What do you think is the weirdest/most original episode in all of Trek?

"Where No one has Gone Before"

So there's that weird alien who keeps looking at Wesley like he's a perv or something, who's winking in an out of "this universe" who sends Enterprise "billions of light years away" where everybody's thoughts become reality... need I say more?

 

ENT's Two Days and Two Nights is the first Star Trek completely devoid of plot, that's pretty experimental.
Of course they then decided to repeat the idea with A Night in Sickbay.

 

Voyager's "Muse" is pretty clever, imo. It combines a standard Star Trek plot with Greek Theater and a meta narrative about writing for network tv.

 

I have to go with the first thing that popped into my mind. "Whispers". An episode from DS9 S2 where O'Brien is replaced with a double, only we don't know it until the end, even though everyone else does. Along with O'Brien, we're wondering, "What the Hell is going on?"

 

“Return of the Archons”

Doesn’t get weirder than being of the Body, Festival!!!, Lawgivers, killing guys with empty tubes, Landru, Kirk convincing a computer to destroy itself, and realizing that’s Spock sleeps with his eyes open...

 

“Sub Rosa” has to be up there. At least among TNG eps.

 

"Code Of Honor"

A planet of black people all behaving like clichés from "great white hunter" movies from the forties...

In the 1980's that has to be... "out there"!

 

So far I've seen several meanings of "weird/original". Just recapitulating a few in an attempt to get to a categorisation of some sort (my take on it, at least) :

Weird as in 'what were they smoking when they wrote this?' - Threshold, and some scenes of 'is there in truth no beauty' that almost seem psychedelic
Original concept: Darmok
Original as in breaking the fourth wall: Far Beyond the Stars
Taking Star trek in an unprecedented direction, reversing several 'standards' : Dancing in the pale Moonlight, and perhaps Star Trek III
Episodes with just a bizarre feel to them: Schisms, Masks, Emergence, Phantasms and several others. I would like to add voyagers The Fight to this one.
Original format: Kor mentioned there was no musical episode. That's true, but I always liked Voyager's Muse , where in a sense the episode attempts to retell part of itself in ancient Greek theatre format. EDIT: I now see it was mentioned already.


As for the claim that Star Trek hasn't been original since the 60's: was it original back even then? I can't answer that question since I'm not really grounded in science fiction from that era and before….

 

Angel One:

To be any more of a clichéed "what would a society look like if gender roles were reversed" episode, the women would only need to chew tobacco and spit on the floor, not to mention swear every other word.

What a stupid prejudiced episode. In the same vein as "Justice" and "Code Of honor"...

Was their a bigot among the writers, who was later fired? It seems like it anyway.

 

"Justice" and "Angel One" weren't out of the ordinary by '80s standards. "Code of Honor" is a different story.

 

Voyager - 'The Thaw'. It was unsettling and kind of suffocating. Of course there was that clown. Someone reminded me of Janeway taunting him at the end, the way she says "I know".

CLOWN: What will become of us? Of me?
JANEWAY: Like all fear, you eventually vanish.
CLOWN: I'm afraid.
JANEWAY: I know.

 

I was actually watching Sub Rosa last night and my girlfriend walked in right as Ronin possessed Beverly's grandmother and she rose out of her casket and started talking. She was like, "That's creepy as fuck!" Indeed, a space fart possessing a candle and stalking generation upon generation of Howard women (even going so far as to stalk them over 40 light years away) is pretty weird.

 

I think "The Thaw" is one of the best Voy episodes. If only they had made more like this!

 

The creepy centuries-long abuse(?) of the Howard women, the supernatural elements, the Scottishness of the planet/friend, the ghost orgasm, the coffin and reanimating, the fact that it happened so late in the series all just struck me as...yowza, what was that???

 

"Where No One Has Gone Before" (TNG) and "The Thaw" (VOY). Both are entertaining, "out there" stories.

 

That really doesn't seem so weird.

IMO, they were a bit too on the nose with that part. "In my day we didn't rely on tricks to entertain the audience. We just told good stories." (Looks directly at the camera) "But I can see that's becoming a lost art."

"Weird" is not the word to use to describe Code of Honor. "Offensive" is what you're looking for.

 

Course: Oblivion

Maybe the darkest episode of Trek to come out pre-Discovery, and in the lightest Trek. An episode that follows duplicates of the crew who all die. At the end it's looking like there's going to be some final scene where the real Voyager finds out they existed so at least they live on in memory, and then all they find is a dead blob.

 

Well, for once we can't complain of "unfair surprise"... the title gave it away!

It's like a whodunit movie who would be named, "The Wet Nurse Is The Killer"... sort of ... pointless.

 

Yeah.

 

I have to agree with something Wil Wheaton said about that episode. As written, there is nothing wrong with it. It was the casting that hurt it.