time capsule that, according to some fans, is reminiscent of old-school RPGs.
5) The Twilight Zone
Few shows have an opening as instantly recognizable as Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. What started in Season 1 with a moody orchestral theme was quickly replaced by the four-note guitar riff that most people think of. Created from avant-garde French composer Marius Constant’s stock cues, “Étrange No. 3” and “Milieu No. 2,” CBS music director Lud Gluskin spliced them together, saving money while creating one of the most iconic TV themes ever. The visuals: swirling galaxies, floating eyeballs, ticking clocks, hypnotized us into a dreamlike trance, and Serling’s narration guided us to a place “not only of sight and sound but of mind.”
Over the decades, the theme has been reinterpreted, from Jerry Goldsmith’s orchestral variation in the 1983 film to Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts’ moody version in Jordan Peele’s 2019 reboot, but none have eclipsed the original. What began as a budget workaround became the sonic identity of the unknown. You may even hear someone hum the theme song when something bizarre happens in real life. Though the iterations of the opening sequence were varied slightly each season, they all succeeded in taking us to another dimension.
4) Battlestar Galactica
The 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica had an opening as bleak as the show itself. Each iteration of the sequence featured a survivor count, reminding us exactly how many humans were left after the Cylon attack on the 12 Colonies. The number dwindled as the series progressed, a devastating countdown that clearly laid out the stakes before each episode. The visuals were a tapestry of soundless battle snippets, explosions, and the fleet, floating through the vacuum of space, searching for a home.
When it first aired, the version of the theme song you got depended on your location. In Season 1, North American broadcasts used a cue adapted from the music for Zak Adama’s funeral in “Act of Contrition,” which then surged into taiko drums over a montage of footage. But outside North America, viewers heard a haunting vocal performance of the ancient Gayatri Mantra, one of the oldest Hindu prayers. By Season 2, producers standardized the Gayatri Mantra version across all regions, cementing it as Battlestar Galactica’s definitive theme. Paired with the survivor countdown, the mythic BSG credits sequence is worthy of one of the greatest sci-fi shows of the 21st century.
3) The Expanse
The Expanse’s epic title sequence is widely beloved for its intricate storytelling and foreshadowing. Crafted by Brisbane-based motion studio Breeder, the opening is an impressionistic time-lapse of humanity’s past and future: starting with satellite images of Earth’s urban sprawl, it progresses through rising seas and shrinking glaciers, then depicts lunar and Martian colonization before expanding to the asteroid Belt and beyond, all in a single minute. It hints at the show’s political landscape, consisting of Earth, Mars, and the Belt, while setting the tone with Clinton Shorter’s ethereal melody and Lisbeth Scott’s otherworldly vocals.
As the series evolved, its opening did too. From Season 5 onward, the sequence transformed on an episode-by-episode basis, with Breeder embedding subtle visual updates including planetary changes, shifting lights, and even strategic movements of spaceships, that fans eagerly attempted to decode. Evoking the show’s rich speculative storytelling, The Expanse’s title sequence is a modern classic.
2) The X-Files
In the category of title sequences that still haunt our dreams well into adulthood, The X-Files is perhaps the most iconic. Debuting in 1993, the opening credits were an unsettling pixilation collage of mysterious imagery, including ghostly mirages, unidentified flying objects, and the screaming funhouse face that scarred a generation. Shots of FBI ID badges introduced our protagonists Mulder and Scully, and Mark Snow’s whistling melody put us in the perfect headspace for probing unexplained phenomena.
Crafted by the creative team at Castle Bryant Johnsen, the title sequence was unlike anything else on TV at the time. It won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Title Design in 1994, and still tops many title sequence best-of lists. Today, the theme remains instantly recognizable, conjuring memories of conspiracy theories and paranormal activity, and each episode we rewatch reminds us: the truth is out there.
1) Star Trek: The Next Generation
Picking a single Star Trek opening as the most iconic is almost impossible, as each series intro (particularly DS9) brings something special to the table, but The Next Generation deserves top marks for its visual elegance and the way Jerry Goldsmith built upon Alexander Courage’s original theme. Debuting in 1987, the sequence takes its time building up with sweeping views of the solar system and the Enterprise-D soaring past planets, out into the galaxy. Add Patrick Stewart’s narration, beginning with, “Space: the final frontier…” and you have perhaps the most iconic sci-fi opening titles of all time.
Thanks to the passing of time and procuring of a larger budget, the effects were vastly improved from TOS. Fans picked up small details like the crew moving about in the final flyby of the bridge’s observation bubble, offering a complexity and realism that astonished Trekkies at the time and only enhanced the opening’s simple grandeur. Together, the music, narration, and imagery created a credits sequence that inspired optimism and perfectly embodied Gene Roddenberry’s future worth striving for.
Which opening do you think sets the perfect tone? Any personal favorites we missed? Leave a comment below; we’d love to chat with you!
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