That episode in season 6 of Voyager was definitely the worst character destruction I've ever seen in any TV series. They kick out the character in season 4 for very dubious reasons, then spend the coming seasons pretending that the character never existed and suddenly bring her back-only to destroy the character. it was nothing but a finger up in the face to those wo like the chaarcter and wanted her back. The episode should never have been made and the script for it should have been thrown in a trashcan together with the "writer" who came up with that crap. As for Janeway's and Sisko's behavior in Equinox and For The Uniform, I do agree even if it was mor like those captains having a bad day than downright character destruction. As for Hollow Pursuits, the episode was rather silly. However, Barclay could be fun to watch sometimes.
Hollow was a fine episode plus it was Barclay's first appearance if memory serves so it couldn't qualify as a character assassination since the character wasn't born yet.
Worst? There are so many... Data in "The Quality of Life" is reduced to a caricature in a paint-by-numbers plot. Geordi is ageist in "Relics" and while Scotty may be eager but he would still not indiscriminately press buttons like that. "Relics" is a two-for-one blue light special in that regard. While many might cite Troi episodes where she spouts "Captain, he's hiding the obvious", I'd wager "Face of the Enemy" is worse for taking the opposite extreme. The ideal poker player cold reader can't read the minds and struggles to get into a personality type that is the polar opposite and isn't found out for the bulk of the episode? Granted, season six is loaded with this sort of contrived paint-by-numbers plotting, in ways that make the complaints of "The Way to Eden" (TOS) where actors said their characters were altered for the sake of the plot seem minuscule by comparison... Spock wasn't well-used in "Unification". Q was turned into a series of cheap gags in VOY, though to be fair the tattoo size joke was admittedly chuckle-inducing. That aside, Q and the Continuum did get assassinated. VOY also did the same with the Borg, even before "Unimatrix Zero" and its lame "let's assimilate the captain, engineer, and science officer - only with blue lasers this time - and even give big big hints that all this won't be shocking because we'll subvert the 'how do we get them out' by nudging it in part one too." Picard did an impressive 180 regarding the same issue "Journey's End" and "Insurrection", for absolutely no reason. But Picard was inconsistent and mopey with the prime directive in the 7 year run as well. Stewart's acting makes it all seem like treacle by comparison. Kirk was misused in "Generations", solely so TNG could get the movie spotlight, and after how great ST6 was, but that was from a movie and not a TV episode... As much as I love "All our Yesterdays", it's bizarre that only Spock devolves due to the time travel aspect. Kirk and McCoy, who were just as unprocessed, didn't devolve. The script's ideas were genuinely great and especially for how late in the show's run it was, but it all got overlooked - or they wanted Spock to be the butt of a joke, which is not atypical for season 3, where he is often poorly scripted. Such as in "That Which Survives", which has his cadence completely off, if not outright wooden and caricature - and may have been the inspiration for Sheldon Cooper for all we know. Having him also babble to Droxine his mating habits in "The Cloud Minders" despite a season earlier being oh-so-shy about boinking in "Amok Time" -- yes, fans have tried to find ways to make it work. Less successful than that was when Spock of all people didn't notice the differences between Bele and Lokai that Kirk and everyone else had -- again, for the sake of typical season 3 plotting as opposed to being true to the character, thus causing another proverbial assassination. Star Trek III proved a Vulcan can have more than one life so it retroactively explains all the assassinations Spock got... Oddly, how the Platonians abused him and the others is far more in-character and while working with the script, as opposed to the other way around. Star Trek 6, for all its positives, has Communications Officer and xenolinguistics expert Uhura reduced to the butt of a joke in not knowing Klingon and having to read (incorrectly) out of a book. But was it a funny scene or what? Star Trek 5 needlessly made everyone the butt of jokes, some more than others, regardless of the good points and moments that script had... thank Star Trek 4 and its use of comedy for that... Data in the TNG movies had his emotion chip fused and not removable, but by the movie's end he wrote his own subroutine to control it. By the next movie he made an on/off switch for it. After that it could be removed. Then finally he has none, ostensibly unmentioned because the movies couldn't make up their minds in terms of how to assassinate Data this time 'round, or to do it seriously or as the butt of a joke that made "Mister Tricorder" genuinely funny by comparison. Troi is made drunk in First Contact as the butt of a joke... Cochrane in the same movie becomes an allegory for Gene Roddenberry in the same movie... and the movie thought it was being clever by doing a pee joke too... yes, there's nothing more thrilling in a sci-fi adventure than to recognize characters need to take potty breaks as opposed to doing more science-fictioney things yet this isn't "Futurama" or any other conscious parody, where said jokes tend not to be used for the character assassination (and/or flanderization) trope. Of course, Picard becomes "John McClane in space" for the final three TNG movies as well*, complete with all those self-destruct buttons sold next to the lollipops in the candy store, so rest assured that when people say the ship is a character, the sefl-destruct button is the ultimate assassination right there too... * like or dislike, the PICARD sequel series reels him back in and that's a good thing! And everyone in "Nemesis" is just a caricature anyway.
