Ranking the Star Trek: The Original Series episodes

Inspired by the 55th anniversary of the first broadcast, I'm going back and watching Kirk and company, more or less in order but with a little bit of skipping around. Watching them from the perspective of 2021, the most egregious thing is not the effects (some of which have been upgraded anyway, in the Netflix version) or simplified plots or retro future tech, or even race relations, it's gender roles and outright sexism. I'm sure having women Starfleet officers was very progressive for 1966, and it is true that there will be a certain amount of sexual tension in any crew (even a single-gender one), but it's pretty blatant.

On the other hand, if you like looking at 1960s style beauty in stunning costumes, it's definitely a bonanza.

Let's divide the original three seasons up into half-season blocks and rank them separately, see what we get.

I'm just going to post this and update it ad hoc as I watch more episodes.

The "Worth Watching" List

It's tempting to try to fashion some sort of order out of this list, either chronological by broadcast date, or so that it makes some sort of actual story arc, but by and large the episodes are fully independent and there is little growth or change among the characters over the three years. So, this is just a list of the ones I consider to be worth watching. You can pretty much discard everything that isn't on this list, except for a couple that are iconic in some way but don't make my own quality threshold. This is numbered bottom to top, with the best episode listed last.

1. Let that be Your Last Battlefield (S3E15)
2. A Piece of the Action (S2E17)
3. The Doomsday Machine (S2E6)
4. A Taste of Armageddon (S1E24)
5. The Ultimate Computer (S2E24)
6. Arena (S1E19)
7. Is There In Truth No Beauty? (S3E5)
8. All Our Yesterdays (S3E23)
9. Elaan of Troyius (S3E13)
10. Mirror, Mirror (S2E4)
11. Space Seed (S1E23)
12. Tomorrow is Yesterday (S1E20)
13. Balance of Terror (S1E15)
14. Devil in the Dark (S1E26)
15. What are Little Girls Made of? (S1E8)
16. The Menagerie (S1E12 & 13)
17. The Enterprise Incident (S3E2)
18. The Trouble with Tribbles (S2E15)
19. Errand of Mercy (S1E27)
20. Amok Time (S2E1)
21. Journey to Babel (S2E10)
22. The City on the Edge of Forever (S1E29)

Season 1, first half

In ranked order, with broadcast order in parentheses (following the Netflix counting of "The Cage" as #1 and the first regularly scheduled broadcast of "The Man Trap" as #2). The first half ends with "Balance of Terror". The top three here are classics, IMO; after that, it drops off kind of quickly, but only "Mudd's Women" would I call actively bad. On the whole, the writers, production team, directors and actors really hit the ground running in this first half year, but I suppose two years of gestation helped.

