Right. Although the most didactic episode and the worst episode might conveniently be synonymous.
Justice Justice (Star Trek: The Next Generation) - Wikipedia (aka - you had a perfectly reasonable way to get rid of Wesley and wasted it).
I disagree: “preachy” and “didactic” have strongly negative connotations. A didactic episode is necessarily bad, because a good didactic episode isn’t didactic - it’s “relevant” or “enlightening”. It “teaches an important lesson”. It “discusses an issue”.
And to think they visited the Planet of the Joggers just a few weeks after going to the Planet with the Angry Black Tribe. “Code of Honor” was also very bad. From what I understand, the racism was unintended and director Russ Mayberry gets a lot of the blame for it.
I think “The Outcast” gets honorable mention because it handled the thing it was being didactic about so clumsily. It was trying to be an episode about gay rights, and tried to make a fictional allegory on the topic, but the allegory ended up being directly about the real phenomenon of transgender people. Ignoring the unintentional slamming into trans issues, the episode handled it’s material clumsily all along, and having it end with gay conversion therapy working on the character really muddles whatever it was trying to say.
Good suggestions so far. How about:
In TOS, The Omega Glory in which the Asian looking Kroms are civilized, yet turn out to be evil, whereas the “Yargs” – which are barely sentient, even though they “look like us” (cringe even in the 70’s when I saw it,) but turn out to be noble savages who worship the US constitution. I don’t get where this came from, except that somebody at NBC was ticked off at the hippie sentiments of TOS, and wanted some rousing 'Merica jingoism, I guess just to have in case someone pointed the left leaning out, or something?
I often said that NextGen “jumped the shark” when they discovered the Warp core was damaging subspace and they had to limit their speeds to avoid damaging all of sub-space. Then the next episode they said, “this is an emergency, you can go any speed”, then the next episode was a “bottle-episode” so they don’t mention it, then they just don’t mention it, then the series ends.
My take: some producers friend wanted an Eco-message, and forced them to put it in. Then they broke up, or something, and the writers took it out, especially with Voyager, which was designed to “clean up” its warp exhaust, so they don’t have to mention it. It actually ruins the Eco-messgae, when you ham-fistedly cram it in, and then ignore it like that. Its like, recycling because everyone’s looking, and then when they’re not looking, instead of not recycling, you dump motor oil in the lake, or something.
Not NBC. The Omega Glory was one of the scripts proposed for the second pilot! :eek: I still can’t reconcile that. A “third season” episode could have been the pilot. And the show would never have been picked up.
That was the episode “Pen Pals”.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Pen_Pals_(episode)
I nominate the episode “Ethics”. Worf get paralyzed in a freak accident and he debates committing ritual suicide. A visiting doctor proposes an experimental procedure to replace Worf’s spinal column even though the doctor has never performed it on a living being. There are complications on during the operation and Worf supposedly dies on the operating table. But afterward Worf suddenly revives because apparently Klingons have redundancies in their nervous systems that allow Worf to live. Basically a huge Deus ex machina that I don’t remember ever being mentioned before about the Klingons.
The Drumhead is one of my favorite episodes of the series. And one of my favorite Picard episodes. When the new Picard series was announced, my girlfriend who watched some Star Trek but not a lot of TNG didn’t understand why I was so excited about the character coming back, the first episode I showed her was The Drumhead (and then Measure of a Man).
It was Kohms and Yangs (“Communists” and “Yankees”). The Kohms weren’t depicted as evil, just as survivors of the bacteriological war that destroyed the White civilization. They looked the way they did because the war was fought between their “China” and “United States.” (Not exactly a remote possibility in 1968.)
As noted, it was one of the three stories proposed for the second pilot (“Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Mudd’s Women” were the other two), and was a good “Prime Directive” story until the final act. (I suspect the script had been extensively rewritten between 1965 and 1968; it was one of the final episodes of the second season). The “lesson” was that the principles of the Constitution must apply to everyone or they mean nothing at all.
Not a **bad **lesson, but one that certainly could have been delivered more subtly.
I loved “I, Borg”. I think the one that was most ridiculous was “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, where the people with a face that was white on the left and black on the right hated the people with a face that was white on the right and black on the left.
These are my two favorite episodes of the series as well.
To be fair, most folks at that time, even those who were supportive of rights, didn’t really grasp that “gay” and “trans” were two different things.
Wasn’t there one where the entire episode the crew thought the planet was Sun worshippers, till at the end they realized they were really Christians worshipping “The Son”?
That one was TOS, not TNG. By the time it was filmed, budget cuts were really hurting, and the “half-black, half-white” makeup was the best thing they could come up with.
It was intended as an indictment of racism and intolerance, but was an excruciatingly slow-paced “bottle” story. It was redeemed somewhat by Frank Gorshin’s psychotic performance (I always think of Commissioner Beale as The Riddler in pink tights).
“Bread and Circuses,” ***TOS ***second season. Many of those episodes were mentioned as “springboards” in the series format, but you can bet the NBC censors had a lot to say about the way religion was depicted before they were allowed to be filmed.
My family has been watching TNG in order. The “Drugs are Bad” speech was definitely a low-point of preachiness; I asked my wife how much money Nancy Reagan had given them to include the speech. But the first season has a ton of other moments of preachiness that I’d forgotten about.
While the title of the thread used “didactic”, the actual question posed in the OP was “most heavy-handed moral tone”. I was basing my statement on the actual OP. Notice that the poster of the OP has agreed with my interpretation.
In fairness, the “preachy” aspects of the first season tend to get lost amid the horrid dialogue and terrible plots of the first season (to say nothing of the generally atrocious acting of Marina Sirtis and Denise Crosby :rolleyes:).