Anything involving time travel. It's the sci-fi equivilent of jumping the shark. There needs to be a viewer warning at the beginning of such episodes stating:
Warning! Our writers are currently out of good ideas. So, we threw this lazy shit together, which is going to be completely unsatisfying and will leave you with a vague feeling that the show should just end and let the writers move on to something new. Viewer discretion is advised.
As an added warning, any episode which involves going back to the real present day should end the above warning with 20 minutes of Bobcat Goldwaith screaming.
I'm going to say any space battle scene made since 2009.
From TOS up through Enterprise, you could follow the space battles. "This ship went this way and fired phasers but it only hit the ship's shields, then they fired back..." Camera movements were smooth and comfortable, you could see and tell what is going on.
J. J. Abrams shows up and all of a sudden we've got panicky Saving Private Ryan cam and there's just nine layers of beam spam on the screen. Everyone is machine gunning everyone from every which way. It's got George Lucas syndrome. "Put more special effect bullshit on the screen. More. MORE. MOOOOOREEEEE!"
Star Trek: Picard, when the Borg wake up and the Romulans just vacuum them out. In that moment the Cube should have automatically teleported them back inside. If the teleporters were down for some reason, the remaining Drones would just happily continue working in hard vacuum and proceed to assimilate the shit out of the Romulans. What happened was an uncalled for nerf of the Borg.
Whenever Riker meets eyes with a female humanoid alien earlyish in an episode, you know exactly what the B plot is gonna be
The one where Dr Crusher has sex with a ghost
The "Allamaraine" song scene from DS9's Move Along Home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FM6Xfs2ZoY
In fact that whole episode.
Tasha Yar dies due to the Exxon Valdez.
DS9. The Dominion is about to come through the wormhole with hundreds or thousands of ships and the prophets are like "omg Sisco you can't have a fucking war here, man, we need you later on" and Sisco was "fuck you, I do whatever I want, do your magic, I don't care, it's man's business" so Sisco wont retreat.
and then what happened?
The whole fucking Dominion fleet just disappeared, poof! like Sisco used some kind of cheat code.
fuck that.
anyway, it's not the scene itself that was bad, but man. that was so freaking cheap I think the whole show changed in me a little bit after that. still amazing series, tho
When Spock fails to get laid because he's a half-breed.
Janeway and Paris making lizard babies.
People often say the Evil Spock episode was memorable, but why? I always thought it was so tropey. It just doesn't strike me as thought-provoking if you can sum up something with "a parallel universe decided to release an evil version of me with an evil beard and nobody else to come from a parallel universe and frame me aboard my ship". That would be more in line with Futurama, and ironically they handled the concept better.
Edit isn't working, so here's a second one https://gfycat.com/coolveneratedfrillneckedlizard That is all.
Although I could argue there are worse scenes in general, the one with the most impact for me, that almost cut my Trek fandom short... the handholding jellyfish at the end of TNG's debut 2 parter.
I watched it when it first aired, and I cringed so hard that my family thought I had a stroke. Really, those episodes were full of stuff that made you feel like an ass telling your friend new to Trek that "it gets better," but that really was the whipped cream and cherry on top.
In the movies I would say when Worf went into Klingon puberty in Star Trek: Insurrection and got a giant pimple in his face that everybody was making fun of.
Data's continued quest to be more human.
And the whole of TNG Series 1 where they're all as wooden af cos they haven't grown into the roles yet.
Data's organ solo is hilarious though (look it up on YouTube).
As an episode in general, any one ever where 1) someone/something messes around with the timeline, screwing up a bunch of stuff 2) they go back and do a bunch of stuff to fix it, timeline returns to normal, fade to 3) end of episode, everything is as if nothing ever happened, all characters, in actuality, DID NOTHING, and NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENED
Every time I run into this episode in Star Trek or any other sci-fi, I want that hour of my life back. Like, why did I just watch all of this, if literally nothing happened?
