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Sometimes, despite their best efforts, these ideas in Star Trek don't stick the landing.
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00:00All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
00:04In essence, that's the incredible premise at the heart of Star Trek which has kept us watching
00:08week after week for over 50 years. Star Trek is a great idea. The rest is making the most of it.
00:15Such is the nature of the creative process and of television that even some of Star Trek's now
00:20most celebrated episodes didn't go from concept to screen unchanged. For what is the best of the
00:26best of both worlds? Writer Michael Piller admitted in Captain's Logs The Unauthorized
00:30Complete Trek Voyages that we had no idea it was really a Riker story when we started out and that
00:36it took a while to think up Locutus. The reverse then is also true. Sometimes the most extraordinary
00:41premises fail to come to fruition in the episodes they've been given. Worse, there are those ideas
00:47that should have shaken the galaxy and the franchise to its core but were never spoken of again. The
00:52mystery of the preservers was wasted on whatever the paradise syndrome turned out to be and the
00:58mind-blowing revelation from perhaps the same species in The Chase were relegated to archaeological
01:03curiosity. None of the above makes for a bad episode either. Just a lost opportunity. We should
01:09all just be glad that a briefing with Neelix or Good Morning Voyager was apparently axed. With all that
01:15out of the way, I'm Bri from Trek Culture and here are 10 episodes that wasted an incredible premise.
01:20Number 10. That Hope Is You, Part 1 and 2
01:24From what had been a pretty awesome second season, Star Trek Discovery took a jump to the 32nd century.
01:29It was a bold idea ripe for storytelling. The 32nd century was previously an unexplored century and
01:35there were hundreds of years of largely unknown history to fill in before it. In the first act of
01:40the first episode of the third season in this new century, we learned of an event called the Burn.
01:45Basically, when all Dilithium suddenly went inert around 3069, every active warp core exploded,
01:51causing death and destruction on a massive scale, radically altering the political and technological
01:56landscape of the spacefaring galaxy. In hindsight, however, that hope is you,
02:01Part 1, got our hopes up. The premise of the Burn was incredible. Its explanation stretched belief,
02:07however. One of the main problems was the why of the Burn was left to a protracted investigation
02:12throughout Discovery's third season. During the wait for an answer, theories abounded from those
02:17genuinely excited by figuring it all out in advance. To say that the solution, given In That
02:23Hope Is You, Part 2 was disappointing, would be putting it mildly. With so many opportunities to
02:29link the Burn to other parts of canon, or to innovate with something new to match the stakes,
02:34the Lone Kelpien option was truly a waste of a great premise.
02:38Number 9. Conspiracy. We've said it before and we'll say it again until we're blue in the face.
02:43Bring back the butt bugs. You'd think the invasion of Starfleet into its upper echelons by a very
02:49non-humanoid species was too good of an idea to leave on a one and done. However, while events to
02:55come had been somewhat telegraphed in coming of age, the epic bluegill premise was pretty much confined
03:01to conspiracy. In Drumhead, we did find out that Admiral Nora Satie had played a crucial role in exposing the
03:07butt bug plot. After that, the little parasites had no further impact on canon than a slight uptick
03:12on subreddits on Talgana 4. That doesn't mean conspiracy was a waste of an episode by any means.
03:18In fact, it was one of the best of a rough season, and it certainly swung for the fences when it came
03:23to gruesome special effects. It all comes down to budget and the episodic nature of Star Trek at the
03:28time, but there could easily have been a whole mini-series about the bluegills depicting their
03:33discovery and schemes for galactic domination before the Enterprise-D even entered the frame.
03:38In fact, according to the Star Trek Next Generation Companion, the original idea for conspiracy didn't
03:43have any bluegills at all. Instead, it was regular members of Starfleet who were plotting against the
03:48Prime Directive and Federation-wide complacency following the Klingon detente. That plot became
03:54central to Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country and, in a more roundabout way, to the next entry on this list.
04:00Number 8. Star Trek Insurrection At first, you might be wondering what
04:04a movie is doing on this list about Star Trek episodes. Well, we do like to keep you at red
04:09alert, but more to the point, as we've previously discussed on this channel, Star Trek Insurrection
04:14has always seemed more like an extended two-parter than a feature length. For theaters, it just didn't
04:19quite work, but it probably would have made a strong enough outing on television. At the movies,
04:23however, Insurrection was a bit bland. Whatever the morale, telling it through the prism of an
04:28interstellar band of privileged wannabe neo-Luddites made the whole thing a little difficult to care
04:33about. Insurrection was also not without similarities to an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation,
04:38Homeward. At its core, however, the film did have quite the premise. The rebellion against Starfleet
04:44and the Federation by one Captain Picard and crew. The idea of the usually-by-the-books captain forced to
04:50turn against Starfleet and the Federation has already played out in the now-admirals eponymous TV show.
