JC's Trek Talk

The Worst of Star Trek Voyager Threshold Threshold.  For about 10 years this episode held to dubious honor of being considered the worst episode of Trek ever (until Enterprise ended in 2005 with "These are the Voyages" which actually stole Threshold's shit crown).  The crew equip a shuttlecraft with a new form of dilithium and Tom Paris breaks the Warp 10 barrier (read: infinite speed).  After returning to the ship he mutates into a lizard creature.  He then kidnaps captain Janeway, takes her to warp 10 and they both mutate into salamander creatures.  And have salamander babies on a planet.  Even Brannon Braga has admitted this episode was a "royal steaming stinker". Virtuoso Voyager meets the Qomar, a species who have never heard music.  They then go totally googoo fan girl over the Doctors opera singing.  Boring premise.  Also the Qomar come across as jerks for fangirling over the Doctor, then just as quickly replacing him with a "superior,...

The Worst of Star Trek Deep Space Nine Profit and Lace A potentially progressive episode in the tradition of trek, using Ferengi society to talk about gender inequality, the "glass ceiling" and women in business, totally wasted by playing the "Quark in drag" plot device as the butt of a joke.  What could have been a good "deeper message/moral lesson" episode was instead turned into a cringeworthy crossdressing comedy.   Let He Who is Without Sin… DS9's Risa episode.  Jadzia takes Worf on a vacation to Risa.  And he's miserable the whole time.  Which should have been obvious before they left.  And he bitches and complains the whole episode.  Yawn.  The episode was supposed to explore the topic of sex, but it wasn't able to deliver on that due to tv restrictions at the time.  The only thing we got resembling that was Terry Ferrell and Vanessa Williams in one piece swimsuits with their legs around each other. The Muse Bad boring A-plot abou...

The Worst of Star Trek The Next Generation Code of Honor The poster child for the issues in TNG season 1.  Poor casting decisions and a bad story resulted in this racist and sexist episode.  The aliens of the week being Hollywood stereotypical, tribal African caricatures all played by African American actors and the sexism throughout the episode ("a woman? Your chief of security?") make this episode nearly unwatchable.  When asked about TNGs worst episode at a convention, Jonathan Frakes famously once said "One of our worst, and the one even Gene [Roddenberry] was ashamed of, was that horrible, racist piece of shit from the first season "Code of Honor". Oh my god in heaven!" Shades of Grey The clip show.  A boring, skippable episode.  I'll give this one a slight break, seeing that the 88-89 season was shortened by a writers strike, and the writers on TNG were exhausted by end of the season despite only producing 22 episodes down from 26.  That does not...

The Worst of Star Trek The Original Series Turnabout Intruder The finale episode of The Original Series.  Kirk's old flame is jealous of his success as a starship captain, so she steals his body to become captain of the Enterprise.  Miserably bad acting, a tired boring gimmick (the body swap trope), and a premise (Lester's motivation being that women can't be starship captains) that is sexist and insulting to what the franchise stands for (and wrong: see captains Hernandez, Georgiou, Batel and Janeway among others).  It boggles the mind that Gene Roddenberry's name is in the credits as the writer of this episode.  With this episode TOS ended with a deafening whimper. Spock’s Brain "Brain and Brain!  What is Brain?!"  This episode.  The long ridiculed, goofy third season premiere.  A goofy story filled with silly, absurd, nonsensical, cringeworthy moments like McCoy remote controlling brain-less Spock and being able to perform brain surgery after g...

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