Crusher's sex ghost episode was so bad that its become a bit of a fun watch.

See a lotbof other episodes on this list, like Spocks Brain and Sub Rose, are entertainingly bad. This is just horrifically bad.

I just gotta say this. I really like that comment. It struck me in the gut. Lmao. Very clever.

Nah, ghost stories are fun. She had a Oghostasm

Best Line in the whole episode😂

I bet Beverly was thinking about him when she was with the candle....

Steve's dialog paraphrasing is an art form.

Threshold is terrible, but it's terrible in a much less problematic way.

Move along home

Profit and Lace???

It’s like having Shou Tucker on a list of most hated Annie characters it’s to easy.

Fruit hanging so low it's underground

That's a very good way of sorting bad episodes into categories. How about another one that's for 'boring/dull' kinds of bad? Like the TNG clip-show episode, or that Voyager one where Chakotay goes on a vision quest and something something random boxing match--wait, that one's racist, too. For a show that's supposedly out to restore peoples' faith in humanity, to say it fails in that on occasions is....an understatement.

One could argue the latter half of Threshold also qualifies as category #1 from a pacing and structure perspective.

Move Along Home at the very least has the characters/actors looking rather aggravated that they have to do that hopscotch & singalong chant. Both Nana Visitor and Avery Brooks look so annoyed in that scene and that alone is comedy.

Just watched Retrospect a few weeks ago as part of a Voyager rewatch and whoo-whee does that one have a terrible ending/message, especially since the rest of the episode was well acted and directed. Really hated the "distrust the rape victim" mentality it espoused.

Steve should do a "so batshit stupid they're fun" review

Star Trek has always been progressive, but it's concerning that when you're talking about "the racist/sexist episode" you have to clarify which one.

And, just like 'Code of Honor', it's widely considered SG-1's worst of the worst. Maybe she should've just left bad enough alone.

Lmao what the fuck!

​@@Erinaceus87I think this is her kink.😘

I was shocked to find out the writer was a woman, given how misogynistic it is. But it's possible that Gene wrote that in - the exchange about how Tasha must find being kidnapped by Lutan arousing feels very in line with Gene's worst impulses.

​@@Talisguylots of women have internalized misogyny and it's quite sad to see

I never even realised some how you made this worse

Yeah... Tasha's character was always a bit of an unfortunate mess. Not surprising the actress got fed up and decided to leave before the first season had even finished, even if it will always be a bit of a retroactive shame since the show did actually get a lot better in following seasons.

Eh, sooner or later, all racial politics become so primitive as to be humiliating for everyone involved. It's inevitable that however sensitive a current-day episode is, someone will find something legitimately kinda racist in it.

Don't worry, they moved on to Stargate SG1 where they brought us stories like "Every religion but Christianity is fake and made up by aliens".

@@jimballard1186Dear commenter, people in the past were still being racist and there were people who were in fact considered racists. Lovecraft for instance was well documented by others who knew him as heavily and irrationally racist.

It's even weirder than that though. The writer wanted to write an episode about lizard aliens with an East Asian culture (and wrote it full of horrible stereotypes), and then the director decided to nix the lizards and hire black people instead. So it was already bad, but it became even worse!

​@@--Animal--man I was waiting for Jesus to finally show up and turn out to be the worst of the Goa'uld. My disappointment was immeasurable 😔

Reading the description of that episode makes me think that writer has only one plot.

I think "Emancipation" was way better and a good Major Carter Episode to develop her as a character.

Lol yeah, thankfully it was an early episode so it’s quickly forgotten

Yes, blame the writer for the horrifically terrible output - but WTF was up with the producers/directors who agreed to actually produce this drek?!?!

I was really hoping Steve would touch on Emacipation. I remember several years ago, I was rewatching SG-1 on DVD, and thinking, "Why does this feel so familiar?" A first-season episode that is nearly entirely full of cringe moments and lines, with lots of racism and misogyny that tries to be a female empowerment story but fails miserably? Then it hit me. I looked it up, and sure enough, Kathryn Powers wrote both. How Brad Wright, Johnathan Glassner and all the other SG-1 people didn't realize the situation of what they were making, I'll never understand.

I felt especially bad for her character in this one. Instead of her normal, thoughtful, supportive self it felt like she was just gaslighting all her peers. Will the lameness of this episode find no boundaries?

