The 25 Worst Episodes of the Star Trek Franchise

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers of various episodes of the Star Trek franchise. 

It’s no secret that I consider Star Trek the greatest fiction franchise of all time. But it’s still not without its problems. The franchise has had episodes that were boring, cliché, sexist, racist, homophobic, and just incredibly stupid. So before we look at my Top 100 episodes, it wouldn’t be fair to not also acknowledge at least its 25 crappiest episodes. The quality of Star Trek is often dependent on the writing, but sometimes the actors or directors can save a bad story or kill a good one. All of those situations have been the case at some point throughout the franchise. As I list these 25 terrible episodes, I’ll be sharing my own opinion of why these episodes failed.

Let’s get started. 

25. "Precious Cargo" (Enterprise, Season 2 Ep. 11)

Chief Engineer Charles “Trip” Tucker III accidentally opens some cargo of aliens they recently rescued, only to discover that the cargo is A HOT GIRL?! The episode proceeds to resolve that cliché by piling on top of it about forty more clichés. This was a complete non-starter, a terrible idea at conception that ended up actually being produced because, well, it was Season 2 of Enterprise and the showrunners had no other ideas. It was that or they somehow watched River Tam in the pilot of Firefly and asked themselves “Now how can we do the dumbest possible version of that?” Then again, it could have always been both.

24. "Innocence" (Voyager, Season 2 Ep. 22)

Tuvok’s shuttle crashes (the first sign of both a generic and a terrible episode of Voyager) on a planet and meets children who say people are trying to kill them. Only it turns out, these aren’t children, their species just ages Benjamin Button style. What’s the problem? For starters, the idea itself is just stupid, and like plenty of episodes of Voyager, it completely defies how biology works. But what’s worse is that that idea is withheld from the viewer until the end to make it a big shocking twist. As a result, the story starts as a cliché, immediately gets annoying (the child actors are pretty bad), soon gets boring, and builds to a really stupid reveal.

23. "Bound" (Enterprise, Season 4 Ep. 17)

Orion slave girls come aboard the ship and work their charm (read: lady parts) on the male crew members in an effort to gain control of the ship. There’s plenty that goes wrong here. The story tries to be about the power women have over men and how other women are disgusted by women who blatantly use that power, but it just makes women look fickle in the process, their only means of getting what they want apparently being to seduce men who can do things for them. It isn't helped that the female crew members (that are incredibly annoyed by everything that happens here) aren't annoyed because their gender is being horribly objectified. Oh no, Orion females just release pheromones that make other women irritable so they can’t truly compete with them. The especially sad thing is that this might have fit right in if this were an episode of The Original Series, which was often pretty sexist just because that’s how society was at the time. Unfortunately this aired in 2005.

22. "Shades of Gray" (The Next Generation, Season 2 Ep. 22)

Some episodes have complicated failures, but this one is simple – it was a clip show, which automatically makes for a bad episode. But even worse, it’s a clip show with an absolutely terribly written and acted framing device. Riker gets poked by a thorn that infects him with a parasite that conveniently feeds on memories of all the fun times we’ve had so far, right guys?

Why'd we get this? Well, there was about to be a writer's strike, so they needed a quick cheap episode to crank out before that happened. That's still no excuse for this atrocity. When the DS9 showrunners needed a cheap episode, they made “Duet,” one of the greatest episodes in the entire franchise. When Maurice Hurley, one of the worst writers to work on the franchise, needed a cheap episode, we got this. There is no excuse for ending the season in which TNG really started to come into its own…with this.

21. "Unimatrix Zero, I and II" (Voyager, Season 6/7 Eps 26/1)

The only two-parter to make this list. Usually season finales and premieres are supposed to be some of the strongest episodes of a television show, but it’s definitely not the case here. It’s this episode people point to when making the claim that Voyager made the Borg suck. Personally, I don’t completely agree with that claim, but one thing is abundantly clear – this story is terrible. The episode revolves around a minority in the Borg Collective experiencing a shared dream world, and the starship Voyager trying to use that to deal a significant blow to the rest of the Borg. 

