Star Trek: The Next Generation didn't get much of an easy start, but the series eventually won
over the fans, thanks to some truly excellent episodes... and despite a few pretty terrible
ones. According to IMDB, these are the best and worst episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
To its credit, the season seven episode "Sub Rosa" really tried to go for...
well, something. Whatever that was supposed to be, however,
was muddled by an odd mishmash of gothic drama, romance, and science fiction.
It starts with Beverly Crusher, the ship's doctor, attending her grandmother's funeral on Caldos,
a terraformed planet that looks kinda like a Scottish theme park. During the funeral,
a mysterious man drops a flower into the grave, makes smoldering eye contact with Beverly,
and leaves. When Crusher goes to her grandmother's cottage, she finds the
older woman's journal - and discovers that her grandma had a young lover, named Ronin… who,
for some reason, Crusher has never heard of before. Also, this guy tries to steal a candle.
"Who's there? What the hell are you doing? Get out of my house."
Later, the same candle lights on its own, and ghostly hands start to mess with Beverly's
nightgown. The same mysterious man from the funeral soon appears, claiming to be
Ronin - who then persuades Beverly to resign her post and shack up with him on Caldos.
Turns out Ronin is an entity who inhabits the candle holder, and he's been loving up the Crusher
family women for centuries with their very dubious consent. In the end, Beverly vanquishes him,
but not before a series of overdramatic hijinks that include briefly reanimating
her grandmother's remains. So yeah, it's pretty weird. And with a mere 4.9 out of 10 on IMDb,
you can't blame fans for wanting to skip right past it, either.
Season five's "The Inner Light" is basically guaranteed to break your heart,
and it's all thanks to a derelict space probe. Sounds odd, right?
But don't knock it - because this episode sits at a practically perfect 9.5 on IMDb.
The episode begins when the Enterprise encounters the probe in question.
Without warning, it zaps Picard unconscious, and while the crew tries to revive him,
he somehow wakes up on a strange planet. Stranger still,
the woman who greets him claims she's his wife - and that he is actually a man named Kamin.
"This is your home, of course."
The so-called Kamin eventually settles into life on the planet,
Kataan, convinced that he must have experienced some kind of traumatic brain injury. His family
helps him piece together his life as a father, scientist, and even a penny whistle musician.
And that's just as well, too, since Kataan is facing destruction at the hands of an unstable
sun - with Kamin and the other scientists desperately searching for a solution.
The whole episode spans 50 years of Kamin's life, as an aging Kamin realizes that he simply can't
save his people. But "The Inner Light" really twists the knife when it's finally revealed that
this has been a vision all along. It's explained to Kamin that the people of Kataan launched
the probe so someone could hold the memory of their people after they met their destruction.
"Tell them of us, my darling."
Picard wakes back on the Enterprise, having been out for only a few minutes. The episode ends
as a quietly devastated Picard plays the very same whistle he had learned to play as Kamin.
While some Next Generation episodes tug at your heartstrings,
others stumble over them and end up in an awkward tangle on the floor.
And at 5.8 on IMDb, "The Child" definitely falls into the latter category.
In the opening scene, a ball of light enters the ship, zips around, and enters the quarters
of Counselor Deanna Troi. She wakes up suddenly, but is otherwise unaware that the light has lodged
itself in her body - until strange things begin to happen to her. Basically, it looks like she's
pregnant, but she really can't recall doing anything that could have gotten her in such
a situation. In the space of only 36 hours, she gives birth to a baby boy, who she names Ian.
Ian continues to grow at an alarming rate, looking like an eight-year-old after just
two days. Meanwhile, an unknown radiation source is causing containment issues in the cargo bay,
which is carrying deadly plague samples. Obviously, no one wonders why the Enterprise,
a ship with civilians on board, is transporting a cargo this dangerous - but hey, just go with it.
Eventually, the crew discovers that the radiation is coming from Ian.
So he destroys his human form, sticking around just long enough to explain that
he is a "life force entity" who wanted to learn more about humans.
"He said thank you. I told him we will miss him."
Either way, Troi is devastated as her magical space baby jets off into the unknown,
never to be seen again. It's… not a great episode.
The series finale "All Good Things" starts off on an alarming note. A retired Picard
is talking nonsense about time travel while puttering about on his vineyard in France.
Geordi La Forge visits him, but it soon becomes obvious that Picard hasn't been enjoying himself.
He and Dr. Crusher married and then divorced, Deanna Troi has died, and Picard himself
is suffering from dementia, which promises to only get worse. Bad times, basically.
Then Q, the all-powerful trickster, shows up. He's decided to judge all of humanity and treat
them accordingly - and he just happens to be leaning toward total and utter destruction.
So Picard decides he's got to get the crew back together to save his species. All of
this comes together in a plot that moves back and forth between the show's first episode,
the "present day" of the series, and a future in which a deteriorating Picard
is trying to save everyone's skin. In the end, everyone involved acts in such a noble
and self-sacrificing way that even Q has to admit that he'll give humanity a pass.
For a series that had gone on for a full seven seasons, with so many opportunities to fizzle
out into nothing, this episode is a lovely finale. The strength of "All Good Things"
really rests on the characters themselves, whose arcs are drawn together beautifully
despite the ambitious nature of the plot. 9.2 on IMDB for this one, and it's easy to see why.
