“Move Along Home” is widely panned by fans, but I prefer it to “Dramatis Personae,” in which the station’s command crew are behaving weirdly, and it isn’t until nearly the end of the episode that we understand why, and I personally don’t really care. It would take several episodes for Next Generation to come out of the shadow of the original series. I nominate “The Naked Now,” a bland rehash of “The Naked Time” from the first season of the original series. The episode is notable mostly because it was written by Walter Koenig, who was not hired as a voice actor to reprise his rôle as Ensign Chekhov. In “The Infinite Vulcan,” there’s a gigantic Spock. Sometimes writers spend too much time on titles, but in this case, it might have helped. Maybe he could destroy two universes, and there’s not much the crew of the Enterprise can do about it one way or the other.ĮDIT: Oops, I got the title wrong, it’s “The Alternative Factor.” This correction actually makes me think even less of the episode. There’s this guy Lazarus in “The Alternate Factor,” who seems a tiny bit scattered, but I don’t really understand or care why. Due to scheduling coincidences, I’ve seen it more frequently than “What Are Little Girls Made of?” or “Miri,” which don’t impress me too much either. I nominate “The Alternate Factor” as the worst episode of Star Trek’s first season. “Spock’s Brain” doesn’t count for this open thread. So as to avoid spoilers for those of you who want to avoid them, let’s try to limit the discussion to only the first season of the show, at least for the newer shows that are still in production. In this open thread, let’s celebrate the worst first season episodes in the Star Trek franchise. Somehow, I doubt that artificial intelligence can create a show and then “grow the beard” of the show. By the seventh season of Next Generation season finale, Frakes had a neatly trimmed beard with full volume (the picture at right notwithstanding), and the show went out on a high note. In the case of Next Generation, this happened at about the same time as Jonathan Frakes, who played Commander Riker (and came back as Captain Riker for Star Trek: Picard), started to grow a beard. There’s this thing called “growing the beard,” said of a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation which becomes better at some point after several so-so episodes, or even a couple of seasons. Human writers grow after failure in ways that are difficult to quantify for an algorithm. But the difference between human learning and machine learning is that the humans can genuinely learn from their mistakes. My preference for human writers doesn’t preclude my criticizing human writers for writing scripts that are boring, confusing or in some other way bad. Or an artificial intelligence like Data who can write an ode to his cat that puts Commander Riker to sleep? Well, that might be more the level of artificial intelligence these days. Commander Data as Sherlock Holmes? I don’t think so. The writers reasonably want a bigger piece of the streaming pie, which they certainly deserve, and they’re also concerned about being replaced by “generative artificial intelligence” like ChatGPT.Īlthough I have been impressed by some of what ChatGPT has come up, it’s still got a long way to go before coming anywhere near the kinds of artificial intelligence that human writers imagine for franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars.Īn artificial intelligence that can create a Moriarty capable of defeating Lt.
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