I knew that last week's fun little piece on the Ars staff's least-favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes was going to draw its share of negative comments because no matter how bad an episode is, there's always someone who loves it. But I didn't realize exactly how crazy things were going to get until Peter turned in his pick: "Darmok." Originally airing in 1991, the second episode of TNG's fifth season stars Star Trek II's Paul Winfield as the representative of a species that communicates only through metaphor. It's often cited as a fan favorite, but Peter jumped at the chance to take it down a peg or two.
"It's a terrible episode, made all the more terrible by the fact that some people actually like it. They're objectively wrong," he opined in the article. He was considerably less diplomatic (and legitimately hilarious) in the staff IRC channel as we were kibitzing our way though the article's planning, pasting "DARMOK = SHITMOK" into chat over and over again.
However, a fellow named Kevin Wu has already done all the legwork necessary to prove that "Darmok" is not terrible at all—at least, not according to IMDB's user-submitted ratings.
Wu has actually pulled together rankings for many different TV shows, but the TNG one is available here. I've circled "Darmok" in the image above, and by Wu's reckoning, "Darmok" isn't just good—it's great. It ranks far above the median and definitely outshines episodes I'd personally rank as better (like episode 2 of season 4, "Family").
How did the rest of our picks do? The other five episodes we nominated as stinkers were "The Naked Now," "Journey's End," "Rascals," "Angel One," and "Up the Long Ladder." I've highlighted their positions below:
Putting aside "Darmok," our staff episodes hover around the 6.5 mark, with "Rascals" in season 6 and "Angel One" in season 1 being the outliers. Interestingly, there were a far worse episodes that we could have picked as our least favorites—though I'm pretty shocked that "Masks" in season 7 didn't rank lower than it does. (It holds a solid 6.2—the season 7 nadir at 5.1 is "Sub Rosa," also known as "the one where Beverly falls in love with a lamp")
According to the data, the worst episode of TNG by a significant margin is the season 2 finale "Shades of Gray," a clipshow episode famously hobbled by the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike. We also managed to not pick season 6's "Man of the People" (the one where Troi falls in love with a brain vampire and gets really old) or season 4's "The Loss" (the one where Troi loses her empathic abilities and gets really whiny) or season 2's "The Child" (the one where Troi has dream sex with a space anomaly and gets really pregnant).
Also managing to avoid our list of shame were any number of terrible Riker episodes (like season 5's "The Outcast," where Riker decides that what he really wants to do is impose traditional gender norms on an androgynous alien—who, rather than stabbing him in the face, instead falls in love with him, because...beard?).
On the whole, we picked episodes that most folks agree are bad—all except Peter. By the chart, "Darmok" ranks as one of the best episodes of TNG. There were several that ranked better, including all the old standbys that grace everyone's best-of lists, like "The Best of Both Worlds" and "The Inner Light," but at least according to the mass of IMDB episode votes, "Darmok" is good.
Peter, when the walls fell.
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