Heh. I suppose you could give Spock's Brain a pass much like something like Sub Rosa, just for being unintentionally funny. Feel free to swap it for "The Way To Eden". Now that episode…

Nope, because Sub Rosa is unintentionally hilarious in many ways, which can make it worth the time to see at least once. Shades of Gray, though…

Indeed. It's actually my personal pick for Worst Trek Ever (although
damn, does Shades of Gray come close…). My personal
beef isn't with the offensiveness - although that's bad enough by
itself - but with the sheer lack of laughs, chuckles or even wry smiles
in what is ostensibly a comedy. It monumentally fails to…

Every Star Trek series has that one special episode. An hour of television that is completely and utterly without merit and can never be redeemed. TOS has Spock's Brain. TNG has Shades of Gray. Voyager has Threshold. Enterpise has A Night In Sickbay.

Stephen Poe's "Vision of the Future" book that goes into the creation of Voyager strongly points the finger at network interference being the prime culprit behind the show's creative limitations. DS9 got away with a lot because they were in syndication, but poor old Voyager was saddled by Paramount with the…

Voyager is indeed deeply problematic, and the biggest of those problems is that there's so very much wasted potential. It had what could have been the best premise yet for a Star Trek series. It had a cast that did their very best to sell what was often extremely formulaic material (with the exception of Beltran, and…

How quickly is "a little too quickly"? He lasted three seasons as the frustrated lightbulb. On a show as notorious as Voyager was for freezing its characters in amber forever, Doc's the one example of a character who genuinely grew and changed over the course of the series.

Enjoyed this one. Yes, it was beyond obvious that Kennex wasn't going to get blowed up, or that Dorian wouldn't plummet to an untimely demise from the side of the building. (Also, Dorian's battery sucks harder than a first-gen iPhone. If it depleted that fast all the time, dude wouldn't last through a single episode!)

Ooo, that's a lot of downvotes!

I'm with you. Crystal Skull is fine, and actually holds up better than Last Crusade IMO. Minus the awful "Shia LeBoeuf swinging through the jungle" moment. That was terrible.

Interlopers? The one that instantly springs to my mind is Lauren Graham's character Andrea, who showed up for a multi-episode stint early in Newsradio's fourth season. Specifically introduced to vocalise the observation that all the regulars on that show were weird as hell and that no actual office should be run like…

It was freaking awful. There's good Star Trek and there's shitty Star Trek. Good Trek can stand up there with the best of sci-fi/space opera (see TWOK, TUC and numerous TV episodes). Bad Trek is just bad. And this movie was bad. It was a failure at pleasing the fans and it was an utter failure with the general public,…

The worst Trek movie of the lot. At least V didn't kill the franchise.

That, and having to interview replacements…

I didn't mind Archer too much, although he's definitely the weakest of the Trek captains. He's definitely the most idealistic (although that idealism take a visible hit from the Xindi arc), which at least gave him a defining trait, unlike some other characters on the show (hello Mayweather).

@avclub-bca3531762af8a993c4f60c48fd5e33b:disqus Agreed. Voyager at its best did some top-shelf Trek. The problems with the show weren't in the execution of the episodes (which like most Trek, varied from awful to middling to spectacular, although Voyager did have a higher ratio of mediocre), it was in the big picture,…

The Sisko/Watters comparison is deftly handled, as you mention. But coolly competent Janeway does indeed exist; the best example I can think of is the final battle sequence from Basics, Part 1, where she's playing Voyager like a fine instrument against the Kazon. Right up until she's sabotaged by the plot, that is…

I enjoyed Starship Down, but Worf's after-school special lesson in command was always particularly grating to me. The guy was a department head on the Federation flagship for years; Klingon or no, you'd think he would have had his management style down-pat by now.

@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus Too true. If you ever read Stephen Edward Poe's "A Vision of the Future" behind-the-scenes book on the creation of Voyager and its first four seasons, you can see the genesis of the show's problems right from the outset: the studio was paranoid about killing the goose…

@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus Too true. If you ever read Stephen Edward Poe's "A Vision of the Future" behind-the-scenes book on the creation of Voyager and its first four seasons, you can see the genesis of the show's problems right from the outset: the studio was paranoid about killing the goose…