Episodes where the entire plot fundamentally doesn't work

[TommyR01D]

I said I would, and now I have.

Fury
Elderly Kes transwarps her little shuttle all the way from Ocampa to USS Voyager about 35kly away, boards it by crashing, touches the warp core and uses it to transport herself six years back in time... as well as 35kly back the other way in space again. She then disguises her old self as her young self while sedating her actual young self, and concocts a plan to betray the ship to the Vidiians to allow her young self to be transported back to Ocampa.

What the hell?!

How does Kes find Voyager again? How does touching the warp core send her back in time and space? How does she control that? If she still has the ability to hyperwarp that distance at will, why after coming to her senses does she not give the ship another push the rest of the way to Earth? Why doesn't she go all the way back to Caretaker and stop her young self ever leaving in the first place. Why doesn't she meet up with either of the Nacene to help hone her abilities and slow her ageing? Also, since when can you not change direction at warp speed?

Not only does this episode trash a beloved character, it doesn't make any sense!

Latent Image

The Doctor has a repressed memory of Ensign Ahni Jetal, whom he allowed to while keeping Harry Kim alive, seemingly just because the latter was closer to him socially. It's a fascinating character study, but there's one niggling flaw:

Was it really necessary for Jetal to be unpersoned entirely? This entails not just erasing the EMH's memory, but also removing any trace of her from the ship's logs and forbidding mention of her by the rest of the crew. Given that the crux of the Doctor's madness was the equality of injury between Jetal and Kim, it would have been much simpler to say that Jetal was actually injured worse (perhaps shot twice instead of once, or standing closer to the gun?). It could even have been argued that Kim took priority because he was a bridge officer and therefore had priority over a lower deck grunt. Janeway's solution strikes me as greatly excessive.

Maneuvers

This one doesn't come down to any single specific flaw so much as death by a thousand small cuts. Seska gets through Voyager's shields because she remembers their access codes - didn't the remaining officers think to change the passwords in the months since she fled? Two Kazon infiltrators steal transporter parts - how does stealing parts from one transporter break all the others on the ship (including shuttles), and how do they beam themselves away after they've sabotaged the system? At the end Janeway successfully kidnaps a group of Kazon Majes and trades them for Chakotay, but doesn't think to ask for Seska's custody as well. There are probably a few others I've forgotten but basically the whole episode is a long chain of "because the plot demanded it" contrivances.

Do you have any suggestions? They don't all have to be from VOY, or even Star Trek as a whole.

 

[Mudd]

"The Menagerie."

 

[Citiprime]

I think I could make an argument that “Caretaker” has a HUGE plot hole, since it seems Starfleet doesn’t have any explosives that work on timers. Use the Caretaker’s array to send Voyager home, but before leaving plant explosives with timers on the array. Problem solved and the series never happens.

 

[Turtletrekker]

I think I could make an argument that “Caretaker” has a HUGE plot hole, since it seems Starfleet doesn’t have any explosives that work on timers. Use the Caretaker’s array to send Voyager home, but before leaving plant explosives with timers on the array. Problem solved and the series never happens.

I have thought the same thing ever since the very first time I watched it.

 

[Turtletrekker]

The Alternative Factor is a bit of a mess.

 

[Qonundrum]

TNG - Symbiosis. Yes, the story has some good themes. Yes, as a microcosm the episode just about works. On any practical level? No, it's fundamentally flawed. Even for sci-fi, this story is making things waaaaaay too narrow and parochial in scope for the sake of the plot. The plant can only grow on one planet. Nowhere else? Not even via controlled, hydroponic greenhouses? Granted, the dialogue almost manages to sell the idea of the one planet selling the dope to the other that's doing all the work for them, on top of getting high - especially with the Ornarans not knowing how to fix their shuttles... really, nothing else grows on Brekka except the drug plant? No industries where they can build their own ships?! Amazing they didn't take notes while the doped-up Ornarans were getting the latest crop. And Ornara has everything else, including working comm systems, and nobody there knows how to maintain diddlysquishles?

TOS - Wink of an Eye. Great plot ideas, yes. But, no, the two timelines are too interconnected and the faster-paced one doesn't mesh up to the main crew's un-accelerated rate.

