The Empath from TOS is bad to me. The gratuitous torture just makes me turn away. I honestly don't think I've rewatched it in this century.
Ditto. Gratuitous and with a reason so thin and superficial, it isn't believable.
Data’s Day is a boring, corny non-event of an episode that it seems like a lot of folks like. It’s an immediate “skip” for me.
Ditto. Data would still have reported the Vulcan ambassador to the Captain regardless, and Captain would have made a more educated guess. I'm amazed Data didn't realize the ambassador was a spy at that one moment. This is on par with "Justice" from season 1 where Riker and Yar are written to be out of character for the sake of the plot. Humor is subjective, but as much as seeing the Romulans score a point otherwise being an interesting change of pace, it felt surprisingly shallow too.
I'm one of those.
That is to say, I don't dislike The Visitor, but I do think it's overrated. I'd call it merely good but not great. In order for me to rate it great it would need to have more substance than it does, and focus a bit less on the emotions.
Similar for Threshold, I don't deny that in terms of logical consistency and presentation of science concepts it's bad. But I still think it has some redeeming characteristics, even though the episode is plainly ridiculous.
Same here. "Visitor" works great on initial viewing, but doesn't hold up because it's doing more to tweak the emotions than to tell a deeper story. In rewatches, the plot foibles really start to stand out. Best to watch it every few years, when some of the initial awe-striking moments feel awe-striking again, and in considering that the 24th century has everyone so accustomed to goofy things in space that when a complete old guy stranger says he's seeing his younger father because of a temporal distortion and how he has to kill himself for the timeline to be restored or whatever, the citizens of that era don't call for ambulance to get the person to the inpatient hospital for suicide watch due to delusional thinking (the DSM-V-TR is loaded with lots of things, but what might the DSM-XXIV-R might tell, change their minds on, et cetera? Could modern day viewers even handle a science fiction theory and changes mannerisms?)
"Threshold" is a bit silly with the treknobabble that does wean one off of it, but to be fair nobody really knows what would happen if an organic being inside a spaceship breached the barrier, didn't have their atoms scattered across everywhere and what not as a result, and it'd arguably be sillier if Paris and Janeway mutated into apes because sci-fi was already doing that "what humans will become" trope way too often before the 1990s. Which apparently is no big deal since Doctor "I'm a hologram not a McCoy ripoff" EMH there can easily fix everyone, so transwarp 'em all home and dollop the antidote on 'em before they all fall to pieces and go communicate with Geoge and Gracie's great-great-great-great-great-orso grandcalves, since the whaling flick had its own share of issues too (with warping away while in the atmosphere being the dumbest as the velocity would strip all that pesky air away and all, but most in the audience hooted and hollered with glee so it must all be good.)