1. "The Menagerie" (12 & 13): Wow, this is better than I had remembered, one of the best episodes of all, in my current judgment. It's better as "The Menagerie" than as "The Cage", with the wrapper meta-story, but hard to believe the studio execs didn't just fall all over themselves getting this launched after the first pilot. Loyalty on trial, and important questions about what drives us as humans. Will we lose our will when illusion takes over?  (Today, there are those who claim that the Internet and smartphones are "robbing us of our boredom," and that's a solid concern, IMO.)
   Really glad the Enterprise tech got a facelift from its 1950s look to the 1960s look of the series in full gear, but interesting that the transporter is 100% the same. Of course, there is a gratuitously good looking officer on the starbase for Kirk to ogle (complete with seductive music, the only adjective here is "lovely"), entirely aside from Pike's green alien dancer. As much as you gotta love Kirk, Pike would have made a great captain and Number One should have stayed. Pike's wheelchair and communication tech were surpassed for Hawking and others with little more communication capability than moving their eyes by the end of the 20th century, but the point stands. Also glad they dumped running a starship with paper and clipboards!
2. "What are Little Girls Made of?" (8): An episode I had largely overlooked before. Are our petty jealousies and flaws a product of our organic bodies, or would they be the same in an android? More than a little iffy on what "programming" an android imprinted from a sentient being means, but asks interesting questions. Christine made the tough choice to break off an engagement to pursue a Starfleet career, a pretty progressive move for the day. And who doesn't love Lurch? Not the first and certainly not the last dying/dead civilization to be explored by a guest star, then left behind without a further thought as the Enterprise warps off to another adventure, though.
3. "Balance of Terror" (15): Peace through strength, very Cold War. Honorable people fulfilling their duty on both sides of a conflict can still result in waste of life, and war. Prejudice based on appearance is, well, a bad thing. And love, and loss, happen under many circumstances. This is by far the most space opera-y episode of the first half season, with "Run Silent, Run Deep"-style cat-and-mouse starship-to-starship hunting. Electromagnetic signals, surely, but I'm a bit dubious about the need to work quietly! A great episode, even if the ending is inconclusive. Going in, I was expecting this to be my top episode for this half year, but the ending robs it of first place.
4. "Charlie X" (3): Teenage angst and self control, Uhura ad libbing a funny song about Spock, 3-D chess, what more can you ask? The first time, but not the last, we encounter an apparently superior race who then inscrutably leaves without us even getting a chance to ask their names -- and we seem totally unworried about that. Not wild about the ending, this one leaves me uneasy, which is a good thing.
5. "The Enemy Within" (6): The dubious plot device of the transporter dividing based on personality aside, a solid episode. We need our yin and our yang to be whole.
6. "The Man Trap" (2): Not as chauvinistic as the title suggests. One of several in this first half season where illusions, mind control, ESP, or telekinesis plays a big role. What is it that makes us happy? First redshirt to die, in the very first regular broadcast episode, and we have established a paradigm.
7. "Miri" (9): A solid episode. A human attempt to live forever has intergenerational consequences, and nearly takes out Kirk, McCoy, Rand and Spock, too. This one (as with many of the episodes, both good and bad) doesn't really need a starship; it's SF, but could take place anywhere. But the timeline doesn't really make sense -- how did they get there three centuries ago? And once again we warp away, leaving behind a live community who could really use our help.
8. "The Naked Time" (5): It takes a contrived plot device, but we get to learn about the innermost thoughts of the crew. Sulu's stripped-to-the-waist swashbuckling is the most memorable bit, but Christine's love of Spock and Spock's sometimes wobbly control of his emotions advance the characters the most. Kirk's iron will, sense of duty and love of the ship get him through it.
9. "The Corbomite Maneuver" (11): My brain had this listed as dreadful, but it's not as bad as I remembered/feared. The first time we meet a (possibly) technologically superior species, get over an initial misunderstanding, and leave on mutually agreeable terms.
10. "The Conscience of the King" (14): A pretty good human drama about how hard conditions and impossible choices can incite horrible, inhumane actions. This one doesn't need starships.
11. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (4): Its biggest gift, of course, is the title. Another telekinesis episode, with muddled reasoning for the sudden growth in powers of a character or two, but an interesting question about how we will deal with ourselves when we start to outgrow these bodies -- from both sides of that issue. Also, a barrier at the edge of the galaxy? Really?
12. "Dagger of the Mind" (10): The first of many geniuses who advance Mankind, then go wrong later in life. Establishes a precedent of Kirk not asking anyone else to do something he wouldn't try first, but is sitting down in a brain ray chair you suspect damages minds really a good idea?
13. "Mudd's Women" (7): All the good stuff is in the last two minutes. Otherwise, c'mon, man, smuggling brides to male-only mining outposts in the 23rd century and controlling women by controlling their access to a "Venus drug" beauty enhancer? And a lot of "hubba! hubba!" from the crew. Umph. Is this our first reference to Kirk being married to the Enterprise?

Season 1, Second Half

Lots to look forward to. Through my rose-tinted glasses, "A Taste of Armageddon", "Devil in the Dark", and "Arena" are all great episodes, leading up to "City on the Edge of Forever" (not only inarguably the best episode, it's definitely got the best title). Hoping they have aged well.

