Star Trek is a sweeping franchise with over a thousand episodes spread out over sixty years. It contains some of the best science fiction ever put to film, but there’s bound to be some clunkers in any artistic creation of that size. Trekkies tend to take this franchise very, very seriously (I know I do), but this can sometimes manifest as hating on episodes that don’t fit the tone they tell themselves the series has. But then again, Trekkies love when the Enterprise meets Space Abraham Lincoln.

 

I’m going to go through the classic live action Star Trek series and talk about the classic hated episode that isn’t that bad, and list off the actual worst episodes, in badness order. Let’s get rolling.

Star Trek

Spock’s Brain has a legendarily bad reputation among Trekkies. What they hate about it is that it’s extremely stupid and goofy, but also, like, Star Trek is incredibly stupid and goofy. Sometimes the Enterprise is fighting space wizards with cat familiars or a recreation of the gunfight at the OK Corral or space genocide wars between aliens who look exactly human except they’re black on one side white on the other (and their hated enemies the same, but with the color orientation reversed). That has grown more and more uncommon as fandom has taken the shows more seriously, but it’s an indelible aspect of the franchise. Spock’s Brain is about as stupid as it gets.

 

In Spock’s Brain aliens steal, well, Spock’s brain so they can use it as a super computer and the Enterprise has to get it back before Spock’s body, which is stumbling around very stupidly, dies. It’s an attempt at a comedy episode and the humor doesn’t hit. The problem with viewing it as the worst episode of the series is, well, there’s much worse episodes. There’s nothing particularly offensive about how it’s bad.

 

Where Star Trek really gets bad is when it fumbles on it’s supposed progressive social values and does something weird and bigoted. The one thing that Trekkies get right is that the worst episodes are mostly bunched up in the third season, when the show was on death’s door and about to be cancelled, and there wasn’t enough editorial overview of the scripts.

 

The Paradise Syndrome is the third worst episode of Star Trek. A coconut conks Captain Kirk on the head and gives him amnesia, so he becomes a Space Native American Chief while the Enterprise goes off to stop the planet from being destroyed. To Trek’s credit their portrayal of the Space Native Americans isn’t as bad as you might expect for 1967, that is to say they weren’t Italians painted red and singing The Potato Song while doing an approximation of what they think a “war dance” is, but it’s still pretty bad in a Noble Savage kind of way.

 

The second worst episode is The Way to Eden. A dissident academic takes over the Enterprise on a mission to find the legendary Space Garden of Eden. No, this is a totally different episode from Star Trek V: The One Where The Gang Kills God, the dissident academic isn’t Spock’s previously unmentioned secret brother. The episode pulls off an impressive trick in how it portrays the space hippies that follow the dissident academic around. It feels somehow racist against a group of people who are by no means a race. I don’t even like hippies and even I am offended on their behalf. It’s one of the episodes that really hammers home that Star Trek’s progressive social values were constructed after the fact by fandom and backported into the franchise by Big Rod himself later on.

 

The worst episode of the original Star Trek has got to be The Turnabout Intruder. It was written by Gene Roddenberry himself, that’s how you know it has strange issues with women. In it, one of Captain Kirk’s ex-girlfriends is absolutely ape-shit pissed that women cannot become Starfleet captains, so she body swaps with Captain Kirk. But then immediately Spock and McCoy clock what happened because she’s such a crazy bitch and women are so emotional.

 

Star Trek’s progressive bonafides don’t come literally from nowhere. The show is genuinely somewhat anti-racist. The show wanted to be on some level feminist, but also women have traditional feminine jobs, like receptionist, nurse or waitress and rarely have much plot relevant work to do. This is a problem in TNG as well. I think it’s fair to place this bias at the feet of Big Rod himself, because once he was out of the picture you started to get much better portrayed female characters, such as Kira Nerys.

The Animated Series

Thankfully, the original series wasn’t the end of Star Trek, so I have more to watch and make fun of. Star Trek: The Animated Series was a stripped down more kid friendly version of Star Trek made for Saturday morning TV. But there’s way less episodes. There isn’t really a concensus about what episodes are the “worst,” so there necessarily isn’t an unfairly maligned episode. I’ll still note a particular stinker.

