National barriers in the future are obviously nowhere near as high as they are today. If you go to Britain even today you’ll find people of many nationalities living there. Not at all unusual that a Frenchman would learn English with an English accent, particularly one that employs Received Pronunciation.
Granted, the premise makes no sense. (Neither was it explained how the Gideons were able to build such a precise replica of the Enterprise on their crowded little planet.)
However, abortion was never mentioned; birth control and sterilization were. No reference was made to religion, nor was there any need to.
Yeah, that was my interpretation. Lester hated that Kirk prioritized being a captain over his relationship with her - that’s what I figured her line “Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women” meant.
Heck, we’d seen that Kirk’s predecessor had a female first officer who of course takes command when the male captain of course gets captured while leading an away-team landing party: she’s calm and efficient, good at deductive reasoning and knows how to handle a raygun, gets briefed by experts but ultimately decides which orders to issue while outranking everyone on the Enterprise; she’s Spock before Spock was Spock.
And when Pike was ready to surrender to the Talosians, his female first officer sets her phaser to explode, saving Pike and the others.
I’d say DS9 has more very good episodes, compared to the others. They did have a few clunkers. The Brigadoon episode was mentioned, and I mentioned the Quark-Plays-a-Game-With-the-Senior-Officers on the first page.
But hands down, best Trek episode of ALL of them is DS9 In the Pale Moonlight.
I agree this might be the worst episode. It took a series of absurd decisions and contrivances to set the situation up, but more importantly it never really seemed to have a plot. The crew comes to this planet, fails to find any solution the people will agree to, and then some people kill themselves to… What? Prove a point? I guess?
The first two seasons of TNG had a lot of fails, but “Conspiracy” stands out in my mind. This episode, more than any other, demonstrates the kind of chaos they were dealing with in the early seasons, when they didn’t really know what kind of show they were making. It’s very clearly an experiment, in which someone suggested making TNG into something like “Alien.” This one has always been a head-scratcher, because at the time Gene Roddenberry’s jackassery was actively preventing them from making decent shows… But “Conspiracy” doesn’t just push against Roddenberry’s “vision,” but takes it all the way to the opposite extreme. It’s very, very strange.
The other dud that comes to mind is “Sub Rosa” (TNG). It’s not so much that it was “bad” or poorly made. It’s just, “WTF?” The whole plot is Beverly travels back to her ancestral Earth mansion and has sex with a ghost. It’s like someone took the script from a gothic romance they wrote in film school and tried to graft it onto an episode of Star Trek. If I had to listen to that pitch I would wondered if I was in the right studio… And this is from the later seasons when TNG was (mostly) pretty darn good. After I watched this, I actually went online to look up when it aired to make sure it wasn’t some kind of novelty “Halloween” episode.
TNG had some awful episodes where the female officers, Troi and Crusher, were mind-raped, and raped otherwise. Troi’s was that diplomat who used women to store his negativity, and Crusher’s was the Irish spirit who raped generations of Howard women before her. Both awful awful episodes.
^^we were thinking along the same lines…
I’ve never done either, and I’d say DS9 is the best of TREK. And while it had its share of stinkers, none of them approached “Threshold” or “Spock’s Brain” levels of badness, except maybe that final-seasojln Mirror Universe episode.
Like those, “Fascination” plays as a parody of the show it is nominally part of.
I LOLED 
Musta been a thermodynamics test.
They (we!) are the ones who care the most.
If you showed all the episodes to an impartial jury, selected at random from the populace, I’m pretty sure you’d get similar results. Trouble with Tribbles would be voted near the top, and Alternative Factor near the bottom.
(Why do you hate democracy?)
Enterprise’s These Are The Voyages was the worst in my opinion because it was so unnecessary.
First and foremost, it was an Enterprise episode shoehorned into a retcon of a TNG episode, “The Pegasus”. The Pegasus was a Riker episode about a phase cloak (which makes the ship intangible rather than just invisible) and a mutiny. I don’t remember the specifics but Riker has some serious thinking to do.
So in TATV we see how he came to his decision: by playing on the fucking holodeck! In the middle of a crisis which could lead to war, Riker is pretending to be Enterprise’s Chef, doling out advice to Trip and smooching T’Pol.