1. "City on the Edge of Forever" (29): Accept no substitutes. The finest episode in all the ST universe. And only nine weeks earlier, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" showed that time travel could be treated both relatively rigorously and interestingly, and yet here CotEoF blows it out of the water.
2. "Errand of Mercy" (27): Are we really as different from the Klingons as we think? Non-corporeal, powerful aliens solve the ultimate plot dilemma for the episode, and save us from having a perennial hot war with the Klingons.
3. "Devil in the Dark" (26): One of my favorite episodes: will we recognize other life, and other intelligence, when we find it? (We'll leave aside the Class M Planet bipedal species, 1.5-2m tall, with eyes, ears, a mouth, favoring N2-O2 atmosphere, that seem to keep popping up in ST:TOS.) How will we communicate with it? (Well, that one is kind of finessed in this episode.) Will we be able to establish (in Kirk's own words) a modus vivendi? Cheesy 1960s "monster"/alien "effects" aside, this one would be fun to revisit later, to learn about the Horta's society. And man, for something made out of silicon, the body part that gets phasered off the Horta is awfully light!
4. "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (20): Solid time travel paradox. Established that gravity + warp = time travel, a device we will use again in movies and other series.
5. "Space Seed" (23): An iconic episode, this gave us a look at 21st century history and it gave us the great Khan, the best human villain we get in TOS (and the movies). Hurt only by its innate chauvinism.
6. "Arena" (19): A personal favorite, but would have been better with Fredric Brown's original (but probably unfilmable in 1966 and certainly not a sympathetic character) alien. The watered-down ending compared to Brown's original short story hurts a bit. A good chance to demonstrate some of the Federation's core principles.
7. "A Taste of Armageddon" (24): One of the best episodes. If you sanitize it, is it still war? Aren't we supposed to be horrified, repulsed by war? Some pretty blatant ignoring of the Prime Directive, if you consider them to to be the kind of civilization not to be interfered with. Also, the issue of the U.S.S. Valiant's disappearance 50 years ago gets referred to, but just dropped as an issue.
8. "This Side of Paradise" (25): Another episode with a bad rep in my memory, but turned out to be pretty good. The spores and the Bertholdt(?) rays are a bit contrived (especially the "we can fix your health" bit), but asking the question of whether humans must strive in order to be whole, to be human, is an eternal question. Answered in favor of striving rather than paradise here (spoiler alert! But did you expect different?), nothing super-original in thinking, but well plotted and executed. Far better than "Archons" (below), and an interesting comparison to "The Enemy Within" (above) in what makes us human.
9. "Court Martial" (21): Solid. Can we trust data just because it's recorded? Will a person really hold a grudge serious enough to fake their own death to sabotage another's career? There is a hint that Riley's daughter learns he is still alive, but that's never pursued. Perhaps it's continuity issues, but it feels to me like this one (and several other episodes) had scenes that were written and either never filmed or cut from the final episode for time or other reasons.
10. "The Alternative Factor" (28): The idea of alternate universes in and of itself was probably a fresh concept, but this episode has some holes and doesn't really address the core issues of the multiverse very clearly. And that's a heckuva...UFOy spaceship. Not bad, not good, mostly due to poor execution of a solid idea.
11. "The Galileo Seven" (17): This one seems to be ranked highly in a lot of polls, but I found it awfully blunt. A test of Spock's logic as a method of command could be really interesting, but it's such a contrived plot, including unseen giant natives with Earth-like simple spears. And would you really have three of the top four officers on one shuttle that is nominally out on a data-gathering mission? To me, this feels like a script written by a young fan, rather than a mature writer in the full swing of Trek. (n.b.: Some of the fan fiction exceeds the original in depth, originality and maturity!)
12. "The Squire of Gothos" (18): One of the more memorable "encounter with a god-like entity" episodes, but in this case a petulant child with a silly view of Earth and humanity. Don't think too hard about this one.
13. "Shore Leave" (16): An occasional light episode is fine, but this is just silly. Not a good start for the 2nd half of Season One. Another corporeal species apparently advanced compared to us, but not interested in conquest. Leave them and warp away, without trying to establish an embassy!
14. "Operation -- Annihilate!" (30): Encounter with perhaps the most alien species in Season One, but we just kill it then get outta there. Also sets the record for cheesiest practical effects.
15. "Return of the Archons" (24): This one's just a muddled mess. Too many things going on. The "Festival" is never really explained, nor is anything about the 6,000 year old technology. Why the town looks like the late 19th century in the U.S. is baffling, and we don't get any sort of justification even for how the Enterprise crew knew how to appear in period costume. The weapon tubes used by the lawgivers are examined once and shown to be nothing but empty tubes, but that's never pursued. How people not of "The Body" are detected isn't discussed. If everyone is part of The Body, why are the lawgivers needed at all? And, most of all, all signs point to the planet's residents being human. If so, how did they get there 6,000 years ago, and why would there be any parallel at all with Earth civilizations? Yet another episode in which the Enterprise is investigating a missing starship, then just warps away without really completing that investigation.

