Fan or not, talk about what you hated in any version of Star Trek [spoilers]

Cafe Society
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TOS
The first series is lucky in that many of its most dated stylistic touches — the endlessly recycled incidental music, the gauzy close-ups of the Chick of the Week — have become camp and so remain fun to watch. However, as pointed out already, many of the stories were just plain dumb. “Piece of the Action,” anyone? And that one where Kirk is possessed by a woman … uueerghhh …

TNG
Wesley. Alexander. In fact, pretty much every child on any Star Trek series talks and acts like a refugee from a late 50s sitcom, only without any jokes. You really noticed it in TNG though; it was almost bizarre how little ability the writers had to imagine what children in a technological future would be like.

With the exception of “Best of Both Worlds,” their season-ending cliffhangers sucked. In fact, they all seemed like fairly obvious and grasping attempts to recreate the excitement that “Both Worlds” had stirred up. They should’ve just left it alone.

I’m far kinder on the regulars than many fans seem to be. I enjoy pretty much everyone, even Riker. Troi I liked the least, but she got better in the last seasons (she was one of the few things that did) when she toned down the would-be sexpot routine and just tried to act like a normal officer.

The last two seasons on the whole were painful. How ironic it didn’t get nominated for an Emmy until it had really started to suck.

DS9
Didn’t stick with it long. For one thing, it’s an ugly looking show. I hate the colors of DS9, the phony gun-metal grey combined with those fugly colors everybody seemed to wear. Who dressed Quark, anyway?

Kira Nerys. Ugh. So grating and unpleasant. I’d rather watch a series with two Trois than one Kira.

Voyager
I had hopes, but this is BY FAR the worst of the Trek series. Everything I hated about it can be summed up in one anecdote. I don’t remember the specifics, but the gist was that one of Voyager’s probes got stuck in the atmosphere of some planet. Another ship came by and told Voyager they were going to steal it. Janeway pursed her little lips and had her officers hatch an elaborate and dangerous scheme to fly into the planet’s atmosphere to retrieve the probe before the bad guys. That’ll teach 'em!

Now, why the HELL wouldn’t you just call the bad guys and say, “That probe is our property. If you make a move toward it, we’re going to open fire on you. You won’t like it. Have a nice day.” Not only did they not do that (and they would’ve had every right to), NOBODY EVEN MENTIONED IT as a possibility! (I’m sorry to be shouting so much. Getting a little carried away here.) At least TNG had Worf to suggest a little ass-kicking now and then. Voyager seemed to embody every stereotype of turn-of-the-century liberalism (and I say this as a liberal): mealy-mouthed, constantly apologetic, almost self-loathing in their unwillingness to impose themselves on anybody in any way.

Come to think of it, I should’ve taken the hint at that early episode when Chakotay doesn’t let Tom Paris take tricorder scans of a gravesite. Because that would “desecrate” the site. Apparently by this time Starfleet’s exploratory missions were conducted entirely by people gazing through viewports.

Enterprise
The theme song. Am I really the first to mention this?

I never bothered much with this one. It had a not-bad premise, but Berman and Braga simply can’t cut it anymore; I had no expectation that it would thrive, and it didn’t.

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TNG: Any episode where Picard is the main character, save the finale–he doesn’t do a good job of driving a story. I also believe this to be the main reason Nemesis sucked.

Voyager: The whole “can a hologram be human” thing got old around the first time they did it.

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Enterprise: The gratuitous fan-wanking. They couldn’t just write good science fiction, they had to pack in every possible bit of foreshadowing that the fans wanted to see. “Look! The first Andorian! Look! Tribbles! Pon-Farr! Tellarites! Mirror universe! Woohoo, we’re writing some good stuff now!”

Actually, no, you aren’t. It reminded me of that old joke about people sitting around in an old folks’ home saying numbers, because they had all heard each others’ jokes so many times they just numbered them to save time. “14! 23! 62! Surak!”

