The Alternative Factor. The Dauphin. Fair Haven.
Sometimes the B plot is the worst thing aired in an otherwise stellar episode.
Example: "Endgame" Voyager's Finale. Great episode except for the whole Chakotay/Seven romance subplot.
Also that I heard some story ages ago that they did that romance based on a dare or a joke or something?
At least even before Picard came out they had already been broken up in the novel that followed right after.
The treknobabble on the ship trying to bring the captain back. Also their attempt to research the Tamarian language on the ship.
oh, I didn't consier that a b story. More like support for the A story. Like the cut aways back to the enterprise in Inner Light.
That's a better interpretation, although I felt those scenes were done much better in the Inner Light.
I'd still prefer those over Tattoo, where they scrambled to shoehorn in an alien explanation for Chakotay's odd Native beliefs after it was discovered that the consultant on Native beliefs they hired was a complete fraud.
Oh is that why that episode was created? I had no idea.
I'll give them credit on hushing it up. I watched Voyager as it aired and I didn't find out about the fraud "Native American" they hired until years later.
I understand why they did it though. They had to do something and they couldn't just say "well, Chakotay was a fake indigenous American all this time."
They should have been more up-front about the whole thing, but I can see why they did it.
They could have kept most of that episode as a character background filler without the aliens traveling 70000 lightyears over multiple generations just to visit some primative tribe with no language on some backwater planet. That part seems to be the most awkward to shoehorn in.
Don't forget that the technologically superior visitors who brought culture to the primitive natives were given the distinct visual design of being white. Nope, no unfortunate implications there.
I feel like they could have just stopped focusing on his made up culture. He could still bring up authentic bits of culture and trivia when relevant, but it could be featured about as prominently as Picard's french heritage, rather than dominating the character like Worf's klingon heritage.
They could maybe even throw in a line at some point about how much of his people's heritage is lost due to that nuclear holocaust thing that messed the Earth up a bit back in the day. Acknowledge the disconnect with reality connecting it to the established lore.
Or it would have been fun to find out that he's actually the descendant of a fraud and the whole culture he was raised to believe in was a scam. But that might have been a little too on the nose.
I feel like you are overselling "Alliances," but to be fair, this shot was pretty cool
They definitely blew the effects budget for the season, though. They put it in the commercial and I swear, it was every other commercial on UPN that week.
I'm not supposed to ban people for making me want to vomit, but you sure make me want to have my mod powers taken away right now.
Ick.
(I don't actually want to ban you.)
May I present to you, SUB ROSA!
Followed shortly after by All Good Things.
The worst and best TNG episodes were only 12 episodes apart.
Edit: got an episode name wrong.
I still say 'doctor fucks candle ghost' is better than 'captain and pilot turn into amphibians, have babies, then get turned back into people but the babies stay on the planet.'
‘captain and pilot turn into amphibians, have babies, then get turned back into people but the babies stay on the planet.’
"And despite The Doctor knowing how to reverse this side-effect, Voyager doesn't ever use the tech again." Don't forget that part.
As someone who is only trek-curious, the problem I often have in this sub is finding fucking amazing shit like this but not knowing which episode it is! How the fuck do I even massage that animorph broken family story into a search query?
And I am certainly not going to put 'Doctor fucks candle ghost' into Google.
Update: I guess I lied, because I certainly did put it into Google. Should I buy this scented candle? https://files.catbox.moe/fpq4i8.png
I promise you that you can Google and figure out what we're talking about almost every time. "Doctor fucks candle ghost" is pretty much what everyone says about that episode and most people only know it that way and not that the episode name is Sub Rosa.
I can tell you the candle ghost happened between the episodes Time's Arrow and Wolf 358, look for the ones that focus on Crusher
Isn't that Voyager though? I was just talking about TNG. I haven't made it that far in Voyager yet. I'm currently watching it. So far I'm not impressed, but I'm going to wait until at least season 3 to pass judgement since even TNG and DS9 don't really pick up until later seasons.
Seasons 4 & 5 of Voyager are ita strongest. When it was still airing and in the final season I got my first job and bought a bunch of vhs tapes to record the newest season as it aired, and I started 'best of' tapes from reruns. They were dominated by those two seasons.
