What are some plain stupid things from Season One?

For example, in "The Neutral Zone", Worf does not know how to open a door (he assumes all doors open automatically and this one must be broken)

 

- Troi's insane level of emoting in "Encounter at Farpoint".
- Wesley saving the ship repeatedly.
- Riker being too dumb to figure out how to use Q powers to good effect.
- The casting for "Code of Honor". The whole episode was pretty dumb, though.
- The early Ferengi.
- Worf - "Klingons do not take hostages." Kruge - "Hold my bloodwine."
- Picard unnecessarily risking two of his crew in "When the Bough Breaks".
- Data being unable to use contractions when you could probably program a 1980's era Speak and Spell to turn "Do not" into "Don't".

 

I watched ET too

 

Making all the officers idiots so Wesley can be the one to out Lore in "Datalore".

(At least Tasha voiced a legitimate security concern regarding Data and Lore when she asked Picard if he can be fully trusted to be the sole watcher over Lore.)

 

Anyone being able to stroll onto the bridge in "The Neutral Zone." In TOS times they at least had bridge guards so if someone wanted to take a pop at the captain they wouldn't be able to.
I don't think kids being on the Enterprise is stupid, because I feel like it's a holdover from an idea of the ship being on a twenty year mission and a necessity for crewmembers that otherwise wouldn't see their family members for decades. I do think it's dumb that they didn't keep to this idea or do saucer separations more.
I remember reading the Star Trek Fact Files and they did an article on the Picard Maneuver that it seem awesome, and then you watch it and it's just nothing. It's meant to be unbeatable and Riker just grabs it in a tractor beam.
Data's contraction thing also makes no sense when he was doing contractions in the episodes prior.
Q putting humanity on trial. There's aliens out there way worse than us, like the Dominion's making terrible diseases and enslaving races, but humanity is moving too far in the galaxy?
I feel like there's something off about Dexter Remmick having the mother alien in him and yet being an aide to the guy trying to uncover that conspiracy. Maybe he got implanted later?

 

I actually think the alien being in Remmick makes sense. What better place to hide than in the person who is conducting all the actual investigations? You control what information is or isn't being told to Quinn.

 

Plus, you're aware of everything that's going on, but no one pays attention to you because you're just an underling. The perfect way to hide in plain sight.

 

Exactly. Plus, as a Lt. Commander, Remmick's rank was high enough to give him good access, while being low enough to not be scrutinized by others who weren't compromised.

 

It's like being the Marine who carries the Football. No one notices you, even though you're carrying armageddon in your hands.

 

I thought the male miniskirt uniforms looked stupid, but at least they treated men and women equally in terms of uniforms*- they disappeared for both sexes at the same time.

(* As long as you're not Deanna Troi, who never wears a uniform in the early seasons, another dumb thing, but not S1 exclusively).

 

In "The Neutral Zone", the way the survivors from the 20th century got treated like dogshit by everyone on the crew, even though one of them (Ralph Offenhouse) had the presence of mind to figure out the solution to the problem and save the day!

(I like what the novelverse did with Offenhouse: First, he becomes an ambassador to the Ferengi. A perfect marriage if there ever was one. Later on, he's the Federation Secretary of Commerce.)

 

1. Worf does not know Klingons.
2. Don't forgot Errand of Mercy

 

The treaty of 2164 outlawed all "autocorrect" functions after it was finally proven to be the root casue for the G'Gugvunt and Vl'Hurg wars.

 

That's good, because I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.

 

In "Skin of Evil", Yar must often record posh death speeches in advance, since making one and by the time she is killed and everyone goes to see it but, oops, half of them aren't given a line toward would be somewhat embarrassing.

Picard fires a volley of torpedoes over Ligon II for the sole sake of bullying and terrifying the populace to getting Yar back.

Whoever decided the rewrite of "Justice" to end up like a NC17 massage parlor where the death penalty concept is now made brilliant by applying it to tripping over a tiny flower bed at random... never mind the first scene that goes from being family-friendly to orgy-invitation at the drop of a hat. The casting of this story is arguably even more glaring than "Code of Honor"'s and at least they had Jessie Lawrence Ferguson, who was as compelling to watch as Patrick Stewart and it's obvious both had some incredibly bad dialogue...

