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The most godawful Star Trek moments (with spoilers and gifs)

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Slayven

Member
Yeah, he went from "bad but somewhat ambiguous" to "haha just kidding I'm evil". He could've been meant to be that way all along and was just hiding it better, but it makes him less interesting.

I wonder what Quark bartered to Dr. Bashir to convince him these extensive-yet-reversible gender reassignment surgeries were worth his time.

They're entertaining in their own way, but definitely completely built around the premise that Captain Kirk is the most important man in the universe. I also doubt Shatner had much to do with them other than putting his name on them; I don't think Shatner has even watched much non-TOS stuff so there's no way he was thinking of a lot of the other characters and situations pulled in. Maybe he was tossing in ideas like "Make sure Kirk is sleeping with a much younger woman!" and "Make sure Kirk can beat Klingons with their own weaponry!"

Apparently a TNG episode idea that never got off the ground involved a guest appearance by Chekov, and would've had him and Worf bonding over shared Russian heritage. :)
The novels were ghost written by a husband and wife team.
 
cOhc1.gif


“Haters gonna hate”
 

MedHead

Member
Ronald Moore said:
But at the end of the episode, it’s just a shrug and a smile and off to the next. I just hit the ceiling. I remember writing in the margins, ‘This is a total betrayal of the audience. This is wrong. You can’t end the show like this. If you are going to do all this other stuff, you can’t end the show like this, because it’s not fair, because it’s not true, and it just wouldn’t happen.’ "But the show is what the show is. It just became about action sequences. Brannon is very proud of the fact that the show is more action-oriented than the others, and it’s faster; it’s stylistically a little more daring than the other STAR TREK shows. All that’s great. I give him a lot of credit for changing the look and feel of the show. When he came aboard VOYAGER, the show started to look and feel different; it has a different sensibility stylistically. Even in the storytelling, it was starting to become a little more edgy. That’s great, because STAR TREK needs that breath of fresh air to keep it vital. But it can’t all be flash and sizzle. It has to be about something at some level.
And then he went and made Battlestar Galactica, and discovered it's not easy making a TV series.
 
I always felt had the Maquis storyline remained a constant subplot on Voyager, especially considering the premise of the show, it had the potential to be the 90's Battlestar Galactica. Yet for some reason they ignored it.

There was one episode however when it came to light that Janeway assigned Tuvok to investigate the likelihood of a Maquis mutiny amongst the Voyager crew and to develop contingency plans. Chakotay obviously was in the dark about this. That was the moment and they ignored the chance
 

DrForester

Kills Photobucket
I always felt had the Maquis storyline remained a constant subplot on Voyager, especially considering the premise of the show, it had the potential to be the 90's Battlestar Galactica. Yet for some reason they ignored it.

There was one episode however when it came to light that Janeway assigned Tuvok to investigate the likelihood of a Maquis mutiny amongst the Voyager crew and to develop contingency plans. Chakotay obviously was in the dark about this. That was the moment and they ignored the chance

Think you got your episodes confused. It was a third season episode where the contingency plan was a holodeck program Tuvok made, but quickly abandoned it when he saw the crews integrating so well. Someone finds the program and a lot of the crew begin to run it. And then in a totally original turn, the program goes rogue and people inside the holodeck are put in danger. Though, to be fair, it's a pretty good "holodeck malfunction" episode because instead of just being a malfunction it turns out Seska found and altered the program to try and kill Tuvok, and Seska was one of the few great things to come from Voyager.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Worst_Case_Scenario_(episode)
 

Jacobi

Banned
Voyager could've been so good. I still liked it back then because I was a kid, but nowadays most episodes are just stupid.

One example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sopELGwSoE0
The Swarm

"Captain, there's a territory of brutal aliens who kill everyone that try to cross it! Starfleet rules forbid flying through! We'd need 15 months to fly around it!"

Janeway : "15 months? Fuck this shit we'll fly through it!"

And so they get attacked. And manage to kill a lot of them through a technobabble method. That's the peaceful way of Starfleet!

Still, the episode is one of the best of voyager, because there's a lot of doctor in it. And the more you see of the doctor, the better a Voyager episode is...

These days I just realized how good and mature many TNG episodes were. No senseless action and bullshit... I think we won't ever get Star Trek like this again.
 

kinoki

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
I've been rewatching TNG this year and I'm currently mid-season 4. Loving almost every second of it. The episodes that are Troi-centric drag on a bit since she really is the least intresting character there.

Reading through this thread makes me happy I skipped televised Star Trek after TNG and went on to Babylon 5 and Battlestar: Galactica.
 

Pseudo_Sam

Survives without air, food, or water
Never seen a ST but for the JJ movie, which I really really enjoyed. Even so this thread is a great read. Nice job OP.
 

dalin80

Banned
And then he went and made Battlestar Galactica, and discovered it's not easy making a TV series.

