10 Worst Star Trek Moments In 2025
8. A Bit Of Bio-Essentialism On A Thursday
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' third season was quite the mixed affair, arriving after a lengthy hiatus between the second and third years. The Writers' Guild Of America Strike in 2023 pushed all production back, giving fans a two-year gap between the cliffhanger and its resolution. Was the wait worth it?
The season was mostly impressive, with some true stand-out moments along the way. While the second and penultimate episodes were particular highlights, the same cannot be said for the seventh and eighth ones. What Is Starfleet? and Four And A Half Vulcans were ill-judged affairs, though the latter was the more egregious by far.
The former's greatest struggle was the uncertain tone of what exactly it was trying to do. Presented as an in-universe documentary about the famous space-faring organisation, it instead devolved into a one-man hit piece, a wildly fence-sitting statement about Starfleet's involvement in alien conflicts, and a horrendous revelation about Spock's childhood.
Had that been the worst of the season, the overall score would be higher, but then came Four And A Half Vulcans. Unfortunately, the 'comedy' intended to fill this episode's runtime instead focused on one-dimensional portrayals of Star Trek's oldest alien races, jokes about smells and insinuation of mind-meld coercion, consent be damned.
By far the worst part of all was, one week after revealing that as a child, Spock attempted to 'cut the humanity out of himself' with a knife, this episode spent much of its runtime depicting 'Vulcans' who openly mocked and belittled him for being half-human. It was an offensive, upsetting episode that leaned into frat-style humour rather than any serious exploration of a new Vulcan identity.
Rather than any of the above, or lest we even discuss the hairstyle changes, let us instead remember Patton Oswalt's Doug, even if he was, in fact, too slow.