TOS - The Changeling. Let's see: Uhura is brought back to her original educational level in a week, Scotty dies and is revived 5 minutes later as if all this is somehow dramatic and epic, Spock whips out his ability to do his oh-so-personal mind meld-- onto a floating box of microchips (the same mistake TNG did when Troi could sense real emotion coming from Data's emotion chip...), never mind the power that Nomad emits is 90 torpedoes and somehow the ship can handle volley after volley despite more of that exciting melodrama.... Just how far out did this Earthy satellite make it in 400 year across the cosmos to find this other machine being that it crashed into then got rebuilt by? The episode sells more on style than anything approaching substance, but the best bits of it are reused far more effectively in TMP.

TOS - any episode involving "galaxy hopping", where it can go half across the galaxy and back again in time for the next episode. (At least it's TOS and the evolution of sci-fi at the time... so much we know of science has grown since then.)

TNG - 11001001. More a plot hole or oversight but is big enough to be considered a fundamental story issue, but in an episode that carefully crafts itself to set up the Bynars as requiring to work in pairs and emphasizing that point, having Riker get off in the holodeck and Picard just waddle on in for Minuet to later say "What a fortunate happenstance" since the entire Bynar race would be utterly screwed... oops...

TOS - Assignment Earth. They go back in time on a flick-of-the-wrist whim, encounter an alien whose magic wand can do anything on a flick-of-the-wrist whim, and tell the alien after some drama over a failing rocket that will start nooculhuhr armagiddon how they knew everything for this event they knew about (which then imploded the preceding episode there and then since Kirk was also hyper about the impending doom despite never going back to the ship to find out what the record tapes had already known) and then they smile and say how Gary and Ms Lincoln will have many great adventures together, the only thing missing is Kirk winking at the camera as an attempt at encouragement to the people who greenlight shows as this one is a poor attempt at a backdoor pilot with some Trek regulars poorly grafted on... (and if you think that paragraph is a mess, sit through the episode! :P )

TNG - Inner Light. Last I recall, the aliens of the week made this big space probe, sent it into space because they're narcissists, have it mind-rape one person and only one person since the thing shuts off after handing out a flute-shaped candy dispenser to be haunted by... overlook the beginning and ending and it's still a compelling drama with some nice chatter on environmental fluff (which then begs more questions about their making a probe that is launched into space by rocket, traveling the stars, and rather than telling everyone in the universe about how great they weren't it seeks out one mortal and latches on like a good little e-parasite...)

Any Borg episode where they say their phasers will work once or twice each, yet each phaser works 3 or more times before the Borg finally adapt... it's more amazing how often the Borg don't adapt, right down to

STFC - on top of a couple dozen other problems, like their notion to time travel is anything but perfect and no drone piped up on how/where they should have went back in time beforehand first, the Borg keep sending one ship to Earth yet in VOY episodes they discuss multiple cubes being sent-- to new planets where they've not experienced their prey in battle. Yet for humans with Earth, it's always one ship and they keep wondering why they get defeated despite the usual tactic of sending in 40 ships and finding the exhaust port and torpedo some womprats in there... there's your Star Wars crossover... but it's the Borg. Check your brain at the hatstand and laugh at drunk Troi and 4th wall-breakin' Cochrane also having to pee behind a bush, woohoo!! This movie is the epitome of TNG era being intelle-- eh, not...

 

[Citiprime]

Voyager’s “Scorpion” never made sense to me. The entire two-parter hinges on Janeway’s ability to blackmail the Borg into a temporary alliance by offering something that the Borg couldn’t figure out on their own.

Adapting to things has been the Borg’s entire bag since they were first introduced. It never made any sense to me that The Doctor could come up with Borg nanoprobes that would be effective against Species 8472, but the billions of minds working together in the collective couldn’t.

 

[Brennyren]

"Favorite Son." Honestly, that it doesn't make any sense is one of this episode's lesser flaws, somewhere behind the gender-flipped "Mars Needs Women!" plot. That said, it really doesn't make any sense. Where do Harry's supposed Taresian memories, or his renascent Taresian features, actually come from, if he's not Taresian?

