The Five Worst Star Trek Episodes of All Time

Every cloud must have its lining but every starship must also have its gaping hull breach. Television series that are genuinely great, also often tend to be uneven with episodes varying from one to the other in quality and sheer sanity. Star Trek in all its incarnations has had its ups and downs, from the odd vs even curse of the movies, to the episodes of Star Trek so infamously bad they are often remembered better than the good ones, there have been potholes aplenty on the wagon trail to the stars.

Here we present the five worst episodes of Star Trek, selected one from each series to insure a certain amount of fairness, as it would after all be too easy to make up the entire bunch from the third season of Star Trek The Original Series, the first or last seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the fourth season of Star Trek Deep Space Nine or the third season of Voyager, the first season of Enterprise... and so we begin.

1. Spock's Brain - Star Trek: The Original Series

There probably is no more infamous bad episode of Star Trek than Spock's brain. Even people who could not even begin to name an episode have a vague recollection of the one where the planet of women in skimpy costumes stole Spock's brain and the Enterprise crew fitted him with a remote control instead.

Spock's Brain began the third season of Star Trek: The Original Series, infamous in and of itself because NBC had reneged on its promise to Gene Roddenberry causing him to leave the series and paving the way for a disastrous final season for Star Trek before it was cancelled. Oddly enough, Spock's Brain had been written by Star Trek producer Gene Coon under a pseudonym. Gene Coon was considered the second most influential person in the shaping of Star Trek after Roddenberry himself.

Spock's Brain was simply put startlingly bad. From poor set design to a ridiculous story to an awful script and poor direction which allowed in a number of embarrassing errors in consistency to creep in, everything about Spock's Brain pointed to a meltdown in the way Star Trek was run. Despised by the stars of the series, Spock's Brain became a pop culture phenomenon, referenced in songs and TV episodes. It seemed to hold that same element of wackiness as episodes of Batman would, thus transforming Star Trek into pop culture kitsch. It was a significant blow for a show that aspired to make a statement about the world.

Yet in practice Spock's Brain was not so much worse than a number of other Star Trek episodes and its premise not significantly more absurd. Predatory alien women in skimpy clothing, supercomputers that controlled planets leaving their denizens in a kind of paternalistically backward Eden and Spock losing his mind were after all staples of the series. Yet somehow Spock's Brain managed to combine them in a way that made you wince and groan and laugh at the same time.

Runner Up: Turnabout Intruder

Second Runner Up: Catspaw

2. Masks - Star Trek: The Next Generation

Picking a final contender for Star Trek The Next Generation's worst episode is a good deal more difficult than it was for Star Trek The Original Series. Where Star Trek: TOS had one infamously infamous episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation instead had dozens of mediocre ones. If Star Trek The Original Series boldly took risks, aiming for the sky and sometimes crashing down to earth, Star Trek: The Next Generation took far fewer risks preferring a more comfortable mediocrity. First season of Star Trek: TNG boasted plenty of painful moments including the planet ruled by women and the planet ruled by black people. But it was only seventh season TNG that routinely boasted ideas for episodes insane enough to even begin to compete with classic Star Trek. And of all of these no episode was quite as insane as Masks.

Masks was not quite awful in the Spock's Brain sort of way. Spock's Brain after all had a story absurd as it might be. Masks was more of an idea rather than a story. For an hour viewers sat wondering if some sort of lunatic ballet company performing a Latin American production had hijacked the Enterprise and that remains the best possible explanation for Masks. Masks was not so much an episode as a production, a production virtually devoid of story and low on dialogue that featured the Enterprise being transformed into some sort of Incan space temple with Picard and Data entering the roles of space gods or avatars of some sort.

On the surface, Masks likely began as an attempt at doing another Inner Light episode about the artifact of a vanished civilization carrying the weight of personalities and memories, combined with an attempt at giving Data another humanizing experience. Instead what emerged was something so awful that viewers could only gape in disbelief as they watched what seemed to be an experimental production of Enterprise buried in a neo-Incan myth in which nothing much made sense or wanted to make sense.

Runner Up: Sub Rosa

Second Runner Up: Angel One

3. Let He Who Is Without Sin: Star Trek Deep Space Nine

Let He Who is Without Sin features members of the Deep Space Nine crew arriving on Risa which is apparently run by Vanessa Williams. Planet Risa is dedicated to sex, which explains the phallic statues everyone carries around. Unfortunately there are some spoilsports who think that Risa weakens the Federation and hijack the weather control system to make it rain. Also they briefly attempt to take hostages. As it rains on Risa, some of the crew contemplate the possibility that the storm really does prove the Federation is weak.

Let He Who is Without Sin is not spectacularly bad. Being spectacularly bad requires ambition. Let He Who is Without Sin is however pretentious, foolish and pointless. All qualities that would embody Ira Steven Behr's tenure on Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Robert H. Wolfe's tendure on Andromeda.

Runner up: Take Me Out To the Holosuite

Second Runner Up: Field of Fire

4. Favorite Son - Star Trek Voyager

Had Lisa Klink never put pen to paper, Star Trek Voyager might have had many candidates for the title of worst episode but once Lisa Klink decided to create her very own version of Spock's Brain, the die was cast.

Unlike Spock's Brain, it is quite likely that Favorite Son began as either a parody or some attempt to comment on the gender in Spock's Brain specifically or Star Trek in general. It's hard to know and it's harder to say. But what viewers were instead treated to, was Kim displaying signs of being an alien and arriving on a planet filled with seductive women eager to bear his child, suck the life out of him and turning him and any other men they can entrap into skeletons (apparently they somehow suck the flesh and skin away too) and proceed to try to beat him into submission with phallic shaped sticks when he refuses.

The results were bad. Very, very bad.

Runner up: Twisted

Second Runner Up: The Fight

5. Unexpected - Star Trek Enterprise

Star Trek Enterprise attempted to recapture some of The Original Series and it succeeded in part with Unexpected. Unexpected did not capture any of the classic Star Trek vision or imagination, it did capture some of the sheer awfulness of its worst episodes.

Unexpected featured Trip Tucker, Enterprise's engineer becoming impregnated by an alien woman by touching her hand. He then develops wacky pregnancy symptoms including cravings and a fixation on safety and possibly another nipple. As painful as all of that was, what helped set it apart were the utterly terrible alien sets which easily could have been topped by any set designer in the last two decades and were actually worse than the sets on the original Star Trek engulfing the viewer in a kind of amateurish psychedelic alien disco.

Trip winds up becoming the first human male impregnated by an alien and viewers thankfully bid the episode goodbye and the ratings rapidly decline.

Runner Up: A Night in Sickbay

Second Runner Up: Vox Sola