Yeah, the Irish chick was easily smoking-hot enough to justify that episode. She was about the only thing justifying it, mind you, but she was enough.
And if we’re hating on Riker, here, how about the one where he’s offered independent command, but turns it down in favor of remaining a loser on the Enterprise, and inexplicably doesn’t get handed his severance papers or bumped down to Holodeck Janitor, Third Class?
Picking out the good episodes is more of a challenge.
I nominate “Ethics” as being particularly bad. Worf is paralyzed in an accident and though his mobility his restored with the cutting-edge techniques of a forward-thinking surgeon, said surgeon gets oodles of sanctimonious scorn from Crusher because of her “recklessness”.
In addition to Worf’s right to determine his own path of treatment being questioned, the episode closes with Crusher delivering her final little speech while sitting in an office adjacent to a 24th-century sickbay (loaded up with fancy gear that wouldn’t even exist without such “recklessness” and the spirit of experimentation) struck me as particularly distasteful. I can picture it being written by some Hollywood hack who fretted that something should be done about the environment while driving an early SUV. The guest character is a skilled experimental surgeon (she’d have to be to ensure the perfect restoration of the status quo at the end of the episode), but the dialogue goes to great lengths to make her out as a big meanie-pants who gives up at the critical moment, letting Crusher be the hero and the voice of righteous indignation.
I’m one of those people who enjoy nitpicking a bad episode more than sitting through a good episode, so I’m torn.
But how does this thread have 41 replies, and NO ONE has mentioned “Planet of the Blacks,” AKA, Code of Honor? (If I missed a nod to that in a previous post, I apologize)
FFS, here was a planet inhabited by these quasi-African black dudes who were space faring and possessed some sort of advanced medical technology. For all of the kudos Gene Roddenberry gets for Ohura and Kirk’s interracial kiss, all they were missing here was leopard print loin cloths and spears to make it **completely **racist. Never mind the stupid rules of their cat fight to death, which cannot be stopped once it has started!!
Unless someone gets pushed out of bounds. That’s never happened before.
All respect to Wheaton, but describing the Ligonians as African-American is kinda silly. The characters were stereotypically African-African. The actors might be described as African-American (though I’d just call them “black”, myself, since I refuse to use “African American” in this manner).
Yeah, I came in here to nominate “Code of Honor,” which really was appalling. Wince-inducingly stereotypical. Although “Shades of Gray,” the clip show, was a big disappointment too.
I will say a word in defense of “Masks” (had a nice mythic undercurrent to it that appealed to me, and gave Brent Spiner the chance to really show his acting chops), “Family” (despite the odd English accents for the entire Picard clan, it had a heartfelt sincerity to it, and I liked seeing how the captain was struggling with the aftermath of his Borgification), as well as “All Good Things” (a good use of Q, a nifty time-travel story, and would’ve made a better movie than Star Trek: Generations). All IMHO.
It’s funny you should say that. Joan Collins wrote her autobiography a few years ago, and a Trekker friend who read it (or who just checked the index to see what Collins said about “City on the Edge of Forever”) told me that Collins was mistaken about her own role - she recalled that Keeler was a Nazi sympathizer!
Interesting… I just looked up the actress from “Up the Long Ladder”, Rosalyn Landor, and despite how hot she is, all of her work in the past twenty years has been voice-only.
Hmmm…wasn’t there an episode where Wesley Crusher came back from the academy all moody and ends up leading a bunch of magical space-Native Americans on some kind of quest? Iirc, that one sucked.
Yes, but the magical native turned out to be the traveller. And Beverly Crusher seemed happy that her son was dropping out of school to become a space faring Hippy.
You recall correctly. It DID suck. But I’m amused by it because, like the first half season of Voyager, they still occasionally use the term “Indian.” They’ve been to thousands of worlds, and yet they still can’t be bothered to peg them from the right part of the Earth. 
Thank you, antonio107.
You know, there have been a fair amount of stinkers mentioned in this thread, but I have to agree with the OP that sub rosa is the absolute worst. I had to read the synopsis to even recall that episode, as I had only watched it once; I saw it as a kid when it originally aired, and whenever we came to that episode on the dvd I made my husband skip it, simply saying “I don’t know what it’s about, but I remember Crusher doing it with a ghost and it sucked.”
