Only 8?

"Setting aside geeky nitpicking, this episode spews an annoying kid power message so overwhelming that you expect Riker to utter "I don't know" and get doused in slime." LOL

Yeah, TNG really had some klunkers. It wasn't all "The Best of Both Worlds," sadly. And the late 80's episodes look really dated and cheap. It's all still entertaining in some form, though. It's too bad we can't take the production values of Enterprise, the crew of TNG, the more varied aliens and worlds of The Original Series, and the superior storytelling of DS9 and make one totally awesome Star Trek series.

BTW, TR FINALLY remembered my personal info for once! Yay!

Wait, no it didn't. It thought I was anonymous. Weird.

How about any episode with Deanna Troi. I cant help but laugh any time she says that she can sense the guy yelling at them is angry.

And who doesn't love Tasha Yar getting killed by slime. I thought it was brilliant (the only funny thing I have seen on Family Guy in a long time) when Stewie killed Denise Crosby 1 minute after he teleported her in.

Where, where, WHERE is that piece of shit 7th season episode where we learn that the Frenchman Picard (played by an englishman) is actually of Spanish heritage and his conquistador ancestors wiped out Indians? And Wesley becomes a demigod. Fuck that episode.

Troi did have one good episode, the one where she is coerced into going undercover on a Romulan ship. At least she got to do more than state the obvious.

You left out the season 1 episode, "Code of Honor", which was so offensively racist that the cast wish it was never made.

ANY episode with the adventures of Holo-deck Sherlock and Watson. Good, GOD!

As you pointed out, just about any episode focusing on Data was worth switching the channel over to find "Whose the Boss?"

Jordi and the chick engineer was bad, but it was worse when he fell in love WITH THE HOLOGRAM.

DUDE.

Whats worse is that it didn't bother me that much when I saw it at 14 (still thought it was a little lame), but I saw that a while ago and its whole other level of pathetic when viewed as an adult.

But it does bring up (and then completely ignores) the obvious fact that the holodeck is the ultimate in sex toy technology. He should have just jumped her bones until they needed a damn pressure washer to decontaminate the holodeck.

cool list though i would have had skin of evil atnumber one and naked now higher on the list. for al the episodes one wonders if the writers had finaly stopped caring and loving being part of star trek

To be honest, I'd have just listed most of season 7 and left it at that for my list.

Remember the one where Picard is stranded on a moon with a woman who kisses him? And she then turns out to be the male alien ambassador in disguise. I bet The Crying Game was playing that night in Picard's quarters...

Or the one where Data is eating a Deanna Troi cake and making squealing noises?

Or the one where Dr Crusher is shagging a ghost that has been having sex with her ancestors for centuries and a highland fog rolls onto the Enterprise bridge?

Or the one where the Enterprise becomes sentient and we have to put up with lots of tedious randomness on the holodeck?

Or the one with the insultingly obvious environmental message where warp drive is destroying the universe?

Or the one where Brent Spiner does puts on masks and does stupid voices?

Or the one where Worf and Troi get it on, after 7 seasons of zero chemistry?

Or the one where the crew de-evolve into random creatures?

OK, I've gone on a bit there. I really hated that final season, although thankfully there were a few diamonds in the rough in there, including the finale.

Fistful of Datas! Fistful Of Datas! How is that not #1????

Wow, good list except for #2. Best. Episode. Ever. I mean, while the plot, dialogue, sfx, and pacing were horrible, after this episode, TASHA YAR WAS GONE FROM THE SERIES.

Which makes it the best episode ever.

(side note: I had no quarrel with the later, Romulan version of Tasha Yar. Truth be told, she shoulda been a Romulan from the start.)

Hey, I liked Insurrection.

I would have liked to have seen the Tasha Romulan in Nemesis. In fact, having a actors who had played Romulans during the course of the series would have been nice; Andreas Katsulas would have been awesome in some capacity as Tomalak had butted heads with Picard on several occasions.

I would have to vote for the insanely racist "Code of Honor" as #1 except I generally like to pretend that one didn't exist and was never made. Seriously, the show that put an African-American woman on the bridge of a starship in 1966 also made THAT pile o' stank?

I saw Micheal Dorn speak once and fan asked him which episode of the show he didn't like. He said "What was up with that episode with the masks?" He was, of course, referring to "Masks", which IMO is much worse than "Rascals."

Any episode with freaking Lwaxana troi is the absolute worst. Remember the whimsical and creepy episode where she basically kidnaps Worf's kid on the holodeck and tries to teach him to have fun? She ends up seeming less like The Cat in the Hat and more like the creepy old lady who touches little boys.

Also that multicolored head in a bubble?

Sweet heaven above, I hate Star Trek.

Oh, come on. Every show made in the late '80s/early- to mid-'90s did clip shows, and the framing devices were ALWAYS awful.

That said, the difference in quality between the best and worst Next Gen episodes is probably greater than any of the other Trek series. The best episodes are some of the best Trek episodes ever. The worst episodes are like, well, Voyager episodes.

PS All the episodes involving Barclay should tie for #1 on this list.

Luckily the series seems like a fog now, but I do remember the episode where Ryker "how's My heroid pose now?" goes to the holodeck to play trombone and chat up some French Bim and the ship get's hijacked. His attempt at sauve was painful to watch.

The most memorably stupid episode for me was the one where they were de-evolving into random, and sometimes horny, creatures, as Photoboy mentioned. If only Tom Paris were on board, they could have gone to infinite velocity, and evolved forward, nullifying the problem.

Some of the episodes mentioned here, like the Joe Piscopo episode, were horrific in execution, but not so much conceptually. That episode fits in with Data's whole search for humanity shtick, er, I mean "theme".

