sholio | (no subject)

You know, there are times when, as an SGA fan, it's kind of heartening to be reminded that there are worse shows out there. It's even more heartening to be reminded that even the Star Trek franchise had its lousy episodes. (Even though TOS is still and will always be one of my favorite shows ever, the writers' grasp on biochemistry, anthropology or, god forbid, convergent evolution was pretty flimsy.) Or perhaps an entire lousy series or two ...

... which is why I've been reading agonybooth.com's recaps of the Worst Ever Star Trek Episodes and giggling myself silly. (Quick warning: Some of the commentary in these recaps is quite funny. Some of it makes you want to smack the writer in the face with a dead flounder. Brace yourself for a bit of casual sexism and repeated use of the word "retarded".)

SGA had some embarrassingly bad episodes, but at least no main character ever spent an entire episode in sickbay freaking out about a sick dog or evolved into a salamander and had little salamander babies with his commanding officer. ("Conversion", I guess, got pretty close in some ways, but never hit the absolute rock bottom of having Sheppard carry off Weir to impregnate her with salamanders. That's actually the only Voyager episode that I specifically remember from the limited number of episodes that I've seen. It may have been awful, but at least it was memorably awful!)

Threaded | Flat

Oh, god, "Threshold".
I was a huge Voyager fan, and even I was cringing over that one. At least Farscape had the good crack. The writers of Threshold? Must have been smoking some pretty damn bad weed.

I just lost waaaaay too much of my morning reading the sickbay recap.

XD

Oh, I had read these just a few weeks ago. And I have felt as you now do about the cross-comparison with SGA for some time. Heck, I couldn't even get further than an hour into original BSG because it was too painful!

Some of the commentary in these recaps is quite funny. Some of it makes you want to smack the writer in the face with a dead flounder.

That was my reaction too.

The Star Trek V one is hilarious. That movie is just so BAD! I rewatched it recently, and couldn't believe how bad it was. I've been listening to Shatner's ST movie memories, and I know they had major problems during writing and filming it, but his original vision for it actually sounds worse than what they ended up with.

The reviewer is right about "Spock's Brain" (which I also rewatched recently and laughed my head off throughout). It's BAD, so bad I can barely believe the actors agreed to say the lines (McCoy:His brain is gone! Kirk:But he can't live without a brain. We have to find whoever's stolen Spock's brain!), but it's not dull. It's televised bad!fic. "And the Children Shall Lead" long stuck in my memory as BAD BAD BAD without being amusing. I'm glad others agree.

Star Trek TOS has wonderful WTF moments, and nearly all the romance goes from 0 to Kirk's patented shoulder-grab and smooch in about 5 minutes. Declarations of love take about 30 seconds more. It's really quite astounding.

Oh, dear. The time... the time I will never get back that I spent reading the Threshold recap.

...it was worth it. OMG. Nothing can ever beat the sheer bad of that! BWAHAHAHAHA.

It's really too bad that's your big impression of Voyager. I manage to forget that episode for weeks, even months at a time!

Reading the first page of the Sickbay episode review, where they recap the series overall, there's a lot of parallels between the two franchises -- Stargate, too, suffered from having the showrunners and writers spending their entire careers in the "bubble" of Stargate, and then not understanding why it didn't work when they tried to do something "new." And the showrunners there also wrote some of the worst episodes (Irresponsible). Plus the note about being able to overlook bad writing in a series if the cast gelled -- that's why SGA worked as well as it did, I think, because the cast had chemistry with each other and I got the impression that some of them were actively trying to subvert the material to give it some depth. The Boys from Bridge got much luckier in casting SGA than they deserved. We'll see if they get lucky twice, or if SG:U will be that franchise's Enterprise.

I remember watching "Threshold" when it aired -- it made a lasting impression on me, too! ;)

LOL! Voyager was sooooo bad that me and a friend jokingly said we could write a better episode and spent a weekend planning that out :) All I can remember was that it involved Paris getting throw in jail (hey, it's a must on Voyager), some H/c and a moon base.

Ahaha Threshold! That is sort of amazingly awful. I was actually a Voyager fan, but I somehow managed to miss that one (luckily?). My hand-waving abilities are pretty much cast-iron, but even I would've balked at that.

I totally remember that Voyager episode, and I'm not even a Voyager fan! (I only watched it when I was bored and nothing else was on.) At first I was rather excited about it, thinking, "Oh, yay, whump." and then... and then!... As far as WTF moments go, that one had been a beauty ;)