What’s sad is that this could have been great, as there’s plenty of potential in just that premise. But instead, it’s used for a Romance of the Week with Seven of Nine, it makes Captain Janeway look even crazier than she often comes across as, and the Borg not connected to this dream world are all incredibly thick. This also features really, really terrible guest acting, from Seven’s love interest to a Klingon warrior who really isn't any more believable than a typical cosplayer. Unlike most of these previous episodes on this list, this was a great idea that was executed in the worst way possible. If there is a redeeming element in here, it’s that…nope, I got nothing. This two-part episode just sucks.

20. "Spock's Brain" (The Original Series, Season 3 Ep. 11)

This episode features another stupid idea (aliens steal Spock’s brain and the crew has to get it back in order to save him) but it’s not as bad as people say. At least it had the decency of being endlessly silly to watch. When it comes to “so bad it’s good,” it doesn't often get much better than sending a brainless Spock into a cave using a remote control like a freaking toy race car. Sadly, like with most bad TOS episodes, there's not much to deconstruct here, it's just a stupid story. While most episodes are terrible and boring, “Spock’s Brain” at least succeeds at being terrible and entertaining.

19. "Carpenter Street" (Enterprise, Season 3 Ep. 11)

This episode aired as part of the show’s Xindi Arc, which more or less boiled down to being a season of 24, but in space. It was a pretty solid season except for episodes like this (and another I’ll discuss further down). In this episode, Captain Archer and First Officer T’Pol travel back to the year 2004, where the alien enemy they’ve spent the season trying to defeat are working to infect humanity with a virus in the past. What went wrong? When Archer finds Loomis, the human unwittingly helping the enemy, he proceeds to go full Jack Bauer and unnecessarily beats the crap out of Loomis for information. Eventually Archer stops even caring about information, he just wants to punch someone. And T’Pol somehow has the nerve to call Loomis the embodiment of humanity’s worst traits. On top of this, this brings up the Temporal Cold War subplot again in the middle of the Xindi Arc, and it does so in a way that makes even less sense that the rest of the Temporal Cold War subplot.

Interesting note: The main alien baddy of this episode is played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, better known as Papa Winchester from Supernatural or as The Comedian from Watchmen. He took the role because he needed money, and in an EW interview, he said the experience of wearing the extremely heavy makeup combined with being part of a terrible story made him consider quitting acting entirely.

18. TIE - "Let He Who Is Without Sin..." (Deep Space Nine, Season 5 Ep. 7) and "Sub Rosa" (The Next Generation, Season 7  Ep. 14)

We have a tie here, because both of these episodes fail in the same way - Both episodes are supposed to be about love and sex, and both of them are thoroughly unsexy and unromantic.

Lest you think that Deep Space Nine didn’t have any crap episodes, worry not. Even the greatest television show ever made had some stinkers, and this is one of them. The plot: The couples of DS9 (plus Quark) go to the vacation planet of Risa. Everything goes to hell because Worf is incapable of having fun, Dax is incapable of putting herself in anyone else’s shoes, Bashir and Leeta participate in a Bajoran breakup ritual that’s basically just pretending that everything’s okay, and Quark is, well, Quark. Modern Star Trek really wasn’t very sexy, and that’s something that’s kind of necessary for an episode that’s supposed to be about sexual liberation and open-mindedness. Instead, it’s a boring hour of character assassination and fan disservice.

With "Sub Rosa," meanwhile, Doctor Crusher hooks up with a Scottish Ghost Alien that used to hook up with her grandmother, and she finds the entire thing extremely erotic. We even see her have a freaking ecto-gasm. But wait wait, it turns out that the Scottish Ghost Alien, get this, is evil. Or something. But he must be destroyed. So he gets destroyed. And then this is never spoken of again. It's an unbearably painful 45 minutes of television. Even with Jonathan Frakes directing, there's nothing anyone could have done to rise above this terrible script. If there is a bright spot here, it's that for once Doctor Crusher had to go through this awful kind of story, instead of the usual Counselor Troi.