 

In The Practical Joker a coconut hits the Enterprise’s computer and makes it an asshole. It runs pranks on the crew, becoming increasingly deranged as time goes on. Ultimately Captain Kirk props up another coconut in a nebula and once it hits the Enterprise’s computer it goes back to regular. It’s a comedy episode where few of the gags work. Even thinking of it as the worst TAS episode it’s hard to hate it that much because it’s over in like twenty minutes.

The Next Generation

The episode of TNG that unfairly gets the most hate is Sub Rosa. In it the Enterprise visits Space Scotland for the funeral of Dr. Beverly Crusher’s grandmother. After reading a particularly erotic chapter of her grandmother’s diary Bev discovers a candle with her grandmother’s ghost boyfriend inside, who then seduces her. It gets a lot of hate because it doesn’t fit the much more serious tone of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and is instead more of a gothic horror kind of thing. I’m not saying it’s not a weird and even bad episode, but it’s not even top five.

 

It is actually hard to narrow down the list to just three. I really wanted to add in The Child, the episode where Troi gets space pregnant by an alien trying to speedrun human experience and Cost of Living, the episode where Troi’s mom becomes friends with Worf’s neglected son Alexander and teaches him to let his freak flag fly. I also really hate The Outcast, where the Enterprise goes to the planet of the lesbians but Riker fucks one straight so they have to give her conversion therapy. All these episodes pale in comparison to my real top three.

 

One thing to keep in mind is that the bad episodes of TNG are mostly bunched up in the first two seasons, which was before the show really figured out what it was trying to do, and in the last season, where the A-team had already gone on to write for Deep Space Nine. All of these worst episodes come from the first two seasons.

 

Justice is a tragic episode. The Enterprise visits a planet of bleach blonde and boob jobbed toga Aryans. Everything seems cool and good (!?) until Wesley Crusher steps on some flowers and is sentenced to death for his crime. It turns out the planet is being run by a mad computer so the Enterprise has to find a way to force it to release Wesley. It feels like a warmed over plot from the original series and is creatively empty.

 

From a structural standpoint Shades of Gray is probably the worst constructed episode of the Star Trek franchise. Riker gets conked on the head by a viral coconut and to heal his deadly space amnesia Doctor Crusher has to play clips from previous episodes to save money on shooting new footage.

 

But as bad as Shades of Gray is, it is not as execrable as the real worst episode: Code of Honor. It’s incredible that TNG came out of the gate so hot, this is only the fourth episode in the entire series. In Code of Honor the Enterprise goes to Space Africa and has to negotiate for vaccine. The only thing the bone-through-nose caricature of an African tribal chief wants is a white woman, specifically Tasha Yar. She is the doomed original security chief on the Enterprise D. Yeesh, the episode ends up with really fucked up racial and sexual politics. As I understand it, in the original script the Space Africans were a generic warrior race but the production staff made them Space Africans to make them more interesting. I don’t know if I can really give the writer too much credit because she went on to write Emancipation, (also) the fourth episode of Stargate SG1, which is broadly similar but this time the space warriors are Space Mongols. I think Katharyn Powers just has a thing about "warrior" races.

DS9

Deep Space Nine as a series is an outlier. It went into production when Star Trek: The Next Generation was at the height of it’s powers. It pulled over the best staff from TNG, which led to a bland and forgettable seventh season.

 

The thing is… DS9 doesn’t’ really get bad. There are some episodes that don’t really land, but almost all of those still do what they set out to do.

 

The most hated episode of Deep Space Nine is Move Along Home. Board game aliens come through the wormhole and Quark, the station’s bartender, tries to scam them. To punish him they trap The Gang in a board game and force Quark to play through it. It is indeed very goofy, even silly. And the reveal that “No Quark, you weren’t playing for the lives of the crew, this was just a board game, what is wrong with you?” could deflate the tension. But ultimately it’s a mediocre episode, it just breaks the tone that Trekkies expect from their serious franchise.