Now maybe this is just the way people blow off steam in 400 years. I have a feeling that human progress will come screeching to an absolute halt if and when we ever build an actual holodeck. Maybe the humans of the 24th century account for this. Or maybe Riker lied and told the captain he was running some tactical scenarios to save their bacon from the Romulans. In any case, this episode reaches back into the guts of TNG to make Riker look like a complete asshole. Unethical.
We also get a flash-forward on the Enterprise crew. Ensign Mayweather is still an ensign! Trip does something dumb and dies for it. Archer spends a bunch of time pissing and moaning about a speech we never get to see him giving. Shran comes back and brings problems with him. Nothing really happens but we’re led to believe that Archer’s speech was what brought the Federation together.
The problem with this plot is that we just had a much better Birth of the Federation story in the previous two episodes. Those were written by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Trek authors with serious long-time cred. They are excellent writers and they make sure to give every character something to do. So in “Demons” and “Terra Prime” we get a useful Mayweather, who pilots a shuttle like a boss into a very dangerous situation. Shit’s flying and the shuttle crew could die at any moment and Mayweather is grinning! He’s having the time of his life, something we never got to see on this show before. And later on, his personal relationship with another character helps to move the plot along as well. Hoshi gets to take command of the ship and her relieved almost the point of tears “standing by!” when she hears from the away team gets me to this day. The villain is Peter Fucking Weller, yes Robocop himself, thank you for your cooperation. He’s no Khan but he has a clear goal and the means to accomplish it. His only fault is trying to trigger humanity’s xenophobic urges by menacing them with an adorable baby.
In any case, Demons and Terra Prime were two of the best episodes of Enterprise and they very much captured the spirit of Star Trek as a whole. As a Birth of the Federation story it works - Weller’s character was targeting San Francisco and there was a large gathering of alien delegates there. Having Archer save them from annihilation works a lot better for me than the idea that he just gives a speech and everyone decides to make nice. If the show had ended with these two episodes and TATV had stayed in the conceptual stage everyone would have been happy. It would have been a good note for the series to go out on. Instead we got Brannon Braga’s “valentine to the fans”, a heart-shaped box filled with diarrhea.
But it *was *explained though. Nobody spells it out in dialogue, but if you watch and think there’s a scene where it becomes clear what is happening.
Remember Kirk looks out of a window on the Enterprise, and sees a crows of people, this is then quickly replaced by an image of a star field. This tells us:
- That the empty Enterprise is an illusion.
- It’s created on the fly, with an occasional glitch.
- It’s showing Kirk what he *expects *to see.
Obviously, it’s something like a Holodeck, with a mind scanner. Maybe some parts are a physical set, but it is mostly an illusion. It may be a fairly small space, no need for a full-size replica.
I don’t think this is a terrible episode. It’s got quite a lot of good stuff in it. The mystery of the empty Enterprise is an intriguing one, and Spock dealing with the unhelpful bureaucrats is a great scene.
There’s no such episode.
“hand me the 20mm wrench” = “Alice and the caterpillar”:rolleyes::dubious: sure, why not? It was a stupid, stupid episode.
I’m on record as not liking DS9 (not enough adventuring) but it never gets to the depths of the worst TNG or voyager episodes.
One I found difficult to watch was the one where Jake and Sisko try to pilot an ancient spaceship. Being ancient, the ship was made of wood and everything was manually operated, which struck me as beyond dumb.
I think the episode has won some awards though, so what would I know.
Oh, and any time they’re playing f-king baseball.
Sounds like a crossover with Lost in Space. 
If the planet is that crowded, and the ship is mostly a hologram, how do they keep from bumping into people everywhere?
Of course the windows would have to have some sort of imaging device, and it could be prone to failure, but the people were clearly on the outside.
Spock says nothing about a hologram when he beams down. It’s been decades since I’ve watched this episode, but he tells McCoy and Scotty that the ship is an exact replica sitting on the planet (which is orbiting the star), or something like that.
The Talosians would be able to pull something like this off, but the Gideons? Come on!
I also don’t think the third season writers or story editors were sufficiently tech-savvy to even imagine a holographic Enterprise.
They needed Kirk’s space seed.