It was sooo bad that they fired the original director _during the production_ of the episode. He's the only director to have been fired this way in a Star Trek production.

Didn't Denise Crosby list it as one of the reasons she wasn't so sure about staying with the show?

Also, the Holodeck is clearly more sophisticated. Previous attempts in the Trek universe probably looked like bad AI-generated images.

Exactly. At the time the holodeck was supposed to be brand new state of the art technology. The closest we'd ever seen to it elsewhere was in a single episode of the then non-canonical Star Trek animated series, and even that only rendered static simulated environments, not real-time dynamically interactive characters.

I agree, but I find The Room to be a far more enjoyable watch.

The Room has better acting 😂

@@SteveShives: For all of its baffling quirks, _The Room_ is at least a fascinating look into a bizarre but genuinely wholesome world view, albeit narcotically self-centered. Whereas even by the standards of bigoted trash, _Code of Honor_ is unremarkably generic, only standing out in just how blatantly antithetical it is to the series its hijacking.

@@EmeralBookwise I don't know about "wholesome", it's pretty hardcore misogynistic what with Lisa being basically a walking stereotype of evil woman cliches: - Fickle and inconstant, falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat. - Manipulative and cruel, treating an amazing, loyal guy in Johnny like garbage, while seducing his reluctant best friend with her feminine wiles. - Utterly self-involved and heartless, not caring about any of the people she is hurting with her actions, not even giving a crap about her own mother's cancer diagnosis. Also, there's the awful way Tommy Wiseau treated the Juliette Danielle (the actress who played "Lisa") on set, nothing wholesome about that emotional abuse. However, I do love the room because it's such an enjoyable bad-watch, plus is absolutely a piece of Art with a capital A. The entire point of art is to lay one's soul bare and convey all your deepest and most honest emotions to an audience, and Tommy Wiseau 100% did that fearlessly, and with nothing held back. It's just unfortunate that he's such a terrible writer, actor, director, producer, and every other job he did on that movie. Haha

Good man; this episode is not worth thinking of, aside from when thinking of what to avoid and not do.

*high five* THAT is inspired!

Definitely.

man he go on about all the bad clip show episodes that exists and it would be a good time. Scrubs had a few and one where they just recycled the same bits again I think it was called my deja vu.

That’s a great idea lol

I don't let people take my picture because photographs steal souls. And I worked hard for those souls dammit, do you know the effort that goes into getting someone to sell that shit? I'm not gonna let some hack with a polaroid profit off my work!

People in America still believe in God so it’s only one step away from weird superstitions.

@@andrewleah1983half a step

I think autocowrong got you there, Patrick...

Especially given the stinkers the rest of Season 1 was littered with. That TNG recovered from this and grew to the point where it's hailed as one of the greatest entries in the franchise is a testament to how great the rest of the show is, because they damn near killed with with these first few episodes.

​@@VegetaLF7in fairness to TNG season 1,I'd say this and the Naked Now were the two worst episodes and while most of season 1 was pretty bad, nothing was quite as stinky as those two

I swear we were hate watching it. They were clearly blowing a ton of money on the show and I think people were assuming it would find its legs and get better. Also, there was no competition. The first half of season one is astoundingly bad. It’s not until episodes 12 and 13 - The Long Goodbye and Datalore - that they finally churn out material that isn’t embarrassing. Right at the end of the season we get a string of decent episodes like Heart of Glory, Symbiosis, The Arsenal of Freedom and Skin Of Evil which - while far from perfect - demonstrated the show didn’t have to stink like hot garbage. I feel like the only really good episode that first year is Conspiracy, though.

When I watched TNG for the first time a few years ago, I got to this episode and had to pause it to see if the show gets any better online. I was relieved to see so many people going "Oh man, that episode sucks, just a heads up there are a few more, but then the show gets better". It was a bad enough episode, it almost convinced me to not watch TNG past it.

At least in the naked now they let us know data can fuck

I didn't know that but I weirdly in my head always associated the two episodes together as being bad in similar ways (wrt racism)...never occurred to me there was a link between the two.

Wait, a _woman_ wrote this racist drivel?!? 🤯 Somehow that makes it _even worse_ than it already was…

Holy shit. How on earth does she get work on these shows, with writing like that. It's like the KKK made amateur home-made cinema for their summer picnic or something.

