As much as I enjoy them, any of the Mirror Universe episodes.
Lots of very unfortunate implications involving the 'evil' versions of characters and their increased predilections towards bisexuality. Randomly demeaning to women, highly offensive towards Garak's character.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
As much as I enjoy them, any of the Mirror Universe episodes.
Lots of very unfortunate implications involving the 'evil' versions of characters and their increased predilections towards bisexuality. Randomly demeaning to women, highly offensive towards Garak's character.
as well as being a militant atheist who more than once pontificated on how terrible it was for a culture to be held back by their primitive devotion to the concept of religion.
Except that is true in the ST universe, almost every god we've come across in an episode has been evil, incompetent or malevolent.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
ive never found any episode of trek truly offensive. there have stories with leftist sermonising that i have found a bit condescending, but thats about the extent of it.
The bajorans were believed because they had power- control of the wormhole, and because they looked like humans. The cardassians had a different appearance, and were a rival to the federation for control of the wormhole, so they were considered the other, the lesser.
In fairness, the 50-odd years of Cardassian occupation of Bajor may have had something to do with it as well.
In the interest of being fair to worffan101, I choose to believe that it is largely derived from the recent spat of "which Trek series had the worst Xth season" threads that we've had. Perhaps his own personal take on them, anyway.
He did, as well, suggest that the list wasn't nearly complete.
The thing is that, as we are all nerds here, I think we have a hard time mentally separating "bad" episodes from "offensive" ones. If we don't like something we have a tendency to pick it apart into tiny pieces to find everything there is to be offensive about it even if, objectively, there really isn't anything to be offended about.
Take, say, "Shadows of P'Jem." Worffan101 derides Archer for motorboating T'Pol...while leaving out that the position they ended up in was an accident caused by the two of them trying to escape from being tied up (you ever tried to escape being tied to another person before? Things invariably become awkward) and ignoring that the only reason that Archer and T'Pol were even on the planet in the first place was because Archer was trying to convince T'Pol to remain with the Enterprise rather than be re-assigned by the Vulcan High Command.
There is really objectively nothing to be offended about in the episode, and in fact "Shadows of P'Jem" is considered one of the best episodes of Enterprise's first season (not to mention that it successfully built off of another well-regarded episode, "The Andorian Incident")
Plus Blalock and Bakula themselves didn't mind the scene. Evidently someone on the soundstage during the scene's filming had "Love Shack" come on right when it happened and everyone burst out laughing.
Pretty much every episode where bajoran voices were privileged above cardassian voices was offensive.
It was clear from the context that the federation, especially the officers on ds9, strongly considered cardassians as the "other" and in addition to the overt bigotry against them, engaged throughout the show in a more insidious form of discrimination.
The stories bajorans told were always given a high privilege, and the voices of cardassias never had any privilege.
The bajorans were believed because they had power- control of the wormhole, and because they looked like humans. The cardassians had a different appearance, and were a rival to the federation for control of the wormhole, so they were considered the other, the lesser.
There are too many examples to count, but I think a major message of ds9 is often overlooked, the insidious power of considering a group of people the other, and the real harm it does to them.
considering that this same thing is a problem in the real world, it's kind of offensive when people have the lesson go over their heads and end up reveling in what the show was supposed to be educating us against. Buying into the bajoran smear campaign about the occupation, considering cardassians to be bad, buying into the sanctimonious federation play-along with it, thinking the cardassians "got what was coming to them." Its nasty stuff and the parallels to things in the real world that matter are uncomfortably clear.
"Spoonhead" was used as a term of endearment by starfleet personnel, and is therefore not racist or offensive in any way.
The Cardassians...eh...I find it difficult to really care about them the same way I care about the Romulans, Klingons, or even Ferengi, Kazon, Krenim, Suliban, or others. It's not that I hate them, it's just that they're kind of meh.
Might have something to do with the fact that all Cardassian ships look the same...wait, is that racist for me to say? :P
Still, the species as a whole needs some more ships. The hammerhead + tail design is fairly distinctive looking and I do like it, but we need more than just the Galor and Keldon, which are nearly visually identical save for size. There are somefandesigns that are pretty cool.
2. Um, flying squid things that shoot goo at you? How is this not weird in a bad way?
3. I admit that I'm prejudiced because my inner biologist screams blue murder whenever I see that episode. Newsflash, Brannon Braga! Viruses don't have or respond to hormones! Viruses can't grow in the infective form! Viruses don't shoot gooey stuff! Viruses don't grow to the size of basketballs and fly like illogical squid! A life-form that does that is NOT a virus, it's an animal. Or something very similar to one.
tl;dr: They offend my inner biologist. Probably just cheesy to other people, but they drive me insane.
1. Alien life forms, not terran life forms. They don't have to follow the behaviour patterns of our life forms.
2. That's what normal squids do. Just without the flying part. It's a bad situation to be in, but Japan has come out with far dodgier stuff. Trust me.
To be honest, even when I first saw that episode when I was young, I never really thought of those things as a virus, but more like an animalistic lifeform. A parasitic type thing, rather than an actual virus.
