10 Worst Star Trek: Enterprise Episodes, Ranked

"Star Trek: Enterprise," the "Original Series" prequel saga that imagines a nascent Starfleet in its pre-Kirk early warp exploration era, is all about going where no one has gone before. Most of the time, that means meeting new life on new planets while bringing diplomacy and the human passion for discovery to previously uncharted corners of the galaxy. But every once in a while, the destination is kind of a letdown. If we learned anything from "Spock's Brain," it's that not every Trek episode can be a winner — and that's certainly true for the occasionally perplexing voyage of Enterprise NX-01.

From boring, meandering plots that go nowhere to creepy storylines that wouldn't make it in the 2020s, let alone the 22nd century, some episodes just aren't quite the top tier Trek we've come to know and love. And that's okay, because even "Star Trek" at its worst is worth watching (although we might skip a few episodes from time to time). With a little help from Reddit and IMDb, here's a fan-informed breakdown of the worst "Enterprise" episodes you might want to overlook on your next streaming journey with Captain Archer's crew.

The early days on Enterprise turn out to be kind of a tough time for the ship's resident polyglot Hoshi Sato (Linda Park). Although Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) aggressively recruits her from her teaching job in Brazil to join him aboard the Enterprise, she's not particularly well-suited to space travel at first, particularly given her space sickness, space suit claustrophobia, fear of transporters, and general anxiety about space travel. So it's depressingly poetic when she develops an attachment for a random space slug who's also failing to thrive in his new space home.

Sadly, that Sluggo subplot would turn out to be the most interesting storyline in "Fight or Flight," the first "Enterprise" episode after the two-part pilot. And that's really saying something in an episode where the crew encounters an abandoned ship full of dead bodies suspended upside down and jammed full of tubes.

It's not a terrible episode — it's just not a particularly good one, as the main storyline gets buried under the overplayed bickering between Archer and T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) and Hoshi's incessant whining. Any potential for a great — albeit network-friendly — space-themed body horror episode is squandered, and the strong female characters "Star Trek" is usually so good about creating have been replaced by tiresome, annoying caricatures taking up far too much screen time with their neuroses. Given the eventual revelation that the bodies are related to one of the worst diseases in "Star Trek," the story would have been better framed around the central storyline without the heavy-handed emphasis on character building and exposition. And that's to say nothing of the crew irresponsibly ditching Sluggo on a random planet — the most egregious example of Starfleet invasive species-dumping since the baby salamanders of "Threshold" on "Star Trek: Voyager."

If we learned nothing else from Geordi La Forge's (LeVar Burton) holostalking adventures on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and Deanna Troi's (Marina Sirtis) alcohol-fueled #MeToo moments with Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell), it's that meeting your engineer heroes can only serve to disappoint. And that's exactly what happens in the "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode "Daedalus," when the ship's engineer Trip Tucker (Connor Trinneer) gets a chance to meet Emory Erickson (Bill Cobbs), the man responsible for inventing the molecular transporter.

The first problem with this episode is Erickson's characterization. Far from an esteem-worthy scientist, Erickson has been taking a page from "The Fly" with some questionable beta testing — testing that resulted in a handful of folks, including his own son Quinn (Donovan Knowles), going missing.

Much like "Fight or Flight," this episode is plagued by pacing problems that stem from the writers' failure to fully commit to a genre or purpose. A sizable chunk of "Daedalus" is wasted focusing on Erickson's sneaky, ostensibly malevolent intentions before revealing that his original purpose on the Enterprise was a ruse and he's trying to recover his missing son from subspace. Despite all of Erickson's lying and questionable ethics — not to mention causing the death of a crewman and nearly blowing up the ship by igniting a stack of torpedoes — Archer ends up going along with his plans after learning the truth in yet another example of his questionable captaincy. This lack of professionalism, along with the emotional instability of just about everyone on board the ship, feels like a poor attempt to punctuate the otherwise dragging plot with a handful of spicy moments that ultimately fall flat.

A few years before Padma Lakshmi became famous for her food-related content on Bravo's "Top Chef" and "Taste the Nation With Padma Lakshmi," she appeared as one of the most obnoxious characters in the entire "Star Trek" canon on the "Star Trek: Voyager" episode "Think Tank." That's not to say Lakshmi is at fault — on the contrary, she does a fine job with what she's given to work with in this episode, and the chemistry between her character and Trip Tucker is one of the only things salvaging this episode.

The episode finds Trip accidentally cryo-awakening an entitled princess (Lakshmi) who was space-kidnapped by some aliens in order to raise ransom money. It's easy to see how the episode could have been written as a romantic comedy, but once again, the writing team appears to have gotten lost along the way — something they've freely admitted in post-"Enterprise" interviews. The episode went through several rewrites before landing on its final product.

