10 Terrible Star Trek Episodes With Awesome Endings

If we're honest, Star Trek: The Next Generation had to work to achieve a greatness that was none too evident in its pilot episode. If you skip ahead about three and a half seasons, it's almost like you're watching a completely different show (for a multitude of behind the scenes reasons). Encounter At Farpoint is, in essence, two scripts forced together that don’t quite work: something about giant space jellyfish and an omnipotent letter of the alphabet that freezes people. "Captain. I'm sensing a powerful mind" in these knee-high boots.

Accounts are contradictory for the finer detail, but the general idea, as reported in the 2014 documentary Chaos on the Bridge, is that Encounter At… was originally a 90-minute script written by veteran Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Animated Series writer/story editor D.C. Fontana. Fontana's draft focussed exclusively on the mystery of Farpoint Station and on assembling the new crew. Gene Roddenberry then took Fontana's script and added the Q character to bump it up to two hours as the network had wanted.

"To this day, I have no idea what that episode was about," former Paramount President John Pike said in Chaos on the Bridge. "It didn't really even have an ending," Pike (not that one!) later noted. That's not strictly true, however. Encounter At Farpoint's saving grace is its very last, now iconic, Picard line that was the shape of things to come: "Let's see what's out there. Engage!"