Star Trek's 20 Most Embarrassing Moments (Part 1)
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Here at Monsters and Rockets, we are absolute, unabashed dorks for Star Trek in all of its incarnations. (Yes, we even have Star Trek: The Animated Series on DVD.) But even we have to admit that through the years, Trek has had its share of cringe-worthy moments. Here we present the first part of a Trekkie's guide to 20 Star Trek moments that would make any Klingon decide that today is a good day to die... of embarrassment! Note that we are not including the awesomely silly stuff like Spock's Brain, or the animated series. These are the just plain awful moments, the stuff you're so desperate to forget that you'd gladly put one of those Wrath of Khan brain-worms in your ear. (Part 2 appears here tomorrow.)
20. Tom Paris turns into a lizard. (Voyager - Threshold) The one comes last for a reason: we include it with great reluctance. For years, Trek fans have held up Threshold as the worst Voyager episode ever, perhaps the worst episode in all of Star Trek. (Even screenwriter Brannon Braga hates it: "I've written well over a hundred episodes of Star Trek, yet it seems to be the only episode anyone brings up, you know? Out of a hundred and some episodes, you're gonna have some stinkers! Unfortunately, that was a royal, steaming stinker.") So, because everybody apparently hates it so much, we feel obligated to include it. But the thing is, you're all idiots. We think this is one of Voyager's most memorable, creepy episodes. Robert Duncan McNeill does a great job selling his rapid mutation into an evil, hyper-evolved monster, and the part where Paris' tongue falls out is some crazy X-Files stuff. The last act twist, with Paris abducting Janeway and turning her into another salamander monster so they can make slimy little salamander monster babies, is a good example of a show taking big risks and following a premise to its logical if disgusting conclusion. It was the kind of risk the later Enterprise shied away from... And that's exactly why Enterprise was so sadly forgettable.
19. The two Lazaruses (Lazarusi?) wrestle each other forever. (Star Trek - The Alternative Factor) This episode takes an OK premise - two versions of the same man exist in different universes (universi?) and are doomed to fight each other for eternity - and drags on the fight scenes for so long that we start to feel like we're the ones who have been cursed to watch them fight for all eternity. And these aren't big, James T. Kirk-style fight scenes with dropkicks and all that, it's just Robert Brown and a lookalike listlessly grappling for most of the episode, while the effects guy occasionally twiddles a knob to invert the contrast. If this episode plays like they were desperate to fill time, there's a reason for that. It originally included an entire subplot where Lazarus romanced a crewmember, a subplot that was dropped after a black actress was cast and the network freaked out. So, we lost one of the first interracial romances in TV history, and got like nine hours of a guy wrestling himself instead. Awesome.
18. Every freaking second of Nemesis. (Star Trek Nemesis) With this one, we're cheating a bit. There's nothing really embarrassing in this movie. It's just tedious and filled with missed opportunities, and coming out when it did - just as the entire Trek franchise was teetering on the brink of ruin - it very nearly killed Trek for a generation. So, there's no one moment that makes us cringe, but we get cringe-y whenever we think of this tired, sad excuse for a Trek movie. We wouldn't have thought it was possible to watch Data die without shedding a tear, but this movie actually made us not give a damn. That's truly impressive. And why did the "young Picard" look and sound nothing like Patrick Stewart? It's hard to buy the idea of Picard in conflict with himself when you cast a heavyweight like Stewart opposite some pissy schoolboy with a shaved head.
17. The Rock does his stupid eyebrow thing. (Voyager - Tsunkatse) The actual episode around the Rock isn't so awful. It's your standard, gladiatorial-combat-in-space stuff. But the moment when the then-WWE star first saunters into the ring, strikes a pose and does his eyebrow thing? That was a pure UPN marketing synergy horrorshow, a scene that made you want to put a phaser in your mouth and end it all. (And can it truly just be coincidence that this episode's title sounds so much like "stuntcast"?)