That, and the fact that, in spite of foreshadowing every single pivotal point ever to happen in the Star Trek Universe, they abandoned canon in the first episode and were obviously travelling down a separate time line. View screens???

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OMG–Me too! “Hey–Neelix got his lungs stolen!” “Is he ok?” “Yeah, we’ll just hook him up to holographic lungs, he’ll be cool for a while…”

NO! NO NO NO NO NO!! He’ll be DEAD! When they found him he should have been dead! You don’t live without lungs!

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TOS: It’s dated tripe with the exception of maybe 10 or so episodes. Fun to watch does’t make it a GOOD show. Remove your nostaglia and you’ll agree.

TNG: First rule, don’t watch it if Riker is clean shaven.

DS9: First rule, don’t watch it if Sisco has hair.
Once the Dominion war stuff starts the show is excellent. Excepting anything having to do with Pa Wraiths or Bajoran mysticism. Man those episodes sucked.

Voy: First rule, just don’t watch.

Ent: Shrug… just don’t watch.

The Fans: Weird nitpickin fans who point out flaws of technology of a series set hundreds of years in the future.

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In the world of Star Trek, there is only one thing to truly hate. That would be Bergmana.

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Anecdote for those who hate Wesley:

I don’t remember the episode very well… Something about Wesley being in the academy and there being some sort of trial… shrugs

Anyway, when it first aired, I was in a pizza place at Perdue University with the local SCAdians (my brother was a member, he was trying to get me involved). They convinced the manager to turn on said show. In the opening moments of it, Picard gets a message from the academy, something along the lines of:

“We know you’re a friend of the Crusher boy… There’s been an accident.”
cut to commercial

There was a moment’s pause, and the entire restaurant went up in cheers! :stuck_out_tongue:

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And then when it came to explaining something real, they talked to us like we were three. Like that damn Genesis project in Wrath of Khan. How many times did they explain the same stupid things??? I get it!

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No matter how they tried to explain it away in TNG, and in TOS, neither the Captain nor the First Officer are going on ‘away’ missions.

Enterprise is a huge naval vessel. Where are the marines? Not redshirts. Marines!

Kirk insulting Spock after Spock had died. “He was the most…human…of us.”

Time travel on demand. Suspending disbelief, I can accept unplanned TT and even the recreating of a situation that returns things to normal. Make it a non-repeatedable anomaly. But if you can travel in time on demand, then nothing more should be an issue ever again.

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TOS: I’m nostalgic about this series because I grew up watching the reruns with my dad, but it is rife with problems (many stated already). I must say that I found the end of “Mudd’s Women” very unsatisfying. These women could go from hag to hottie just by thinking about it? Okay…

TNG: Almost all holodeck episodes. I could care less about Picard running around the holodeck and pretending to be a private eye. I would place the Q “Robin Hood” episode in this collection as well, since it was a wasted episode to give the cast a chance to run around and play dress-up.

Worf’s son, Alexander Rozhenko. Horrible character, and any episode he is in is essentially unwatchable as far as I’m concerned. This goes triple for the episode “Cost of Living” which also featured the almost unwatchable Lwaxana Troi being a negative influence on the boy.

As long as we’re mentioning Lwaxana, I would choose “Dark Page” (the episode exploring her damaged psyche) as her standout horrible episode.

The entire 2nd season in general, and Dr. Pulaski in particular. Horrid character; her “aw-shucks” demeanor made DeForrest Kelley roll over in his grave (and he wasn’t even dead yet!). Not to mention the season finale clip show.

“Sub Rosa”, or Dr. Crusher getting it on with a ghost. Where’s that puking smiley? Scariest episode of the series, and not because of the supernatural elements.

Ensign Ro: No thanks. Obvious set-up for DS9, but apparently they couldn’t get her under contract. So they replaced her with the equally annoying Kira portrayed by Nana Visitor. Speaking of DS9:

DS9: The Ferengi subplots got a little tedious towards the end. The Bajoran mythology was also somewhat weak and often made for boring episodes. The worst for me though was the baseball episode. Who cares? Note that this is another holodeck episode, so perhaps I’m biased.

