"Great" episodes that you don't really care for

[F. King Daniel]

Star Trek VI. I don't hate it, but it's grim and the characters have been changed or made stupid to serve the plot. Kirk is suddenly racist, right after drinking with Klingons at the end of V. McCoy knows nothing of Klingon anatomy, despite them being the Federation's #1 nemesis for the past century. Uhura doesn't know Klingon. Spock mind rapes Valaris in front of everyone, and they all just watch. He might as well have bent her over the helm console. What the fuck were they thinking??

Chang was a caricature, quoting Shakespeare every five minutes because someone, somewhere, thinks that makes him deep. It makes him an annoying twat.

It ignores established lore, which says Klingon/Federation peace came about as a result of the Enterprise-C's sacrifice 22 years prior to Next Gen.

I'll be in my apocalypse shelter

 

[jamestyler]

I'm surprised at the Tribbles hate - not a great script (but how many were? :/) but I've always thought it was one of Shatner's finest hours, just being fed up with everything around him as the world gets ridiculous.

Relics is one for me. I've been told it's great, but.... no. It turns one of the most stable and reliable original series characters too far into "old and useless", almost feeling embarrassing at times. That version of Scotty had more connection to Knight Rider 2000 than TOS :/

Space Seed is another one. I like the episode, I've enjoyed watching it - but great?! Seriously? It takes too long for the crew to figure out theat Khan from the 90's might just be evil Khan from the 90's, Khan isn't much of a threat at all and the only thing worse than his treatment of women is how that woman is portrayed ("big strong man, I will submit to you for no reason!")

Absolute mess that gets glossed over as the film was better :/

 

[maneth]

Space Seed is one of my least favorite TOS episodes simply because I detest Khan. For that reason I've never really understood why people think TWOK is so great. I'd rather watch Insurrection ten times in a row than sit through TWOK again. Khan makes my skin crawl. And that said, with another, slightly less arrogant villain, TWOK would be a decent movie, cinematographically probably the best of the TOS crew's movies.

 

[Paradise City]

Kahn's remark that "how little man himself has changed..." is something that struck a chord with me personally, improvements around the edges not withstanding. It's kind of a challenge to the Roddenberry vision that I agree with. I think Montalbán is exquisite in the role but he's given a lot of dumb stuff to do by the writers who give him serious impulse control issues that's incongruent with him as some sort of clever scheming prince. And this comes out fully in TWOK. Still, I hold the Kahn outings in high esteem.

Anyhow, my main intention with this post is to add The Eye of the Beholder to the table. I certainly grant there are good moments in that episode but the entire plot to arrive at the Picard-Crusher scenes is far too clumsily contrived and absent mindely hokey for me to overlook it.

 

[flandry84]

The DS9 double episode.."Homefront" and "Paradise lost".
Big story with huge implications for both Earth and Starfleet addressed rather perfunctorily while IMO wasting a lot of time in Sisko's restaurant.
One of those times I wished I could go back in time and fix things.

 

[plynch]

City on the Edge of Forever. It's a good episode. But like all Star Trek, there's many episodes that are good, but fall apart at the ending. And for me, it falls apart at the ending. The big moment that's supposed to tug at your heart strings just doesn't do it for me. Simply because the girl is just Kirk's conquest for the week. You just know that once he's back on the ship, he's chasing another piece of tail.

I'm on record recently as disliking the instantly-in-love plots, but this one seems more genuine than others. There's a passage in time shown by the script and direction; Spock and Kirk are there for a while; and there's the scene of Kirk and Edith on a date-walk: very nice and believable. YMMV

Prepare to hate me: I find Balance of Terror dull and the whole groom-death contrived. Lenard is great, yes. It's good; I just don't love it.

 

[wayoung]

City on the Edge of Forever.

 

[Nyotarules]

City on the Edge of Forever.

Agreed, not convinced by Kirk falling in love with Edith after a few weeks, knowing he will get over it by the next episode. Her name was never mentioned by him again.

 

[Cox of Seagulls]

I never found The Visitor to be anywhere near as moving as most make it out to me. There's far too much technobabble used in setting up the situation so I don't really buy what is happening on screen.

I thought All Good Things... was bogged down in technobbable as well.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Flashback, as great as it is to see Sulu, Rand, Kang and the Excelsior again, I otherwise found the story to be pure crap. Of the two 30th anniversary stories, DS9 won hands down.

Agreed, but I never thought that episode was terribly well regarded. But maybe I'm biased as "Flashback" is the episode that finally convinced me to give up on VOY.

To answer the original question, I never really saw what the big deal about "The Inner Light" was. I just couldn't get all that caught up in Picard's other life when all we saw were little snippets of it. Decent concept, but so-so execution. And Patrick Stewart's kid was a pretty horrible actor, as I recall.

