Intriguing Episodes With Disappointing Endings

[WarpTenLizard]

... and you're not allowed to say "every episode of X" or "the entire premise of X series."

What's an episode of "Star Trek"--any series--that had you on on the edge of your seat, trying to guess what was going on, only for the answer to be a complete let-down?

Obviously, this entire thread will be a giant spoiler mine.

For my family back in the day, it was "Vanishing Point" ("Enterprise"). For about 45 glorious minutes, it seemed like "Enterprise" was actually good. After using the transporter, relatively new technology that she's terrified of, Hoshi finds her molecules slowly disappearing. The reveal is....it's all a dream/hallucination.

For me personally though, the most infuriating cop-out ending to an episode is TNG's "Remember Me." One by one, people on the Enterprise are vanishing out of existence, and out of all history, as if they had never been there. Dr. Crusher is the only one that seems to notice this, while everyone else insists that the missing people never existed, and Crusher is off her rocker. Crusher eventually concludes that the entire universe might be shrinking! And then..........it turns out she's just in a fake balloon universe that's deflating. My interest also deflated.

A close second is "Heard of Stone" (DS9): A strange crystal lifeform is gradually forming around Kira's body, trapping and crushing her. Why? How does this strange alien lifeform work? Is it feeding off her? Does it perceive her as a threat? Is this some kind of alien bear-trap? The answer is..........both Kira and the crystal lump are really just Odo-With-Tits in disguise, messing with Odo. The real Kira is having a nap a few yards away, and the crystal alien doens't exist.

A few others that grind my gears:

"Frame of Mind" (TNG): Riker keeps shifting between his life on the Enterprise, and being a mental patient in an alien asylums. As he tries to figure out which life is real, we the audience try to figure out what's causing the duel realities. Has Riker's consciousness been merged somehow with someone else's? Is he simply shifting between universes? Nope. Turns out...some bad guys kidnapped him and put him to sleep, and both realities are just his dreaming brain trying to kill time for an hour until 5 minutes before the credits roll.

"Future Imperfect:" (TNG) Riker has a knack for finding himself in intriguing mysterious realities, that turn out to be lame gaslights by lame aliens. In this one, he seemingly awakens 15 years into the future, having suffered some kind of amnesia that erased the last 15 years of his memory. He tries to adjust to being captain of the Enterprise, having a son named Jean-Luc (even though Jean-Luc Picard is still alive), Jean-Luc the First sporting a ludicrous billy-goat beard, and Geordie having normal eyes. After realizing things don't add up, Riker demands that this trickery end. Then, seemingly, it turns out to be a holo-program, controlled by Romulans! But for what purpose? And then...........the Romulans are fake too. Turns out, it was all one big hallucination caused by a lonely bug alien, who didn't want Riker to leave him friendless again. Riker cheerfully tells the alien that they can totally be bestest-best friends for the next 3 minutes until the credits roll, after which the bug-boy is never mentioned again.

"Twisted" (Voyager): A strange anomaly turns the laws of physics aboard Voyager to mush! And has Janeway speaking in some eerie "Paul-is-Dead" type of demon talk! What's going on? They never find out. Janeway speculates that this is just how some strange aliens say hi.

"Favorite Son" (Voyager): The first third of the episode is extremely intriguing, as the dweeb suddenly develops precognition. Then the rest of the episode is just a bunch of alien vampire babes luring Harry with a needlessly complicated lie.

What are some episodes that you felt began very intriguing, and had terrible cop-out endings?

 

[F. King Daniel]

It's funny, because I loved Frame of Mind, Twisted and Favourite Son. But Vanishing Point left me thinking I'd just wasted an hour of my life.

 

[at Quark's]

Shades of grey. I was very disappointed to learn that most of it was only happening in Riker's mind.