17. "The Naked Now" (The Next Generation, Season 1 Ep. 3)

In a way, I’m picking on TNG for including its second ever episode here (the pilot counted as the first 2 episodes, but this is its real second story). Second episodes of TV shows are notorious for often being one of the worst episodes in a series. Hell, DS9 had some really bad episodes in its first season, but I'm not including them on this list because I'm usually more forgiving of shows that start out solid but just need time to find themselves.

But this episode was just a mess, like a lot of The Next Generation's first season. I'm less forgiving with shows that don't get off to a decent start and just get worse. Like basically every other modern Trek show but DS9. The plot of the episode? Well, it’s basically just TOS’s “The Naked Time” with the TNG crew. And because of that bigger crew, it’s even more unfocused and ridiculous than the original story. If there’s a bright spot here, it’s that Data’s “fully functional” incident here is later referred to in “The Measure of a Man,” to touching effect.

16. "These Are the Voyages..." (Enterprise, Season 4 Ep. 22)

Here’s the thing – this is really only a terrible episode because it was the final episode of a television series. If it was just another episode, it might have actually been embraced by the fans if the story was given a little more thought. In this episode, Commander Riker (during the events of the TNG episode, “The Pegasus”) faces some indecision, and decides to recreate on the holodeck an important moment of history, the foundation of the Federation. He gets some insight from holographic versions of the first Enterprise crew as they journey to Earth to sign the first Federation Charter.

Honestly, that’s really not a bad idea for an episode. It’s just not a good idea for the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise. If they made the pre-conference part of the episode something besides a hackneyed attempt to mirror the ENT pilot and kill off Trip for no other reasons but shocking the fans, this actually could have been this series’s “Trials and Tribble-ations,” an interesting crossover that pays homage to the franchise’s history.

Hell, since the only TNG characters we see are Riker and Troi, this could have taken place on the U.S.S. Titan, the ship Riker's Captain of by the end of the last TNG movie. That way we could see the characters we liked again, but not also have to watch "The Pegasus" and think "I guess between scenes here, Riker and Troi aged 20 years." On the Titan, we could even see something new. What's Captain Riker up to now that he has his own ship?

The point is that this crossover episode could have been anything. A backdoor pilot for a show about Riker and Troi on the Titan, a fun reunion for the TNG crew, or even a fun story for the Temporal Cold War arc. What if Captain Riker encountered a change in the timeline that he couldn't fix because of something that happened during the Enterprise era? He could have brought Captain Archer or another NX-01 crew member to the late 24th century to give him an account on what happened that was different, because the original Enterprise crew would be the ones who know that era best. Working together, the two generations fix the timeline, everybody shakes hands and return to their normal time. Archer would be happy to see the Federation he's starting to form is flourishing in the future, and Riker would excited to have met the first Captain of the Enterprise. Since Archer's already done so much time travelling, there wouldn't even be the need to operate in secret, like Sisko and crew have to do in "Trials and Tribble-ations," and being on the Titan means they're not limited to green-screening through archive footage of old episodes. They could do whatever they wanted to do.

Instead the Enterprise creators didn't really think about what a gift they had given themselves beyond the basic concept, and tried to do a special franchise homage and wrap up a television series at the same time. They ended up failing at both, solidifying Enterprise's reputation as the worst series in the franchise. I'd still make the case that Voyager was worse, but when this is what we get for a series finale, it's not hard to agree with that consensus.

15. "Skin of Evil" (The Next Generation, Season 1 Ep. 23)

With the exception of Spock in the Wrath of Khan film, Star Trek has never done a good job killing a main character. See the previous episode on this list for a good example. But the worst bad character death of them all (even worse than Kirk getting crushed by a bridge) is Tasha Yar’s meaningless redshirt-esque death here in “Skin of Evil.” Denise Crosby, who played Tasha, was tired of just doing the same shtick over and over again every episode, and the sexism she’s rumored to have experienced from the producers and studio execs didn't help either. So she wanted off the show. Instead of dedicating an episode to giving her character a fitting exit, the writers instead just worked her dying into a script they were already writing. So Tasha Yar gets killed by a black sludge monster supposed to be the embodiment of evil about a third of the way into the episode.