 

Looking through lists of the supposed worst episodes of DS9 you end up with a mad range of choices with very few of them lining up and in my estimation most of them actually being pretty good episodes. Yeah, Troi’s mom comes back to DS9, but actually those are great uses of the character. People really do not like the Evil Universe episodes. In fact, I really wanted the thesis of this section to be actually DS9 doesn’t have bad episodes. But I can’t do that.

 

Profit and Lace fucking sucks giant Ferengi lobes.

 

The Ferengi episodes were always a problem in TNG. As I’ve noted before Star Trek has a thing where they create species that are different configurations of Jewish stereotypes. Vulcans are the positive Jewish stereotype people. The Ferengi were the next iteration of this, being the bad Jewish stereotype people. Instead of noses they have big ears, but they are the only species allowed to perform hated capitalist functions in this space socialist utopia universe. Subsequent series have brought in the Lanthamites, the Space Wandering Jews, a particularly weird one. I bet they go for a horned species next.

 

Deep Space Nine went a long way toward healing this deranged plot element. The Ferengi, through the characters of Quark and Rom, are fleshed out as a civilization and they become a much more rich and well portrayed society. Ferengi episodes in Deep Space Nine tend to be comedy episodes and when they delve into Ferengi culture they are more satirizing American culture of the 90’s, through a distorted lens. They are mostly great, except for Profit and Lace.

 

So it turns out Quark and Rom’s mother is hooking up with the Grand Nagus, the president of Ferenginar. She has been whispering into his very large ears about feminism, and Grand Nagus Zek has begun some basic reforms. This has caused Ferengi Gamer Gate. Quark is pissed that his mother has caused such upheaval in his society. A Ferengi senator is invited to DS9 to smooth this over, but Quark pisses off his mother so she won’t help in de-escalate. So far so good. This is a really interesting premise for an episode. Then it goes off the rails.

 

Quark is forced to go through the transition so she can prove to the senator that females have worth. Excuse me what!? I kind of get what they’re going for, but it absolutely doesn’t work. The goal was to have Quark learn a very important lesson about females having value himself, but after this he still goes on to sexually harass his employees just as badly as he did before. It’s gross and weird and it really doesn’t stick the landing for such a sensitive concept. It is indefensibly bad for a series that pretty much always does better.

Voyager

Voyager is a contentious series in the Star Trek canon. It was opposite DS9 for much of it’s run, so the fandom bifurcated where fans would pick one or the other to be their real show. It was initially popular for having a diverse crew and more “lean in” feminism, but eventually it’s problems caught up with it. Now, Voyager is often hated for unfair reasons, basically it’s a series of comparable quality to TNG (pejorative) but it has an even more diverse cast. The conservative side of Star Trek fandom hates it because woman captain bad, whereas I just barely like the series because woman captain can be bad too.

 

The most hated episode of Voyager is Threshold. It is a deranged goofy story. Tom Paris tricks out a shuttle to go too fast. He ends up going faster than infinite speed and that causes him to hyper-evolve for some reason and turn into a space gecko. He bites Janeway and turns her into a space gecko too. They fuck off and have a brood of space geckos on some random planet. Then the tattoo guy rescues them and turns them back human and everyone looks uncomfortably at each other and says “Let us never speak of this again.”

 

It is a classic goofy weird epsiode. One of the main problems with the “science” of Star Trek is that the writers are not scientists. Evolution doesn’t work like this. There’s another widely hated TNG episode where there’s a de-evolution virus on the Big D which causes everyone to turn into some creature they are descended from. Trekkies are nerds and science this bad offends them. Honestly, it offends me too. Another reason it gets exaggerated hate is that it actually won an Emmy award. The gecko loaf they put on Robert Duncan McNeil was absolutely banging, they were rightfully proud of that. But ultimately Star Trek doesn’t win many awards, so Trekkies are embarrassed that out of all episodes this one won an Emmy.

 

The thing about Voyager is that it is as swingy as The Next Generation, with just as many low lows, but also the show ends up getting a lot more hate than it deserves, so I’m going to be circumspect about my hated episodes. Some of the episodes most hated, such as Mortal Coil, are actually great. That’s the one where Neelix dies and gets resurrected, then has an existential crisis because the Talaxian afterlife doesn’t exist (interesting, because the Vulcan afterlife and Klingon afterlife both canonically do).