There is an awful TNG episode where the whole crew devolves into lizards and other animals. I just remembered that right now, but I don't remember what it's called.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
"Genesis" is the 171st episode of the American science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and the 19th episode of the seventh season. It was directed by series cast member Gates McFadden, her only directing credit to date.
Does Voyager get better after season one? I'm kind of on the fence if I should continue watching or not.
I absolutely love voyager… a few episode are my all time favorite Star Trek episodes. Just force yourself to watch the whole thing, it does get better after season 3 and some of the best episodes are in the last season.
Yes there are some bad episodes, especially in the beginning, but imo the good far outweighs the bad.
I think the next logical choice after those is Voyager whether it's better or not, because it revisits ideas and characters from those two shows. I personally put TOS above them all, but that's the Star Trek closest to my heart since it's the one I was watching from about 2 years old on.
Uh, Voyager Had a very ruff start and is objectively garbage until the end of season 3. After that it has a few cool episodes. But then it also makes the Borg boring by overusing them.
It can't be worse than Picard. Every time they wanted some hand wavey magic they'd just go "Borg tech!" rather than try to explain it. It was so bad by the end of the series that I didn't even want to watch it anymore, despite having my favorite cast and beautiful new SFX.
If you type "mess" on a phone with a gesture/slide keyboard, it draws out a pattern that's nearly identical to the one for the word "need", especially if you're sloppy like me and had to rewrite half this comment.
Do you think that's why they named it that? I've always wondered why it has that title and I think you're on to something!
It's latin for "under the rose" which is an expression of secrecy- as in 'sub rosa surveillance'.
I like the delicious candle ghost theory better though.
Sub Rosa is awful, but I'm not even sure if it makes the top 5 worst episodes of TNG. Code of Honor, Justice, The Neutral Zone, and Shades of Grey definitely have it beat. And there's several others I'd probably rank as being sub Sub Rosa, but which I would have to rewatch to be certain.
Maybe it's just that Sub Rosa has a distinct "so bad it's good" quality. The superstitious groundskeeper, the fog taking over the enterprise, zombie grandma, it's all so ridiculous in just the right ways, so I can't help but get a few laughs out of it. That's a lot more than I can say about those other episodes.
The one no one ever seems to mention is Transfigurations. It comes right before The Best of Both Worlds (another arguably best episode) and is so incompetently written that it doesn't feel like a real episode. It legitimately feels like they didn't have a real script, just a jumble of notes from a brainstorming session in the writing room where they couldn't decide what they wanted the episode to be about. It just meanders from one cliche premise to the next, with vestigial remnants of subplots still dangling off of it. And for the icing on the cake, the climax it builds up to is a guy in a morph suit pretending to be an energy being, an effect that might have been barely passable in standard definition, but which looks like something that would get laughed off of a power rangers set when watching in HD.
It's probably not the worst episode since it isn't painful or offensive, but it's still a dumpster fire that would fit in better among bad fanfics than actual episodes. I swear, they must have kept it out of the episode rotation too, because I didn't even know it existed until fairly recently.
Transfigurations at least has a consistent main theme and message, and bad as the final special effect is (my dude I can see the texture on the zentai suit you're wearing) the resolution and the way it unfolds are very Trek, especially the semi-hopeful note of "they're jerks but only because they're ignorant and they might change once they know better." It's easier to forgive a lot of the awkward stuff in the middle when the end is on brand.
Meanwhile, Sub Rosa's only message seems to be "ain't no fuckin' like ghost fuckin'."
Also, I maintain that Code of Honor is the worst episode of TNG by far. Even discounting the uncomfortably possibly racist undertones throughout, the whole thing is full of incredibly regressive and outdated stereotypes of gender even for the time. Also it's just kinda boring.
Sub Rosa's message was "I'd rather be writing gothic horror romance stories, but I'm stuck writing for Star Trek" which is an important enough message that they managed to bring it back as a subplot for the first two seasons of Voyager.
