Least favorite type of episode

[gakelly]

I have watched Xfiles, Stargate, TOS, TNG, and have viewed a lot of DS9 (I just finished watching season 1)and VOY, and I have noted there are certain type of episodes that I really dislike.

1 The catch the rapidly aging disease episode. Xfiles and Stargate both had one like this. The Deadly Years and Unnatural Selection were other examples.

2 The alien entity takes over one of the main characters episode. Tons of examples of these. Lonely Among Us, Turnabout Intruder, Power Play, etc.

3. The it was all just a dream episode and it all goes back to normal after the heroes solve the problem. Basically half of the Voyager episodes and 90% of Brannon Braga episodes.

Does anyone like these type of episodes?
Are there other archetypal episodes you dislike/like?

 

[kkt]

There's a lot of room for an episode to be good or bad while still falling into one of these types.

 

[flandry84]

The one where the Ds9 shuttle was miniaturised...
Or the de-aged Picard and Ro episode...
God almighty.

 

[cultcross]

Types of episode I'm not fond of - most holodeck malfunction episodes are below par. I dislike episodes which focus primarily on romance too, they always seem so forced and awkward. 43 minutes is just not enough to convince me that character x is willing to give up everything for this person they've just met, and yet time and again I'm asked to believe that.

I got tired of Klingon episodes too. The formulaic way in which they failed to live up to their alleged code got dull.

 

[TheSeeker]

This topic seems a little better suited to General Trek Discussion, so off it goes!

 

[Swedish Borg]

The one type that gets on my nerves is the episode that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, like "A Night in Sickbay" whose subject seems to be "Archer is an ass" or "Threshold" who's just inept, I mean the three lizard babies really take the cake!!!! I can list about a dozen of episodes like that... that make you wonder what the writers were smoking at the time.

 

[Qonundrum]

Holodeck malfunctions were the setup for way too many episodes. That said, "Our Man Bashir" - despite the script just spewing out the treknobabble just to set up the 8 millionth reason for this plot device - geuinely works wonders, if you roll with the setup and enjoy the end result of the contrivance. The actors pull it off and then some too, and that doesn't hurt. The malfunction trope is cringe yet the episode as a whole is in my "all time greats" list despite it all. "Elementary, Dear Data" is the other high end on the trope and not because it became a trope creator because it was such a good story and before the use of "holodeck malfunction"(tm) became a trope to coast on. Usually, the stories are middle-of-the-road at best. Or a total stinker.

And time travel. TOS had one way to do it, found by accident, and they stuck with it - nor did they overuse it. In comes 90s Trek and by the time we get to "Little Green Men" there's about the 500th way to discuss easy-peasy time travel throwaway bit. Then comes "Trials and Tribble-ations", whose orb of time also whizzes them halfway across the quadrant so it's a time and space orb o' magic, but whatever, also has a whole department set up for temporal affairs... despite the setup, the payoff is more than worth it but - again - most stories don't have the payoff to lift up a story that resorts to the same setup for the 500000th time. I think this falls into the tv trope "flanderization".

Latter-era TNG episodes were all about Klingons and "Birthright part two" is the ultimate snore-fest with contrivances so laughably and inconsistently bad... What's even more bizarre is that DS9's re-use of Klingons felt far more lively than a lot of TNG's templated routines had. In part because DS9 could do a lot more with the those ideas than anything TNG could...

 

[Relayer1]

Planet of the week...

 

[kkt]

Holodeck malfunctions were the setup for way too many episodes. That said, "Our Man Bashir" - despite the script just spewing out the treknobabble just to set up the 8 millionth reason for this plot device - geuinely works wonders, if you roll with the setup and enjoy the end result of the contrivance. The actors pull it off and then some too, and that doesn't hurt.

Yes, I was about to say, Our Man Bashir is proof that an episode can be a holodeck malfunction show loaded with Treknobabble and still be really good. Lots for Andy Robinson and Avery Brooks to do is a great start to an episode.

 

[Xhiandra]

I hate dream sequences in general, not only the "it was just a dream" trope. Dreams are meaningless and overromanticised, Freud was wrong, as he was on most things.

A sister trope is the "it's a training exercise/simulation" one. Less silly, but just as predictable. For instance, character X gets shot... you know it's going to be a dream/training exercise/simulation in advance. You probably even know which.

Not fond of alien possession, either. Especially since the possessing alien tends to be of the "cartoonish villain" variety. Not always, but very often.


On the other hand, the rapid aging disease, I disagree on. I thought that episode of SG1 was one of the best they did. Don't remember that trope in Trek, though.