But in comparison 90% of BSG is outstanding while 90% of voyager is pure festered crap getting forced down your throat human centipede style.
 

Divvy

Canadians burned my passport
I actually have somewhat fond memories of Voyager since I watched it as a kid and didn`t really have much of a critical eye or anything. Maybe I should rewatch it...
 
I actually have somewhat fond memories of Voyager since I watched it as a kid and didn`t really have much of a critical eye or anything. Maybe I should rewatch it...

It hasn't aged well. I kind of liked when it first came out too, but rewatching is painful.
 

Reuenthal

Banned
Well Gal Dukat to me was someone who was kinder than other Cardassians but he was still a despot, a man who wanted Bajorans to love him for being a kinder despot. But they wouldn't because he was still a despot and he still saw them as inferior. He seems somewhat obsessed with Bajorans and their rejection after he loses what was precious to him which was half Bajoran and he becomes mad, and I think in that great episode where he is found along with Sisko in that plant he was handled well so his turn to destroy Bajorans was believable. I also liked the team he made with Kai Winn. In the last episode he is a bit ridiculous though. So to me Dukat is the despot who wants to be loved while being a despot.

In regards to some comments. Conspiracy is a great episode. From Season one of TNG! Perhaps the only episode of such quality in that god awful season. It is also a good horror episode and a daring one, perharps one of the most daring of the show. Also a good paranoia episode. Really well done.
 
Slightly off-topic, but I've always thought of the movies as such:

Star Trek: The Pajama Party

The first one will always be: 'Space Odyssey 2001: Lite Edition' to me. Or alternatively: 'This Is How We Got The Band Back Together: The Motion Picture'

Completely agree. I still don't understand the Chakotay and Seven thing. I must have missed an entire season or something.


You didn't miss anything, that was thrown in during the last two episodes of the show. I think it was just the writers way of trolling the fan base one last time before they capped off the series.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
And then he went and made Battlestar Galactica, and discovered it's not easy making a TV series.

I thought BSG did a very good job of showing the effects of scarce resources and being on the run. It's not always perfect of course, and things eventually settled down a bit, but a lot of what occurred on the show was great for this point. You start with 33, where they're jumping all the time and they're tired. They lose their water. They need to find ore. The population count of humanity declines all the time. They lose fighters. And in the end,
The Galactica gets more and more damaged until it is eventually unable to be salvaged, and is lost
 

DrForester

Kills Photobucket
Much as "Code of Honor" sucked, I still hold that the three worst episodes of the series are "The Game", "Genesis", and by a long mile "Sub Rosa". Season 1 stuff I can write off as being season 1 and getting their legs.
 
Another reason to be thankful for this thread to me; a comment by a poster introduced me to the Plinkett reviews. They are some funny shit. :)
 

MedHead

Member
Negative.

Wheaton might be a great actor, but he only seems to take roles that annoy me. I've read some of his blog posts and interviews, and I still don't think I'd get along with him well.

But in comparison 90% of BSG is outstanding...
While I agree that Battlestar Galactica was better than Voyager, I disagree about the percentage. I started to lose interest in the series quite heavily through season 2. It lost the focus on trying to find earth, and instead started putting too much attention on the oftentimes atrocious people on board the Galactica. Moore fell victim to the same problem experienced by a lot of writers: the belief that a good character makes for a boring character. By the end of the series, I didn't really care about any of the people on board, because they were shadows of the people they were in the original. I don't mean to claim that I expected no characters to change throughout the series, but Moore seemed to believe that no good could continue largely unscathed throughout a war, when real-world experience has shown us otherwise.

I thought BSG did a very good job of showing the effects of scarce resources and being on the run. It's not always perfect of course, and things eventually settled down a bit, but a lot of what occurred on the show was great for this point. You start with 33, where they're jumping all the time and they're tired. They lose their water. They need to find ore. The population count of humanity declines all the time. They lose fighters. And in the end,
The Galactica gets more and more damaged until it is eventually unable to be salvaged, and is lost
The damage inflicted by war was handled well on the show (other than strange disproportionate strength of ships during that silly tactical decision in the New Caprica battle), but I was speaking more to the way the series was handled as a whole, and not on the way the ships were weathered by the trip through space. Neither series handled crew behavior appropriately, in my opinion, though I do think Battlestar Galactica did a better job. What I liked about Voyager is that many people remained good on that show; however, what I didn't like was that characters often acted outside of their character arc for the sake of an episode. Battlestar Galactica had fewer out-of-character moments, but when it did, those moments tended to be just as wildly out of character as in Star Trek: Voyager.
 

