Wink Of An Eye
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 11
The Enterprise is responding to a distress call - if you can imagine such a thing. They beam down to the planet Scalos and find nothing. Back on the ship they soon realize they've brought something back with them.
Parallax
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 1, Episode 2
A reasonably well done episode in which the newly integrated crew struggles to deal with their new circumstances. Along with all of this is a sub-plot having something to do with a mirror image of Voyager trapped in a singularity. Which part was kind of so-so, actually.
(viewed 01/17/2008)
Who Mourns For Adonais?
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 2, Episode 2
Who mourns for my ass is a more appropriate question, for having to sit through this piece of dreck. If I was setting out to watch every Star Trek episode (and I am, now that you mention it), but was permitted to skip just one, it would probably be this one or one of the episodes featuring that singularly unfunny bit of comic relief known as Harry Mudd.
Caretaker
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 1, Episode 1
Because I've been watching Voyager as it airs on Spike, I've had the curious experience of viewing the last episode of the series one night and the first one the next night. How's that for time travel?
Endgame
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 7, Episode 25/26
In the two-part series finale we flash forward to Earth in the future. After a 23-year mission, Voyager returned home ten years ago. Admiral Janeway travels back in time to guide the Voyager on a path home that will result in certain key players not losing their lives. While the ship makes its way safely to Earth, Admiral Janeway sacrifices herself to take out a Borg Sphere.
Bound
Star Trek: Enterprise
Season 4, Episode 17
Space pirates and scantily-clad, green-skinned alien babes. Now that, my friends, is a recipe for topnotch science fiction TV. If you're 13 years old.
Plato's Stepchildren
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 10
Imperious near-godlike beings who model themselves on the ancient Greeks of Earth summon Kirk, Spock and McCoy to provide medical assistance to their leader. After he's recovered he wants McCoy to stay on to provide continued services - and won't take no for an answer. The humans isolate a chemical that will give them the same telekinetic powers and give the Platonians a taste of their own medicine.
Homestead
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 7, Episode 23
Baffling and arbitrary - two words that could safely be applied to the appearance of the Talaxians. Who figure heavily in this episode in which Neelix, Paris and Tuvok crash land on an asteroid inhabited by a band of them.
The Tholian Web
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 9
Starship crew members go nutso and kill each other. The Enterprise may be next. In the meantime, Kirk has been left behind on the starship Defiant, which has slipped into another dimension. While the Tholians are weaving an energy web around the Enterprise, the crew must work to treat the spreading madness and get Kirk back into the right dimension. Things tend to sort themselves out, as they so often do.
(viewed 01/12/2008)
Natural Law
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 7, Episode 22
Chakotay and Seven of Nine crash land on a planet inhabited by blissfully primitive aliens. The catch - they're protected from the rest of the planet by an energy barrier that can't be retracted or breached under any circumstances.
Friendship One
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 7, Episode 21
A landing party to a ravaged planet is captured by a group of radiation-scarred aliens. They blame Voyager for the harm caused by the technology they developed after finding a probe launched from Earth in 2067.
After a whole bunch of fuss, the gang on Voyager come up with a solution to set the planet right again. Results are almost immediate.
Inane dialogue snippet: There's a toxic atmosphere down there and you're breathing for two.
(viewed 01/11/2008)
Author, Author
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 7, Episode 20
Attempted whimsy for about the first half of the episode as the ship's doctor, apparently unhappy with his lot in life, "pens" a work of fiction that stirs up a hornet's nest on the ship.
For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 8
If the episode kicks off with McCoy contracting a incurable terminal disease, would you guess that he's going to be cured at some point within the next 40 minutes?
One of the more trying episodes of TOS has to do with an asteroid ship ruled by a cranky oracle and features acting, dialogue, and costumes that would have fit in quite nicely in an early Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers episode.
Ouch.
(viewed 01/10/2008)
Q2
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 7, Episode 19
Ah, the whimsical episode. That unfortunate staple of SF TV. In this instance, Janeway's godson (Q's son), is left on the Enterprise in hopes that she'll be able to whip the annoying little s**t into shape.
Affliction/Divergence
Star Trek: Enterprise
Season 4, Episode 15/16
With a virus threatening the Klingon empire with extinction, Phlox, the Enterprise's doctor is kidnapped by said Klingons while the ship is laying over on Earth. As the Enterprise sets off in pursuit, a party of four rather...enterprising Klingons manage to cripple the ship.
Spectre Of The Gun
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 6
Star Trek lore has it that Gene Roddenberry envisioned the show as a sort of "Wagon Train to the stars." So perhaps it's no surprise that episodes like this one turned up from time to time.
Human Error
Star Trek Voyager
Season 7, Episode 18
In which the statuesque but repressed Seven of Nine engages in a series of computer-aided fantasies about letting her hair down - literally and figuratively. Tedious. Unless, of course, you're a fourteen year old boy.
United/The Aenar
Star Trek: Enterprise
Season 4, Episode 13/14
A gang of bad eggs (Romulans) skulk about while using a kidnapped Aenar telepath named Gareb to steer drone ships. They are used to launch unprovoked attacks hither and thither in an attempt to start a war and "destabilize the entire region."
The Immunity Syndrome
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 2, Episode 18
There are few things that can put a damper on your day like an 11,000 mile long amoeba. Just ask the crew of the Enterprise, who are confronted with a big black blob that is not liquid, gas or solid, but somehow manages to do away with a starship and an entire solar system. As they penetrate the boundaries of this object, they discover that it's a living critter that survives by sucking off the energy of all beings in the immediate vicinity.
Day Of The Dove
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 7
Nothing says mind-numbing tedium quite like a seemingly unending series of poorly executed sword fights. In this episode, they take place on the Enterprise, no less, as an entity that resembles a piece of colored plastic wrap arms a group of Klingons and a like number of humans with swords.
Workforce
Star Trek: Voyager
Season 7, Episode 16/17
My first Voyager episode is a two-parter in which most of the crew bails after some sort of radiation-related incident, only to be brainwashed and pressed into service on an alien planet. A handful of unaffected crew members work to bring about their freedom and the requisite happy ending.
Is There In Truth No Beauty?
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 5
Can you say "title that rolls right off the tongue?" Can you say "overwrought?" Then say it about this episode from Star Trek's third and final season.
The Enterprise is tasked with transporting an ambassador - as it seemed to so often do. The ambassador in this case is a member of a race whose scary creepy downright godawful appearance causes humans to go stark raving nutso. Their name - the Medusans. Oh, good Lord.
