30 Years on, TNG's Ghost Sex Episode Remains as Unhinged and Awful as Ever
"Sub Rosa" is reviled as one of Star Trek's lowest lows, for many, many good reasons.
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To me it crosses into "so bad its good" territory. It's like Dr Crusher posted this script to AO3.
And its great meme material. 🕯
Yep I always happily watch this train wreck on a rewatch. The only episodes I actually can't even watch are the riker clip episode and the one where space Africans board the enterprise to steal a white woman.
The most unsurprising thing about Code of Honor? The director was a fucking racist.
The African theme of the episode was brought in by director Russ Mayberry, who had the Ligonians race cast entirely from African-American actors. Mayberry was fired during production by the show's creator Gene Roddenberry, and First Assistant Director Les Landau completed the episode. Star Trek novel author Keith DeCandido later recalled that this was because of the casting itself,[5] while cast member Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher) thought that it was because Mayberry was racist towards the guest stars after they were cast.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
They weren't even supposed to be a black race originally??
Nope:
In this episode, the entire humanoid population of the planet is portrayed by African American performers. In the teleplay, however, only Lutan's guards were specifically written as being African.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(episode)#Background_information
Which, you know, also not terrific, but not just balls-to-the-wall racist.
Thing to keep in mind with that writer is she also wrote the SG-1 episode where a character got captured as a slave wife for mongols (SG-1 episode emancipation). She was fulfilling her racist brute kink. She holds the honor of writing what are considered some of the worst episodes for both series.
I... kind of like the Riker clip episode. It's just so weird and pointless.
I absolutely love clips episodes. When watching through old sci fi series that got syndicated, you're guaranteed to get at least one or two. I'm always psyched up when they come up in a rewatch, it's one of my favorite meta tropes.
Community did the best one when it was actually stuff that you never saw.
HARRISON FORD IS A RADIATING OUR TESTICLES WITH MICROWAVE SATELLITE TRANSMISSIONS
The Community clip episode is great, but I think the best one has to be Avatar. The original one, Ember Island Players, not the lame-ass actual clip episode in Korra. An in-world summary of the events thus far as portrayed by actors who don't have complete knowledge. With in-jokes referencing various aspects of the show's production, like how Toph was originally meant to be a burly man, and how Aang, as a young boy, would have been voiced by a woman in most cartoons.
That was wild. Some of those clips were clearly expensive to make, too. And many of them left me mourning that we would probably never get the episode hinted at.
The thing is this clip show was because of budget shortages and it came too early in the shows production. So to get enough material for different emotions they had to use some very weird and non-emotional clips imo.
Super early clip shows are some of my favorites, it really hits home how awesomely campy they are. Did you ever see Clerks: The Animated Series? They did a clip show for the second episode ever, it was genius.
Did you ever see Clerks: The Animated Series? They did a clip show for the second episode ever, it was genius.
...how? Did they use clips from episodes that hadn't aired yet, or did they just chop up the first episode and show it again out of order?
Nope all the clips were from episode 1 mostly the same clips too. The 1st time I watched I was in histerics.
Whenever I'm reminded of that clip episode the only thing that pops into my head is Riker telling data calmly that something may have him
My pet theory is that bad episodes are at least two of the following:
-dumb
-boring
-cheap
This one and the warp 10 lizard sex episode from Voyager are extremely dumb, but I love them because they're definitely not cheap/low-effort or boring. (But if someone did find it boring I would understand them calling it a bad episode.)
Interesting. That certainly fits.
I'll attempt to peer review this theory.
It's been a while since I've seen it, but as I recall while the plot was so-bad-it's-good, the pacing was a snooze fest.
We were a lot more tolerant of slow paced shows in the early 90s.
Im curious but too afraid to google.... Whats AO3?
Archive of Our Own. It's a massive community of fanfic / fanart. Think about a show, movie, book, video game, or famous play and you can bet they have stories set in it. Also just lots of stories about specific actors, I guess.
Oh okay so only occassionally scary if i read the wrong thing.
Thanks!
