Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com
Named for the show designated, by collective consensus, as the worst episode of Star Trek ever made, the Spock's Brain Award is given to the episode of any given sci-fi or fantasy series which our members feel deserves to be officially known as the wors t ever. In an on-line poll, our members meandered through the galaxy, designating what they thought were the biggest black holes out there. Here are the results, collated, compiled, and commented on by yours truly.
Ah, "Justice." A poignant tale of childhood lost, in which a bevy of innocent babes are forced out of their Edenic paradise of ignorant bliss into the difficult world of knowledge and responsibility. The fall from innocence is a theme that has fascinated us since the beginnings of civilization, from the book of Genesis through Milton's great epic "Paradise Lost" to Arthur C. Clarke's darker reworking of it in "Childhood's End." And how masterfully the writers emphasized this theme through their skilful us e of Wesley, whose boyish charm and openhearted naivete made him the emotional center of the TNG universe...
BZZZT!! Thank you for playing. To TPTB, perhaps, "Justice" was all that; or maybe they just found out they had a few crates of peroxide and some white Ace bandages left over in the makeup room and figured, what the hell. Either way, "Planet of the Jogging Blonde Bimbos" takes the lead with 6 votes. Unmoved by Bev's tiger-like defense of her young, unamused by Riker and Worf's byplay about the rigorous physical demands of Klingon sex (sowing the evil seed that would eventually blossom into the rank flower that is "Let He Who Is Without Sin..."), vote rs were united in their belief that the only way anyone could have made this episode watchable would be to let them kill Wesley.
Don't tell me you didn't see it coming. If this episode had Wesley in it (devolving into what? A weasel? A banana slug?) I'm sure it would have won the gold. "Genesis" constitutes perhaps the most violent assault ever perpetrated on the viewers' collectiv e intelligence. We may not be Charles Darwin, but we know cats didn't evolve from iguanas. And, as with most "hideous transformation" story lines, there was no explanation of how a person can, say, be a lagoon-dwelling frog creature one day, and a perfect ly coiffed Betazoid the next. You may be able to change someone's DNA, but the cells still have to replicate for a while before that spider skin is going to grow out. On the production side, Gates McFadden gets marked down for not realizing that camp is the only place you can take a script this bad. However, 4 votes say this may well be a script you just can't take anywhere.
With these two porkers gorging themselves at the trough of badness, there wasn't much left for the rest of the litter. Third place is shared by several episodes, each garnering a single vote: "The Game", "The Perfect Mate," and "Sub Rosa."
Voting in this category was much more even; DS9 has apparently avoided producing a "Justice"-calibre mistake that would overshadow the lesser badnesses cowering under its giant purulent wings.
This was something of a dark horse, having featured far less prominently in the pre-ballot discussion than favorites like "Let He Who Is Without Sin..." or the all-Fereni extravaganzas. But there were four of you who felt that although witnessing the emer gence of feminism in Ferengi culture is more painful than, for instance, a root canal, it was less painful than watching a favorite repeating character die with so very little dignity. Killing Bareil was, as Tiara will tell you, going to be the biggest mi stake TPTB made no matter how they handled it; but to kill him, bring him back to life, and then kill him again in tiny bits over an extended period of time was at best uncalled for. Even the liberal screen time given to Kira, Bashir and Kai Wynn--the pontiff you love to hate--could not make up for the episode's shabby treatment of its guest star, who deserved to be remembered as something other than Jack Kevorkian's poster boy.
This was my odds-on favorite, because frankly I feel that even if a dozen Brannon Braga clones sat down and really put their minds to it, assisted by Beavis, Butthead, Bob Guccione and a dead cat, they still could not come up with an episode that was a mo re fetid compound of sophomoric humor, sleaze, and just plain stupidity. However, there were only 2 of you out there who agreed with me, perhaps because so many of our number never saw it because they were warned off by the hurl-o-rama that this episode p recipitated.
Tie for Second Place: The Ferengi Chronicles.
If you count the two votes for "Rules of Acquisition" (that's "Acquisition" with a "c," Paramount) and the vote for the "homage" to the Magnificent 7 together, the Ferengi episodes tie "Let He Who Is Without..." for second (rotten) banana. Obviously this is a culture best left unexplored. Could be something about their Neandrethal-style gender politics, could be the prosthetic teeth, could be their extremely challenged fashion abilities; but when it comes to these scrappy little H. Ross Perots, less is most indubitably more.
Tie between "The Emissary," where the orbs open up visionary realms of way bad acting for us, and "Looking for Par'Mach in All the Wrong Places," another lovely voyage into the exciting world of Klingon sex.
No surprises here...
