Episodes focusing on children are awful.
There are no episodes more tempting to skip during DVD rewatches than the ones where the crew encounters a strange child, and trouble follows. It’s an unwritten but universally acknowledged rule of Trek that children are some of the surest signs that a given episode won’t be a good one.
From those dreadful kids in “Miri” to the infamous Wesley Crusher, child characters have long been the bane of Trek fans who just want to get through 40 minutes without being irritated. They must have been pulling our leg when they wrote “Rascals”, literally transforming the crew of the Enterprise into children, or when they conspired to bring Worf’s disappointing son Alexander into the story again and again and again.
It doesn’t help that Trek traditionally struggles to find decent child actors, or to write dialogue for children that isn’t embarrassing; with Cirroc Lofton’s Jake Sisko perhaps the notable exception, their performances and lines are typically hair-raising. Granted, it’s not exactly easy to find gems like Maisee Williams in the industry, but you can save yourself all the trouble by simply not writing episodes revolving around children controlling the ship via mind-controlling fist pumps and chanting about “friendly angels”.
If they’re not somehow impeding the crew or directly responsible for the problem of the week, they’re frequently finding new ways to annoy, from mimicking more beloved characters, to throwing temper tantrums, to being granted nauseating levels of importance: remember when The Traveler compared Wesley to Mozart?