Writer David A. Goodman, also known for his work on "Futurama," "Family Guy," and "The Orville," revealed on the audio commentary for "Judgment" that "Precious Cargo" had suffered quite a few rewrites after he was done with it. And speaking on the "Enterprise" Season 2 Blu-ray special feature "Destination: Unknown," executive producer Brannon Braga lamented that he'd intended to produce the episode as a screwball comedy but "struggled through it." The result is a middling storyline that wishes it was funny but turns out to be a predictable quasi-romance that adds nothing to the series.

One "Enterprise" character who simply doesn't get enough air time, despite his arguably very interesting back story, is Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery). That, along with the fact that he's apparently still an ensign years into his Starfleet tenure, has led to a few fans referring to him as the Harry Kim of "Enterprise."

The concept behind Travis' "space boomer" character packs a lot of potential. The child of parents working on a pre-warp-era cargo freighter, Mayweather spent his childhood living in space aboard a generational ship. And that's why it's so disappointing to see Travis finally get his own episode only to have it turn into yet another meandering, go-nowhere ASMR podcast of an episode.

"Horizon" follows Travis as he takes leave to visit his family aboard the freighter they call home, the Horizon, to pay final respects after his father's recent death. But as he deals with his family's drama and an encounter with some space pirates, there's little to keep the audience locked into the episode. Many fans were also critical of Montgomery's acting in this episode, noting that he's fine among the ensemble cast but doesn't seem to have the chops to carry an entire episode alone. It says everything that the B-plot where Archer and Trip convince T'Pol to watch "Frankenstein" is the highlight of the episode.

One thing that hasn't changed much since the days of "Star Trek: The Original Series" is that you usually can't go wrong by throwing in a few hot green-skinned Orion girlies. And the concept behind "Bound" is actually kind of cool, effectively inverting the Orion worldbuilding to suggest that the Orion slave women are actually controlling the men.

When the Orion Syndicate reaches out to engage in a little sexy space diplomacy, Enterprise is visited by a trio of buxom babes who immediately disrupt the general vibe of the ship. The men of the Enterprise are completely scrambled by the scantily-clad ladies, exhibiting aggressive, primal behavior and presenting as almost hypnotized by the Orion "slave" women. At the same time, Denobulan doc Dr. Phlox (John Billingsley) finds himself suddenly facing an early oncoming sleep cycle, and the Enterprise women are getting some gnarly headaches. Only T'Pol and Trip are unaffected, which we learn is a side effect of their recent chicka chicka bow activities. While the Enterprise crew is busy completely melting down, the Orions immediately get to work peeling away the defenses — not to mention common sense — of armory officer Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating) in an effort to dig into the ship's security information.

The whole gender role subversion of a "TOS" legacy race seems like a cool concept on paper. But when it's eventually revealed that the Orion ladies were in charge of the whole operation, it plays out like yet another mishandled attempt at progressive gender politics. As one Reddit user put it, "I imagine that the dudes in the writers room probably high fived each other after coming up with that twist, thinking that they had just solved feminism. It's not sexist if the women are actually in charge."

Remember the cringeworthy devolution scenes in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Genesis"? The ones where Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) turns into a primate, Barclay (Dwight Schultz) turns into a spider, Troi transforms into a bathtub-dwelling, gill-rocking amphibian, and Worf (Michael Dorn) starts spitting venom? "Enterprise" writers saw that episode and said "Hold my synthehol" before breaking out their PADDs to pen "Extinction," an episode so weird that even LeVar Burton's directing and a pre-"Lost" Daniel Dae Kim couldn't save it.

Set somewhere in the middle of the Xindi crisis, the story finds an Away mission compromised when the crew members pick up a mutagenic genetic recoding virus that completely transforms them into another species — a freaky-looking species that likes to run around frantically looking for a city called Urquat. They speak a different language (is that even how DNA works?) and appear almost animalistic in their levels of comprehension, drawing comparisons from fans both to the "Voyager" episode "Threshold" and tales from the genre drama.

As reported by IGN in 2012, "Star Trek" producer Rick Berman's assistant Doug Mirabello once lamented on a "Star Trek" message board, "We even had one [Enterprise] director go to the producers and tell them he was ashamed to direct the episode where our crew turned into lizard people." Echoing the sentiment on a Blu-ray feature for Season 3, Brannon Braga called "Extinction," "one of the singularly most embarrassing episodes of 'Star Trek' I've ever been involved with."

Much like the "TNG" episode "Qpid" is the Robin Hood "Star Trek" mashup, "Exile" is the "Enterprise" mashup of "Phantom of the Opera" and "Beauty and the Beast," where a lonely "nice guy" in a remote gothic castle targets his dark romantic obsessions on Hoshi. And while it's nice to get a POV "Star Trek" episode with an often overlooked secondary character, "Exile" left many fans wondering why this was the best concept the "Enterprise" writers could come up with to give Hoshi the screen time she so sorely needed.