16. Riker shatters taboos by falling in love with a girl who has a kind of butch haircut. (Star Trek: TNG - The Outcast) For years, gay characters had been conspicuously absent from Gene Roddenberry's Utopian future. There were people of every color, aliens, androids... But no gays. Fans kept lobbying Paramount to include gay characters in the franchise, and in the years before his death Roddenberry had publicly stated his intention to introduce some gay characters in Next Generation. But then Paramount got cold feet, and the show's "gay episode" ended up being a sadly compromised, lukewarm thing where Riker falls for a girl from an all-female planet - although we're told that the girls there don't quite have genders like we do, and they have a taboo against man/woman sex. As Jonathan Frakes himself has remarked, the episode would have made its point much more effectively if Riker's love interest had been played by a man. As it is, Riker's girlfriend looks like a girl and sounds like a girl, but... Apparently she's not quite a regular girl, somehow. (A few years later Deep Space Nine would break the homo barrier with the swoony lesbian romance of Rejoined, which just made The Outcast look even more sad by comparison.)
15. Phlox has a bad trip. (Enterprise - Doctor's Orders) Enterprise wasn't really interesting enough to have a lot of embarrassing moments. Seriously, it's only been off the air a few years, and we've already forgotten most of the episodes. But then there's Doctor's Orders, where the entire crew is put to sleep so they can pass through a dangerous area of space, and Doctor Phlox stays awake but suffers increasingly vivid, frightening hallucinations. It's an OK premise, executed reasonably well. So, why are we picking on it? Because Voyager used the exact same premise, just a few years earlier. In the episode One, Seven of Nine stays awake and hallucinates while the rest of the crew is asleep so they can navigate through a dangerous expanse. The only real change is that Phlox has an imaginary T'Pol to keep him company, only we don't know she's imaginary until the end... And that's the kind of twist M. Night Shyamalan would probably reject as a bit too hokey. Jeez, if you're going to steal a plot from an earlier Trek show, steal from the original series, or at least from Next Generation. Don't steal a plot from the show that ended its run mere months before you began yours!
14. Riker remembers stuff in his sleep. (Star Trek: TNG - Shades of Gray) As a result of the 1988 writer's strike and budget overruns, this clip show episode was banged out in three days. (An episode normally took a week to shoot.) Riker gets stung by some plant, and spends the rest of the episode in a coma, remembering random scenes from earlier shows... And this was back in Next Generation's rocky early days, so there wasn't much yet that anybody would want to relive. The sheer tedium of this episode can perhaps best be summed up by Maurice Hurley, who co-wrote it: "Piece of shit (...) Terrible, just terrible, and a way to save some money. I was on the way out the door."
13. "I feel strange, but also good!" (Star Trek: TNG - The Naked Now) This episode was a real cringer, for many reasons. It was only the Next Generation's second episode, and they were already ripping off the original series' The Naked Now with a story about a disease that makes you perpetually drunk. It features the revelation that Data is "fully functional" when he beds a tipsy Tasha Yar. And it offers us this unforgettable line, delivered with gusto by young Wil Wheaton. Now, over the years Wheaton has taken way too much flack for stuff that really wasn't his fault. He didn't write Wesley's clunky dialogue after all, or pick out that rainbow sweater. But with this line, Wesley achieved a dorkitude so extreme that even the dorks watching the show wanted to drag him into the Enterprise bathroom and give him a sonic swirly.
12. "Allamaraine!" (Deep Space Nine - Move Along Home) As the most badass of all the Treks (you know it's true,) Deep Space Nine didn't have many truly embarrassing moments. But Move Along Home is just really wretched stuff, and the moment when Captain Sisko starts playing hopscotch while he chants the little girl nursery rhyme ("Allamaraine, then three more...") is like spending a season in the Mirror Universe agony booth. It's a testament to Sisko's Shaft-like cool that he ever lived this one down. (At least the DS9 writers learned their lesson. Apparently it became something of a joke in the writer's room, and for years afterwards, whenever a script wasn't working, somebody would holler, "Allamaraine!")
11. A Scottish alien ghost makes Doctor Crusher have an orgasm and we have to watch. (Star Trek: TNG - Sub Rosa) Never has an episode of Trek felt more like some shut-in's fanfic. Seriously, somebody has converted an entire planet into a Gothic novel theme park, complete with quaint cottages, crashing thunderstorms, nutty old groundskeepers offering dire warnings... And a freaking ghost who has been getting his spectral groove on with the women of Crusher's family for generations. The whole premise is absolutely nuts, but the moment when we see Crusher having sex with her invisible boyfriend is just too awkward to bear. Gates McFadden is an actress of such prim dignity that all you can imagine under her Starfleet uniform is another Starfleet uniform. Watching her writhe in the throes of passion is like walking in on a three-way between your Aunt Bernice, Hillary Clinton and your first-grade teacher.