This couldn't be handled any worse than it is here. For starters, the death is meaningless, something the writers sought to rectify in the infinitely better “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” But once she is killed, they beam her back to the ship to try to revive her. Except they beam her to the transporter room instead of directly to Sickbay. Maybe if the writers allowed their regular characters to be intelligent and do things they’ve already done before, Tasha could’ve survived. But she dies, and the crew seems to be over it after about two minutes. Worf gets promoted to Tasha’s position and then it’s back to dealing with the Lord of Toner.

But the real kicker here is that the episode ends on the holodeck, with the bridge crew watching a pre-recorded message Tasha created in the event of her death. She says something to each of the crew before the program ends. While this was supposed to be touching, Tasha’s known these people for a few months. At the end of the day, all this scene implies is that Tasha was morbid enough not just to make such a message in the first place, but to continually update it again and again each time she takes a new position. Makes you wonder if she had this message already prepared if Data had accidentally proved to be too “fully functional” in “The Naked Now.” But if you think this was Tasha’s worst moment in the show, just read on. We’re not even halfway done.

14. "Extinction" (Enterprise, Season 3 Episode 3)

In this episode, Captain Archer and two of his officers land on a planet and are transformed into another species, compelled to find a city they believe to be their home. That’s already a pretty cliché plot for Star Trek. After all, metamorphosis that defies all of biology is something Voyager did basically all the time, and TNG had a pretty decent episode called “Identity Crisis,” that followed nearly the exact same story as this episode, only with a cooler alien design and a more mysterious angle. With “Extinction,” though, the crew transforms immediately and meanders around like hunched over baboons. Now, this would have just been a forgettable bad episode, and not bad enough to be on this list, if it hadn’t aired during the Xindi arc in the third season, especially not immediately after “Anomaly,” which succeeded in both raising the stakes of the entire show and in being a genuinely good episode of television. But to put out something like “Anomaly” only to follow it up with ape frogs, you’re not going to convince viewers you’re truly taking your show in a new, exciting direction.

13. "Twisted" (Voyager, Season 2 Ep. 6)

Here is the plot of “Twisted” – the ship hits a Space MacGuffin and the ship is jumbled around like a jigsaw puzzle, resulting in people walking through one door thinking they’re on the way to, say, the bridge, only to end up in the mess hall. That is it. The conflict is “Oh, this isn’t the room I wanted.” Unlike many of these episodes (which are bad but still fun to watch), this episode is just boring. There’s not even anything I can deconstruct. So little happens in these 45 minutes. It’s the same non-starter obstacle over and over again until a technobabble solution fixes it, the end. Of course the writer of this episode was promoted to showrunner for the final season.

12. "Hide and Q" (The Next Generation, Season 1 Ep. 10)

I left this image big for your pleasure. 

Q is an incredibly compelling character, thanks in most part to actor John de Lancie, who often understood who Q was better than the writers did. But in his second appearance after the TNG pilot, Q’s personality is nothing more than every hammy trickster character in the history of fiction, from Loki to Bugs Bunny. Everything is an over-the-top joke to Q in this story about how power corrupts. The episode certainly makes it clear that power corrupts, doing everything possible to hammer in that very simplistic point. When Q gives Riker the power of the Q, Riker immediately becomes an arrogant douchebag, and after a ridiculously simple-minded game of temptation for the other crew members to accept his power and take advantage of it, he just decides he’s done with it. 

Besides all the silliness of the first half of the episode, the thing that really makes this story insufferable is that on top of all this, we see Starfleet’s Prime Directive at its absolute worst. When Riker has the power of Q, he has an opportunity to save a little girl who was just killed. He regrets not saving her, and it’s Captain Picard who says “You were right not to try.” It’s pretty hard to justify not saving an innocent child on moral grounds, but damn if Picard didn’t make us really consider the long term ramifications of interfering with OH MY GOD THEY LET A LITTLE GIRL DIE FOR NO REASON AND THEY COULD HAVE SAVED HER. THERE IS NOTHING THAT CAN BE SAID TO TRULY JUSTIFY THAT. NOTHING.

On the bright side, we do get to see Wesley get impaled through the chest in this episode. Even if he’s fine by the end, it’s always good to see people get what’s coming to them.