Hoshi receives a psychic transmission from Tarquin, a telepathic alien living alone in a book girl's fantasy castle on an unpopulated planet. When he claims to have intel on the Xindi, Hoshi's fellow crew members are perfectly fine with taking off to check out a Delphic Expanse sphere or two while she's trapped on the planet with a random creepy alien they don't know. As it turns out, he's an unsympathetic creep who plays mind games by telepathically cosplaying a hunky human suitor while begging her to be his lady — and never mind the collection of past lovers' graves hanging around outside the castle. Of course, like all nice guys, he quickly switches from the carrot to the stick when she refuses to become his tradwife, deepfaking Archer before threatening her pals.

Directed by B'Elanna Torres actor Roxann Dawson, "Exile" is another exercise in missed potential. Besides furthering the Sphere-Builders storyline, the primary plot plays like a boring holodeck version of a gothic horror. It's also never really clear what Tarquin's deal actually was, nor is there a point at which Hoshi feels either heroic or in true peril.

"Vox Sola" is a "Star Trek" episode where the writers thought, "What this show about post-scarcity space exploration really needs is a bunch of giant, gelatinous snot spiderwebs that looks straight out of a 'Nightmare on Elm Street' dream sequence." And what follows is, by almost every metric, unbearably hard to watch.

Strip away the abysmally poor execution, and "Vox Sola" is a pretty cool concept with a lot of potential: The Enterprise accidentally picks up some sort of symbiotic jelly monster who absorbs crewmen one by one, wrapping them up in its globlike tentacles and sucking away their life force. It's a trope that's been done before, but much better. Take the 1999 " X-Files" episode "Field Trip," which saw FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) getting gradually absorbed by a giant hallucinogenic underground fungus, or "Supernatural"'s Djinn episodes which follow a similar storyline.

The problem with "Vox Sola" is there's no reality-bending to make things interesting, and the slow absorption of Enterprise crewmen feels pretty low-stakes. As one IMDb reviewer put it, the alien is "a stupid, boring mass of white goo webbing that traps Trip, the Captain and several others who are too slow and dumb as molasses for poking their noses too close to the thing." While it is kind of cool to see Hoshi use her language skills to riddle out a solution, that's truly the high point in a bizarre but boring episode that easily could have been envisioned as a more cerebral homage to some of the best cosmic horror movies.

Not to be mistaken for The One With the Whales, a.k.a. "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," the "Enterprise" episode titled "Home" deals with T'Pol making a trip back to Vulcan for some much-needed family time with Trip in tow. This becomes a little awkward when the on-again, off-again situationship pals learn T'Pol needs to wrap up her arranged marriage to repair her mom's local image after her involvement in "The Andorian Incident." Meanwhile, the Enterprise crew has a nasty run-in with xenophobia back on Earth and Archer has a booty call with his old girlfriend Starfleet Captain Erica Hernandez (Ada Maris).

The episode bears a similar feel to the "Next Generation" episode "Family," which finds Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) retreating home to work through his post-assimilation trauma while Worf reconnects with his adoptive parents aboard the Enterprise-D — only far less well-written. Splitting the episode between a trio of equally "meh" plots means spreading all three entirely too thin. With the Xindi plot freshly wrapped up and nothing particularly exciting to keep the story moving along, there's an overarching sense that the whole episode is just empty calorie filler.

"After the long and drawn out Xindi ark they finally return home and it's completely underwhelming," complained one "Star Trek" fan on Reddit before adding, "Watching Archer feel sorry for himself and another quasi romantic storyline had me rolling my eyes." While it is kind of cool to revisit Vulcan and catch the first live-action glimpse of a Vulcan city, it exists mostly to serve as the background scenery for the one-act play starring T'Pol and Trip's quietly simmering romance, and even that drones on way too long.

Every "Star Trek" series has its core group of diehard Stans — the hardcore fans for whom the series can do virtually no wrong. But even among the most devoted "Enterprise" fandom, there is one episode that's almost universally hated: The controversial series finale "These are the Voyages..." Framed by a future holodeck review of the events by William Riker on the eve of an important decision, the "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode proved so controversial that even Riker actor Jonathan Frakes came to regret it.

After four seasons of finding its footing, many fans felt "Star Trek: Enterprise" was just starting to get good at the time of its cancellation. Rather than focus primarily on giving a fitting end to the NX-01 characters we'd come to love, "Enterprise" writers thought it best to shoehorn in an awkward shout-out to the first big hit of the second wave of "Star Trek" by framing the episode with "The Next Generation" characters.

While it's easy to generally understand the logic of writers who thought revisiting a hit 11 years off the air would be exciting for some fans, the execution felt like "Enterprise" was getting hijacked by the more popular older siblings at its own birthday party. And to add insult to injury, they decided to take out one of the show's most beloved characters on their way out, killing off Trip in the final episode for what felt like no logical reason at all. Writing on Reddit, one fan recalled the list of inspiring, hopeful finales in "TNG," "Deep Space Nine, and "Voyager," concluding, "Enterprise, instead of getting a series finale worthy of both the series and the fans, was left with nothing but an empty feeling, perhaps even a nihilistic depression."