What Are the Worst Star Trek Episodes?

[Gojirob]

I only had one major issue with Unimatrix Zero, and that was that they actually allowed themselves to be assimilated. Ridiculous! Other than that, I really liked both parts. It just came up in my rotation tonight in fact.

The assimilation was ridiculous enough -- the fact that there were no lasting repercussions for any of the three assimilees (is that a word? it is now.) was worse. Reset button much? Tuvok and Janeway were off chasing the Borg again IN THE VERY NEXT EPISODE. Fearlessly. (Though, I guess an argument could be made that after assimilation, it's not like the Borg can be MORE scary to them. But Janeway was complaining about how much it hurt ...)

But even WORSE than the reset button on the characters was the reset button on the Borg rebellion. Hey, let's start a Borg civil war! AND THEN NEVER MENTION IT AGAIN.

(Oh, and during this episode, they seemed to have forgotten about the Borg children they had just picked up. Seven was spending all her time regenerating in the cargo bay, and I was like, "Where are the kids?" So minus one for continuity, as well.)

-k7, who has now written a ridiculous amount of fanfic, thanks in part to this horrible episode. So I guess it was good for something ...

K7--the one and only defense I'll offer is a subtle one, perhaps ficcy in and of itself. Could it be that the successive mental blows of assimilation and then the Maquis fanatic's long-distance brainwashing pushed Tuvok's illness further along? Maybe...extreme maybe...this is something we were meant to infer? I doubt it, but that thought did occur to me.

My worsties?

TOS : The Alternative Factor - Wins the Gargamel award for muddled motivation.
Movies : TMP - TFF at least goes somewhere and moves.
TNG : Code Of Honor - Ye....ah. No one will be offended by that.
Also, 'Who Watches The Watchers?'. As needed as another South Park anti-environmentalist episode, in bringing home its founder's philosophy. Picture Picard as Love Hina's Naru, and any religious thought as Keitaro. And I mean the anime versions.
DS9 : Paradise - No, Joseph--you didn't invest your lives in that world. Your lives were embezzled by a fanatic who invested them for to write a dissertation. But take home the Herman Munster Award.
Voyager : Fury. Hey, kids! Remember your old pal Kes? Well, you won't want to after this one.
ENT : Hint : At least two eps where you can't learn the aliens' names--so why are you doing it?

 

[Michael]

ENT : Hint : At least two eps where you can't learn the aliens' names--so why are you doing it?

Maybe I'm a bit dense right now, but what exactly do you mean by that?

 

[DevilEyes]

ENT : Hint : At least two eps where you can't learn the aliens' names--so why are you doing it?

Maybe I'm a bit dense right now, but what exactly do you mean by that?

My guess: Acquisition (Ferengi) and Regeneration (Borg).

 

[Gojirob]

Yeah, those two. Sorry to be unclear.

 

[Myasishchev]

I've always quite disliked TOS' City on the Edge of Forever, possibly more than the obviously bad outings like "Children Shall Lead" and "Brain." At least they were goofily entertaining. CotEoF has the following major problems:

1)An illogical time travel philosophy.
2)A complete misunderstanding of the history of World War 2, with a huge heaping helping of Americentrism.
3)A rushed love story, grantedly slightly better than the one with Flint's gynoid.
4)Extrinsically, Harlan Ellison's ego.
5)...And the cardinal sin, it's dull.

Some of the other episodes mentioned here, "Cloud Minders" and "Wolf in the Fold," I actually liked, though...

For the other series, my picks are more standard, and have been mentioned already, usually more than once. "Let He Who Is Without Sin..." Argh. The alternate, Friends-style title is "The One Where Worf Becomes a Domestic Terrorist, But It's Okay."

 

[DevilEyes]

I've always quite disliked TOS' City on the Edge of Forever, possibly more than the obviously bad outings like "Children Shall Lead" and "Brain." At least they were goofily entertaining. CotEoF has the following major problems:

1)An illogical time travel philosophy.
2)A complete misunderstanding of the history of World War 2, with a huge heaping helping of Americentrism.

ITA with those two - although 1) has been used so many times in fiction that I'm used to it. But 2) is really annoying.

(For that matter, so do all those "what would you do if you could go back and kill Hitler" stories. Please. If you killed him, someone else would take his place. He wasn't the National-socialist party all alone, and his charisma was NOT the real reason why gain popularity, it was the social, economic and political circumstances of the time. "I'll kill a single person and change history" is a silly view of history.)

 

[greenguy]

Aquiel and Sub Rosa were really bad TNG episodes. Paradise was an awful DS9 episode, as was Rivals.

Of course there are tons of bad VOY episodes, like Threshold.

 

[Joel_Kirk]

Since this is all opinion (and online threads usually are), I'll give some of my usual answers:

*Inner Light
*Darmok
*Carbon Creek
*Move Along Home
*Plato's Stepchildren
*The Visitor

I'm sure there are more I could come up with....