 

[Farscape One]

I think another reason "OUR MAN BASHIR" works so well is that it really isn't a holodeck 'malfunction'. It was simply storing their physical patterns and playing them as characters in the program. Bashir and Garak could leave at any time, but they just ran the risk of deleting those patterns.

It was one of those unique scenarios where the holodeck was actually doing something to keep them alive, not malfunctioning. It's that originality that helped make the idea work.

 

[at Quark's]

Generally, I don't think I hate any type of episode. I mean, sure, some tropes are overused and I don't like that, like the 'holodeck malfunction' one. But that's exactly because the premise allows for an easy story. I think I hate episodes that have this 'lazy' or uninspired feel to it (' we don't know what to do, let's do an evil alien possesses character X ep, we haven't done one since last season'). But episodes of any type -no matter how overused the trope- can be really good (and usually the trope starter episode was a good one, or it wouldn't have developed into a cliché in the first place).

 

[Farscape One]

Generally, I don't think I hate any type of episode. I mean, sure, some tropes are overused and I don't like that, like the 'holodeck malfunction' one. But that's exactly because the premise allows for an easy story. I think I hate episodes that have this 'lazy' or uninspired feel to it (' we don't know what to do, let's do an evil alien possesses character X ep, we haven't done one since last season'). But episodes of any type -no matter how overused the trope- can be really good (and usually the trope starter episode was a good one, or it wouldn't have developed into a cliché in the first place).

I agree. Any type of story can be good, even if overused. It's the execution that makes or breaks the episode.

Like VOYAGER's "HEROES AND DEMONS"... a holodeck malfunction episode, made at the point in the franchise when it became a trope. I thought it was a good, fun episode. It was executed well because it used an almost never used scenario... vikings. And we get a look at a brand new type of species.

"THE ASSIGNMENT" on DS9 and "OBSERVER EFFECT" on ENTERPRISE... I thought they very well done, and used the alien possession trope.

"SHUTTLEPOD ONE"... the trope of 'a few crew think everyone else is dead', byt ut was highly effective because of Trip and Reed. Bonus, it was a bottle episode, which runs the risk of being boring or bad, but this is one of the best bottle shows of the franchise.

"ONE" on VOYAGER... the 'only person left aboard' trope. Very good episode, entirely due to Jeri Ryan's performance.

"YEAR OF HELL" two-parter... time as a trope. By this point in the franchise, time as a plot device was already way overused. I myself am against those stories because they create too many headaches and rely too much on resets. But that was an excellent use of time.


While tropes can be tiring or overused, all can have superb episodes within those tropes.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

Klingon episodes generally don't do it for me.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Definitely Berman-era Klingon episodes.

Look at us with our made up language and songs and pie heads and identical perms! Look at our warrior code except we never keep to it!

Skip!

 

[Qonundrum]

Definitely Berman-era Klingon episodes.

Look at us with our made up language and songs and pie heads and identical perms! Look at our warrior code except we never keep to it!

Skip!

LOL. The songs did get a bit much and demystified the lorebuilding too much, IMHO. Maybe because they got overused...?

On the plus side, "A Matter of Honor" - one of the best Klingon-themed episodes prior to DS9 - didn't have everyone all stepping into line dance and song... Now, next week on "The Orville"... when early TNG hit a home run, the only reason the templating didn't start to show was because they didn't use it every week. Except for "Warp Core Breach"(tm)...

 

[Mudd]

Self-consciously contrived social analogies. Only one or two have really worked in fifty-odd years.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

There's no individual trope that can't be done well or done terribly, and Trek has been around long enough to do them all both ways.

I guess what bothers me the most is the kind of episode where they have a character act like a jerk for the episode then 'Learn a lesson' which they forget a week later. When they turn scifi into sitcoms. DS9 did this most often with Worf.

 

[maneth]

I really dislike most of the episodes that turn into musicals. The hippie TOS episode is dowright painful to watch. I admit I'm not a fan of the Vic Fontaine DS9 episodes either.

I'm not too fond of time travel episodes or movies either, although I'll overlook it if the story is otherwise decent. Some exceptions include Doctor Who, where the whole show is built around the concept and the Babylon 4 plotline on B5.

 

[kkt]

On the other hand, the rapid aging disease, I disagree on. I thought that episode of SG1 was one of the best they did. Don't remember that trope in Trek, though.

TOS "The Deadly Years", DS9 "Distant Voices". Both good episodes, I think, despite treknobabble to get into the bad situation and to get out again.