Star Trek has given us countless hours of stories, some of them great, and some of them not so much. I was wondering which plot resolutions you think were the worst, whether they let down an otherwise good story or made you feel like you wasted 45 minutes. One ending that made me angry was a Voyager episode where Tom Paris is accused of sleeping with an alien woman and killing her husband and because of the culture he is forced to prove his innocence. Now the premise of the episode is lifted straight from an already underwhelming episode of TNG so I wasn't expecting much, but the ending was the laziest thing I've ever seen. Eventually the crew proves Tom's innocence because the household dog doesn't bark at another guy and that proves that he was the one sleeping with the deadguy's wife and not Tom. Not only is this an extremely worn and unconvincing cliche but its not even an alien dog. Its just a dog. That's called a dog. And looks like a dog. And barks like a dog. 75 years at maximum warp from Earth in a quadrant of the galaxy humans have never been to and this household has just a regular dog. The whole episode just felt extremely lazy but relying on this worn out cliche for the climax and then not even substituting the dog for some alien equivalent felt like no one involved in the episode actually cared and made me question why I should either. So what are your thoughts? Are any other episodes who's resolutions made you feel utterly let down?
^^Why? I thought that one was better done than the TNG version. Granted, I see what you mean about the dog, but I suspect it wasn't in their budget to come up with a truly alien creature, Spoiler: Don't look if you haven't seen Beyond :D like those things during the first scene of the new movie.
I was sort of stunned by the sheer afterschool special banality of the end of Take Me Out to the Holosuite. As Solok said, they are manufacturing a victory where none exists, and it feels trite and forced and honestly the whole episode was a waste of a pretty cool premise. But the ending feels like a non-ending it's so poor, and definitely not worthy of being called Trek.
To be fair I've never seen a baseball movie that wasn't banal. Yeah they could have at least done something like this. I don't need it to be super believable. I just need it to not be a standard Earth issue dog.
End of Darkness, all the destruction Khan causes, all the harm, all the deaths (probably) in San Fransisco, and his fate is to merely be put back in his otter-pop tube? Where's the trial, the verdict, the sentencing, the harsh penal colony? And don't say it's because they didn't want the public to find out the true story, because that just makes it worse.
The Federation doesn't do harsh. It was probably otter-pop or talking about his feelings while living at a resort in New Zealand. Otter-pop is the safer bet.
Cogenitor from Enterprise. Trip criticises an alien culture's society, in this case the role of the titular "Cogenitor" in the Forehead Race of the Week's society. His actions in the end result in a person committing suicide, which destroys one family's chances at procreating. By extension, relations with a potential ally in the form of an advanced and friendly race are irreparably screwed, and what's his punishment? Archer sets him aside and delivers a fatherly "I'm not angry, just disappointed" lecture.
The dozens of episodes resolved w fake science used as deux ex machine because the writer(s) painted themselves into a corner.