Episodes that are considered "good" that you actually dislike

The other thread had me thinking, are there any episodes you dislike that are usually considered good?

For example, I find "The City of the Edge of Forever", "The Empath" and TNG's "The Inner Light" to be boring snooze fests. They may have good payoffs at the end and good character development, but you have to wade through fifty minutes of chloroform to get there.

As with episodes that are considered bad, I think sometimes it's just trendy to consider certain episodes good

 

Far beyond the stars. I enjoy the first half but then it gets too preachy

 

I'm perpetually amazed that "The Man Trap" has any apologists at all.

 

I hate "The Inner Light" with every fiber of my being.

 

It is incredibly dull. Picard is mind raped again and they act like it was some beautiful experience. Riker acts like a complete and total dunce on the bridge. A probe that only has one use is utter non-sense.

It goes far beyond dull, into "what the fuck were they thinking" territory.

 

I've only seen The Inner Light once, but I recall finding it dull rather than outright bad. I don't think I've seen it since it first aired.

 

I can get the concept of "The Inner Light", you live out an entire lifetime and then get thrust back into your normal life. You see Picard go through all that stuff, but it's just so boring.

Deep Space Nine did something similar with the mind prison in "Hard Time." If I remember it correctly I like "Hard Time"'s execution of the concept better,

 

I hope that Plato's Stepchildren isn't considered a fan favourite because I hate that fifty minuter!
JB

 

I find myself disliking both Space Seed and Wrath of Khan. Aside from being the catalyst that more or less ended the point of stardates and dated Trek by Earth dates (Wrath of Khan was the first to mention the franchise was in the 23rd century, Space Seed put Earth dates to Khan's rulership), Khan as a character was only saved by the great Montalban's performance.

As he was written though, he was fairly flat and one note. You would expect someone of superior strength and intelligence to defeat the Federation from within (think Palpatine destroying the Republic from within in Star Wars), but instead he resorts to brute force, decompressing Kirk in a laundromat, and chasing Kirk around in the Mutara Nebula when Joachim outright says that with Genesis and a starship they can run off and rule a world again.

You would expect Chekov to have lifelong trauma due to the atrocities he committed under Khan's brainwashing along the lines of Picard's rage at the Borg, but I don't recall it ever being mentioned again.

Wrath of Khan also brought in the ridiculous "radioactive room that is needed to restart warp/main power" that was never seen in TOS, TAS, or any of the subsequent spinoffs except when it's conveniently needed again in 'Star Trek Into Darkness', at which point many realized how ridiculous such a concept was--at the least Starfleet would have robotic drones sent in if such rooms actually existed.

They were only created because Leonard Nimoy was on board with killing Spock at the time, which to be fair he immediately regretted.

 

I genuinely find 'The Inner Light' one of the dullest and most insincere of all the TNG/Trek episodes I've seen. I think it has an admirable concept, but the execution comes over to me as a Picard/Stewart vanity project (which gained weight later when found his son was employed on that show). And it always feels reaaaally slow. And I really don't care about that frakkin' flute. There were other TNG episodes I felt really conveyed Picard's dislocation from his crew and family ('Family' notably) moreso than this. But then I love 'Far Beyond The Stars' - so what do I know

 

That one's painful to watch because of what they put the characters through. I get that it's supposed to be painful and we're not supposed to like what we're seeing... but it's painful nonetheless.

So, I guess, in a back-handed way, they did their job and got the reaction from us they were looking for.

 

While I would defend to the death your right to characterize "The Inner Light" as "mind rape" (and I understand that Ron Moore even anticipated that some would have your reaction), I would also imagine that Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields would most likely be shocked to the core about it.

The "one purpose" of the probe was an entire society's desperate attempt to have their culture live on, in some way, after the nova of their sun.

I always found it an incredibly moving episode.

 

By forcing it on someone?

 

That's just reminded me of that terrible VOY episode: 'Remember', which uses a similar narrative device of forced memory. Interesting to read it was conceived as a Troi TNG ep (where it should have remained and unmade).

 

Yeah, you'd think they'd have found way to make the probe communicate through other means and tell people it had this program it could run on a volunteer

 

I Borg was a total jump the shark moment for me. The followup to The Best of Both worlds should have been more ambitious and less sappy than this episode.

The writing staff of TNG at that time(season 5) were still writing great episodes but for some reason when it came to the "big event shows", Spock's return, The Borg episode, the season cliffhanger, they botched them.

 

"Far Beyond the Stars". While nice to see the cast out of "alien" make-up, the set-up was incredibly contrived, I didn't like the story and Avery Brooks' acting - which others seemed to love in this episode - I found really hammy.

I like "The Wrath of Khan" but do find it incredibly over-rated by many fans. It has a lot of problems.

 

Let me guess, you're one of those weirdos who also hates chocolate right?

The Empath is a highly regarded episode? If anyone thinks Inner Light is a snoozefest then Empath is a snoozefest with the aid of sleeping pills and warm milk.

 

Probably blasphemous for the DS9 fandom, but I never really got what was so great about Duet.