Seriously though, Vanishing point is a good contender for such disappointment. Besides that, basically any episode with a formulaic and unimaginative execution where the solution can be seen from miles ahead, when during watching you keep hoping they'll come up with something unexpected and original ( Voyager has a string of such mediocre eps). Imaginary friend - you know from the first minute that there will be a scene where Picard Explains Humanity To Alien. Several of those 'it was all a dream!' episode, though it really depends on what they do with that theme - some are quite original.

Birthright. The two-parter starts intriguingly enough with data having interesting dreams and pursuing their meaning, but it soon fizzles out in 'your creator wanted you to have such dreams to come one step closer to humanity!' and then the rest of the two parter is filled with a story of worf visiting some Klingons in Romulan captivity, which I really couldn't care less about.

I'd have to think about it a bit more.

 

[Finn]

... and you're not allowed to say "every episode of X" or "the entire premise of X series."

What's an episode of "Star Trek"--any series--that had you on on the edge of your seat, trying to guess what was going on, only for the answer to be a complete let-down?

Obviously, this entire thread will be a giant spoiler mine.

For my family back in the day, it was "Vanishing Point" ("Enterprise"). For about 45 glorious minutes, it seemed like "Enterprise" was actually good. After using the transporter, relatively new technology that she's terrified of, Hoshi finds her molecules slowly disappearing. The reveal is....it's all a dream/hallucination.

For me personally though, the most infuriating cop-out ending to an episode is TNG's "Remember Me." One by one, people on the Enterprise are vanishing out of existence, and out of all history, as if they had never been there. Dr. Crusher is the only one that seems to notice this, while everyone else insists that the missing people never existed, and Crusher is off her rocker. Crusher eventually concludes that the entire universe might be shrinking! And then..........it turns out she's just in a fake balloon universe that's deflating. My interest also deflated.

A close second is "Heard of Stone" (DS9): A strange crystal lifeform is gradually forming around Kira's body, trapping and crushing her. Why? How does this strange alien lifeform work? Is it feeding off her? Does it perceive her as a threat? Is this some kind of alien bear-trap? The answer is..........both Kira and the crystal lump are really just Odo-With-Tits in disguise, messing with Odo. The real Kira is having a nap a few yards away, and the crystal alien doens't exist.

A few others that grind my gears:

"Frame of Mind" (TNG): Riker keeps shifting between his life on the Enterprise, and being a mental patient in an alien asylums. As he tries to figure out which life is real, we the audience try to figure out what's causing the duel realities. Has Riker's consciousness been merged somehow with someone else's? Is he simply shifting between universes? Nope. Turns out...some bad guys kidnapped him and put him to sleep, and both realities are just his dreaming brain trying to kill time for an hour until 5 minutes before the credits roll.

"Future Imperfect:" (TNG) Riker has a knack for finding himself in intriguing mysterious realities, that turn out to be lame gaslights by lame aliens. In this one, he seemingly awakens 15 years into the future, having suffered some kind of amnesia that erased the last 15 years of his memory. He tries to adjust to being captain of the Enterprise, having a son named Jean-Luc (even though Jean-Luc Picard is still alive), Jean-Luc the First sporting a ludicrous billy-goat beard, and Geordie having normal eyes. After realizing things don't add up, Riker demands that this trickery end. Then, seemingly, it turns out to be a holo-program, controlled by Romulans! But for what purpose? And then...........the Romulans are fake too. Turns out, it was all one big hallucination caused by a lonely bug alien, who didn't want Riker to leave him friendless again. Riker cheerfully tells the alien that they can totally be bestest-best friends for the next 3 minutes until the credits roll, after which the bug-boy is never mentioned again.

"Twisted" (Voyager): A strange anomaly turns the laws of physics aboard Voyager to mush! And has Janeway speaking in some eerie "Paul-is-Dead" type of demon talk! What's going on? They never find out. Janeway speculates that this is just how some strange aliens say hi.

What are some episodes that you felt began very intriguing, and had terrible cop-out endings?