 

In Sacred Ground Kes, the two year old Neelix (the ship’s chef) is grooming gets injured in some stupid alien religious ritual, so Janeway is forced to go through a bunch of hokum. It’s about how science is fake and bullshit, she needs to smoke peace pipe and something something crystals. It’s a part of a really stupid anti-science undercurrent that pops up from time to time in Star Trek.

 

Tattoo is another legendarily bad Voyager episode. This requires a little explanation. Chakotay is the second in command on Voyager. He is a Space Native American from a fake tribe. Jamake Highwater was a white guy who pretended to be Native American* for some reason and he was a consultant on Voyager to ensure the authenticity of Chakotay’s character. The problem is that indigenous Americans were not and are not a cultural monolith. There are a wide range of cultures that spread across the Americas, but this guy’s understanding of them was vaguely defined pan flute mysticism, squashing all cultures together in a bland homogeneous broth. Hank Adams, a American Indian Movement member and journalist identified him as a race faker in the 80’s**, but even to his death white people generally regarded Highwater as a “real” Native American.

 

So that brings us to Tattoo. Chakotay finds a symbol from his fake Native American tribe on a planet tens of thousands of light years from Earth. In the process of finding out what the hell is going on Chakotay has to dress up like a stereotypical Native American and go on a Vision Quest. The resolution is a little bit confusing, but it turns out aliens are his tribe’s Sky Spirits and they’ve seeded fake Native American tribes across space for some reason. There’s also a subplot where The Doctor gives himself a cold to teach an important lesson about some bullshit.

 

The worst episode of Voyager is, however Retrospect. The intent of the episode is supposed to be a metaphor for the Satanic Panic, where children had false memories implanted of abuse at the hands of a Satanic Cabal. Seven of Nine has a trauma response to a trader they meet. The Doctor for some reason tries hypnotic regression to help her find out why she had that reaction. It initially appears that the trader sexually assaulted her, which causes a lot of drama. Eventually they figure out that this was actually some unrelated Borgs trauma that squeezed out, but not before the trader blows himself up trying to evade fake sexual assault accusations. The problem with this is the episode ends up lending credence to a common cultural narrative about pervasive false accusations of sexual assault. That’s a rare thing that happens, but it becomes a permission narrative so you can allow yourself to not believe a woman when she has an accusation against someone you don’t want to be guilty of such a thing.

Enterprise

By the time of Enterprise Star Trek was running on fumes. The great creative minds behind DS9 had moved on to other projects and yet they were still dragging around a deflated and empty version of the Enterprise on poorly thought out prequel adventures that were either bland and by the numbers or ended with Captain Archer looking directly at the camera and in a perfect Peter Griffin voice saying, “Hey Lois remember the time an episode from later in the Star Trek canon?”

 

And in fact Peter Griffin is a minor character in the series for some reason. ***

 

One of the main problems with Enterprise is that it’s most hated episode was a bad idea that was performed badly. I can’t pull the trick of um, ackshully the worst episode is good. It would be too implausible.

 

Enterprise has a lot of stupid episodes, such as the one where Trip, the ship’s engineer, gets mpregged and sprouts arm nipples, Unexpected. It also gets a lot of hate because it was running opposite Battlestar Galactica, whose figurehead was Ronald D. Moore, the guy who eventually got the most credit for DS9 being good. A lot of people hate Daedalus, the episode where the beloved inventor of the teleporter comes onboard to try and trick Enterprise into helping him rescue his son from the Phantom Zone. The episode is constructed perfectly fine. I don’t think these are really all that notably bad, per se, but the average level of quality for the whole series is definitely the lowest out of middle period Trek.

 

In particular I don’t really like the whole Space Iraq War arc that takes up season 3, but I get what they were going for. They got blown out by BSG running opposite it and could not compete. They shouldn’t have even tried.

 

The series did get really, really bad sometimes, but I’ll admit, number three and two don’t hold a candle to the worst episode, which, if you know Enterprise you know the only episode it could be.