20. Tom Paris turns into a lizard. (Voyager - Threshold) The one comes last for a reason: we include it with great reluctance. For years, Trek fans have held up Threshold as the worst Voyager episode ever, perhaps the worst episode in all of Star Trek. (Even screenwriter Brannon Braga hates it: "I've written well over a hundred episodes of Star Trek, yet it seems to be the only episode anyone brings up, you know? Out of a hundred and some episodes, you're gonna have some stinkers! Unfortunately, that was a royal, steaming stinker.") So, because everybody apparently hates it so much, we feel obligated to include it. But the thing is, you're all idiots. We think this is one of Voyager's most memorable, creepy episodes. Robert Duncan McNeill does a great job selling his rapid mutation into an evil, hyper-evolved monster, and the part where Paris' tongue falls out is some crazy X-Files stuff. The last act twist, with Paris abducting Janeway and turning her into another salamander monster so they can make slimy little salamander monster babies, is a good example of a show taking big risks and following a premise to its logical if disgusting conclusion. It was the kind of risk the later Enterprise shied away from... And that's exactly why Enterprise was so sadly forgettable.
19. The two Lazaruses (Lazarusi?) wrestle each other forever. (Star Trek - The Alternative Factor) This episode takes an OK premise - two versions of the same man exist in different universes (universi?) and are doomed to fight each other for eternity - and drags on the fight scenes for so long that we start to feel like we're the ones who have been cursed to watch them fight for all eternity. And these aren't big, James T. Kirk-style fight scenes with dropkicks and all that, it's just Robert Brown and a lookalike listlessly grappling for most of the episode, while the effects guy occasionally twiddles a knob to invert the contrast. If this episode plays like they were desperate to fill time, there's a reason for that. It originally included an entire subplot where Lazarus romanced a crewmember, a subplot that was dropped after a black actress was cast and the network freaked out. So, we lost one of the first interracial romances in TV history, and got like nine hours of a guy wrestling himself instead. Awesome.
18. Every freaking second of Nemesis. (Star Trek Nemesis) With this one, we're cheating a bit. There's nothing really embarrassing in this movie. It's just tedious and filled with missed opportunities, and coming out when it did - just as the entire Trek franchise was teetering on the brink of ruin - it very nearly killed Trek for a generation. So, there's no one moment that makes us cringe, but we get cringe-y whenever we think of this tired, sad excuse for a Trek movie. We wouldn't have thought it was possible to watch Data die without shedding a tear, but this movie actually made us not give a damn. That's truly impressive. And why did the "young Picard" look and sound nothing like Patrick Stewart? It's hard to buy the idea of Picard in conflict with himself when you cast a heavyweight like Stewart opposite some pissy schoolboy with a shaved head.
17. The Rock does his stupid eyebrow thing. (Voyager - Tsunkatse) The actual episode around the Rock isn't so awful. It's your standard, gladiatorial-combat-in-space stuff. But the moment when the then-WWE star first saunters into the ring, strikes a pose and does his eyebrow thing? That was a pure UPN marketing synergy horrorshow, a scene that made you want to put a phaser in your mouth and end it all. (And can it truly just be coincidence that this episode's title sounds so much like "stuntcast"?)
16. Riker shatters taboos by falling in love with a girl who has a kind of butch haircut. (Star Trek: TNG - The Outcast) For years, gay characters had been conspicuously absent from Gene Roddenberry's Utopian future. There were people of every color, aliens, androids... But no gays. Fans kept lobbying Paramount to include gay characters in the franchise, and in the years before his death Roddenberry had publicly stated his intention to introduce some gay characters in Next Generation. But then Paramount got cold feet, and the show's "gay episode" ended up being a sadly compromised, lukewarm thing where Riker falls for a girl from an all-female planet - although we're told that the girls there don't quite have genders like we do, and they have a taboo against man/woman sex. As Jonathan Frakes himself has remarked, the episode would have made its point much more effectively if Riker's love interest had been played by a man. As it is, Riker's girlfriend looks like a girl and sounds like a girl, but... Apparently she's not quite a regular girl, somehow. (A few years later Deep Space Nine would break the homo barrier with the swoony lesbian romance of Rejoined, which just made The Outcast look even more sad by comparison.)