What are you talking about? Your family was right. The episodes you listed for yourself was great. How would you have ended it? I don't think I'd done it better.

 

[FederationHistorian]

“Vanishing Point” is annoying because a) is a Hoshi story and develops her character & b) the episode "Daedalus" a couple of seasons dealt with a transporter accident. If “Vanishing Point” did not cop out on the dream ended, there could have been a nice callback to that episode.

I would say “Tuvix”. I get the sentiment to split Tuvix back to Tuvok and Neelix, but there was a way to keep Tuvix around as well on Voyager as either a transporter clone, hologram or a holoprogram.

 

[dupersuper]

Most of them can work if well written, but mentioning Twisted...seriously: what was that?

 

[WarpTenLizard]

...but there was a way to keep Tuvix around as well on Voyager as either a transporter clone, hologram or a holoprogram.

That still doesn't help the ethical dilemma. Because even if you can create an extra Tuvix, one of them still "dies" to save Tuvok and Neelix, and every Tuvix is sacred.

 

[at Quark's]

Most of them can work if well written, but mentioning Twisted...seriously: what was that?

To me, 'twisted' wasn't a disappointment. I thought it conveyed the idea quite well that sometimes species are so different that this is really all that can be had from a first contact with them. In that sense, the mystifying 'feel' at the end of the episode ('what the hell just happened?') and the unsatisfying realisation that no answers are forthcoming worked exactly as intended, imho.

 

[Tomalak]

Projections is one of those for me. It's a really good set up (a nice Cartesian dilemma for the Doctor), but really falls apart in the third act. It's not at all clear how the radiation caused the computer to magic up a simulation of Barclay or why it would try to get the Doctor to blow up the ship.

Oh it's some kind of anomaly.

 

[1001001]

I liked Twisted but it could have used a little follow-up.

 

[Henoch]

Chekov's dead! Meh, it was just a dream.

 

[Oddish]

Agreed about Vanishing Point. Though I'm not entirely sure how it could have been handled differently, Hoshi's sense of foreboding and gradual disappearance were an engaging story. Same with Twisted. Heart of Stone was a questionable choice for the big reveal about Odo and Kira.

Not having Harry turn out to be an alien in "Favorite Son" was arguably the second-worst decision regarding his character in the series (do I have to tell you what was the worst?) Making him an alien was a potential change in character direction on the level of Nog on DS9.

Honestly, I don't think Frame of Mind would have been any better with any other ending. It was awesome, one of the best Riker episodes made.

Another Riker episode, "Future Imperfect", follows the problematic trend of "The Bonding" and "Hero Worship", having characters establish close relationships with young male orphans... who then disappear. Might have been cool to know what happened to Jeremy, Timothy, and Barraj afterward...

And while this one wasn't exactly a copout, it could have been really interesting with serialized Trek: "The Child". Instead of having to abandon his exploration of humanity as he did, what if Ian Andrew has spent, say, a full season as a recurring character, going through infancy, childhood, adolescence, various stages of adulthood, and finally old age? In "Shades of Gray", he finally learns his last lesson (the experience of dying), and resumes his energy state.

 

[Kirby]

RESET BUTTONS! - We'll just set up a really dangerous situation, kill off a main character or two, and then get out of it in a way so it never really happened.

As much as I love Yesterday's Enterprise - just sending the C back through the rift and undo everything that happened kind of sucked. At least they paid it off later with Sela.

 

[Kor]

Yes on the reset button. That makes VOY "Year of Hell" my top choice for this thread.
Very intriguing possibilities went out the window by making everything revert to normal without even any memories of all that had transpired.

Kor

 

[Brobdingnag]

Yes on the reset button. That makes VOY "Year of Hell" my top choice for this thread.
Very intriguing possibilities went out the window by making everything revert to normal without even any memories of all that had transpired.