But how could he actually be Taresian? Even if it was true that the Taresian women implanted their embryos in women of other worlds (for "reasons"), and then implanted a "homing beacon" in the child so he would want to return home, why would they ever choose a world so far away as Earth, from which the chance of any return would be extremely remote? They claim to have given him a desire for space travel, but his actual passage to the Delta Quadrant was pure coincidence, and not one over which the Taresians had any control.

Why did the Voyager crew simply accept this fantastical story at face value? And why did they not at least think to ask the Taresians how they got to Earth? If the story was true, the ship might have been able to shave some time off its own journey.

Nonsense all the way down.

 

[Oddish]

Was it really necessary for Jetal to be unpersoned entirely? This entails not just erasing the EMH's memory, but also removing any trace of her from the ship's logs and forbidding mention of her by the rest of the crew. Given that the crux of the Doctor's madness was the equality of injury between Jetal and Kim, it would have been much simpler to say that Jetal was actually injured worse (perhaps shot twice instead of once, or standing closer to the gun?). It could even have been argued that Kim took priority because he was a bridge officer and therefore had priority over a lower deck grunt. Janeway's solution strikes me as greatly excessive.

Better still: the Doctor is a computer program. Simply rewrite his ethical subroutines to allow subjective decision making when (and only when) other triage programming has been exhausted. Ergo, he is still incapable of doing harm or using unsound medical judgment, but he doesn't decompile himself when he has to make a difficult decision.

TNG - 11001001. More a plot hole or oversight but is big enough to be considered a fundamental story issue, but in an episode that carefully crafts itself to set up the Bynars as requiring to work in pairs and emphasizing that point, having Riker get off in the holodeck and Picard just waddle on in for Minuet to later say "What a fortunate happenstance" since the entire Bynar race would be utterly screwed... oops...

I think the Bynars were planning to "capture" another crew member, but once they had Picard in the bar, they said "10001011011000110100100011111001"which is Bynarese for "we got two, we're good."

TNG - Inner Light. Last I recall, the aliens of the week made this big space probe, sent it into space because they're narcissists, have it mind-rape one person and only one person since the thing shuts off after handing out a flute-shaped candy dispenser to be haunted by...

A very farfetched episode... but it's so good I don't care.

STFC - on top of a couple dozen other problems, like their notion to time travel is anything but perfect and no drone piped up on how/where they should have went back in time beforehand first, the Borg keep sending one ship to Earth yet in VOY episodes they discuss multiple cubes being sent-- to new planets where they've not experienced their prey in battle.

My chief issue is that the Borg slaughtered pretty much all of Zephram Cochrane's ground crew... and nothing in history changed. Like none of those engineering pioneers had anything to do with the creation of Starfleet, the construction of the Warp 5 engine, or were anyone's ancestor.

But how could he actually be Taresian? Even if it was true that the Taresian women implanted their embryos in women of other worlds (for "reasons"), and then implanted a "homing beacon" in the child so he would want to return home, why would they ever choose a world so far away as Earth, from which the chance of any return would be extremely remote?

Better would have been for them to simply admit the truth: Harry was a compatible subject for transformation via their retroviruses. The offer (stay on Taresia and bang lots of gorgeous women) could remain unchanged, as could the unpleasant truth.

Still would have been a pretty bad episode, though.

 

[Tango]

The Mark of Gideon - it makes no sense to me at all.

 

[Dukhat]

I’m doing a TOS rewatch, and I just saw ‘The Mark of Gideon.’ Absolutely nothing about that episode made any sense. The plot was basically that a planet with such an overpopulation problem that people can hardly move build an entire replica of the Enterprise on said planet, in an effort to trick Kirk into infecting a native woman so that she can go back among the population and kill them with a virus Kirk carries in his blood.

So let’s get the obvious elephant in the room out of the way: how the hell did the aliens get enough space on their planet to build an entire replica of the ship, much less know every single nook and cranny about the interior, right down to little things like personal items? If it was just a one-room holodeck or something, that would have made at least a little more sense. And for what? Just to confuse Kirk? And if they had such a problem with overpopulation, wouldn’t there not be enough food to go around, or even space to have sex and conceive children?

And why not just ask the Federation to evacuate half the population to another planet?

The whole plot is simply inconceivable.

