The built in crutch they seemed to pull up when personal drama wasn’t enough.
TOS: The Transporter malfunction. Several times teh Transporter would fail at the most importatnt moments. Sorry But If you have that as your main means of transportation to teh planet have better back ups and redundancies.
TNG: Warp core breech. One time is exciting, two interesting but come on it seemed like at least three times a season the damn containment field was ready to drop. Sometimes it blew them up (fixed by a reset) but mostly it would be a computer count down until a last minute fix. Lazy writing.
DS9: The Whole changing The Bajorians thing. When first introduced Bajorians seemed like a metaphor for the Occupied territories, then quickly shifted into something else akin to the Jews after the holocaust then they became like the medieval Catholic Church.
The wild mood shifts of the Cardassians and Klingons over the series was odd too.
I can write those off to the influence of the Founders
VOY: Voyager. The whole series annoyed me save Tuvok I thought he did an excellent job at being a Vulcan. The Writers just used him poorly.
Enterprise: The whole pandering wishy washiness of Bergma. If they had a vision they should have stuck to it. Instead, they kept toying with the show based on viewer complaints and ratings trying to keep viewers.
First was to soften T’Pol because she didn’t give the viewers the warm Fuzzies, then the gratuitous panda. Then trying Story arcs and changing T’Pol again. then the relationships shifted. By the end you don’t know what the series is about or who these people are supposed to be. Just a pulpy mass.
Just FYI, both of 'em are now featured recurring characters in the Star Trek: New Frontier series of novels. M’ress even got accused of murdering a fellow officer at one point… :eek:
No strong feelings about TOS or TAS; the latter I’ve never seen at all, while the former I’ve only seen a scattering of (mostly good) episodes of. Similarly, I was unable to really get on-board with the ‘Star Trek staying still’ premise of DS9, so I didn’t watch it. Having heard good things about the Dominion war, I intend to catch it on DVD at some point.
TNG:
- The Warp ‘speed limit’, fortunately dropped after the episode it was first mentioned
- Pretty much the whole of Nemesis.
- Wesley as an acting Ensign
- Wouldn’t have objected to a bit of Panda with Troi and Beverly Crusher. And Yar. What!?! :o
VOY:
- Neelix. I don’t think there was any episode to which he contributed positively. I wanted him to die in pain, but alas! 'Twas not to be. At least the Federation at large was spared him.
- That thrice-darned Irish village. Earth to Voyager: TNG did the basic idea about sixteen times! It’s done!
- All of the children.
- As mentioned, the amazing appearing romance in the final episode or two. Chakotay and 7/9? What?
- The excuses they had to come up with again and again for Janeway not to use the latest way of getting home.
ENT:
- Wasted promise is my biggest peeve here - there were some good episodes in seasons 1 or 2, but they didn’t appear frequently enough to save the whole thing.
- No consistent characters. (Hoshi’s scared of space travel, but happy to sleep with the first alien who smiles at her nicely? Ya what?)
I really can’t believe no one has mentioned this yet, but one of the things I hated most about Trek in general:
The stupid way they killed of JTK in Generations!! Falling down a cliff? Come on, you could have done better than that!
In no particular order here’s a list of the others:
Major Kira (why did so many men fall in love with her? ICK!!!)
Troi
Any plot line concerning the Klingon empire (Strangely enough I do enjoy the character of Worf)
Separating the saucer section
The Nexus
The Prime Directive
Star Fleet Admirals (they’re either corrupt or incompetent)
The Prophets
Robin Curtis as Saavik
I don’t have too many complaints, I enjoy TOS, TNG, DS9 and the movies as a whole. Never really got into Voyager or Enterprise.
Maybe you can explain to me why a phaser will disintegrate someone if you shoot them in the chest…or, specifically, the shirt. How come it doesn’t just disintegrate their shirt? Why does it get their shoes but not even scorch the deck under their feet?
How can a phaser disintegrate someone and yet, when shooting at Monster of the Week it doesn’t even affect them? What’s magical about their skin?
Most everything that annoys me has been mentioned already. General impressions:
TOS - never watched more than one or two
TNG - too much holodeck; too much Wesley Crusher; too much late 80s PC sensitivity - a counsellor on the bridge crew?!
DS9 - I really enjoyed some of the mid- and later-season episodes; Kira bugged me a lot; too many episodes about Bajoran religion; Quark’s brother annoyed the crap out of me
VOY - pussified the Borg; make-up team has no creativity re: alien’s appearance
ENT - watched two episodes - one very boring, the other had the TCW and even only watching less than one episode, it struck me as the stupidest idea ever associated with Star Trek Worst episode ever - Voyager - the ship gets trapped inside a black hole, and has to escape by breaking through the event horizon which is depicted as a physical barrier. Bar none, the worst science-related mistake I’ve ever seen in Trek. Not just gobbeldygook treknobabble, but outside stupidity.
Am with Diceman on most of the issues in TOS thru VOY. Specially the TNG Season One standard plotline of “We’ll just stand here being morally superior and thus prevail”. Sheesh.
Disagree on Q, though. Q was interesting in TNG. Unfortunately, like the Borg, they could not leave well enough alone and proceeded to ruin the whole idea in DS9 and Voyager.
Must disagree with many of the prior posters on ENT and Panda. Panda was ENT’s redeeming quality. But it could not carry it alone so I said *&^% it after noticing we would not have a decontamination every episode
Did anyone else kind of puzzle over how there seems to be no new human cultural developments between the 20th and 24th centuries? I mean, I know you can’t expect the writers—especially a lot of those writers—to create a 22nd century symphony to rival Beethoven just to use in the background in one episode, but it’d still pretty weird. (Maybe perfect utopias like the Federation just stifle artistic and cultural development, as an unfortunate side effect. :smack: )
Generations—
•All the ship’s lights apparently burning out, and
•The death of the Enterprise-D. They couldn’t just give it a refit or anything, nooo…they had to blow it up. :mad:
Voyager—
Kinda minor, but how they pretty much dropped the Caretaker and his mate after the premiere, and that one episode in season one. The Borg element in the finale was OK, I guess, but I was hoping for kind of some way of bringing the story “full circle.”
Now that you mention it, I did find it strange that everyone knows Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” It’s already a fairly obscure song; you’d think that by the 24th Century, it would be totally forgotten.
And Limpet’s science was not only better, but since at one point it involved top-secret Nazi weaponry, it was automatically cooler.
On the plus side, Threshold did involve a Star Trek crewmember pulling out his own tongue, then knocking up the captain. (Which, unfortunately, sounds a lot better than it actually was.)
Actually, I believe I did see Threshold, and I mostly remember it (despite efforts to the contrary).
I think that the episode with the black hole was worse for making a basic science mistake. An event horizon is not a physical barrier, period. And they didn’t try to invoke any special conditions or treknobabble to make it one for this particular episode.
Threshold made my brain hurt just watching it, and it was completely stupid and ignored basic biological facts (i.e. "de-evolving (devolving?) into “lower” life forms - as if your current body “remembers” what creature it evolved from hundreds of millions of years ago). BUT, at least they tried to “explain” it with hand-waving about breaking Warp 10. It was still a stupid-ass show, but at least the writers tried somewhat.
Why did half of Star Fleet defect? I guess we were supposed to sympathize with them and think they were fighting a noble cause.
What was their cause anyway? That the Federation gave up territory to the Cardasians?