Sing, goddess, the anger of the Terrorists when confronted with so awful an episode as this. The badness of "Threshold" is indeed too rare and exquisite a thing to be adequately celebrated in the words of mere mortals, although a whopping 10 respondents t ried. There are many reasons why this episode dominated the Voyager category the way Godzilla dominated Tokyo, laying all other nominees waste in its reeking and radioactive path; but the basic story is, as one respondent put it, that "any episode where t he leads become salamanders has got to suck." But even aside from the fact that the writers of this episode managed not only to make the calamitously bad decision to rework "Genesis," but to actually make it worse (a feat for which they should ge t some kind of award, preferably one presented in a ceremony that involved public shaming and the chance for the attending audience to throw cow pats), there's a lot to dislike about this episode. For one thing, there's no explanation of how Janeway manages to overtake Paris on the road to salamanderdom when she got such a comparatively late start; for another, assuming that these salamanders, mudskippers, lungfish, whatever, really were the "most highly evolved" form of humanity, it was probably a real big mistake, not to mention a real big violation of the Prime Directive, to leave Janeway and Paris's young there on the swamp planet . The only way I will believe there is justice in the Voyager universe is if the final episode has a race of giant mutant salamanders with some real abandonment issues coming back to the ship to give their parents what for.
There is no second place. It's true that there was one vote each for "The 37s" and the Seven of Nine rape paranoia episode, but basically all other nominees retire crushed by the bulk of "Threshold's" heinosity.
This was another surprise winner, with four votes. It's true that this episode doesn't boast dialogue that can compete, for sheer hemorrhage-inducing imbecility, with "Brain and brain! What is brain?" But it is a potent badness cocktail comprised of parti cularly unfortunate ingredients: an allegory so threadbare you can see right through it, uncritical glorification of American patriotism, and an ill-explained and implausibly exact replication of Earth culture on an alien planet (at least in "A Piece of t he Action" and "Patterns of Force" this could be explained through cultural pollution). "The Omega Glory" is indeed the pinnacle of a particular kind of badness peculiar to the original series, which was the constant trumpeting of American values as the only thing that's going to save the universe, contrasted with those favored by the Bad Communists. And, as TOG shows, when Gene tried t o be even-handed things only got worse, since he felt the need to compensate for his concessions to the Evil Empire with that truly emetic final scene in which Kirk reads the Declaration of Independence.
Tie between "And the Children Shall Lead" and "Spock's Brain."
For a different kind of badness we turn to the second place category. This is the land of garden-variety stinkerdom, where a bad concept, bad dialogue, bad acting and bad set design combine to make a truly unwatchable hour of television. In this sense, "S pock's Brain" may perhaps have suffered because "Spock's Brain" achieves heights of badness so dizzyingly incredible that in a sense it becomes entertaining. However, "And the Children Shall Lead" does not make the "so bad it's good" category; it is merely so bad that it's bad. What could even Tom Serv o say when faced with the spectacle of Melvin Belli, draped from the neck down in what looks like a combination between a lampshade and a lit Christmas tree, exerting his hypnotic powers on the most talentless assemblage of child actors that side of Barney?
"Charlie X," "The Empath," and "Turnabout Intruder" share the honor with one vote each.
With three votes, "Home" is the narrow winner, indicating that for a barely perceptible majority what makes an X-Files ep unwatchable is gratiuitous grossness. (I am just now realizing I forgot to include Millennium in the original call. Shows where my head is.) My vote for "Unruhe," an episode I literally could not watch because I was so viscerally disturbed by the ice-pick lobotomy concept (I turned it off after Scully's first description of the process), would place me in this group with the folks wh o can stand a certain amount of gore, but draw the line at some point. (With this in mind, I'm surprised no one nominated "Sanguinarium.")
Tie between "The Host," "Teso dos Bichos," and "Chinga."
This category, where each nominee received two votes, is reserved for episodes whose badness is in the inherent silliness of the basic premise. Had these folks voted in a bloc, silliness would have conquered gore; but as you can see, there are so many dee ply silly episodes that the vote was split, leaving the field open for the major gross-outs. Some paranormal phenomena are compelling and scary; some are just ridiculous. Killer pussycats, human-sized parasites, and possessed dolls would appear to fall in to the latter category.
I can't comment as much on these because I don't watch the show, but at this point that's probably a relief for you guys:
FIRST PLACE: "Infection." Monster-themed episodes take yet another beating, to the tune of four votes. B5 evidently got off to a shaky start, but that beats the hell out of starting well to finish lousy, like some other franchises we might mention.
SECOND PLACE: "Grey 17 Is Missing," with three votes.
