As the thread title says: what is the bad Trek episodes or movies you just can't resist getting into a heated argument about? For me, it's Star Trek: Insurrection. Terrible premise with terrible script logic which puts six-hundred pretty white people at the risk of losing their private paradise. I always thought the tagline should've been, "Yuppies battle eminent domain!"
I usually find at least one single thing that I can like in every episode, no matter how bad it is. The only one I haven't been able to do that with is TNG: Shades of Gray (or Grey, I'm too cranky to be bothered with looking it up). But none of it's worth me risking a second stroke for.
Star Trek 2009's plot holes and bad science, all I could think about were the things that didn't make sense. There's plenty of bad Trek movies and episodes but none that have bothered me in the same way after seeing them. What make it worse was the number of people I've talked to who liked the movie and said that it's sci-fi so it doesn't have to make sense.
People have confused science fiction and science fantasy ever since a little film came out in 1977 by some guy named Lucas.
As opposed to Barbarella or Lost in Space or even Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe . . . ? I'm not sure Lucas should take the rap here. Especially since he was just paying homage to earlier space operas! Now Edgar Rice Burroughs on the other hand . . . .
Who had the brilliant idea that space operas cannot be science fiction anyways? Since when is opera only fantasy?
I'm not sure what you intend to imply. Jules Verne's work was mostly real life edutainment mixed with elements of science fiction, and therefore more "science" than "fiction" (with the exception of Atlantis he presented as the real thing in "20.000 Leagues Under the Sea" and ironically thus deprived Plato the status of being one of / the earliest science fiction author). On the other hand his contemporary H.G. Wells leaned rather towards fiction than science. I can't recall one Verne story that would "qualify" as opera. H.G. Wells on the other hand... Bob
For me it'd probably have to be Nemesis. A premise that beats the dead horse over the nature-vs-nurture debate, with a very limp script, no explanation given about Worf or Wesley (though his appearance was brief he was still there in uniform), Data reverting back to his S1 persona, the invention of the Remans, plus many other little niggles. My biggest issue with it is the death of Data. Him sacrificing himself is very fitting, after all he gives his life for his Captain, friend and 'father figure', which is very touching and shows that he is very much human. Then they go and fuck things up by having B-4 becoming Data 2.0, which cheapens his death and all he had become.
Much of TNG season 1 qualifies. The Naked Now was hilariously bad, Code of Honor was just offensively bad. Lonely Among Us was bad but later had the benefit of Wil Wheaton trashing DC Fontana's dialogue in response to something she said about his supposed lack of acting talent. Justice, Angel One, Home Soil, Haven, Arsenal of Freedom, When the Bough Breaks, Skin of Evil, We'll Always Have Paris are all bad too.
TNG Shades of Gray. TNG Season 1-2 in general. Star Trek Nemesis Star trek V: The Final Frontier Anything that's the "underdog" I tend to find myself defending as it's never as bad as people rant about!
Whenever someone brings up STVI, I'm compelled to point out how horribly it treats the characters (Uhura doesn't know Klingon, Bones doesn't know Klingon anatomy, Kirk is suddenly a racist and they play the mind meld scene as if Spock is mind-raping a helpless, screaming Valaris in the middle of the bridge while the crew just stands around watching). Oops, I did it again...
The Nexus in GEN. It was just too powerful. You could travel anywhere in it by force of will. You could go back and forward in time by force of will. A bit of you remained around in it once you left it. It gave you immortality. It gave you the delusion you were experiencing your deepest wishes. It made you want to stay in it. I could understand it maybe if it were some sentient super thing like the Q or the Companion or the Guardian on COTEOF but it seemed to be some sort of natural phenomenom. OK if you could travel in time why didn't Picard or Soran go back in time to before all their troubles began and make sure Soran and his family were off planet/ship when the Borg attacked or about a hundred other things that didn't involve destroying the ship... Forget it. I could rant about this for days. Don't start me on Picard's or Kirk's greatest wishes.
And change 80-100 years of history? The only thing Picard could do without causing too much uncontrollable damage to the timeline was to go back in time to the point just before Soran launches the missile. Picard also didn't know that the Enterprise got destroyed. Perhaps if he had known that, he would have gone back a bit further. The idea that he could go back to the start and arrest Soran before he did anything also doesn't work. And besides that, how would Picard return to his time when he went back too far? He can't get back into the Nexus. Kirk's racism was more mistrust against the Empire, and has a emotional reason in his only son's death (David was killed by a Klingon claiming genesis for the entire empire, and it's highly likely that the Klingon Empire never ever apologized for it, so Kirk blaming all of them in his pain makes sense), and he overcomes it. Spock was as disturbed after the mind meld as Valeris, which means he touched on a painful memory, he didn't cause the pain himself. The mind meld itself was absolutely necessary. Uhura might have not known that particular Klingon dialect.
Are you sure that Picard couldn't go back into the Nexus? Is he out of the Nexus when he goes back/forward in time? Are there rules about where/when in the universe you can go? I mean thats what I'm talking about - are there rules because if there aren't why not go back and save Picard's family? Picard is willing to muck around in the Nexus to save a pre-Warp planet. Isn't that usually what's called breaking the Prime Directive? Not that I agree with that particular rule. Why is Soran destroying the planet any different from an asteroid destroying a planet unless Soran is a Federation citizen. And Soran wouldn't hesitate to change history. I mean why not go back and save his family instead of getting a fake family? Unless there is a rule that you can't go back in time to before the time you entered it. But is that actually a rule of the Nexus? Actually I agree that Kirk has a right to be angry with Klingons. Although in TOS he was generally pretty merciful to the Klingons and by the end of STV he was drinking with them. But Uhura and Chekov were making racist remarks in STVI and in TOS, TAS and all the other TOS movies I had never seen Uhura be anything but gracious to other species
TAtV riles me up something fierce. But that's only in describing it to people, because no one who's seen it ever defends it.
To be fair, the idea that Uhura is supposed to be some sort of super-linguist who has mastered multiple alien languages appears nowhere in the original series--where she seemed to be relying on the Universal Translator just as much as anybody else. I don't recall her ever speaking fluent Klingon or Romulan on TOS . . .