Worst Star Trek Plot Device

I hated episodes that included these horrible plot devices. Which one was worst?

Is there some other one you think is even worse? post it!

All poll options come with complimentary pie and cheese

i liked q - especially how they ended the show

Ugh. Time Travel.

Althought some of my favorite and most hated episodes both use time travel.

I voted for the holodeck, cause it's too similar to the worst plot device of all time (inside or outside of Star Trek or even Sci-Fi in general)....

"It was all a dream..."

I absolutely HATED the most of the holodeck ones. Especially the ones where humans fell in love with the characters from the holodeck... ick ick ick a thousand times: ICK!!!

Yes, although I hate most time travel sci-fi stories, the DS9 episode where they went back into the "trouble with tribbles" episode had me laughing my butt off.

The worst episodes were ones that featured Wesley Crushers school projects threatening the ship, boy genius dexter resolving the situation, and at the end, getting a pat on the back.
I wish they,d pushed the spotty little precursor of Dexter, through an airlock, and left him to the joys of explosive decompression.

I knew there was something I didn't like more than the holodeck episodes... Thanks for unblocking that

Q was awesome! He added so much humor to those episodes, and he added a lot of plot at times as well. Hehe remember when Sisco punched him? "Picard never hit me!"

Remember the borg? Yeah, no Q, no borg.

The books about him are really fun to read as well.

ah, I have fond memories ... alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die

but I never considered him a plot device

Of course wesley was a plot device ..... he wasn't well rounded enough to be a charachter.

What's wrong with Q? Remember when that one Q wanted to commit suicide but all the other Q's were forbidding him to because it had never been done? That was interesting.

I voted for time travel, but now that I'm thinking about it I'd say holodeck might be dead even. I'd rather watch Existenz. :|

Okay, deus ex machina is good in comedey, but it ruins any kind of drama. It is true that Q is really an exentension of the "bored god messing with humanity" that occurs in many mythologies, but he seems a bit too proactive. Perhaps a character more like Puck in A Midsummer Night Dream would have worked better?

Really, the biggest problem with all-powerful gods is that the scriptwriters have to come up with rationalization of their behaviors, which always seems to fail in one way or another.

I can't think of the ones I hated at the moment... maybe Q got me all nostalgic for the good ones.

Remember the TNG episode where they find a probe floating in space (well duh) and it zaps Picard with some sort of beam, which makes him relive the life of a scientist on a dying world from thousands of years ago? Oh I loved that one so much... and how they ended it was just so perfect...

I could never figure out how the Ewoks got those two HUGE redwoods moved up to crush that AT-ST...that'd take like a week to set up.

I remember this really awful episode of Star Trek... it's the one that starts, "Space ... the final frontier ..."

/snicker

Deana Troi. Yes, I know that she isn't quite a device, but acted as one "I feel that there is something wrong with this forum thread, I can't be sure, but my spider-sense tells me things aren't as they seem". Indeed her character, writing, or acting were so bad that that they had to bring Whoppi in to totally take over the role of the wise, empathic one. You know somehitng is wrong when your character is more wooden than Brent Spiner.

Q may have put them in unlikely situations but he played that role with enough smirkiness to make it engaging. And like most really good speculative fiction, he'd only tweak one variable and you could then see how people bounced off of it.

Time travel is tricky but not if properly constrained which the writers were fairly good at. Bad time travel allows anything to follow, keep away from that forumula and you're okay.

So if Troi is disallowed, I'd have to go with holodeck which is as good as sending the Bradys to Hawaii or (searches deep) putting Gilligan and the Skipper in space. Mein Gott, Saturday morning television in the seventies was the first horseman of the apocolypse.

I said "Lunch" not "Launch"!

You two just made my day. Thank you.

Alien Superbeings.

I always wondered about the jumping into warp speed.
They somehow never get flattened like a pancake against the walls.
But if they run into a ship or get shot, oh noo then they all go flying every direction possible.

Addition:
If they are supposed to have some kind of anti-inertia "seatbelt" then it should apply to all physics.

To me "Spock's Brain" was the worst one.

Without a doubt the worst plot line was all of the episodes surrounding Reggie, the whiney misfit, whiney stuttering, whiney incompetent, whiney ultra-phobic whiney engineer. Did I mention that he was whiney???

For me, it depends how these plot devices were used in specific episodes. "The City on the Edge of Forever" is one of the most ACCLAIMED Star Trek episodes of all-time *tips hat to Harlan Ellison*, and it uses time travel.

Q was prominently featured in both the premiere and grand finale of Star Trek: TNG, and his tricks also involved time travel. I think he's a wonderful character on TNG, not so much on DS9 and Voyager because it became less about how mortal beings reacted to his tweaking, and more about his own reactions to his own family. I don't think that was quite as effective, nor was showing cut-down analogs of the Q Continuum that human minds could perceive.