And I didn't mean to say that Transfigurations is necessarily worse than Sub Rosa (though I do enjoy it less), I just wanted to bring it up because I think it's awful in so many ways, and yet I've never seen it discussed.
Transfigurations has an ending consistent with Trek, but not consistent with the rest of the episode. It's a medical mystery plot, then an alien influence plot for all of 30 seconds mixed with a "Geordi is bad with women" plot, then an amnesia mystery running parallel with our love interest of the week plot, followed by a tyrannical alien civilization plot mixed with an energy being with godlike powers plot. A little focus and polish could have made any of those work, but instead it just feels like Trek Trope Mad Libs.
It also uses lazy plot devices that make no sense and seem utterly inconsistent with how Star Trek works. In the beginning, we see a medical device that regulates alien biology by syncing it with human biology, despite the two being potentially very different (and even if they aren't the best it could do would be to mirror what a device designed for humans would do). But we need that to have Geordi get hit by some alien influence I guess. But then we'll mostly drop that plot, except to have the alien tell Geordi that the magic was in him all along.
Later we get an enemy ship that has a "force choke a thousand aliens at once on another ship even though their shields are up" button. How does this technology work? Couldn't they use that effect to target a warp core or something? Who knows, it's just there so that our alien messiah can have a way to save the entire ship using healing powers.
Hell, I can't give credit to the ending because the ending is just a massive exposition dump trying to justify the rest of the episode. Our bland guest star of the week spends several minutes telling us about things we should have seen if they wanted us to care.
In fact, you can see at least one version of what this episode could have been with some trimming and focus by watching Counterpoint on Voyager. You have a tyrannical alien government attempting to wipe out those with mental abilities that they view as a threat, and in the midst of this we have a love interest of the week from that alien civilization, but with questions about who he really is and perhaps whether or not he can be trusted. It doesn't have every element of this episode, but the ones it has are actually fleshed out, and we even have some interesting chemistry in our romantic subplot for a change.
Shit, I just realized that Beverly's love interest in Transfigurations is essentially an energy ghost. She officially has a type. It must run in the family too, because Wesley also had a romantic subplot with a shapeshifter that turned out to be an energy being. And that's not counting the Traveler, who is basically a godlike energy being, and whose interest in Wesley has always had a "there's free candy in the back of my van" vibe to it.
And now I think I need a shower.
Code of Honor is a terrible one. I guess I usually exclude pre-beard TNG from my lists since they're all pretty bad. But the bad ones after it gets good really stand out since it's such a stark contrast in writing quality. Another very bad one is Masks, where Data becomes the mouthpiece for an Aztech god, but I don't usually call it bad because it's such a treat to watch Spiner going all out with his performance. He seems to be having a legitimately fun time with that role.
Code of Honor is so bad I thought for sure it was an unproduced TOS script they decided to recycle for TNG. Nope! Brand new story made for TNG. Astounding given that I'm pretty sure it would've been out of place even during TOS's run.
Then again, the pitch wasn't specifically for pseudo-African aliens. Someone else added that:
The African theme of the episode was brought in by director Russ Mayberry, who had the Ligonians race cast entirely from African-American actors. Mayberry was fired during production by the show's creator Gene Roddenberry, and First Assistant Director Les Landau completed the episode. Star Trek novel author Keith DeCandido later recalled that this was because of the casting itself, while cast member Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher) thought that it was because Mayberry was racist towards the guest stars after they were cast.
Even without that though the underlying "Strong Woman Suddenly Weak When Faced With Average Man" theme was pretty bad.
Alright, I'm done making new comments ranting about Code of Honor, I promise.
Not only is Tasha suddenly weak, but they even have her admit that despite being kidnapped she still finds her kidnapper arousing. Because the story just wouldn't be complete without that little nugget.
Not only was it a new script, but the same writer went on to write an episode of of SG-1 with an almost identical story, but this time on a planet of Mongolians. And as if that wasn't enough, we even get little bit of racist casting, as the one prominent female character from this society (whose parents are clearly Asian and is repeatedly praised for her beauty) is played by a white actress.
TIL people don't like Fair Haven.
I mean it's not the best or anything but I thought it was kinda fun.