Vic Fontaine: Need I say more? Perhaps the ultimate abuse of holodeck privileges.

Voy: A great premise that was never executed with any great success. Ultimately forgettable. Not to mention a huge over-reliance on the holodeck towards the end. Most egregious of these examples was Janeway’s holodeck lover in the Irish Pub in “Fair Haven”, and Leonardo DaVinci’s appearance in “Concerning Flight”. How pathetic was this series? And how pathetic am I to have watched most of it? Don’t answer that. :slight_smile:

Ent: The temporal cold war was a waste of my life. It got pretty good towards the end, but there were some clunkers even then. Of particular note was the recent horrid episode “Demons” with Peter Weller, with some of the worst dialogue in the history of not only Star Trek, but television as a whole. It has to be seen to be believed.

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I HATED that in ST Wrath of Kahn the best thing Kirk could say about Spock was:

“…He was the most human…”

WTF? Like being a human is the highest compliment in the universe? All the shows did that tho, Q was interested in Humans because of some quality that not a single freaking race in the entire universe had!? I am human, we aint that special!!

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Not with that attitude!
Anyhoo… the popularity of the various mirror universe episodes should’ve taught Berman/Braga that the fans don’t mind (and may even enjoy) seeing some ruthlessness in the regular lineup. You don’t have to make the characters serial killers, but how about a moment like:

Parris: They’re attacking!
Janeway: Well, attack them back.

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According to Picard Star Fleet wasn’t a military organization so obviously they wouldn’t need marines. Why a non-military organization carried so many guns, referred to one another by rank, and held court martials is a little confusing though.

Marc

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The Non Military StarFleet was my induction to The Nitpickers Guild. I mean, come on, Gene! In your original proposal for Star Trek you called the Captain a Horatio Hornblower type, in the first series you had ships armed for war and under a centralised command, you even had war situations in several of your first episodes! What happened? Senility set in by TNG? (I think that has been suggested by people close to him.)

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Wesley. Kira. Chakotay.

I Hate Them SO MUCH.

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Man, I had blocked out memories of Worf’s son. Thanks a lot.
I hated how the Klingons morphed from evil bad guys into honorable warriors. Also Romulians, the Borg and those other aliens (the dominion?) are lame. At least Tos had some non-humanoid aliens.

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Ok, I gotta put my ignorance on display here: Is my guess correct that “Bergmana” is shorthand for Berman and Braga, those responsible for destroying the franchise? Or is it something else?

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And one of the reasons I disliked it. Quark, Rom and Nog were aliens, but like all aliens in the Star Trek universe, they never acted alien, they were just humans who looked funny. Does anyone remember the TNG episode that introduced the Ferengi? They were, at least a little, alien in that episode, they acted differently than humans. But the writers just couldn’t keep that up, so the poor Ferengi were reduced to being just greedy humans. And then, even that couldn’t be kept up, so we got Quark et al rejecting the normal Ferengi way of being and becoming, as you say, more human.

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[Ed McMahon]You are correct, sir![/EM]

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Well, the original series took risks and as a result the quality was very uneven, with some extraordinary episodes, a lot of middling episodes, and some truly awful episodes. In 1987 and later, though, the shows have swung between two extremes:

[ul][li]Presenting a heavy-handed politically-correct rather sanctimonious message (many TNG episodes, some DS9 episodes, almost all Voyager episodes), or[/li][li]Pandering to adolescent fans with skimpily-clad women (early TNG with Troi’s catsuits, Voyager after adding Seven of Nine, Enterprise with every “decon gel” scene).[/ul][/li]
The original series often invited the audience to think; the later shows often assumed the audience was incapable of thinking. How much of this is due to Berman and Braga, I can’t really say, but it mostly happened on their watch.