Season 2, First Half

1. "Journey to Babel" (10): One of the very best episodes, thanks to D.C. Fontana's rigorous and compassionate writing. I might place this behind "City on the Edge of Forever" as second-best episode overall. Diplomacy and intrigue, this one could be a Mediterranean or European council just as easily as Federation.
2. "Amok Time" (1): Even better than I remembered. Makes up for Sturgeon's silliness in "Shore Leave". I wonder how Spock later explained to T'Pau that she had been snookered, though? A couple of things are...illogical, but the look at Vulcan is great, even if the culture does kind of resemble a mishmash of Asian tropes.
3. "Mirror, Mirror" (4): an iconic episode, using parallel universes to ask if we are really as pacifist and advanced as we think. Echoes episodes from Season 1, examining our inner selves, but perhaps done best here. Don't think too hard about the parallel universes, though.
4. "The Doomsday Machine" (6): Real drama, and an interesting take on how we will react when we run into a mindless machine that has only finding more energy for itself as a goal.
5. "The Changeling" (3): A largely forgettable episode, but it planted the seed for ST:TMP, and so is logically necessary.
6. "Obsession": More energy beings with unclear capabilities and limitations. You'd think Starfleet would invest some serious effort in understanding these special effects types of sentient beings.
7. "Friday's Child": Once again, fighting Klingons in a proxy Cold War. Silly costumes and Kirk et al. get trapped a little too easily, but not so bad. And this time the aliens don't pull a deus ex machina on us.
8. "The Deadly Years": Weak SF, good drama, although at my age now they don't look as old as they once did!
9. "Metamorphosis" (9): Love comes in many forms. Once again an alien without a true body but many powers.
10. "I, Mudd" (8): Way better than "Mudd's Women", but still borderline silly. So many improbable or implausible plot elements, and terrible system design in the android distributed control and logic systems. "Haaaarcourt! Harcourt Fenton Mudd!!!" is iconic, but not necessarily for good reasons.
11. "Catspaw" (7): Just silly. Nudibranch-like aliens manage to stop the Enterprise, take human form, and find our cultural spooky memories by accident (why are they purely European tropes such as iron maidens and black cats?). And once again we endanger the entire executive leadership of the Enterprise. The limits to the powers of the aliens are, as almost always, unclear.
12. "Who Mourns for Adonais?" (2): This is dreadful, which is really a shame since the core ideas are interesting. What if the ancient Earth gods were space travellers? Do gods exist without people to worship them? (Shades of American Gods?) Should one episode really be trying to answer both questions?  They seem like pretty separate incidents/questions to me. At least this time Lieutenant Palamas, who falls for the hunky space god, gets to have a spine and do her duty for her ship, unlike Lt. McGivers, who falls for the hunky fascist in "Space Seed" and trots off to colonize a planet with him. But there's still a lot of 1960s gender roles baked into this one.
    This "advanced aliens can control anything with their minds" trope certainly wears thin. And does this dude have a real body, or not?
    It's a little too much "Squire of Gothos meets Space Seed", though. A few lines of dialog are thought-provoking. Almost got away with saying, "We no longer have need of gods," without any qualifications! But I'm guessing the Mike Pences on NBC's censorship committee forced the addition of "The one we have is enough," with respect to gods. 
13. "The Apple" (5): Among the worst episodes, with white/orange primitives who bow down to a local machine god that controls them entirely but also keeps them completely healthy. Very little about this makes sense, and it is essentially a white-people-save-the-natives-from-their-own-superstitions schtick.