The casting was black and the costuming was middle-eastern, but given the explicit dialogue regarding the "cultural" gift, it's clear the writer intended the Lagonians to be Asian inspired as well.

I've been so pleasantly surprised that current Trek has not been Like That™ Lower Decks in particular has been extremely good about meaningful representation and people learning to do better as we see Mariner make a better effort over the seasons to cut out her microaggressions towards Tendi. Hell, even in the SNW crossover, where Tendi wasn't even there to deal with that nonsense, Boimler takes care to emphasize that Orions aren't all pirates and thieves. It's been a great thing for me as a Black woman to see this go around.

She deserved better. Could have been the Kira of TNG

If Denise Crosby had stayed, they would have written Troi out of the show. Marina Sirtis has said that she heard it straight from Majel Barrett herself. Seriously, that was the plan for fixing what was wrong with Season 1. Get rid of one of the female characters, then chase another female cast member off the show too.

​@@andrewklang809the whole atmosphere BTS of TNG was so ridiculously misogynistic that it makes the series hard to watch in retrospect. Denise Crosby made the right choice either way because she'd been told that they were focused on their three white male pets and she was gonna have to suck it up. Given how McFadden was treated even after her return to TNG and how Sirtis fought all seven seasons for Troi to be taken seriously, I don't think TIIC would've done much better by Crosby. Last I heard, she (and Anthony Montgomery too!) were kicking ass on General Hospital, so that's cool.

Star Trek: Facial Feminization Surgery?? LOL!

He's not wrong tho

How did I not see this before now?!

That Lutan dude has a type. :D

His favourite cheese is Jarlsberg

You can’t polish a turd! 😂

Polish it with a sandblaster, perhaps.

He was a minor character in season one. So even if he said anything they wouldn’t have listened.

I always kind of of wondered about that bit of cognitive dissonance!

From interviews I think *most* of the cast voiced objections to this episode and just sort of begrudgingly went along with it because they felt they didn't have a choice, but... I dunno, I truly have no idea how much control actors actually have over scripts.

I thought "Steve must have added that, that can't possibly be real!", but then I looked it up, and yes. They literally named her Yar-ina.

whats racist about the other two?

"Sub Rosa" the other, other, other, OTHER racist episode. (Oh, TNG...)

I don't actually mind Up the Long Ladder. I love the space Irish, they actually have personality.

​@@flyingfoamtv2169Up the Long Ladder is old Irish stereotypes (like oooold). I'm not sure about The Last Outpost either.

​The last outpost portrayed the Ferenghi as antisemitic caricatures, and Up the long ladder had an even more blatant and offensive portrayal of the Irish as drunken, horny hillbillies in space.

Ok that’s funny! 😅

😂😂😂😂😂

He did apparently fire the director, and the director was the one who made the decision to cast all Black actors as the Ligonians. It's a bad script even without the racism, but it sounds like the racism was (mostly) added during the shooting stage, so I'd guess that Roddenberry only noticed how racist it was when it was too late to go back and fix it. There are plenty of episodes where he doesn't have that excuse, though, so maybe he wouldn't have ordered reshoots even if he'd caught it earlier.

@@Talisguy Generally speaking, people want to hold Gene up as some kind of super-virtuous paragon...but in truth, he was anything but. He was a habitual smoker and drinker, did cocaine on numerous occasions, and routinely cheated on his wife even before they were officially married (including an affair with Nichelle Nichols, and also one of his secretaries). He was a devout humanist, rejecting religion as "a replacement for a malfunctioning brain", and yet he somehow believed that in the distant future, humanity would magically abandon all our controversial differences. But it hasn't happened yet, and as long as life on Earth continues, I doubt it ever will.

That was savage 🤣

Maybe Ligonian physiology just works that way? 🤷‍♂️

I mean....yeah, it wasn't THAT bad but IMO that just makes the blunders of the latter show worse. There's no excusing the blatant racism in this episode, but in the general sense, there was no set formula for Trek, so a lot of experimenting was going on in the early seasons and _that_ aspect I can forgive. But to still do the same plodding, go nowhere stories forty years out?! Hell no.