11. "A Night in Sickbay" (Enterprise, Season 2 Ep. 5)

When it comes to writing a bottle episode (an episode that takes place in as few locations as possible, usually just one set), you really need the right justification to keep your characters stuck in that single room. Otherwise the audience will start to feel even more confined than the characters. In this episode, Captain Archer and crew are returning from a diplomatic meeting with an incredibly fickle species that they already knew was easily offended by nearly every aspect of human culture. 

Archer, always a maker of sound decisions, brought along his fucking dog. 

The dog got infected with something during his time on the alien planet, and Archer – rather than blaming himself, a supposedly trained diplomat, for bringing his dog to an incredibly important political meeting for no apparent reason – blames the aliens for not warning him that this would happen to his little four-legged pal. Over the course of the night, Archer and Doctor Phlox try to save the dog, and hilarity allegedly ensues. As Archer grows increasingly stressed as time goes on and his dog gets worse, Phlox decides that this is all because Archer just needs to get laid. I know, I’d have drawn that conclusion too. You’d think that the episode couldn’t get more stupid than how it begins, with the crew in the Decon chamber rubbing lotion on each other (including the fucking dog) to kill any pathogens they may have picked up, Archer complaining about the aliens the whole time. But somehow they top it with the end of the episode, with Archer performing a ceremony for the aliens to get back in their good graces, featuring what I like to call the Apology Chainsaw.

What’s especially sad is that the two episodes before it were actually really good, leading this episode to have the highest ratings of the season. Naturally, this episode killed that momentum, putting the entire franchise in jeopardy. But the icing on this cake made of shit? It was nominated for a Hugo Award.

10. "The Outrageous Okona" (The Next Generation, Season 2 Ep. 4)

There is nothing more excruciating than bad comedy that thinks it’s great comedy. See the previous episode for another example. But this episode (which weirdly guest stars Teri Hatcher of all people as the transporter operator) is supposed to be a complete deconstruction of humor and what makes things funny. All while demonstrating how thoroughly unfunny the writers of the episode are. Hell, when Data wants to learn more about humor, he asks the holodeck computer to create a character best suited to teach him how to be funny. Naturally, the computer summons Joe Piscopo, bringing such hilarity as a terrible Jerry Lewis impression. Outside the holodeck, Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan tries to help Data out, but the script does nothing to prove Guinan knows humor any more than Data does. This is so much worse than bad open mic comedy, because at least the struggling comics are trying. Here, the writers are under the impression that they are fucking hilarious, and their supposed A-game material doesn't even provoke a smile.

Oh, and the title of the episode comes from the name of the guest character who is clearly designed to be a G-rated Han Solo. Somehow that is even less exciting than it sounds.

9. "The Way to Eden" (The Original Series, Season 3 Ep. 20)

Here’s the premise: Space Hippies. The End. Again, I really wish I could go more in depth about bad TOS episodes, but there's just nothing here. It’s a plodding, boring hour, and accomplishes nothing but making the dumbest case against using technology possible, and completely contradicting past characterization of Ensign Chekov of all people. To be fair, the episode seemed to have no other goals besides making “Herbert” a lasting derogatory slur akin to “The Man.” Two out of three isn’t bad.

8. "Profit and Lace" (Deep Space Nine, Season 6 Ep. 23)

More bad cliché comedy, this time along the same line as Some Like It Hot. Except really, really bad. The Ferengi are already the most problematic species in the franchise (give or take some stupid one-shot aliens), but this somehow takes something inherently awful and makes it even worse. 

The plot: Quark has to disguise himself as a woman in order to convince an important Ferengi politician that Ferengi women deserve equal rights. The result is part terrible comedy, part disgusting family in-fighting. Quark’s mother, Ishka was first portrayed very well by Andrea Martin, but after her first appearance, Cecily Adams took over the role. Only she didn’t have Martin’s warmth, so the Ishka character became insufferable. And she is never worse than she is in this episode. 