MMaRsu

Banned
Is voyager season 7 worth watching? I really enjoy Voyager and I've yet to fully watch DS9.

I'll have no whining about Janeway, I fucking love that girl. She was always a badass even if her decisions didn't always make sense.

I'll also have no whining about Voyager period, as Tom, Neelix, Tuvok and the rest of the crew make it a worthwhile series in my eyes. Sure I watched it all as a 13/14 year old kid but damnit if I'm gonna let some guys talk shit about it like it's the worst thing ever to grace a tv screen :p.
 

Htown

STOP SHITTING ON MY MOTHER'S HEADSTONE
Sure I watched it all as a 13/14 year old kid but damnit if I'm gonna let some guys talk shit about it like it's the worst thing ever to grace a tv screen :p.

Don't be silly.

It's only the worst Star Trek thing ever to grace a TV screen.
 

DarthWoo

I'm glad Grandpa porked a Chinese Muslim
Relating to the LGBT mention from the OP, don't know if it's been posted since then, but I saw this little anecdote concerning Jadzia's kiss during Rejoined on Memory Alpha. Might be fake, but it's still rather humorous.

There is a story regarding the man complaining about his kids seeing the kiss: It was a production assistant who took the call. After hearing the man's complaint, the PA asked if the man would've been okay with his kids seeing one woman shoot the other. When the man said he would be okay with that, the PA said "You should reconsider who's messing up your kids".
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Much as "Code of Honor" sucked, I still hold that the three worst episodes of the series are "The Game", "Genesis", and by a long mile "Sub Rosa". Season 1 stuff I can write off as being season 1 and getting their legs.

Sub Rosa would be my personal vote for worst TNG episode as well.

The worst part of Code of Honor isn't the terrible "primitive" species, it's the combat scene with Tasha Yar. She wears a low budget spiked power glove and dances around an abstract art sculpture jungle gym. Physical combat is always a bit cheesy in TNG, but this is definitely one of the cheesier ones.

I'm rewatching DS9 right now and an episode that I really hated that I don't remember hating from previous watches is "Tribunal", where O'Brien is hauled in front of a Cardassian court for allegedly smuggling warheads to the Maquis. The cartoonish villainy of the Cardassian court system is unfortunate when it would have been a better idea to go for a subtle but still cruel outcome, The editing is awful: O'Brien is convicted, the trial ends, and at the last second Sisko enters the courtroom with another human, the Judge throws out the sentence, and then there's a cut to the runabout where Sisko explains the entire plot. It's the very worst example of telling, not showing. The acting and writing is pretty hammy as well. O'Brien's defence attorney is pretty much bordering on camp, O'Brien himself basically screams every single line. Memory Alpha says the episode was well-received among fans. I've seen the whole show front-to-back several times and I don't remember this episode, but what a stinker.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
The real No. 1 should be in the 2009 movie how Kirk gets promoted to Captain straight from Ensign as a reward for repeatedly breaking the rules. There's no rational reason for this to occur at all, but it does. It also annoyed me that instead of the movie just being a self-contained reboot, a ton of the backstory was essentially offscreen schenanigans.

Some other terrible things:

1) Data getting emotions in the movie so that there's a significant character development that changes the entire character, but it's not like there's any time time to explore that in a 2 hour movie.

2) Geordi La Forge with women throughout TNG. It seems like La Forge is supposed to come off as kind of pathetic with women, but what ended up on the screen was him being extremely creepy pretty much all the time.

3) Also, a plot hole: there's an episode in which La Forge and Ro Laren get stuck in some kind of phase shift where they can't be seen and pass through walls, etc. For some reason they don't pass through the floor, but pass through literally every other surface.
 

Won

Member
Sometimes I wish I was young again and don't know how bad Voyager is. Always enjoyed the show back in the day. :/

3) Also, a plot hole: there's an episode in which La Forge and Ro Laren get stuck in some kind of phase shift where they can't be seen and pass through walls, etc. For some reason they don't pass through the floor, but pass through literally every other surface.

Now that's a bit unfair. Pretty much every show out there with an episode like that ignores that issue.
 

JdFoX187

Banned
Sometimes I wish I was young again and don't know how bad Voyager is. Always enjoyed the show back in the day. :/



Now that's a bit unfair. Pretty much every show out there with an episode like that ignores that issue.

The only work that I've ever seen address that was Ghost Dad. I remember a scene where he kept falling through the floor in his home. He had to concentrate to keep from falling. Good movie.
 

Cheerilee

Member
3) Also, a plot hole: there's an episode in which La Forge and Ro Laren get stuck in some kind of phase shift where they can't be seen and pass through walls, etc. For some reason they don't pass through the floor, but pass through literally every other surface.