*******************************************
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
1. Alien life forms, not terran life forms. They don't have to follow the behaviour patterns of our life forms.
2. That's what normal squids do. Just without the flying part. It's a bad situation to be in, but Japan has come out with far dodgier stuff. Trust me.
To be honest, even when I first saw that episode when I was young, I never really thought of those things as a virus, but more like an animalistic lifeform. A parasitic type thing, rather than an actual virus.
1. If they're classified by Terran standards, they have to follow Terran rules.
2. And do I let that sort of anime fly by me without calling it out? No.
Yeah, they only make sense as animals...bloody stupid animals...that get blown up by the most ridiculous solution imaginable.
Ah, as opposed to all the different romulan and ferengi, kazon and krenim ships we saw, yes?
I did say *might*, and in fairness even in canon Trek there are a number of different Romulan designs seen throughout the series. D'deridex, Mogai, T'Liss, T'Varo, D-7 (A Klingon design but it's still neat to see in a Romulan fleet), Drone Marauder, and if you count Reman designs then the Scimitar, not to mention the many ship class types that Star Fleet Battles, Star Trek Online, and other games have added over the years like the Faeht, Dhelan, Ha'apax, Ar'kif, and others. Cardassian official or semi-official ship designs, by comparison, are lacking.
Besides, it's not really that anyway, it's just that every time I try to think up something interesting to do with the Cardassians, I think to myself, "...but aren't we already doing this elsewhere?" I mean, Cardassia was hit hard by the Dominion War, but the Romulans lost their entire homeworld. The Cardassians have the True Way, but the Tal Shiar comes across as far more organized and dangerous. The Cardassians aren't really all that trusted, but neither are the Romulans...
...I think my point is that any Cardassian storyline in Star Trek Online would probably just end up being very, very similar to the Romulan one in feel if not in specific events.
Besides galors and keldons there were also hidekis.
The Hideki-class is a shuttle, so I wasn't counting it. I also left out some bulk freighters as well. In fact we see more Cardassian freighter variations than we see Cardassian mainline ship variations.
In regard to the the whole Cardassian matter, I think people are missing the tiny little fact that the Federation had fought a long war with the Cardassians.
Hence the racial slurs and xenophobic attitudes towards them, already in TNG even.
Not to mention the Cardassians had a well earned reputation for cruelty and sadism, and yes there are "five" lights.
In regard to the the whole Cardassian matter, I think people are missing the tiny little fact that the Federation had fought a long war with the Cardassians.
Hence the racial slurs and xenophobic attitudes towards them, already in TNG even.
Not to mention the Cardassians had a well earned reputation for cruelty and sadism, and yes there are "five" lights.
Fighting a war doesn't excuse your side being racist, even if the cardassians were no angels and are basically Space Fascists. It is understandable but it doesn't excuse it.
For the real truth behind the Bajoran "occupation" I would recommend running the Bijor series of foundry missions, and to think back upon both the mission "Of Bajor" and the tremendous infestation of Undine their planet suffers from that is revealed in "Undine Infiltration".
'Code of Honor' is always top of the list in the category 'most offensive Star Trek episode ever' for me. Everything else is a distant second.
Indeed, it was pretty offensive...
It got remade in Stargate: Sg-1, same author. Same basic plot. They just switched the Africans for Asians...and made the "incredibly attractive" native girl white.
See, it's 'cause of people saying stuff like this that the actor and show runners made him go all crazy and get plastic surgery and commit himself to the Pah Wraiths.
I didn't get that vibe from it, really...it was more "oh, crud, we screwed with people's culture".
It could just as easily have been the other way around, and the episode would've been basically the same.
Putting it up anyway, though.
I could have said that except for Picard's sanctimonious speech that not only had they put aside their belief in the Overseer before (their free choice) but that to go back to that belief was a REGRESSION to a primitive and WORSE state of being than oh so enlightened and secular humanity.
If they had stayed solely on the free choice aspect I would have been in total agreement.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
The Hideki-class is a shuttle, so I wasn't counting it.
It's a smallish 100m escort in the same vain as the Defiant or the B'Rel.
The GCI model was reused as a shuttle once or twice but the Hideki it's self wasn't one.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Comments
Lots of very unfortunate implications involving the 'evil' versions of characters and their increased predilections towards bisexuality. Randomly demeaning to women, highly offensive towards Garak's character.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Ooh, true that. Let me add a nod to that.
Except that is true in the ST universe, almost every god we've come across in an episode has been evil, incompetent or malevolent.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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...true that...
I mean, Q's a god, and Q exists to f*ck with us.
free jkname
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...bald spots?
I lol'd, or whatever you kids are saying these days.
In fairness, the 50-odd years of Cardassian occupation of Bajor may have had something to do with it as well.
In the interest of being fair to worffan101, I choose to believe that it is largely derived from the recent spat of "which Trek series had the worst Xth season" threads that we've had. Perhaps his own personal take on them, anyway.
He did, as well, suggest that the list wasn't nearly complete.
The thing is that, as we are all nerds here, I think we have a hard time mentally separating "bad" episodes from "offensive" ones. If we don't like something we have a tendency to pick it apart into tiny pieces to find everything there is to be offensive about it even if, objectively, there really isn't anything to be offended about.