But more than the awful script and generally awful acting (save for Armin Shimerman, who always manages to make Quark interesting to watch), the thing that really led to this episode going from a typical bad Ferengi episode to the worst thing Deep Space Nine ever did was, I’m sorry to say, Alexander Siddig’s direction. Siddig wanted to put the comedy on the back burner and make this episode a dark family drama, about how the people you love can also hurt you the most. The producers thought that approach ruined the comedy and reshot some scenes that Siddig made extremely dark and unsettling. As a result, the episode has a lot of wild shifts in tone from awful comedy to uncomfortable, cringe-inducing drama. And both of those tones end up failing. 

Personally, the thing that makes this especially bad is that it aired in the show’s sixth season, which features some of the entire franchise’s best episodes (6 eps from this season are in my Top 100). You’d think in a show that had been in a fantastic groove for years at that point would’ve recognized this script as a disaster before even assigning it to a director. Instead, the writers thought it was going to be a classic. Another example of the unfunny thinking they’re totally hilarious. Instead, this episode is tonally jarring and incredibly offensive to women. But don’t worry – the franchise gets even more sexist further down. Read on!

7. "And the Children Shall Lead" (The Original Series, Season 3 Ep. 5)

The worst episode of The Original Series, and thankfully it's an episode I can at least analyze a little more than Space Hippies or Remote Control Spock. In this episode, the U.S.S. Enterprise encounters a planet with an evil spirit alien thing that controls children, using those children to take over the ship. Factor in William Shatner acting at his utmost Shatneriest, and you’ve got the makings of a truly awful episode.

It at least begins intriguingly. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet and find that everyone committed suicide. Then children come out to play “Ring Around the Rosie” around Captain Kirk and everything goes to hell. The idea that the children act this way as a coping mechanism to completely tune out their parents’ death is even an interesting idea, but it quickly turns stupid when that whole evil spirit alien thing (terribly played by Melvin Belli, who is not an actor but instead a damn attorney) comes into play. The alien’s motivations are never really clear beyond that he wants more friends and seems to have a childlike mind, but mostly it’s just a bad guy that takes over the ship and fucks around with the crew.

The script offers nothing interesting beyond the first few minutes, and after that the episode not only puts its faith in child actors to carry the episode (never a good idea), but it also doesn’t result in the viewer learning anything new about the characters (though I guess Uhura’s worst fear is being old and hideous), or even having a real emotional reaction about anything that goes on. It’s just there. At least “Spock’s Brain” makes you laugh.

6. TIE - "The Child" (TNG, Season 2 Ep. 1) and "Unexpected" (ENT, Season 1 Ep. 5)

We have another tie! These two episodes tie for the sixth worse because both episodes have the exact same horrible premise. A crew member is raped, that rape is completely ignored, and that rape results in a pregnancy. And both are terribly offensive episodes.

In “The Child” an energy life form “enters” Troi in the middle of the night so it can transform into a human in her body and basically give birth to itself. At no point in the episode does anyone really discuss that Troi was totally raped, and if being offensive wasn’t enough, the episode doesn’t do anything interesting once the alien baby is born. It grows and lives a full life over the course of the episode, and then it just leaves (presumably after stopping at the ship’s gift shop to buy an “I Experienced Humanoid Life” t-shirt). And in the meantime, we’re introduced to the new Chief Medical Officer, the cold, soulless Doctor Pulaski (portrayed without any semblance of kindness by Diana Muldaur). Clearly meant to be a female Leonard McCoy, Pulaski is now best remembered for picking on Data for no reason.

“Unexpected,” is equally offensive, though not in the same way that “The Child” offends. Its not that it's boring, it's that the event at the center of the episode – Trip has what an alien species considers to be sex (but to humans is just playing with some pebbles) and then finds himself pregnant – is apparently totally hilarious and should be approached like a comedy, because obviously there’s nothing funnier than when a man is raped. When Troi’s raped, it’s thrown under the rug and the focus is put on the stupid alien kid. When Trip gets raped, his friends essentially say “Ha ha! You were raped!” And Trip’s violation here is even more clear that this truly is rape than it is in “The Child,” because the alien that does it later confesses that she didn’t know that a different species could end up pregnant after doing what they did. Instead of making her actions understandable, all it does is make it clear that she used Trip to feel sexual pleasure and took advantage of Trip not knowing anything about her species and culture. It’s just a little game, that’s all it is. And in addition to this awful plot, we also have the revelation that the NX-01 Enterprise was designed by morons, with a handrail on an elevator in the Engineering section that could chop your fingers off if you ride the elevator while placing your hands on, get this, the handrail. It’s hard to believe that doing “Space 9/11” is what got this show out of its godawful creative rut. But, sadly, this is still not the worst episode of Enterprise.