The Devo episode is appalling in concept and execution, and TNG was frequently a lot more like Space: 1999 than ST:TOS, except 1999's FX work was a whole lot more interesting to watch.

I found most of the episodes that were character-centric pretty painful, about on par with episodes where they dress up in period clothing and prance around filling time.

The Outrageous Okona gives me douche chills.

Any Troi-centric episode is pretty stupid too. Except the one where she's a Romulan, that one was good.

The Devo episode is appalling in concept and execution,

Good god I remember watching that episode where Crusher bangs a ghost and as a 10 year old feeling embarrased by it, especially as I was watching it with my Dad and that scene started where Bev and ghost "do it" and Dad began shuffling uncomfortably as Crusher began writhing around in her chair as if her sex organs were in her ear.

Watching it as an adult, I fast forwarded through that bit, it was too shameful and traumatic to watch properly.

Nurse, the valium!

#8 had one of the most wince-worthy moments of the series in it: Troi swooning badly into Riker's arms, while moaning, "Bill..."

Ew. Just, ew.

"The Outrageous Okona" sucked on two levels. The obvious Joe Piscopo farce and the rediculous main plot about the "Ice Pirate" rip-off that banged every chick in the crew(including Terri Hatcher)and knocked up the princesses of both groups chasing him. That episode makes me violently ill.

Sorry... I was a fan of the Original Star Trek. This dribble was all just Corporate crap to me...

Now, here's the $1 million question... Was early TNG so bad because of Gene Roddenberry's influence or in spite of it? Keep in mind he was heavily involved in the first season, and to a lesser degree through the third season. I loved Gene's work on TOS, but it kind of seemed like TNG vastly improved after him.

And you might complain about TNG being a pale shade of TOS, but Gene created them both.

The announcer on those videos is insane, especially for #7.

"NEXT TIME, ON STAAAAR TREK, THE NEXT GENERATION..."

Had up the long ladder not been on that list there would have been war. I'm Irish, (no not a once knocked back 6 guinness on St Patricks day Irish, actually born and bred in Dublin) Up the long Ladder makes "Chief O'Hara" from 60s era Batman look like he was written by fucking Joyce. It's a genuinely offensive piece of shit.

But what about the episode where the holodeck becomes sentient? With the train to chatanooga? Or some such shit. Or the locked in the holodeck in the old West and everyone is Data? Any episode set in a holodeck was just fucking bullshit

Outrageous Okona... I don't recall ever watching it. despite my (at the time)obsessive devotion to all things TNG and Brent Spiner. But you discription brought to mind....
Captain Jack Harkness is that you?

What about the one where they all become intoxicated and Data and Tasha get it on?

No mention of Justice (Wesley steps on some flowers and is sentenced to death). Or the one where Troi gets pregnant and has the most boring alien child ever. Or Coming of Age, in which nothing happens. Or the Neutral Zone, in which nothing happens. Or The Dauphin, some really bad teen drama with the worst guest stars in the history of Trek. Or Time Squared, which can make a boring episode out of time travel and two Picards. Or Pen Pals, which was relentlessly ridiculous ("Data, I have to let her entire planet die...wait, now I've heard the kid's voice, that changes everything").

I finally started watching TNG this last week. Wow, what a terrible show. I started with season three, since most people think that's where the show got good. Not from what I've seen. I haven't run across any of the shows people have listed here, and at this point, I think it might be best to quit while I'm ahead. I can't figure out what made this show so popular, it's not that good, the plots are so-so, and the dialog just bland.

"Or Pen Pals, which was relentlessly ridiculous ("Data, I have to let her entire planet die...wait, now I've heard the kid's voice, that changes everything")."

Funny, but that happens everyday. How else can you explain why we allow some to live under oppression in North Korea, allow a few million little ones to die every year from preventable disease, and so on and so forth. Critique the show if you must, and there is much to critique, but if you'd ever been in a similar position, you'd understand the point. One thing to see them on the tv picking through the garbage dump to eke out a meager living, another thing to be there and see them do it. It's revolutionary. Or should I say, for tv viewing you, that up and close personal removes the voyeur from the equation. And so you get the math here, it's 3 million little one a year, so multiple the 3 mil by your age and then add the 3 mil x your remaining life expectancy. You're staring in the face of more deaths than he did. And you call him and it "relentlessly ridiculous"...And I'd thought I'd read it all. I stand corrected.

The thing about "Up the Long Ladder" is that it's a double whammy: not only is it offensive in stereotypes, but the crew are basically murderers.

I realise the idea was to make a decisive pro-choice soapbox, but the difference is that the clones they destroyed were ADULT, SENTIENT BEINGS. The arguments of whether a foetus counts as a "person" completely don't matter in the context of the story: by being physically identical to the fully-grown Pulaski and Riker and designed to be fully functioning members of a species, they are for all intents and purposes adult sentient beings. And Pulaski and Riker MURDER them.

So this episode not only has the outrageously offensive stereotypes to rival "Angel One" and "Code of Honour", it has the deplorable morality of "Homeward" and "Pen Pals." That's pretty impressive.

"Funny, but that happens everyday. How else can you explain why we allow some to live under oppression in North Korea, allow a few million little ones to die every year from preventable disease, and so on and so forth...
And you call him and it "relentlessly ridiculous"...And I'd thought I'd read it all. I stand corrected."

This is a totally, totally different situation. The girl's planet was about to be destroyed. She was the only one on the planet. The Enterprise was perfectly within their capabilities to beam her up and fix the planet's problems, or even take her with them, but the Prime Directive thwarted that.

A better comparison would be if you were in command of a ship, and see a little girl on a desert island which is in danger of sinking beneath the waves. Picard's stance is the equivalent of leaving that little girl to her fate, because of adherence to the letter, as opposed to the spirit, of the law.