Ah, yes - the Planet Hell soundstage…

The whole production design of this episode (and tbh lots of S1 episodes) feels like a 60s TOS throwback - particularly the idea that futuristic clothes must be made of shiny metallic fabric 😅

Gene wasn't forced out - he stepped away because of his health. He had cerebrovascular disease and encephalopathy, as a result of his longstanding recreational use of several drugs, including alcohol and cocaine. By 1989 he was in a wheelchair, and by October of 1991 his right arm was paralyzed. He died of a heart attack on October 24th, which would have been during TNG's fourth season. He was also an habitual smoker himself, in spite of his belief that characters in Star Trek shouldn't have any addictions.

Yup. That one was f**king horrible.

"Move Along Home" has nothing to fear from me.

@@SteveShives That goes for me too. "Move Along Home" > "In the Pale Moonlight" (with ZERO irony)

I've always felt that Move Along Home is unfairly maligned.

@@patrickdodds7162Man, I think "Move Along Home" gets a worse rep than it deserves, but this is a bridge too far!

@@PACABear Likewise actually.

I wonder how it'd have been if filmed as originally pitched by the writers, with reptilian aliens.

Somehow, I don't think Mike McMahan or either of its two Black leads would touch that mess with a twenty and a half foot pole 😂 Lower Decks is known which things to loving roast, which to celebrate, which to drag through the mud and which we're not even worth the time or effort to acknowledge. This one is absolutely in that last category.

@@KariIzumi1 Roasting the Planet of the Racist Stereotypes would be on brand for _Lower Decks_ . Though even they would have to make it clear that they’re criticizing the writers, rather than the people themselves. If there was any show that could revisit Ligon II , it’d be LD, but even they couldn’t play it straight.

Been a Trekkie since '01 myself and yeah, this one's always duked it out between that one and the ghostfucker one as the worst of TNG. The consensus towards CoH winning out over those two in recent years is due to: 1) more racial sensitivity (although people HAD to know this was bad even in 87?!) 2) more younger fans who grew up with cable and/or streaming who have no psychological trauma with clip shows and this going "Oh yeah, that makes sense" when told about the strike at the time 3) many of said younger fans finding Trek through Tumblr and never being poisoned by more conservative leaning Trek communities like TrekBBS or Sufficient Velocity to truly hate the bad but not offensively so episodes (which I'd say Sub Rosa is) 4) Less reverence for TNG in general, so new fans don't have the warm and fuzzies so they're not quite as linient towards the early seasons just because "it gave us the other shows!"

Ive been binging TGN and could not even get halfway through to the intro.

That and "These Are the Voyages" are low hanging fruit for a series that has plenty of contenders, but the one I rarely hear anyone discuss these days? "Precious Cargo." Maybe people aren't as hard on it because it's a Tucker episode and his stans were as militant as the fandom of any given K-Pop boy group, but dear Lord was that one just peak cringe. ANISB was saved by John Billingsley's acting and the crew giving Archer shit for his petulance, but this one? Nope. The princess may as well have been replaced by a cardboard cutout and voiced by AI and that wouldve given a better performance. The premise of enemies to lovers (for lack of a better term) is well worn and people already got that from him and T'Pol, an idea TIIC nearly dropped in favor of putting her with Archer but I've heard rumors that Bakula himself shut that one down. It's worth pointing out that Brannon Braga, the guy who still stands by other slop he's put his name on including ANISB and Threshold, is on record for saying he wanted to skip a week rather than put this one to air. Which says everything.

There's so many good bad episodes in that series. Like, people justly give early Disco flak for the war crimes, but Enterprise straight up has individual episodes about Archer committing torture, piracy, forced organ donation, brainwashing of prisoners, genocide, sex trafficking, and probably a few things I'm forgetting.

I read this & literally LOL'd 😂

Federation Combatives integrate martial arts from across the Alpha Quadrant, including several that would normally be contradictory.

@@jy3n2 Coup de vitesse, which borrows shamelessly from Aikido to marsellaise Savate (also Brazilian capoeira) That's the best martial art. Don't tell me you haven't read David Weber????? The first book had a cover with a woman and a sentient cat. I had to read it! Then I liked and read some more...

I mean this with all love cuz I respect the energy but....are you new to Trek? Cuz people were bashing this episode when I was new to Trek in 2001 :p This is as close to a universally held opinion as I've seen exist in this fandom.

Deadlines.

This tbh ... Oof, just ... oof.