5. "Angel One" (The Next Generation, Season 1 Ep 14)

The Enterprise-D visits a planet where the women are in charge instead of the men. Instead of using that to provide any real form of social commentary, the idea begins and ends with “the women are in charge instead of the men,” which means that everything is just silly, with the men of the planet being physically smaller and wearing low-cut shirts. The end. There’s nothing else here. No commentary, no insight. Just the two social norms flip-flopped. What’s worse, the leader of the planet is a strong woman…until she sees Commander Riker and decides she wants him. And Riker decides that objectifying himself for the sake of pleasing someone else is just fine. Oh, what a great message for people to take away. Factor in some horrid guest acting and you’ve got the second worst episode of TNG.

4. "Tattoo" (Voyager, Season 2 Ep. 9)

A little backstory before I get to the episode (which won’t take me very long to get through). Michael Piller ultimately saved modern Trek. He shifted the focus of TNG from wallowing in TOS-style stories to the people on the ship. He wrote one of the franchise’s most famous episodes, “The Best of Both Worlds.” But unfortunately, he was kind of a sucker for the New Age natural medicine technology-rejection fad that popped up in the 90s, and that attitude isn’t really appropriate for Star Trek, a show about using science and technology to solve problems. He also loved writing about Native American culture, despite not really knowing a lot about it. An author on Native American culture was hired to consult on the character of Chakotay, who’s never said to be of any specific tribe (thus allowing the writers to basically do whatever they wanted with him). Piller wanted to make sure he was being accurate. Unfortunately, that consultant officer he hired kind of just made all that shit up based on hackneyed stereotypes, and was called out on by actual Native Americans for publishing racist garbage disguised as cultural insight. Piller took it all to be true, though, and as a result, Star Trek never featured a good portrayal of Native American culture, either literally or allegorically. Every time Chakotay tells a story of his people or anything like that, it only comes off as one thing – extremely, undeniably racist.

Oh, so in this episode, we find out that Chakotay’s tribe was visited by aliens that look like magical white people thousands of years ago, who were so impressed by the tribes respect for the land that they gave them a genetic bond that made them extra super special, resulting in the tribe worshiping these magical white people they called the Sky Spirits. It's hard to believe that the good part of a Star Trek episode is about a hologram getting the flu.

3. "Code of Honor" (The Next Generation, Season 1 Ep. 4)

I will say this – at least most of the various Trek shows got their awful episodes out of the way in their first couple seasons. Deep Space Nine’s worst episode is in its sixth season, which in a lot of ways is worse than some of these other episodes in the Bottom 10. But just because TNG got its worst moment out of the way in its third real episode, that doesn't make "Code of Honor" more than what it is. And what it is is a racist, sexist, cliché, and idiotic piece of crap. 

The plot: An alien race of all-black people (always a good sign) refuses to give the Enterprise a vaccine unless Tasha Yar marries the leader, Lutan. When Tasha refuses (and proceeds to wipe the floor with the Lutan’s bodyguards), Lutan kidnaps Tasha, prompting Lutan’s other wife (yep, they have other wives) to challenge Tasha to a battle to the death. So we go from racist (all black aliens), to sexist (Tasha is a woman and therefore an object to Lutan) to cliché (fights to the death seem to happen all the goddamn time in this franchise, and fights to the death in order to marry someone is straight out of TOS’s “Amok Time”). And all of it is idiotic. When Captain Picard starts discussing the Prime Directive – about how they could just nuke the shit out of this planet at any time and get the vaccine that they need, but shouldn’t because it’s wrong to take advantage of a less developed culture – he even cuts himself off. The one time speechifying about the Prime Directive would have been really relevant, he stops himself. Apparently it’s only time for speeches when it comes to episodes like this next one.

