Blog:My Top 10 Worst Episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation

To tie in-with the launch of the third season of Star Trek: Discovery (which I'm holding out absolutely no hope for being decent), here are my ten worse episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. To prevent the first two seasons from dominating this list, I'm only allowing two episodes from each season.


 * 10. The Loss (S4): They had a decent idea, exploring a character suddenly finding themselves with a disability, but it really didn't work in execution. I get that Troi isn't going to be in the best of moods after losing what to her is one of her most basic senses, but the episode needs more than just 40 minutes of her ranting to everyone about how much her life sucks now. And of course, they cop out and reveal at the end that her disability was only temporary. If you want to watch this done far better, watch DS9's "It's Only a Paper Moon".


 * 9. Force of Nature (S7): You can tell that this is a product of the early-mid 90s, when the "Save the Earth" movement was really picking up steam. Ironically, the problem with this episode is that its environmental message doesn't show up until about the halfway point, and that everything before that is just completely boring and uninteresting padding. I would have ranked this episode lower on the list, but I'll give it credit for actually speaking out against eco-terrorism, which at least gives it a far more balanced approach than the crap we see on Discovery and beyond, and even many of the "message episodes" from Voyager and Enterprise.


 * 8. Silicon Avatar (S5): This one's here mostly because of how it turns Picard into a complete idiot. When Kirk encountered a planet-eating monster back in TOS, he immediately took every step possible towards destroying it. In two different episodes! Here, Picard's idea of dealing with a planet-eating monster is to politely ask it if it would mind not eating any more planets, and then chew out anyone who suggests that just maybe a full volley of photon torpedoes might be a better way of dealing with it. There seems to be some kind of anti-hunting message in the mix, but fortunately it's too half-hearted to actually be annoying.


 * 7. Rascals (S6): Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? Having a bunch of main characters suddenly turned into children? It was only about a season-and-a-half ago that we got rid of Wesley! And while that would have been bad enough by itself, the way the ship gets taken over by a bunch of Ferengi piloting Klingon junkers is just flat-out embarrassing. File this one under bad idea, worse execution.


 * 6. The Outcast (S5): I know what you're thinking. I hate this because I don't want propaganda in my entertainment, yadda yadda yadda. Well, I can actually give this one a break on that front, because back in 1992 this particular kind of message show was still very rare. Its main problem is that it's really not clear what the message is actually supposed to be! I get that they didn't want to jam the message down people's throats, but still, it's kind of a problem when I can't tell whether I'm supposed to be learning about gay rights, transgender rights, or feminism. The result of this is that we get an episode that bounces between a weird and confusing aesop, a horribly-executed romance, and a boring sub-plot about some shuttle pilots in danger from the Anomaly of the Week.


 * 5. Sub Rosa (S7): In retrospect, this episode foreshadows a problem that the early seasons of Voyager (and even as late as the "Fair Haven" episodes from that show's second-last season) tended to have; the writers doing a story that's pretty much from a completely different genre to what we came to see, and then when it gets a poor reception, blaming the fans for not appreciating what they were trying to accomplish. Then again, this one kind of dodges that issue by being just a terrible story, with a lame and laughable villain, some of the cheesiest romance scenes ever seen on the show, a "Scottish" colony that seems to have been created by someone whose only knowledge of Scotland comes from Sean Connery and Groundskeeper Willie, and attempts to explain away ghostly phenomena via technobabble. It's at least entertainingly bad, which is more than can be said for the remaining four.


 * 4. Up The Long Ladder (S2): They had two subplots in this episode - one dealing with a planet of Irish stereotypes, and another dealing with a planet entirely populated by clones. Guess which one of the subplots the episode focuses on? The wrong one, of course. Then again, considering that the "planet of clones" subplot was apparently meant to somehow set up a pro-abortion message (which I'd never have worked out if I hadn't read about it), maybe this episode was just onto a loser from the word go.


 * 3. Shades of Grey (S2): Okay, it's a clip show. The odds are against it from the start. Still, the way they go about it is just lazy! There are any number of ways they could have done a decent clip show - have Picard doing crew performance evaluations, or have him report to his superior on his first two years in command of the Enterprise, anything like that! Instead, all we get is Dr. Pulaski giving Riker bad dreams in order to kill off an alien virus. Lame.


 * 2. Angel One (S1): Talk about ageing badly. An episode about a planet dominated by women who mistreat and sneer at all men? Okay, props for predicting how 21st century America would turn out, but that doesn't make watching this episode today any easier. Mind you, it would still have been a terrible episode even when it first aired. The guest characters are annoying, the "battle of the sexes" plot would have been incredibly clunky and ham-fisted even for a TOS episode, and the subplot about how everyone on-board the Enterprise is at horrible risk from a virus that doesn't appear to be any worse than a bad cold is just plain laughable.


 * 1. Code of Honor (S1): If they had just filmed the script as it was written, it would still have been an awful episode, but it would probably have been just about better than "Shades of Grey" and "Angel One". Instead, we get an episode with laughably bad direction, awful performances, and the worst fight scene in the entire Star Trek franchise. However, what really makes this episode the stuff of legendary badness is mainly the result of one spectacularly stupid decision - making the entire population of the alien planet look and act like stereotypical African tribesmen. It's kind of telling that you can accuse this episode of being racist, and absolutely no-one will accuse of you of virtue-signalling. Add all of that to a plot that would have felt outdated in the 1940s, let alone the 1960s, and, well, I think SF Debris summed it up best - it's like a missing TOS episode that someone discovered. And after watching it for five minutes, you pray for someone to lose it again.