04:55To a lesser extent, we've also seen Jean-Luc Picard defying Starfleet orders at the start of
05:00Star Trek First Contact, so a full-on rebellion in the next film made a degree of sense. Insurrection
05:06could have been the next generation's search for Spock, but instead of Starfleet just being in the
05:11way, they would have been thoroughly up to no good. Who knows, maybe we'll see this movie on a
05:15dumbest things list in the future. But until then, saddle up, lock and load.
05:197. Learning Curve Once more, this is not a bad
05:24episode of Star Trek. It is, however, emblematic of a larger issue Star Trek Voyager faced. In its
05:30focus on a group of errant Maquis crew members and on a problem with the bioneural gel packs,
05:35Learning Curve, the last episode of Voyager's first season, is perhaps the ultimate example of
05:40the waste of not one, but two premises that were, in theory, supposed to be central to the series itself.
05:47Learning Curve does its best to broach the subject of Maquis-Starfleet relations,
05:51but by that time, only four of the former Maquis that we knew of were apparently having
05:56difficulties with their new working arrangements. The two crews had begun as enemies, or at least
06:01as opponents in a conflict, but in the Delta Quadrant, they rapidly became friends and colleagues.
06:07It wouldn't be entirely smooth sailing after, but Learning Curve does feel like one last bump in
06:12the road for a topic that could have been explored in far greater depth. And then there was the cheese.
06:18It was with a sense of urgency that Captain Janeway described the risk of running out of
06:22bioneural gel packs when one was found in need of replacement. They had 47 left in reserve,
06:28and that was it. After that, it would be bye-bye most of Voyager's critical systems,
06:33even with some isolinear switchovers. However, like for photon torpedoes and shuttles,
06:38lack was never really an issue ever again. Number six, Fury. In Cinefantastic, volume 33,
06:46number five, Brian Fuller, who co-wrote the teleplay for Fury, explained how he started on
06:51Star Trek Voyager. Actually, the reason I got brought into Voyager in the first place was to
06:56come up with a way to kill Kess off. I came up with the story for The Gift. Her whole evolution
07:01into a different phase of Okomp and life was my idea. Nonetheless, Fuller was equally happy with the
07:06twist that he helped devise for Kess's return. In the Cinefantastic piece, he also pointed out
07:11most fans had been looking forward to a comeback for Kess, but the way in which it was done was
07:16surprising to say the least. Kess's angry, vengeful persona always struck a little odd. It jarred with
07:23her still entirely affable self of The Gift. Of course, people do change. That might be especially
07:29true for the Okompa, a species whose average lifespan was only about eight to nine years.
07:35In Fury, Kess was barely recognizable, however, seeming like an almost entirely different character
07:41even by the episode's end. Fury also stumbled somewhat over an explanation for such a dramatic
07:46shift in personality, merely stating that Kess wasn't ready for her transformation and got lost
07:52along the way. Ultimately, for a character we'd known for three seasons, her final appearance could
07:57have been better spent than in trying to deliver Voyager to the nearest organ harvest.
08:02Number 5. Assignment Earth
08:04The original premise for Assignment Earth is more unique than most on this list. The episode was
08:09meant to produce a spin-off series starring Robert Lansing as Gary Seven. We'll never know what the
08:14quality of the show would have been, but the fact that it was never made leaves us with an episode of
08:19Star Trek the original series that can only ever feel like the beginning of something better.
08:24The Supervisor Watcher storyline did get an addendum in the second season of Star Trek Picard.
08:29In that, Orla Brady's Talin had been chosen for service as a supervisor and Picard made a comparison
08:35between her and Gary Seven, who was recruited by superior beings to protect the tapestry of history.
08:41At the end of the season, it was revealed that Wesley Crusher and his colleagues,
08:45aka the Travelers, were the ones who sent out the supervisors. We know so very little about the
08:50Travelers that their reveal as the heretofore mysterious alien abductors of Gary Seven's
08:55ancestors from Assignment Earth seemed almost anecdotal. The brief Traveler recruitment pitch
09:01scene in Farewell was also the last we saw of Wesley, chronologically speaking, or as close to that
09:07as he can be, making it a waste of two premises. There's still hope, however. We're not going to be
09:13getting a Gary and Wesley Traveling Detective Agency, the Assignment Earth spin-off anytime soon,
09:18but both characters could show up anywhere, anytime, and especially in Star Trek Discovery.
09:24Number 4. Threshold. In the 24th century edition of the Dictionary of Federation Standard,
09:30under the entry for Incredible, meaning too extraordinary to be believed, Tom Paris's Warp 10
09:36record and the silliness that followed will be cited as an example. Nonetheless, deep down in the
09:41weirdness of Threshold, there is, somewhere, a fantastic premise. Go fast. It made perfect
09:47sense that the crew of Voyager would begin experimenting with even the craziest ideas in
09:52their effort to get back home, just so long as it was all in line with the Starfleet and Federation
09:56principles, ish. At some point, they were bound to try and beef up their maximum warp speed.
10:01The problem with Threshold is that they went straight to Warp 10, which, as the episode itself states,
10:07is a theoretical impossibility. Between Star Trek The Original Series and Star Trek The Next
10:12Generation, changes were made to the warp scale to put in place an upper speed limit. As the Star
10:17Trek Next Generation Technical Manual states, our solution was to redraw the warp curve so the
10:22exponent of the warp factor increases gradually, then sharply after warp 9 as you approach warp 10.
