10 Terrible Star Trek Episodes With Awesome Endings

This late outing of Star Trek: Enterprise's third season is more of an oddity than it is out-and-out terrible. After they'd obtained the coordinates from Degra through… creative means, it took the crew of the NX-01 a while to get to the Xindi staging ground Azati Prime. It's the stretching-out of that journey that gave us Hatchery.

Spoiler alert: Captain Archer gets sprayed in the face by a dangling appendage in a room full of sacs — eggs aboard a crashed Xindi insectoid ship, to be more precise. Unbeknownst to even Doctor Phlox at first, the spray had caused Archer to "reverse imprint on the baby insectoids." He became obsessed, going to greater and greater lengths to protect the hatchlings, and in doing so endangered the mission. Eventually, his senior staff decided enough was enough.

Although not a unique idea for Star Trek, Hatchery is saved from the madness by the idea for a mutiny at its end. As the situation with Archer went from bad to worse, the members of Starfleet realised they had to intervene (before they ran out of antimatter, for a start) to relieve the Captain of his command. The same level-headed thinking couldn't be said of the MACOs, who, so obsessed with 'following the chain of command' above all else, would have probably gone skinny-dipping in the warp core if the Captain had ordered them to. The Starfleet crew were then forced to seize the bridge (and ship) from MACO control in dramatic fashion.