Grav plating. The source of artificial gravity in Trek is the floor itself, and that's different from the walls. You can't fall through the floor into space, because there's no gravity beneath the floor. And depending on the workings of this fictional technology, the other side of the plating might have some sort of counter-force that creates a rock-solid surface between the two forces, even when the physical substance of the floor is gone.
 

LakeEarth

Member
3) Also, a plot hole: there's an episode in which La Forge and Ro Laren get stuck in some kind of phase shift where they can't be seen and pass through walls, etc. For some reason they don't pass through the floor, but pass through literally every other surface.

Also, how are they breathing?
 

MattKeil

BIGTIME TV MOGUL #2
Wheaton might be a great actor, but he only seems to take roles that annoy me. I've read some of his blog posts and interviews, and I still don't think I'd get along with him well.

I had some limited interaction with him at TechTV and he seemed like a very nice and interesting guy to me. Very willing to engage in honest and critical discussion of TNG, which I think is pretty obvious on his blog and in some of his self-parody acting work.
 
Theres an episode somewhere like halfway through it's run of Voyager where they say they have like only two torpedoes left and they had previously made a point of how they couldn't get more in previous episodes. Yet a few eps after the one where they had two left, they are shown firing them off like they had no care in the world and seasons go by and they had launched countless more. This goes along with the whole Shuttlecraft thing in the OP but yea everything about Voyager tends to ignore the early premise they laid out.

And despite putting the entire crew to ration their energy consumption, they put on a program in later seasons that runs 24 hours a day for the crew to hang out at a fake pub on the holodeck. No you must conserve your energy and not eat, but anyone can be wasting vital energy in the holodeck at all times.
 
Theres an episode somewhere like halfway through it's run of Voyager where they say they have like only two torpedoes left and they had previously made a point of how they couldn't get more in previous episodes. Yet a few eps after the one where they had two left, they are shown firing them off like they had no care in the world and seasons go by and they had launched countless more. This goes along with the whole Shuttlecraft thing in the OP but yea everything about Voyager tends to ignore the early premise they laid out.

And despite putting the entire crew to ration their energy consumption, they put on a program in later seasons that runs 24 hours a day for the crew to hang out at a fake pub on the holodeck. No you must conserve your energy and not eat, but anyone can be wasting vital energy in the holodeck at all times.

It's a problem with trek economy generally. No money and no shortages or want for anything. Except when the plot needs it.
 

Htown

STOP SHITTING ON MY MOTHER'S HEADSTONE
Grav plating. The source of artificial gravity in Trek is the floor itself, and that's different from the walls. You can't fall through the floor into space, because there's no gravity beneath the floor. And depending on the workings of this fictional technology, the other side of the plating might have some sort of counter-force that creates a rock-solid surface between the two forces, even when the physical substance of the floor is gone.

That's how I rationalized it, too. It helped that later episodes of Trek used grav plating as actual plot points.
 

brian577

Banned
This always confused me, what were they doing that first season and how did they go through casting without casting an engineer as part of the main cast.

Because Roddenberry's original idea was that the Enterprise wouldn't even need an engineering section because it was so advanced. The engineering set had to be constructed last minute when the idea was scrapped long after casting had been completed.
 

Davey Cakes

Member
Reading through this thread makes me happy I skipped televised Star Trek after TNG and went on to Babylon 5 and Battlestar: Galactica.
Wait, so you never watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? I enjoy TNG myself but DS9 is as good or better in many ways, at least in my opinion. It has some divisive elements but it's worth checking out, just to see what side you land on. I wasn't sure what to expect going into it, but I ended up loving the hell out of it and finishing all 176 episodes in 3-4 months. It took me way longer to finish TNG. I can't speak for Voyager or Enterprise since I never watched more than an episode of either.

But speaking of Babylon 5, I just started watching it for the first time. After 10 episodes in the first season, I'm liking it so far. Doesn't resonate as well as DS9 for some reason, but I still appreciate the space station setting just as much.
 

Slayven

Member
Because Roddenberry's original idea was that the Enterprise wouldn't even need an engineering section because it was so advanced. The engineering set had to be constructed last minute when the idea was scrapped long after casting had been completed.

They were also suppose to have a dolphin.
 

Ripclawe

Banned
Voyager tends to ignore the early premise they laid out.

That premise would have made for a short series. I always thought okay they are in this new quadrant and whats going to happen is they find interesting new planets, marketplaces worlds where they would have to trade, make new allies, get involved in politics or wars they have no federation backup. Basically making it up as they go along.


Did not turn out that way at all...
 

DrForester

Kills Photobucket
There is a show we can deconstruct from awesome to WTF happened by the end of it...

Pretty simply they went from science focus to the producers wanting an action show after the first season. Then it just got even worse with Ironside coming in to complete the crapfest.
 
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