Mine was the ending of Deep Space Nine.
Gul Dukat was often the “good bad guy” in some episdoes, and I’d hoped that would be true of the series ending. It was not to be.
The holodeck.
A fallback for lazy and uncreative writers.
In the first episode of DS9, the wormhole aliens specifically said they wouldn’t let anybody use the wormhole for conquest.
Except, as it turns out, anybody who tried after the first time. From then on, there were warships going through it right and left.
On Voyager, they started out with the power source for the holodeck being separate from the main power grid, and completely, mystically incompatible. The reason being that they were low on power and needed all they could get, but they needed some excuse to keep the holodeck online so they could have people falling in love with holograms rather than actual people.
Then, later in the series, they suddenly, mystically figured out how to transfer power from the holodeck to the rest of the ship so that it became a tragic problem that they had to shut the holodecks down so they could get the shields up. Hey, Einstein. Ever heard of tape backups?
That there have been very few People of Alternative Lifestyles depicted as sane, rational, enlightened beings, the Trill being the most obvious examples.
1.)Blatant errors in real-life science.
2.)The Magic Reset Button ™ at the end of every episode.
3.)DS9 Ferengi episodes, or any scene with Rom in it.
4.)Berman and Braga.
5.)Harry Kim, Naomi Wildman, and Neelix.
6.)Bridge consoles that explode in a shower of sparks.
Not to say that eliminating all of these things would have made for perfect Trekking. There’s still the first season of TNG to deal with, which was unwatchably weird for mysterious reasons.
Number (3) should be any Ferengi episode. DS9 just made them into a regular dose of torture. But Voyager’s “False Profits” and any TNG Ferengi episode are just as bad.
Technobabble. It completely drained the series of any dramatic tension. No matter what what happened for the first fifty minutes, it could be solved in the last ten by incanting, “If we refiburlate that secondary phase tranducer through the primary core, we can invert the matrix flux!” Feh. I bailed out towards the beginning of DS9, and haven’t missed it one bit.
Voyager.
Holodeck
Time Travel
Q
Bad guys that turn out to just have a thorn in their paw and when it’s removed they are good.
Bad guys who become less bad when a worse guy comes along, who then turns out to be less bad when a worse guy comes along, who then…
Klingon politics…zzzzzzzzzzz…
Transporters used to more or less create life.
Characters that are so flat you can’t see them from most angles.
A mad desire to achieve status quo at the end of the show.
I could go on and on and on…
The tendency on all the Treks, with the exceptions of the leads, to cast the most bland, untalented actors imaginable in the secondary roles.
I take that back, one of the leads was bland and had but one tone of voice and perhaps two expressions. And no, I’m not talking about dear old over-emoting Billy Shatner.
I’m still holding out hope for Scott Bakula, who has been, imho, a fairly uninteresting actor (with the exception of a very nice turn in American Beauty).
Sir Rhosis
The music from the TNG episode that introduces Data’s “brother,” Lore. What, did the producer’s younger brother just get a casio for Christmas and there were no cheap weddings to play?
You’ll understand what I mean if you see this episode in reruns. (It was the first episode of Star Trek my girlfriend had ever seen and I had to apologize profusely for the music.)
Too much use of the reset button in the middle seasons of DS9 and througout Voyager.
The most egregious example being “Tuvix.” (The episode, not the character.) Janeway murders a sentient, peaceful being merely because she likes somebody else better.
Two-part episodes generally; they’re never as good as two individual episodes would be. (Gambit excepted.)
–Cliffy
Any episode that deals primarily with politics.
But she brings back two dead guys.
That’s what that episode was about, a moral dilemma.
You obviously would have chosen differently. I think Tuvix was too ugly to let live, myself.
Q. Deus ex Machina was a lousy plot device way back when the Greeks used it. It hasn’t gotten any better since.
It’s hard for me to name something I dislike most, but here’s the one I’m thinking about now:
Romulans. They were half-sympathetic in the original series, in both Balance of Terror and The Enterprise Incident. Yet in all the later series, they are just these cold, calculating villains.
I guess the Klingons went the other way, so it balances. But still, I’d have liked it if they could have treated them as more interesting people, rather than just as the undisputed bad guys.
Oh, and I’ve got to agree on Q. I never enjoyed shows in which the heroes have absolutely no power to influence the plot, and must just wait for the omnipotent being to allow them to get back to what they were doing.
I’m not a big fan of the Q episodes (although I enjoy Delancie’s performance), but I didn’t think they overused his deux ex machinistic tendencies. (Except the Borg episode.) He always set out rules for his little games and he generally followed them (at least after Picard yelled at him once or twice).
The reason I disliked “Tuvix” was not because it presented a moral dilemma, or even that I disagreed with Janeway’s resolution, but because it was simply, atomistically, the wrong choice.
–Cliffy
I hated the fact that every alien in any Trek series is either a human with a few bumps somewhere on their heads or they’re a glowing blob of energy.
The whole “Transporter Accident Evil Twin with a Goatee” syndrome. Had it in Classic ST, DS-9, and I recall Riker had a weird transporter accident clone (and I’m with pezwookiee, Lore sucked).
What did I dislike most? The Borg.
Don’t get me wrong. They started out cool. They were mysterious, not-quite-malevolent-yet-unstoppable. Then they sort of evolved into “evil”, conquering, “we want to assimilate everything” type of beings, which is all right… they were still cool.
Then Voyager came along, and turned the Borg into a joke. Suddenly, they were dancing circles around the Borg, invading cubes and spheres like they were shopping for groceries, showing us just how painfully inept the Borg were, and GREATLY overusing the whole “Seven’s nanoprobes can cure the common cold!” gimmick.
Star Trek ruined the only cool thing it had, and that’s what has annoyed me the most.
Technobabble.
The subtle pro-socialist leanings of the Federation.
No small arms bigger than a rifle Post-TOS
The gross misuse of the Borg by Berman and Braga
Berman and Braga
The New Enterprise song.
Those jumpsuits TNG, Voyager, and DS9 used. (Why, Why couldn’t they have used snazzy naval-like suits from the movies?)
The conspicious absence of enlisted personnel from TNG, DS9, and Voyager('cept for “Chief” O’Brian, as if a Master Chief Petty Officer is gonna run the engineering department for one of themost important space stations in the Federation)
The wussification of Starfleet.
The Klingons who board Federation vessels with Bat’Leth’s when they KNOW there’s gonna be guys with pistols shooting them.