The rest of the internet is still off celebrating memorial day or arguing at Wiscon and the unpleasant heat today has fried my brain, so I’m not really in the mood for clever posting.
Have you ever experienced the phenomenon of accidentally tuning in to a TV show that’s constantly being rerun and for some reason you always hit the same episode? And it’s usually the worst episode of the show or at least one you really can’t stand? It’s almost as if that episode was stalking you, showing up whenever you innocently tuned into the that show.
One episode that has been stalking me for twenty years or so is “Justice”, an episode from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I can never recall the title, but it’s the episode where the Enterprise visits the planet of the half-naked blonde California beach boys and babes, who like to have sex all the time and try to execute Wesley Crusher for falling into a flower bed.
It’s probably the worst episode of any Star Trek series in the history of the franchise. It’s stupid, preachy, the costumes are awful and why is everybody white and blonde anyway? Besides, the bloody space beach boys don’t even succeed in executing Wesley either to everybody’s disappointment (that was before we all realized that though Wesley was annoying, Wil Wheaton is actually a really cool guy). And yet whenever there’s a Star Trek rerun on TV – and there always is a Star Trek rerun on TV somewhere – I will inevitably tune into that very episode. There are Next Generation episodes I actually remember enjoying, episodes I might actually want to rewatch. But no, I always get the planet of the space beach boys who fail to kill Wesley Crusher.
Today, I went over to Tor.com to see if that particular corner of the internet had woken up. As chance would have it, there is one of those Star Trek: The Next Generation rewatch posts on the homepage. I normally never look at the rewatch and reread posts, because they never rewatch or reread something I liked well enough to want to revisit it. But for some reason, I did look at the post today.
And guess what? It was that episode again. Though the reviewer seems to like it somewhat more than I do. He also links to a really hilarious video of Wil Wheaton recapping that episode, who obviously didn’t like it either.
Well, it was a really crap episode. So why is that one of all Star Trek episodes stalking me?
sending...