Take, say, "Shadows of P'Jem." Worffan101 derides Archer for motorboating T'Pol...while leaving out that the position they ended up in was an accident caused by the two of them trying to escape from being tied up (you ever tried to escape being tied to another person before? Things invariably become awkward) and ignoring that the only reason that Archer and T'Pol were even on the planet in the first place was because Archer was trying to convince T'Pol to remain with the Enterprise rather than be re-assigned by the Vulcan High Command.
There is really objectively nothing to be offended about in the episode, and in fact "Shadows of P'Jem" is considered one of the best episodes of Enterprise's first season (not to mention that it successfully built off of another well-regarded episode, "The Andorian Incident")
Plus Blalock and Bakula themselves didn't mind the scene. Evidently someone on the soundstage during the scene's filming had "Love Shack" come on right when it happened and everyone burst out laughing.
1. You're wrong.
2. I can no longer take anything you say seriously. There are no offensive Trek episodes unless we're talking about offensively bad.
About Q being God? Blasphemy! You're lucky he doesn't cast you out or smite you or something.
:P Just referencing "Tapestry", don't worry.
Holy mackerel.
I have never agreed with repetetiveepic ever before and hope to never do so again...but dude, that's incredibly offensive.
How would you respond if I called an African-American "brownskin"? Or a person of Asian descent "Squinty-eyes"?
Or any other racist caricature of a physical feature?
People like you make me wonder why I'm a part of this fandom...
Might have something to do with the fact that all Cardassian ships look the same...wait, is that racist for me to say? :P
Still, the species as a whole needs some more ships. The hammerhead + tail design is fairly distinctive looking and I do like it, but we need more than just the Galor and Keldon, which are nearly visually identical save for size. There are some fan designs that are pretty cool.
1. Alien life forms, not terran life forms. They don't have to follow the behaviour patterns of our life forms.
2. That's what normal squids do. Just without the flying part. It's a bad situation to be in, but Japan has come out with far dodgier stuff. Trust me.
To be honest, even when I first saw that episode when I was young, I never really thought of those things as a virus, but more like an animalistic lifeform. A parasitic type thing, rather than an actual virus.
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
1. If they're classified by Terran standards, they have to follow Terran rules.
2. And do I let that sort of anime fly by me without calling it out? No.
Yeah, they only make sense as animals...bloody stupid animals...that get blown up by the most ridiculous solution imaginable.
God, I hate that episode.
I did say *might*, and in fairness even in canon Trek there are a number of different Romulan designs seen throughout the series. D'deridex, Mogai, T'Liss, T'Varo, D-7 (A Klingon design but it's still neat to see in a Romulan fleet), Drone Marauder, and if you count Reman designs then the Scimitar, not to mention the many ship class types that Star Fleet Battles, Star Trek Online, and other games have added over the years like the Faeht, Dhelan, Ha'apax, Ar'kif, and others. Cardassian official or semi-official ship designs, by comparison, are lacking.
Besides, it's not really that anyway, it's just that every time I try to think up something interesting to do with the Cardassians, I think to myself, "...but aren't we already doing this elsewhere?" I mean, Cardassia was hit hard by the Dominion War, but the Romulans lost their entire homeworld. The Cardassians have the True Way, but the Tal Shiar comes across as far more organized and dangerous. The Cardassians aren't really all that trusted, but neither are the Romulans...
...I think my point is that any Cardassian storyline in Star Trek Online would probably just end up being very, very similar to the Romulan one in feel if not in specific events.
The Hideki-class is a shuttle, so I wasn't counting it. I also left out some bulk freighters as well. In fact we see more Cardassian freighter variations than we see Cardassian mainline ship variations.
Hence the racial slurs and xenophobic attitudes towards them, already in TNG even.
Not to mention the Cardassians had a well earned reputation for cruelty and sadism, and yes there are "five" lights.
EDIT Fighting a war doesn't excuse your side being racist, even if the cardassians were no angels and are basically Space Fascists. It is understandable but it doesn't excuse it.
For the real truth behind the Bajoran "occupation" I would recommend running the Bijor series of foundry missions, and to think back upon both the mission "Of Bajor" and the tremendous infestation of Undine their planet suffers from that is revealed in "Undine Infiltration".
Indeed, it was pretty offensive...
It got remade in Stargate: Sg-1, same author. Same basic plot. They just switched the Africans for Asians...and made the "incredibly attractive" native girl white.
F***ing racism.
See, it's 'cause of people saying stuff like this that the actor and show runners made him go all crazy and get plastic surgery and commit himself to the Pah Wraiths.
I could have said that except for Picard's sanctimonious speech that not only had they put aside their belief in the Overseer before (their free choice) but that to go back to that belief was a REGRESSION to a primitive and WORSE state of being than oh so enlightened and secular humanity.
If they had stayed solely on the free choice aspect I would have been in total agreement.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
So yeah, that entire series. All of it.
It's a smallish 100m escort in the same vain as the Defiant or the B'Rel.
The GCI model was reused as a shuttle once or twice but the Hideki it's self wasn't one.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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