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Episodes that are generally considered "bad" that you actually like

I'll take any episode of any series over "And the Children Shall Lead" (the most annoying episode ever!) or the space hippie episode (I don't even remember its name!) (the second most annoying episode ever!).
 
Well, my name is Refuge and I'm a Voyagerholic. I like most of "Threshold" The whole concept of what Tom was trying to do with breaking the warp speed barrier. The makeup. Bits of Tom coming off, lol. The dialogue between Tuvok and Chakotay when they find Tom and Kathryn as lizards is gold!

(Night. A pair of giant salamanders are lying on the shore by a river. Tuvok and Chakotay, and two security guards, beam down. The salamanders react to their torches, and Chakotay stuns them.)
CHAKOTAY: There are traces of human DNA. It's them. But I have to admit, I'm not sure which one is the Captain.
TUVOK: The female, obviously.
(Three baby salamanders emerge from a hole in the sand and slither off into the water.)
CHAKOTAY: I don't know how I'm going to enter this into the log.
TUVOK: I look forward to reading it.
 
"THRESHOLD" is by no means a great episode, to me anyway, but it was a good character piece for Tom, particularly the first part of the episode and the end in Sickbay.

"Masks" has always been a favorite of mine because it deals so directly with mythology, a staple subject of Joe Menosky.

One thing I always loved about STAR TREK as a whole is its ability to pepper in great scenes or moments in even the worst episides... or episodes considered the worst by a majority. For my money, there is not a single episode in the franchise (to date) that does not have ONE redeeming thing about it.

Even "THESE ARE THE VOYAGES...", which the ENTIRE episode I hate with every fiber of my being... except for the very last bit with the voiceover of Kirk, Picard, and Archer.
 
TNG’s Night Terrors. A lot of the scenes looked really bad, particularly the scene with Picard thinking he was getting crushed in the turbo lift or Troi floating around in the clouds, obviously on wires.

However, I thought it was a pretty creepy episode with good creepy music. I particularly remember the morgue scene with Crusher where the bodies start to move and stare at her, and I thought that looked terrifying. I was like 7 years old watching that episode and it scared the hell outta me.
 
"THESE ARE THE VOYAGES...", has one redeeming quality... it's shorter than a two-parter, which all the other finales were, well except for "Turnabout Intruder"... also a forgettable episode.
 
Well, my name is Refuge and I'm a Voyagerholic. I like most of "Threshold" The whole concept of what Tom was trying to do with breaking the warp speed barrier. The makeup. Bits of Tom coming off, lol. The dialogue between Tuvok and Chakotay when they find Tom and Kathryn as lizards is gold!

(Night. A pair of giant salamanders are lying on the shore by a river. Tuvok and Chakotay, and two security guards, beam down. The salamanders react to their torches, and Chakotay stuns them.)
CHAKOTAY: There are traces of human DNA. It's them. But I have to admit, I'm not sure which one is the Captain.
TUVOK: The female, obviously.
(Three baby salamanders emerge from a hole in the sand and slither off into the water.)
CHAKOTAY: I don't know how I'm going to enter this into the log.
TUVOK: I look forward to reading it.


I'll grant that I remember "Threshold" much better than I remember any number of safe, middle-of-the-road VOYAGER episodes. My jaw was dropping by the time Janeway and Paris turned into newts--in a good way.

"Ohmigod, this episode is totally insane!"

I'll take insane over dull most any day. :)
 
"Masks" made me want to be an archeologist or a mythologist or psychologist. Win.
"Rascals" (after the face-palming) is just fun. Plus, young Picard was so cute. I wanted to get on his hover-scooter and get coffee and newspapers with him at every coastal cafe in the south of France. And the moon.
 
"THESE ARE THE VOYAGES...", has one redeeming quality... it's shorter than a two-parter, which all the other finales were, well except for "Turnabout Intruder"... also a forgettable episode.

If it were actually a random episode in the middle of an ENT season, it would have been kinda neat.
 
If it were actually a random episode in the middle of an ENT season, it would have been kinda neat.
True. They should have used that episode to introduce the Titan, but I think the design of it came afterwards.
 
"THESE ARE THE VOYAGES...", has one redeeming quality... it's shorter than a two-parter, which all the other finales were, well except for "Turnabout Intruder"... also a forgettable episode.

If it were actually a random episode in the middle of an ENT season, it would have been kinda neat.

"These are the Voyages" still would have two major problems:

1) The unnecessary timejump - it is set, what, 10 years after the previous episode? Time in which ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENED. The ship is still exactly the same. The characters haven't developed one bit during that time. The universe is still exactly the same. That was stupid.

2) Trip's unnecessary death. A lot of fans felt hurt by it. I can understand. IMO it's okay to kill one of your main characters as a closure. But it has to be good. Trips sacrifice was ultimately meaningless, as they have escaped a lot similar situations before. Hell, I would have preffered his death to be a simple accident or something, instead of blowing himself up to defeat this one-time villain nobody cares about.


Apart from that, the episode itself really isn't too bad. It's just not good either. It has a lot of neat little things (revisiting Rigel, the TNG "homage" after the TOS homage in the Mirror episodes, the final shot), but also a lot of problems (setting it on the ENT-E would have been better - because of the actors age, the plot was kinda' boring, and basically Riker takes over what should have been an episode for the ENT-crew).

But the biggest issue is, really, that "Demons" and "Terra Prime" was a perfect finale to the series, hitting all the notes perfectly and bringing both closure to everything while still feeling open-ended and with a future to look forward to. While it's not a "perfect" two-parter, it's IMO the second best "final episodes" Trek has ever had (after the TNG one) - even better than DS9's "What you leave behind", which was partly brilliant, but hampered by having the climax be a stupid fist-brawl in a cardboard cave with religious overtones.

Again - ENT was not a perfect show. But it had a perfect two-part finale for the show it has been. But after that, they aired another episode, "These are the Voyages". Ugh.
 
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I'll grant that I remember "Threshold" much better than I remember any number of safe, middle-of-the-road VOYAGER episodes. My jaw was dropping by the time Janeway and Paris turned into newts--in a good way.

"Ohmigod, this episode is totally insane!"

I'll take insane over dull most any day. :)

You don't suppose that was the intent, do you? ;)
 
I agree with a lot of what you said, Rahul. I’m not sure about Trip’s death. It’s closer to how easily real people die, if not our television Heroes. Don’t know if the writers were thinking about reality though, now free to go there if they liked, or it was an end-of-the-school year oversight.

I watched the episode again last night for the first time since it aired. There was a lot wrong with the acting that I fault the actors and their director and producers. The episode seemed emotionally checked-out for a finale, making bad choices throughout. Maybe this was normal for the series; I really disliked it at the time.

I was astonished they had Reed quote the title of the TNG finale as one of his lines...I mean, was this a valentine to Trek fans or TNG fans, specifically? ...I’m flattered, but also creeped.
 
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That's because it's basically Cronenberg's THE FLY. :)
Hmm. Any time anybody brings up the subject of The Fly, it reminds me of the entrance to the insect zoo at Seattle's Pacific Science Center. Up until about last year, they had an animatronic human-sized insect in a lab coat, serving as "barker" for the gallery. And every time I saw that animatronic, I'd always say (to nobody in particular), "Look! It's David Hedison!"
 
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