THIRD PLACE: Tie between "A Tragedy of Telepaths" (what, is that like "a gaggle of geese" or "a pride of lions"?), "Believers," "Exercise of Vital Powers," and "Comes the Inquisitor" (Jack the Ripper being a reliable source of episode badness since TOS's time).
Again, the voting is dispersed, with viewers in disagreement over what really makes an episode of Xena suck. In fact, this is the only category with an unclear winner: "The Titans," "Warrior, Princess, Tramp," the Joxer vehicles as a group, and "The Deliv erer/Maternal Instincts" sharing the lead with three votes each. Second place is also a tie, between "Giant Killer" and "The Black Wolf."
FIRST PLACE: the one where Quinn gets put out to stud, which as many of you pointed out is the same one where no one thinks to combat the decline in the male population with an aggressive combination of artificial insemination and lesbianism. I never watc hed it, what can I tell you.
SECOND PLACE: Colonel Rickman and that ol' brain fluid.
THIRD PLACE: the death of Professor Arturo, another martyr to the executives' voracious appetite for T & A.
First place is a tie between "Porcules" and the introduction of Young Hercules, with four votes each. One consolation vote for "the Some Like It Hot" episode.
In the Suckiest Episode of them All category, first runner-up goes to "Teso Dos Bichos," whose offensiveness was masterfully expounded to us by Joan the English Chick, whose essay on the subject I wholeheartedly recommend. But the true winner in this cate gory was, and was always destined to be, "Genesis."
While individually "Genesis" may not be as howlingly bad as, say, "Spock's Brain" (also nominated by Cynthia, who has a weakness for the classics), in context "Genesis" is the biggest, baddest blot on the Star Trek escutcheon, and in the words of you the viewers, here's why:
BILLIE: "...At that point, TNG had been doing really well for several years, and they had absolutely no excuse for doing such a ridiculous episode that so thoroughly insulted the intelligence of their viewers. I'm amazed that the actors could actually de liver their lines without laughing out loud, but they probably did it so that they could get out of makeup and go home."
JUDY: "...De-evolution! Come on! and even if it were possible why did all the humans devolve differently? Barclay was cute as a spider and of course I think Patrick did a masterful job of portraying a marmoset. But then it isn't the acting I find faul t with. It's the writing, stupid."
LAURA: "...The plot was just as weak as in "Threshold", and scientifically it struck me as much worse. To see Patrick Stewart forced to deliver lines as truly awful as what passed for dialogue in "Genesis" was painful. How the hell they ever got any takes where no-one was laughing their ass off, I don't know. The slightly clever attempt to make the Trek aliens more alien by showing how the different species had come from very different backgrounds, but arrived at the same basic humanoid form, did not make up for Barclay the spider, Picard frightened at the prospect of becoming a pigmy marmoset, Riker the Neanderthal, and Spot the iguana -- what the hell were the writers thinking? It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but honestly! Maybe the story was submitted as an April Fool's joke, but Berman liked it and no-one had the heart to tell him it wasn't meant to be taken seriously."
Moment of Most Intense Sucking (or MOMIS) was a less popular category, but I find it interesting that two of the three nominees were from episodes of Babylon 5, which to me indicates that while B5 does share the cheesiness gene that marred Star Trek, the overall sophistication and intelligence of the writing behind it can compensate, quarantining the badness in small, containable chunks rather than allowing it to metastasize. Here's what you all had to say on that score:
KATHERINE: "Grey 17 is missing. 'The Zarg [cheesy monster] is a perfect predator. So the idea is to become part of perfection.' Ummmmm... this religion doesn't work for me. Basically it's an excuse to have a killer ventriloquist dummy (always a super -sucking idea) and Garibaldi trying to kill a cheesy monster (without a PPG, ooooh) so they can fill up time not used by Marcus, Lennier going behind Delenn's back to convince Marcus to protect Delenn, and Marcus fighting Neroon. Surely any religion featu ring killer ventriloquist dummies and being eaten by cheesy monsters deserves an award for 'Super-sucking moment in otherwise quality television.'"
BRIAN: "The scene, during the second season episode Acts of Sacrifice of B5, where Ivanova has "sex" with the Alien Ambassador. I know a lot of people found it funny, but for me it kind of just blew the tone of the episode out of the water. The rest o f the episode had such a serious tone, and so many wonderful moments with Londo and Garibaldi or G'Kar and most of the rest of the Cast that the poor attempt at slapstick makes an otherwise wonderful episode almost unwatchable."
CYNTHIA: "The scene in the lame 1st season TNG ep where Tasha seduces Data...just too stupid for words...Pinocchio Gets Lucky!"
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