10 Star Trek Episodes That Just Didn't Work
And it's a swing and a miss for Star Trek!
Despite their genuinely being an argument that no show has quite defied time like Star Trek, it's impossible to ignore that there are some episodes that have... how can we put this??... aged worse than Kes?
Granted no show that draws its origins from way back in the 1960s is going to avoid certain jokes and concepts feeling very "of that time", but Trek's saving grace is usually that the core concepts hold true even if their execution is way off by today's standards.
That said though, when Star Trek episodes do miss, oh boy do they miss by a lot.
Sci-fi being the limitless, untameable beast that is, the conceptual boundaries only really exist in the heads of whoever's holding the pen. Sometimes this gives birth to the wonderful, other times it spawns storylines so nonsensical, characters so incomprehensible, that you simply have to sit back and marvel that they ever, ever made it through a writer's room.
Strap in, dear friends, because we're about to coldly go where absolutely nobody's imagintion should ever have gone before.
10. The Alternative Factor - TOS
This is one episode where everything seemed to go wrong from the beginning. The script was poor. The idea of two parallel men battling for all eternity should have received a better sense of grandiose than it did, while in fact, the story is quite dull. Robert Brown, who plays both men, had a very difficult time on the set.
He was a literal last-minute replacement for John Barrymore, who simply didn't show up for work on the morning he was due to begin filming. The episode began shooting regardless, focusing on the scenes that didn't involve his character. The next day, Brown was cast and then flung onto the set to begin his scenes.
The effects were poor for the time, though of course, they have received a boost in the remastered edition. The acting was wooden. While there is a lot of sympathy toward Brown here, the episode is still a slog to get through. It is incoherent and rambling, rivalling Spock's Brain for the worst episode of the Original Series.