Edit: Ninja’d by @Tango

 

[Tango]

I’m doing a TOS rewatch, and I just saw ‘The Mark of Gideon.’ Absolutely nothing about that episode made any sense. The plot was basically that a planet with such an overpopulation problem that people can hardly move build an entire replica of the Enterprise on said planet, in an effort to trick Kirk into infecting a native woman so that she can go back among the population and kill them with a virus Kirk carries in his blood.

So let’s get the obvious elephant in the room out of the way: how the hell did the aliens get enough space on their planet to build an entire replica of the ship, much less know every single nook and cranny about the interior, right down to little things like personal items? If it was just a one-room holodeck or something, that would have made at least a little more sense. And for what? Just to confuse Kirk? And if they had such a problem with overpopulation, wouldn’t there not be enough food to go around, or even space to have sex and conceive children?

And why not just ask the Federation to evacuate half the population to another planet?

The whole plot is simply inconceivable.

Edit: Ninja’d by @Tango

Fully agree. Even if you accept the premise, why launch such a ridiculous scheme just to get some nasty biological agents? There must have been far easier ways to do that (like asking for or buying them from any number of sources).

And how could Kirk have been fooled by the fake Enterprise for even a moment?

The underlying idea (overpopulation) was perfectly okay, but the entire setup was clumsy and amateurish.

 

[Tango]

Excuse the double post. Had to look up what "ninjaed" meant! While trying to correct a typo in the incomplete post I accidentally posted it. Sorry about that.

 

[wayoung]

Oh just so, so, *so* very many

 

[DesolationGod]

For me.. the episode of ENT:Cold Front... That whole episode makes no sense to me

 

[Tango]

For me.. the episode of ENT:Cold Front... That whole episode makes no sense to me

I just watched that episode this weekend as part of my first-ever watch of ENT. I didn't get it either and am assuming all will be revealed in due course....

 

[Tosk]

Conundrum. Almost none of it makes a lick of sense.

 

[gweeps]

TOS's 'Spock's Brain' is a shoe-in for this thread.

 

[Qonundrum]

Better still: the Doctor is a computer program. Simply rewrite his ethical subroutines to allow subjective decision making when (and only when) other triage programming has been exhausted. Ergo, he is still incapable of doing harm or using unsound medical judgment, but he doesn't decompile himself when he has to make a difficult decision.

Any AI that can decompile and reprogram itself would be scary... They'd need Janeway or Kirk or whoever leads the division to approve the changes.

I think the Bynars were planning to "capture" another crew member, but once they had Picard in the bar, they said "10001011011000110100100011111001"which is Bynarese for "we got two, we're good."

That would make sense and yours is a great way to make it work.

Minuet wouldn't know either, or is programmed to make it sound like an accident.

https://www.binarytranslator.com/
"0111011101100101001000000110011101101111011101000010000001110100011101110110111100101100001000000111011101100101001001110111001001100101001000000110011101101111011011110110010000101110"
/nerdMode

A very farfetched episode... but it's so good I don't care.

I hear ya. A lot of it grabbed and kept my attention too.

My chief issue is that the Borg slaughtered pretty much all of Zephram Cochrane's ground crew... and nothing in history changed. Like none of those engineering pioneers had anything to do with the creation of Starfleet, the construction of the Warp 5 engine, or were anyone's ancestor.

Good point!

 

[Qonundrum]

Fully agree. Even if you accept the premise, why launch such a ridiculous scheme just to get some nasty biological agents? There must have been far easier ways to do that (like asking for or buying them from any number of sources).

And how could Kirk have been fooled by the fake Enterprise for even a moment?

The underlying idea (overpopulation) was perfectly okay, but the entire setup was clumsy and amateurish.

I recall somewhere that Stanley Adams (actor) wanted to become a writer. So after the Tribble peddler and giant anthropomorphic campy carrot, he got to write "Gideon", with George Slavin, a writer with decades' worth of scripts...! The story is ambitious, but I suspect a round of budget cuts this late into season 3 demanded another "ship in the bottle" episode where everything's filmed on the Enterprise sets and that's what did most to cobble a story that, had it been given enough to do location filming, or even in the backlot, it may have been somewhat better. Kudos to the cast for playing it with such stern-faced sincerity.