Great science fiction takes risks. After all, that's part of the genre: thinking up
wild thoughts and using them to say something about our own world. And sometimes that method
of storytelling can produce beautiful, profound results. Then again, sometimes it leads to stuff
like "Angel One." This episode falls flat so dramatically that you wonder if the writers
were even in the room when it was developed. It also clunks in at a measly 5.7 on IMDB.
It all begins when representatives from the Enterprise beam down to Angel One,
a planet ruled by a matriarchal society. They're looking for escape pods from the freighter Odin,
which must have landed nearby, letting loose a number of survivors who are inciting unrest
and upending the traditional power structure. Meanwhile, Beata, the leader of the society,
takes some time to harass Riker. You know, like a man would in our world.
"Relax. We have much to discuss."
"Angel One" smacks of early sci-fi cheese - the kinds of b-movies in which women
slink around in tights and go weak at the knees as soon as a man shows up.
You can almost see what Star Trek's writers were trying to achieve, here,
in trying to make a comment on contemporary gender relations. Unfortunately, simply flipping cliched
gender roles doesn't make for a particularly insightful episode. In the end, it simply folds
back in on itself - and upholds the same, lame stereotypes it's trying to critique.
Time travel is a mainstay plot device in the Star Trek universe - and it's also the basis
of "Yesterday's Enterprise," which earned itself an impressive 9.2 rating on IMDb.
The story begins when the Enterprise is monitoring a space-time anomaly, and another
vessel emerges from the rift right in front of them. Immediately, their timeline goes haywire,
and Picard and his crew are transported to a different reality, in which they've always
been at war with the Klingon Empire - and none of the crew know that anything has changed. Oh,
and ex-Security Chief Tasha Yar is there, too, despite having died back in season one.
"No goodbyes. Just… good memories."
The crew identifies the new ship as the long-lost Enterprise-C. Its captain says
that they were about to defend a Klingon outpost when they were lost in the anomaly.
But Guinan, the Enterprise's mysterious bartender, senses something is wrong. She speaks to Picard,
arguing that the Enterprise-C doesn't belong in their time, and must go back.
"This is not the way it's supposed to be."
But Picard is reluctant to send the other Enterprise on
a suicide mission based solely on her intuition.
Of course, Guinan's right: the Enterprise-C has to return to its
own time in order to undo the war between the Federation and the Klingons. Meanwhile,
Yar learns that she shouldn't exist and transfers to the Enterprise-C,
desperately seeking a nobler end. The Klingons attack while the Enterprise-C returns,
but the fighting comes to an end once the other ship disappears and the old timeline is restored.
After the events of the episode, nobody but Guinan realizes anything has changed,
and the episode ends quietly as she asks Geordi to tell her about a long-lost crew member named Yar.
It's a haunting, beautiful episode, and one that succeeds where many time travel
stories fail - by allowing itself to be led by its characters, and not by the gimmicks of the genre.
Season one's "Code of Honor" is so awful that Worf actor Michael Dorn once called it the worst
episode of Star Trek ever filmed. And with an IMDb rating of 5.2, the fans seem to agree.
It begins as the Enterprise crew stops by Ligon II to pick up a vaccine. Things get deeply cringey,
however, when it turns out that the Ligonians are all played by Black actors in turbans, and
that the Ligonian culture is clearly an attempt to emulate a mishmash of different real-world
African cultures. Unfortunately, the Ligonians are also depicted as aggressive and primitive.
"The abduction I have done according to our custom, for all to see."
Their leader, Lutan, kidnaps Security Chief Tasha Yar, with the intent to make her
another of his wives. Then, Yar and Lutan's first wife attempt to fight to the death,
before the episode stumbles into a hackneyed resolution.
Episode director Russ Mayberry was replaced halfway through filming,
having been pinpointed as the source of the story's troubles. But that wasn't
enough to save "Code of Honor." Actor Jonathan Frakes even hates the episode
so much that he's reportedly tried to get it pulled from syndication.
If not for "The Best of Both Worlds," we might have never gotten the season finale
cliffhanger that's de rigueur for shows today. Love them or hate them,
finale cliffhangers have become an integral part of TV storytelling - and it's
mostly thanks to Captain Picard and a frightening villain known as the Borg.
Originally, the Borg weren't very scary at all. In their first appearance in season two's
"Q Who," they only seemed interested in assimilating other civilizations' technology.
With "The Best of Both Worlds," however, they become obsessed
with assimilating all species - and demand that Picard hand himself over.
The Enterprise crew does no such thing, of course,
but that doesn't stop the Borg from kidnapping Picard,
anyway - and in the final scenes of Part I, he's transformed into the mindless Locutus of Borg.
"Mr. Worf… fire."
Obviously, Picard is eventually rescued and the Borg are defeated. For viewers at the time,
however, the suspense was unprecedented. Would Picard really be gone forever? Even
the creative team weren't sure, having written only the first episode before the season break.
Thankfully, they got it together and produced a classic Star Trek two-parter,
with Parts I and II currently standing at 9.4 and 9.3 on IMDB, respectively.
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