10:29At warp 10, the exponent and the speed would be infinite, so you could never reach this value.
10:35However, if we do assume warp 10 is achievable but has side effects, why didn't Voyager just use the
10:41new form of Dilithium they found to supercharge the warp engines? You don't need warp 10 if you're
10:46actually capable of it. Every decimal point you can add past warp 9 already represents a vast increase
10:52in speed and warp. That being said, warp 9.9999999999 reoccurring would have had them back to Earth in a
11:00jiffy. Of course, the power requirements would have been enormous and they'd probably just have
11:05run out of the new Dilithium. Back to the salamander babies after all.
11:09Number 3. These are the Voyages
11:12We've previously called These are the Voyages weird and now we're going with Wasted. It's really
11:17not looking great for the series finale of Enterprise. To agree with Brandon Braga when he
11:21said that it was a cool concept but it was languid, the core premise of the episode was actually quite a
11:27good one. It was only the application and execution that let it down. We all love a crossover and that
11:33was the basic idea. A future Starfleet gazing upon its past self or vice versa was not a new concept
11:40nor one that had gone out of fashion. It was done most recently with panache and just a bit of time
11:45travel in Those Old Scientists and previously with the transporter in relics and mind meld in flashback.
11:52Through the temporal cold war, a good deal of Enterprise was explicitly linked to the future
11:57from day one. The show within a show on the holodeck could have worked, just not as the end
12:02to the series. It did provide for a different perspective on the characters from both eras,
12:07reminding us that the events of Enterprise we were watching were also a piece of history.
12:12Writer Aaron Waltke took the idea and ran with it to create the brilliantly clever short trek
12:16Holograms All the Way Down. Speaking of the very short treks. Number 2.
12:21All the very short treks. Bar 1. The premise? A celebration of animation and Star Trek for the
12:2850th anniversary of Star Trek the animated series. The result? Five, to quote the teaser trailer,
12:33anything but canon, exceedingly short, non-episodes that seriously missed the point.
12:38In amongst them, only one, perhaps two, was doing any celebrating and that's Holograms all the way down.
12:45It appears that there were tonal problems from the start. Caspar Kelly, the series showrunner and
12:50creative consultant brought on by Alex Kurtzman, has described the very short treks as both a
12:56sort of experimental low pressure bet and even a little more fucked up than lower decks. Kelly is
13:01clearly a fan of the animated series, but by his own admission in the making of Star Trek very short
13:07treks with Caspar Kelly, wasn't that conscious about sort of celebrating it and just focused on
13:13what was funny. Sadly, most of us weren't laughing along. Instead of a proper homage to the 1970s series
13:20and the more recent animated outings, the mini-minisodes were mostly an unfunny hodgepodge of
13:25fart jokes, snot, and a pun too far. Moreover, if you add the very short treks up, they equal,
13:32or thereabouts, the length of an episode of the animated series. It might have been a better idea to
13:37just do that. Apparently, a further five scripts were written and never made it to air. Maybe next
13:43year, Kelly mused in the making of, if it's more of the same, I think we'll pass.
13:49Number 1. The Stargazer and Farewell
13:52Some of us are, understandably, a bit Borg'd out by now. Seasons 1 to 3 of Star Trek Picard all had
13:59the cybernetically enhanced assimilators as a focus, often the primary. Collective fatigue or no,
14:04there is still one Borg, or Borg-adjacent story from Picard, that has been left dangling. It's
14:11often difficult to choose just one episode with serialized television, so we've picked two,
14:15which encapsulate the matter at hand and the season. The premise that began Picard's season
14:20outing in The Stargazer was, to summarize heavily, galaxy-threatening anomaly. Borg and Queen appear,
14:27then there are explosions, and Q. By the second season, Farewell, Q had died, for a bit,
14:33the Borg Queen had been revealed to be a benevolent Jurati spinoff, and the anomaly had become a
14:38humongous transwarp conduit. Aside from the odd oblique reference such as Captain Shaw's forget about
14:44the weird shit on the Stargazer, these events have never been mentioned again. Of course,
14:49this could all be deliberate, there's still more Star Trek to come after all, but for now,
14:53it feels more like a waste of a great premise. As far as we know, Jurati and her collective are still
14:59waiting at the gates for whoever or whatever superpower might come through.
15:04And those were 10 Star Trek episodes that wasted an incredible premise. If you liked the video,
15:09then make sure to give it a thumbs up, and subscribe if you aren't already. Can you think of any
15:14episodes that we missed? If so, then leave them in the comments section below. If you want to keep up
15:18with us on social media, we're on Twitter and Blue Sky at TrekCulture, and on Instagram at
15:23TrekCultureYT. If you want to find me across various social medias, simply search TrekkieBree.
15:29With all that being said, I hope you all have a great rest of your day,
15:32and don't forget to live long and prosper.
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