And I actively hated "I, Borg." To have the TNG crew suddenly debating the morality of eliminating the Borg when the Borg had been depicted as utterly remorseless and without personality up until that point seemed idiotic to me. My college roommate and I called it the "Pet Borg" episode.

 

[The Old Mixer]

It's kind of a challenge to the Roddenberry vision that I agree with.

Did Roddenberry have a "vision" at that point in the show, other than staying on the air?

 

[Paradise City]

Did Roddenberry have a "vision" at that point in the show, other than staying on the air?

I think he had some vague notions and then some firmer notions retrospectively applied when he assumed the more comfortable mantle of a father of a franchise but the realpolitik is that his priorities were commercial when his little show plodded along on a shoe-string. That's my reading of it anyway but I'll defer to people who have a more exacting command of the backroom stuff to give their take on this. .

 

[The Old Mixer]

Whatever the behind-the-scenes intent, humans were portrayed quite differently in TNG-era Trek than they had been in TOS. In TOS, humanity was being portrayed as flawed compared to more advanced races like Vulcans, not as an "evolved" species.

 

[Paradise City]

Whatever the behind-the-scenes intent, humans were portrayed quite differently in TNG-era Trek than they had been in TOS. In TOS, humanity was being portrayed as flawed compared to more advanced races like Vulcans, not as an "evolved" species.

Well, my understanding of TOS, is that we're presented with a more evolved if flawed society. And it's intuitive in depictions of the future to go in either one of two directions 1. either depict a dystopia 2. that more evolved, enlightened society. So Roddenberry unsurprisingly took the show in the latter direction which is neither particularly innovative nor creative but nevertheless it takes no effort to be sincere enough in talking up these values. And were humanity ends and the Federation begins is often muddled in TOS and even sometimes with Q in TNG.

We move on into the 80's, Roddenberry is now more well-to-do, he now has the luxury of being more infatuated with his earlier notions and he's now arguing before an audience of people who are uncomfortable with the new plans for The Next Generation by claiming (with a bit of personal revisionism) that this is 'the Trek he always wanted to do' So we get Picard extolling this utopianism to Ralph Offenhouse, we even get Troi giving her speech to Mark Twain as a hangover of the TNG Roddenberry era and then they consciously completely revise this in the 7th season by introducing the Maquis.

 

[The Old Mixer]

I'll give you "enlightened," but "more evolved" is TNG-era language, and thus describes the conceit behind their depiction of humanity. The main thing about humanity in TOS was that it had survived (Cold War) and progressed (Civil Rights), but mankind was still striving to improve, not looking down their noses at how imperfect everyone else was.

 

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

While not bad per se, I find that TNG's The Drumhead, Yesterday's Enterprise and (gasp!) All Good Things aren't all what they're cracked up to be. The latter two might be because I'm not that fond of the reset button and alternate timelines with not much bearing on the proper one.

On TOS, I think Arena is overrated, and I think people like it for the iconic Gorn.

For VOY I think Year of Hell and Timeless are overrated (as per the reset button). I also don't care for Tuvix at all (the episode, not the character, whose murder I don't condone).

On DS9 I think The Visitor isn't so excellent it's made out to be. Not bad, but just average. I don't get the excitement for Rejoined either.

I really loathe ENT's Twilight, but understand that it is generally liked among ENT fans. Dear Doctor and Stigma are also episodes I think are appreciated but that I can't get on board with.

 

[The Old Mixer]

I always found "All Good Things..." to be overrated. It has lots of fun stuff in it, but as a proper series finale, it fails to bring any real closure to the series. They were saving that for the movie....

Dear Doctor and Stigma are also episodes I think are appreciated

I'm not much of an ENT fan, but I was under the impression that "Dear Doctor" was one of its most infamous episodes.

 

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

I'm not much of an ENT fan, but I was under the impression that "Dear Doctor" was one of its most infamous episodes.

Perhaps I'm remembering it wrong, but I have the impression that people like it for being this proto-prime directive story, even if it was atrociously applied and interpreted in that episode.

 

[The Old Mixer]

I was under the impression that it was generally loathed all around. I know that the "directive" speech at the end made me cringe when I first saw it. Talk about too on-the-nose.

 

[Paradise City]

I'll give you "enlightened," but "more evolved" is TNG-era language, and thus describes the conceit behind their depiction of humanity. The main thing about humanity in TOS was that it had survived (Cold War) and progressed (Civil Rights), but mankind was still striving to improve, not looking down their noses at how imperfect everyone else was.

More evolved and is in more enlightened, converge for our purposes. Values have evolved. but that doesn't infer that they've reached their end-stage. In fact, a prominent and deliberate theme are the various super-aliens correcting our heroes on their hubris and then telling them that in a squillion years they maybe ready to contact them.

In Roddenberry era TNG the problems have been actually overcome. We've got the utopian society. And the writers had to write around Roddenberry's edict that there's no conflict within the crew. In some mitigation of this aspect of this period of TNG, Q is on hand to hose our heroes down with some cold water.