Kor

Voyager is nothing but reset buttons. How many times was the ship critically damaged during the episode only to be completely repaired before the end credits? It's a wonder why people ever bother to put the ship on dry docks if it can be repaired on the run when they are so short on energy that they have to ration the food. I mean Tom Paris has to eat Neelix's slop because he's out of rations but the ship half-destroyed repaired in a matter of hours is no problem at all. It would be like people losing thousands of dollars in a casino while not having enough money to feed themselves... such nonsense.

 

[Oddish]

Yes on the reset button. That makes VOY "Year of Hell" my top choice for this thread.

I actually liked YoH, because it took both Voyager and Janeway into a place they otherwise couldn't have reached. Though if they had done as they planned and made YoH a season, that might have been even better.

Overall I agree with you on the overuse of the reset button, especially when you've got characters stagnating hard because of it. Look at "Before and After", and the changes that occur... it's a sad thing when your characters show more growth in one "never happened" episode than they did in the whole series.

mean Tom Paris has to eat Neelix's slop because he's out of rations but the ship half-destroyed repaired in a matter of hours is no problem at all. It would be like people losing thousands of dollars in a casino while not having enough money to feed themselves... such nonsense.

Yeah...

Season 1: Voyager can't put out an eight-ounce cup of joe without overtaxing the replicators.
Season 5: Voyager can produce a 21-meter shuttlecraft more advanced than the shipyards on Earth are churning out.

 

[WarpTenLizard]

I actually liked YoH, because it took both Voyager and Janeway into a place they otherwise couldn't have reached. Though if they had done as they planned and made YoH a season, that might have been even better.

That would've been awesome. But, if they did do it for a full season, I'd say they should wait until at least Season 5 to do it, since Season 4 was largely about adjusting both the crew and the audience to changes like Seven joining the ship, Tom and B'Elanna getting together, Tuvok's promotion, etc. Unless we replace the Kremin with the Borg, and have the Year of Hell be the catalyst for Seven accepting her humanity, B'Elanna admitting her feelings to Tom, Tuvok's promotion, etc.

... it's a sad thing when your characters show more growth in one "never happened" episode than they did in the whole series.

I can't recall where, but I read a review where someone called "Voyager" "a show about ideas." I wish they could've chosen some of those ideas and ran with them!

Season 1: Voyager can't put out an eight-ounce cup of joe without overtaxing the replicators.
Season 5: Voyager can produce a 21-meter shuttlecraft more advanced than the shipyards on Earth are churning out.

Well Voyager has presumably been gradually acquiring new tech and resources from the aliens they trade with, and the planets they study. Plus the lower ranking crew are presumably getting better with time at things like building shuttlecrafts. Though the show could make that more clear.

 

[Oddish]

can't recall where, but I read a review where someone called "Voyager" "a show about ideas." I wish they could've chosen some of those ideas and ran with them!

I wish I could Like your post multiple times... that's Voyager's chief problem in a nutshell. The starship might have traveled 140,000 light years. But all too many of the characters never went anywhere.

Well Voyager has presumably been gradually acquiring new tech and resources from the aliens they trade with, and the planets they study. Plus the lower ranking crew are presumably getting better with time at things like building shuttlecrafts. Though the show could make that more clear.

One quick addition to one episode would have worked. Just mention Voyager trading for a new industrial replicator that could fabricate torpedoes and shuttle parts with vastly reduced energy use.

 

[Tomalak]

I just always felt that Voyager went through periods of feast and famine depending on how friendly and resource-rich an area of space they were travelling through.

They didn't get much chance to stop and resupply during the first two years due to frequent Kazon/Vidiian attacks. Sometimes in later years they seem to have ample supplies, other times they're on emergency rations.

 

[at Quark's]

Operation: Annihilate

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the episode disappointed as such - on the contrary, I think it's a great episode. It's just that the ending, when it turns out that these dangerous parasites are so vulnerable to something so basic as UV light is slightly disappointing, after seeing an entire episode with these horrific creatures, and how even phaser fire had almost no effect on them.