 

I think generally the show started to really improve in the last season, but it still made some mistakes. The show became minorly serialized and tried to embrace it’s role as a prequel. Divergence is the climax of the Klingon Loaf Arc. In the original Star Trek Klingons were to quote the philosopher Voltaire, “Puerto Ricans in gold lame” and in all other series and movies “Heavy metal rockers with lobsters on their heads.” In the classic DS9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations, the one where the gang goes back in time to The Trouble with Tribbles, they see a Klington who looks like a slightly orange human. When asked Worf looked directly at the camera and said “We do not discuss it with outsiders.” That was enough. We all know what’s going on. They didn’t have the money or the concept to make Klingons look appropriately alien, so this is what they did. We can wink and nudge, we don’t need more than that.

 

So anyway, across this arc of Enteprise, Klingon scientists look directly at the camera and say in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois, remember that time Genetic Supermans took over the Earth in the 1990’s?” They use the genetic augment technology to make Super Klingons, but somehow this leads to a virus spreading through the Klingon Empire. Doctor Phlox is kidnapped so he can come up with a cure. The Enterprise hunts him down to rescue him. There’s some boring action set pieces. Finally, Doctor Phlox says in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois, remember that time Klingons had flat foreheads?”

 

It calls attention to a thing in Star Trek canon that isn’t a problem for anyone but the most de-evolved Trekkies.

 

Stigma is my number two most hated Enterprise episode. It’s another one that’s trying to have a pro-social message but they bungle it rather badly. Previously the NX01 met a crew of cool Vulcans that aren’t nerds like the normal Vulks. They drink and smoke pot. In that episode T’Pol, the Vulcan science officer, did mind-meld with one of the cool Vulcans (who turned out to be a big asshole). It turned out that doing mind-meld gave T’Pol Vulcan HIV. While at a planet with some Vulcan doctors Phlox tries to get better treatment info about Vulcan HIV without it being obvious it’s for T’Pol, but they figure it out. Vulcan Ronald Reagan calls a hearing but one of the doctors distracts everyone by admitting that he has Vulcan HIV too and this is sufficiently distracting the T’Pol isn’t recalled to Vulcan for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell reasons.

 

The metaphor doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. A mind meld is an intimate act in later Star Trek canon, but it’s strange for the idea to be likened to bareback gay sex. In general I think they didn’t have a plan for why the Vulcans are such big assholes when they started. It led to most of the better episodes of the series, mostly the ones involving the conflict with the Andorians, but that is also down to Jeffrey Combs being an excellent actor and Shran being a great character, more than the treatment of the Vulcans.

 

Finally, of course, These Are The Voyages is the worst episode of Enterprise. Before Star Trek Picard it was the worst episode of Star Trek overall. Now it’s not even in the top dozen, maybe fifteen.

 

The problem with These are the Voyages are that it is a series finale for a series that already had a series finale that was great, and it is not this show anyway besides. Imagine being an actor and having your series finale hijacked to be a finale for an altogether different series. It’s insulting and deranged.

 

In These Are the Voyages Riker is playing holodeck during the beloved TNG episode The Pegasus, where Riker’s old asshole captain has come aboard for a mission to steal illegal technology from a destroyed vessel where Riker and the captain tested it before a mutiny. On the holodeck he is playing the last mission of the NX01 Enterprise set a few years after the then current season in the run up to the founding of the Federation. Riker watches a story unfold where Shran enlists Captain Archer’s help in rescuing his daughter, which draws the attention of Shran’s enemies, who attack the NX01. Trip Tucker has to sacrifice himself to save the ship. This teaches Riker the important lesson (???) and so he decides to do the right thing and go back to the TNG episode.

 

It was a bad idea and a bad appeal to nostalgia.

 

The thing to keep in mind about Star Trek is that it’s all still really fun. And Trekkies do take this shit too seriously. Yes, I think these episodes are bad, but they are still a fun watch. Earnest failure is sometimes as good as something… well, not good, exactly, but it can be it’s own kind of satisfying.

 

Fuck it, let’s rewatch Move Along Home.

 

* - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamake_Highwater

** - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Adams

*** - Seth MacFarlane played Ensign Rivers, who is like slightly in the background of two episodes