2. "Dear Doctor" (Enterprise, Season 1 Ep. 13)

This is probably the most divisive episode in the entire franchise. Not necessarily the most controversial, but definitely the episode with the most polarized viewpoints on it. I’ve seen online reviews give this episode a perfect score. But in reality, this episode is legitimately evil. It’s not even bad, really. It’s evil. And all thanks to its last ten minutes. 

The plot: The ship comes across a planet with two different indigenous species. One is suffering from a plague, and the other, lesser race, isn't affected because it’s a genetic condition. The Enterprise crew could help, but Doctor Phlox believes that the lesser race is on the cusp of evolving to something greater if the plagued species wasn't around. He tells Captain Archer that it would be wrong to interfere with how nature progresses, and that they shouldn't treat the infected race. Archer says that someday there will be a Federation with a Prime Directive that also agrees that it’s always better to commit the genocide of an entire species based on a misunderstanding of how evolution works than it is to help suffering people. So the ship takes its leave, Archer and Phlox feeling like they totally did the right thing.

Originally, Phlox was supposed to sabotage efforts to cure the disease and have Archer be angry at him when he finds out. The studio execs wanted Archer to be in the right because he’s the captain. So instead all that happens in the version that aired is that Archer also agrees that yes, the right thing to do in this situation is do nothing, their inaction condemning possibly billions of people to death. All because Phlox thinks evolution functions on a Pokemon-like progression system.

Sadly, this episode wouldn't be on the list if it wasn't for that ending. It still wouldn't be a good episode, but everything potentially interesting brought up in this story is sentenced to death by the last ten minutes. If you argue for genocide on moral grounds, you’re on the same side as Hitler. And some people think this is the best episode of ENT’s first season. This episode is evil.

1. "Threshold" (Voyager, Season 2 Ep. 15)

If you ever want a The Room-esque episode of Star Trek, look no further than this abysmal failure. We start with a bad story – pilot Tom Paris goes to the theoretically impossible Warp 10, only for that to trigger his evolution and becoming a giant salamander thing, then causing him to kidnap Captain Janeway, transform her too, and take her to some planet for them to have giant salamander sex and have giant salamander babies. Then the holographic Doctor finds them, somehow makes them all better, and no one speaks of this ever again. It features the most ridiculous technobabble phrases ever uttered in the entire franchise, it does a disservice to every single character on the show, and it completely defies how evolution – nay, all of biology – works. 

That stupid mess is already enough to make this the worst episode in all of Star Trek. Now add in some awful directing. Many shots on launching the shuttle that goes Warp 10 are staged in a way to make the episode feel like a mission control room (Apollo 13 had come out a year before, I believe), but not only does it fail to make the shuttle launch any more interesting, but it also ignores the fact that just getting the shuttle out of the ship doesn’t require any more effort here than it does any other time. It just makes a big deal out of the same old "Doing whatever my job is to the letter and reporting on it as I do it, Captain" shtick. On top of that, the big action bit where the evolved Tom Paris escapes…happens all out of frame. Except for a few random phaser beams, pretty much an entire act of this episode could have just been a radio play.

Besides the immense failure of ambition here, I also brought up The Room because the two share a common element – a single actor doing his damnedest to sell a truly awful story. With The Room, you get the feeling that Greg Sestero was really trying to rise above the material he was working with. In “Threshold,” we have Robert Duncan McNeill really trying to act through the constantly inflating and deflating makeup. Even when his character’s tongue falls out he tries to sell his dialogue (yes, he has dialogue after his character loses his damn tongue). But the episode, ultimately, is not about anything. It goes from boring to bizarre, and then as complicated an situation as Warp 10 Salamanders is, it’s all resolved off screen in a log. This is the worst story of all Star Trek. But really, it’s so fascinating in its failure that I would honestly recommend you watch it once.

Well that’s it. That’s the worst the franchise has to offer (though I’d make the case that some of the films are worse than some of these episodes). So let’s move onto what ensured Star Trek’s legacy. Next week, we'll look at #100-91 of my Top 100 Star Trek Episodes. Because they're episodes I actually liked, I'll be going more in depth at what makes these 100 episodes so great. See you then.