...oh yeah, Code of Honor also has Data and Geordi being told to analyze the weapons. The resultant dialogue is bad enough, risking Geordi's life over all those sharp blades would be eminently stupid as far as oh-so-bright Picard ostensibly is. Data can analyze them all, faster, with no biological risk of any sort.

Also, Code of Honor treats the audience so poorly that Picard's opponent's to-be wife - Yar's opponent - is named YAREENA.

Space jellyfish and luuuuuuuurve was way too hokey and corny by even TOS standards, despite the fact the only one who could resolve the puzzle would be the one who can sense emotions from aliens without looking at them - which means Troi got a halfway decent moment despite it all. Shame she was relegated to saying "I can sense he's saying the obvious, Captain, apart from next week when I won't be on the bridge when needed or for some unexplained reason I won't be here to have my plot-ending ability to be properly used." Season 1 had a lot of that, too...

Yar and Data *-*-*-*-ing in a tree. (92.5% of that episode is wasted trash.)

Heart of Glory - So there's a ship about to blow up and urgency is needed, but Picard wants to spend more time investigating Geordi's visor transmitter instead. Good episode, good concept for transmitting visuals, but not in the context of that "emergency, ship about to go boom boom".


Neutral Zone - that charming talk of hard drives prevailing, everyone knew those things didn't have great lifespans back then either... never mind the alleged fad of being frozen at the time of death and how all these folks were hauled off to the freezer just in the nick of time... overlook a lot of this episode and there's some fun to be had, but it demands a lot of the audience to get around the cheese.

For season 1, there are too many Wesley scenes exist to count.


I do enjoy more than a fair amount of season 1, but some of those scenes are a tad much.

 

Just the whole thing about Data not being able to use contractions was pretty stupid. He can form complex grammatical structures with ease, but he can't do the one thing you could do with a search and replace?

 

One thing that was pretty stupid was 10 year olds learning calculus. Not to mention the utter contempt for everything 1980s humans do for fun.

The idea that humans overcame their petty squabbles and ended war and poverty was great by itself. But then they had to add, we've gotten so ridiculously smart little kids can do what adult geniuses struggle with, and we're so damn evolved the only thing we do for pleasure is listen to classical music and contemplate philosophy.

It's why DS9 is so great, they kept the good things about TNG utopianism but made humans human again.

 

This is the episode that made me loathe both Picard and Riker. The idea that neither of them could understand why Claire Raymond would be sad about her family who have been dead for centuries is disgusting. They told Deanna to help her not out of compassion, but because her sadness annoyed them. It was basically, "Counsellor, can't you shut her up?"

The whole show has an unrealistic depiction of how humans react to the death of their family members, like the kid whose mother died on an away mission. Perfectly clean, overly-groomed, and nobody watching over him, making sure he eats and sleeps, and he's not even a teenager yet? That's ridiculous.

Picard would have hated Tom Paris, with his love of mid-20th century pop culture. Dixon Hill doesn't count, because there's a considerable difference between the detective genre and the craziness of Captain Proton. Thou shalt not have crewmembers who know how to have fun.

My favorite characters on DS9 are Miles and Julian, and Vic Fontaine. Honorable mention to Julian and Garak, for their quirky friendship that has so much subtext that it could be interpreted either way.

 

Agreed about the calculus thing, though it's possible that (1) with computers, which schools have and use, calculus is less complex, or (2) the version taught to schoolchildren is less complex. But yeah, I failed calculus spectacularly in high school, despite taking algebra in 7th grade. So it's not exactly simple stuff.

 

They leave Lore just floating in space at the end of the episode. So they wanted to leave his fate open so they character could return, fine. Just let him hijack a shuttle and disappear. The whole things seems cruel.
Although I love the idea of Lore internally monologuing at the Enterprise and what he'll do when he gets back onboard and it just straight nopes out and warps away.