QUOTE: And everyone in "Nemesis" is just a caricature anyway. True. How to fix Nemesis: 1. Move the wedding scene to the end of "Insurrection" with a SIX MONTHS LATER title card. Include the "no speech, no clothes either" bit. Show Data as first officer, complete with red uniform and commander insignia. 2. Delete the rest of the @#$*!-ing movie.
How to fix Nemesis: Make Picard's clone a clown with a round red nose and big clown shoes, that way everything else he does will begin to make sense.
I like my solution better. Just don't make "Nemesis" at all. Make a Deep Space 9 movie instead. They could explore Ezri's character some more.
A DS9 movie? In hindsight, that could have been cool. IIRC, Berman decided that the next film should be TNG instead of ENT, or, indeed, VOY or DS9 because he thought TNG had more mileage yet and probably because he thought demand had built up for those characters again. But, yeah, from a fan's perspective, a DS9 film to close it out at least would've been great!
I'm still a bit disappointed that AFAIK , we never saw any DS9 cast member in the movies, not even in a cameo (well, Worf, but he of course was TNG as well), but we did see Janeway (and another EMH) ...
I wouldn't say, and this is my opinion, that they kicked Kes out for "dubious reasons." I think the character, as I said previously, wasn't well thought out and, as a result and as the writers said, they reached an impasse with her. Now, that said, I think Neelix was the worst and Kim and Chakotay were also both expendable. If it was me, I'd have ditched Neelix and try to rehabilitate Kes like they were already trying to do in season 3, perhaps by having her taking Seven under her wing like the EMH did. As far as the rest, yeah, Fury was just awful. And lazy. Not much of a story there and one that completely destroyed the character. It's a dumb as Threshold and some of the other banal episodes on TNG and VOY. But, y'know, on the whole, VOY told far more good stories than bad and TNG as well. Fury was not one of those.
Good, but sloppy. Hard to believe that the people who gave us brilliant episodes like "Projections", "Before and After", and "Year of Hell" were such muffinheads that they didn't even know how to count to 38, or that an ensign is supposed to make lieutenant.
Where were those colony administrators when Romulus needed help??? As others have said, there was surely follow up from Federation experts trained in that sort of thing. That was a very badly written Riker. It was a season 2 episode, so there was no Dr Crusher aboard to say anything. Otherwise, I agree.
They'd need at least a couple of Cerritos equivalents just to follow the Enterprise around and clean up Kirk's messes. Like the guy at the circus with the broom and shovel.
I read an interesting story once... this guy faked his own death, and blamed the protagonist for it. They served five years for manslaughter. When they got out, they chased the guy down, intending to kill them for real: due to double jeopardy, they couldn't be touched for it. However, an alert police detective tackled them, and the bullet missed. So the poor schlub had to go back to jail for attempted murder. In that unique case, the punishment for the failed attempt was actually worse than the punishment for succeeding.
Yes, we see that sort of thing in courtroom series all the time. Like the serial killer who gets off on a technicality. I think I saw at least four episodes (in different series) with that plot device. It's either a botched arrest (the cop didn't read him his right or he didn't have probable cause for an arrest) or the witness dies or changes his mind or whatever. It's a wonder they manage to sentence anybody!! Yeah, and there's also the stupid jury who didn't get what they were supposed to do and let the guy off even though he's guilty (O.J. Simpson, anybody?)
Exactly. They had been convicted, sentenced, and punished for a murder they didn't commit. If they committed the murder after the fact, they could not be punished twice for the same crime.