15. Phlox has a bad trip. (Enterprise - Doctor's Orders) Enterprise wasn't really interesting enough to have a lot of embarrassing moments. Seriously, it's only been off the air a few years, and we've already forgotten most of the episodes. But then there's Doctor's Orders, where the entire crew is put to sleep so they can pass through a dangerous area of space, and Doctor Phlox stays awake but suffers increasingly vivid, frightening hallucinations. It's an OK premise, executed reasonably well. So, why are we picking on it? Because Voyager used the exact same premise, just a few years earlier. In the episode One, Seven of Nine stays awake and hallucinates while the rest of the crew is asleep so they can navigate through a dangerous expanse. The only real change is that Phlox has an imaginary T'Pol to keep him company, only we don't know she's imaginary until the end... And that's the kind of twist M. Night Shyamalan would probably reject as a bit too hokey. Jeez, if you're going to steal a plot from an earlier Trek show, steal from the original series, or at least from Next Generation. Don't steal a plot from the show that ended its run mere months before you began yours!
14. Riker remembers stuff in his sleep. (Star Trek: TNG - Shades of Gray) As a result of the 1988 writer's strike and budget overruns, this clip show episode was banged out in three days. (An episode normally took a week to shoot.) Riker gets stung by some plant, and spends the rest of the episode in a coma, remembering random scenes from earlier shows... And this was back in Next Generation's rocky early days, so there wasn't much yet that anybody would want to relive. The sheer tedium of this episode can perhaps best be summed up by Maurice Hurley, who co-wrote it: "Piece of shit (...) Terrible, just terrible, and a way to save some money. I was on the way out the door."
13. "I feel strange, but also good!" (Star Trek: TNG - The Naked Now) This episode was a real cringer, for many reasons. It was only the Next Generation's second episode, and they were already ripping off the original series' The Naked Now with a story about a disease that makes you perpetually drunk. It features the revelation that Data is "fully functional" when he beds a tipsy Tasha Yar. And it offers us this unforgettable line, delivered with gusto by young Wil Wheaton. Now, over the years Wheaton has taken way too much flack for stuff that really wasn't his fault. He didn't write Wesley's clunky dialogue after all, or pick out that rainbow sweater. But with this line, Wesley achieved a dorkitude so extreme that even the dorks watching the show wanted to drag him into the Enterprise bathroom and give him a sonic swirly.
12. "Allamaraine!" (Deep Space Nine - Move Along Home) As the most badass of all the Treks (you know it's true,) Deep Space Nine didn't have many truly embarrassing moments. But Move Along Home is just really wretched stuff, and the moment when Captain Sisko starts playing hopscotch while he chants the little girl nursery rhyme ("Allamaraine, then three more...") is like spending a season in the Mirror Universe agony booth. It's a testament to Sisko's Shaft-like cool that he ever lived this one down. (At least the DS9 writers learned their lesson. Apparently it became something of a joke in the writer's room, and for years afterwards, whenever a script wasn't working, somebody would holler, "Allamaraine!")
11. A Scottish alien ghost makes Doctor Crusher have an orgasm and we have to watch. (Star Trek: TNG - Sub Rosa) Never has an episode of Trek felt more like some shut-in's fanfic. Seriously, somebody has converted an entire planet into a Gothic novel theme park, complete with quaint cottages, crashing thunderstorms, nutty old groundskeepers offering dire warnings... And a freaking ghost who has been getting his spectral groove on with the women of Crusher's family for generations. The whole premise is absolutely nuts, but the moment when we see Crusher having sex with her invisible boyfriend is just too awkward to bear. Gates McFadden is an actress of such prim dignity that all you can imagine under her Starfleet uniform is another Starfleet uniform. Watching her writhe in the throes of passion is like walking in on a three-way between your Aunt Bernice, Hillary Clinton and your first-grade teacher.
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