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Stupidest Sci-Fi TV Episode: And the Winner Is…


Before we begin, a few notes: regarding the original Star Trek, Space Lincoln is awesome. 100%. No questions asked. And to everyone who said the last two seasons of Heroes… yeah, I probably should have disqualified ’em as the show which murders all brain activity instantly (but come by Topless Robot at 9pm EST for the Heroes Live-blog anyways!).

You guys had some outstanding entries this week, but I’m going to screw you since I’m feeling under the weather and can barely read TR, let alone write it. So here are just a few of the entries you should definitely check out if you missed them:
? edgreen86
? Templar, bleakscience, JeremyA, ranchoth
? ExecutorElassus
? 8den
? Darth Luau
? Evil Monkey Pope
But the winner is JeremyA for the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Threshold.” Now, he was not the only person who nominated the ep — Templar and bleakscience did as well — but JeremyA did it best, so he gets the shirt (this is in the rules, people, so if Templar comes to my house and kills me in my sleep, I expect you guys to testify for the prosecution). Here’s “Threshold:”

It causes me great physical pain to even think about this episode so
I’m not going to go in to much detail describing it, but, basically,
Voyager helmsman Tom Paris builds a shuttlecraft that can go Warp 10,
breaks the transwarp barrier, occupies every point in the universe
simultaneously, grows a second heart, devolves in to a fish, attacks
Captain Janeway (who also devolves in to a fish), thy make little fish
babies together and are returned to normal in the last five minutes of
the episode only to go on with his life as if none of this crazy shit
ever happened.

Transwarp_humans.jpg

Voyager was notorious for what fans called “the five minute wrap-up”
and this episode was easily the worst offender. They just leave their
fish babies on a random planet somewhere and agree to never mention the
incident ever again.

… …honestly I can feeling my brain dying
as I type this so I’ll just leave you with a couple of quotes by the
makers of the episode:

Brannon Braga, writer: “I wrote the episode, or at least the
teleplay. It’s a terrible episode. People are very unforgiving about
that episode. … Unfortunately, that was a royal, steaming stinker.
… I don’t know where this whole ‘de-evolving into a lizard’ thing
came from. I may have blocked it out. I think I was trying to make a
statement about evolution not necessarily being evolving toward higher
organisms, that evolution may also be a de-evolution. …
Unfortunately, none of this came across in the episode. And all we were
left with were some lizard things crawling around in the mud. So. It
was not my shining moment.”

Jeri Taylor, producer: “The fact that we were turning people into salamanders was offensive to a lot of people and just plain stupid to others.”

The fact that one of these fish is Captain Janeway fills me with so much delight. Congrats, JeremyA. You can proudly pass down your TR t-shirt to your fish babies one day… and then abandon them on some random planet.