Seriously, Sub Rosa was the most blatant example of Star Trek plagiarism in any of the series, ever. The whole plot is lifted wholesale from Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour. The Trek producers at the time deny any copyright hanky-panky to this day, but it couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d come right out and thanked Rice for unwittingly writing the episode for them. As far as I know, Rice had nothing to do with the episode, for those who wondered.
He got it out of his system and rejoined Starfleet by the time of Riker and Troi’s wedding, though.
I’m guessing the Traveller’s fingers were wanderers, too.
Voyager’s Blink of an Eye wasn’t a slouch in the ripoff department, either. But at least it was a good story to rip off.
Another Beverly stinker is the one where she falls in love with this guy with a trill inside.
He dies and a female host takes the Trill. They stop by Beverly’s quarters to resume the loving and Beverly can’t deal with a lesbian hookup.
In a bad way it’s pretty funny.
This was the first Trill episode. They carried the idea to Ds9 and created Dax. Sisko wasn’t as freaked by the gender change as Beverly. 
Of course the Trills on DS9 were completely different. Different makeup (spots instead of a forehead), and on DS9, it was made clear that the joined being is a blending of the host and symbiont, whereas on TNG, the symbiont completely suppressed the host’s personality.
IMO, any episode that revolved around Deanna "Counselor Cleavage"Troi was the worst. Troi has to honor an arranged marriage. Troi becomes pregnant with a SORAS baby. Troi’s mother comes to visit. Troi is beset by a weird alien ritual that turns her into a haggard old shrew. Troi’s mother visits again. Troi falls in love with Worf. Troi’s mother visits again.
But the worst of the worst had to be the episode in which she lost her empathic powers and spent the next fifty-five minutes whinning and crying about it. I so wanted someone to slap her. The scene where Riker finally calls her out (and basicallly calls her a stuck-up princess.) was one of the very moments where I liked Riker.
Any episode with Dr. Pulaski grates on me as well.
You mean “how about the two,” don’t you?
Admittedly he had built up a lot of goodwill by saving the Earth the second time. And the series single best episode (well, two best, as it was a two-parter), implies strongly that he suffered repercussions; I refer, of course, to his not getting the captaincy of the Enterprise when Picard was sent to spy on the Cardassians.
Of course it could easily be that, when the decision was made to give the ship to Jellicoe, there was a perfect storm of abandoned ex-girlfriends in on the decision. 
Erm… he DID die in that episode. Quite graphically, actually. Of course, it was Alternate Timeline Riker. It seems that, if they had the money for it, they had wanted to give all the major characters death scenes, but they didn’t have the money for it, so Riker gets blown up, we last see Geordi in Engineering with a plasma coolant leak breaking out, the bridge is on fire while Picard takes control of the weapons himself.
It was quite the awesome episode. The fact that it lead to the character of Sela could be debatable good or bad. I understand some folks consider her to be more annoying than a potent villain (ask yourself this: Is there any episode of TNG where Sela is the bad guy, where it wouldn’t have been better for Tomalak to be the villain? The absense of Tomalak is also a big reason of mine for why Nemesis sucked. That, and everything else about the movie.
Worst TNG episode? Do we go ahead and just discard the first two seasons on general principle and choose from the remainder?
That’s another thing they can fix if they remaster TNG for Blu-ray: add spots to the original Trills.
Oh, me too! I kept wanting her to fall down a turbolift shaft…
ETA: Yes, I realize the LA Law thing happened after she was already off of TNG. It’s a joke, son…
You can sorta-fanwank that by suggesting the symbiont has no personality as such, but takes on the traits of its hosts. When transplanted into a new host, that host is initially overwhelmed with the imprinted personality of the last host, and it takes several days or weeks for the new host’s personality to re-emerge and begin imprinting on (and thus adding to the net experiences of) the symbiont. Had the symbiont stayed in Riker (assuming this was biologically possible), he’d eventually fall out of love with Crusher and more-or-less return to his original personality.
The initial male host was in love with Crusher but was also kind of a cultish dork who honestly believed that he was the symbiont and the symbiont was him, and the death of the host body was a minor inconvenience and protecting the symbiont was all-important. Given that he also didn’t like transporters, I don’t have a problem accepting that he/it had several philosophical and possibly physical differences from the eventual Jadzia-Ezri/Dax trill. Heck, the Trills having species-wide conformity is less plausible.