Season 2, Second Half

1. "The Trouble with Tribbles" (15): Pure fun. Tribbles, Klingons, and a bar fight over an engineering insult, what more can you ask?
2. "The Ultimate Computer" (24): Themes that will echo for time to come. Can our technology replace us? Should we risk human lives if we can risk a machine instead? Are we doomed to transmit our own flaws to our technological offspring? To me, this is a great episode.
3. "A Piece of the Action" (17): Implausible, but the best, funniest romp short of "The Trouble with Tribbles".  And fizzbin!
4. "A Private Little War": Kirk and the Klingons in a Cold War parable about proxy wars and arming the natives. Very dated, but overall maybe not too bad. But did we really need it, after "Friday's Child"?
5. "Return to Tomorrow": Some food for thought here. A handful of minds preserved for eons in noncorporeal contraptions, wanting to get back into humanoid bodies. A lot of implausibilities in the plot, but would we carry our petty vendettas with us to eternity? You betcha.
6. "Wolf in the Fold": Meh. But Scotty always deserves more screen time, and he gets it here, even if it's not in Engineering.
7. "Patterns of Force": Correcting interference in a civilization by another Starfleet officer, in violation of the Prime Directive. Not plausible, not fun, and not especially creative.
8. "Assignment: Earth" (26): The Federation thinks it's a good idea to send a starship into the past, possibly risking realigning all of history? I don't think so. And even in 1968, maybe especially in 1968, would people have failed to recognize a Saturn V? But unlike some other pundits, I think Gary Seven could have been a stylish Mod Squad-era show in its own right, it's just that Roddenberry shouldn't have shoehorned it into Star Trek.
9. "The Immunity Syndrome": I'm writing this a few weeks after watching it, and I no longer remember it. Bad, but forgettably so.
10. "By Any Other Name": They came all the way from the Andromeda galaxy just to swipe human form and a starship, hoping to swipe some actual planets? Among the worst SF in the lot, if not as outright awful on the drama.
11. "The Gamesters of Triskelion" (16): No. Just no.
12. "Bread and Circuses" (25): Can we stop with the almost-parallel evolution of planets to Earth? Please???
13. "The Omega Glory" (23): Can we stop with the almost-parallel evolution of planets to Earth? Please???

Season 3, First Half

1. "The Enterprise Incident" (2): Wow! I had never seen this one before. Tension, drama, sexy Romulans, and Kirk as a Romulan.  Has he lost his senses, or worse? Has Spock betrayed the Federation?  One of the top episodes, IMO.
2. "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" (5): A solid episode with some awkward moments. And that blasted, silly barrier at the edge of the galaxy. One of the most truly alien aliens we encounter, but we are never given an actual look at them.
3. "The Tholian Web" (9): If you ignore some plot holes, not too bad.
4. "Wink of an Eye" (11): Interesting premise, with some weaknesses. I liked this one as a kid -- accelerated people! 
5. "Day of the Dove" (7): Maybe the weakest of the Klingon episodes, due to the contrived "energy being" that feeds on hatred (such a gimmick). I appreciate the difficulties in conceiving and portraying non-humanoid aliens, but these sparkly clouds that can just walk through walls and exist in space are both scientifically dubious and have such powers that (like writing for superheroes) working around them is tricky. I would not say this episode particularly succeeded.
6. "The Paradise Syndrome" (3): Awkward representation of Native American culture. And why the heck would they be way out here, anyway?  Yet another episode of simple people beholden to a machine created by some ancients. At least it's better than "The Apple".
7. "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" (8): A simple people beholden to a machine created by some ancients! Where have I heard that before...? Bad, but not, like, memorably bad, best simply forgotten. I do love the title, though.
8. "The Empath" (12): Another race captures people from multiple planets and tortures them for fun, and Kirk, Spock and McCoy are next. Well, turns out they are being tortured to put an empath to the test; if she would sacrifice herself to save them, then her entire species wins. Yes, that's as bad as it sounds.
9. "Spectre of the Gun" (6): Well, it's better than "Spock's Brain", and has some humor, but the fundamental premise makes zero sense. Was this just because Roddenberry wanted to film a Western?
10. "Spock's Brain" (1): Nothing about this makes any sense.  Widely regarded as one of, if not the, worst episodes, its only saving grace to me is that has less awkward racism and sexism than the ones below it here.
11. "And the Children Shall Lead" (4): In Den of Geeks' phrase, an "angel" in a shower curtain. Just bad all the way around, as both SF and drama. Match this with "The Way to Eden", and boy, you've got bad acting and bad plot taking over the Enterprise.
12. "Plato's Stepchildren" (10): This is dreadful. Painful to watch. Nothing at all in it makes any sense.

Season 3, Second Half

I gotta say, by the time I got here, this was beginning to feel like a slog. NBC arguably did Star Trek a favor by cancelling it after season three. It sure feels like they ran out of gas in the Story Idea Department minivan.

1. "Elaan of Troyius" (13): Kirk plays diplomat and disciplinarian, while using his love of the ship as an antidote to an aphrodisiac.
2. "All Our Yesterdays" (23): Another episode I had never seen before. The atavachron reeks of the Guardian from "The City on the Edge of Forever", but this is a solid, emotionally resonant episode that's also reasonable SF, a too-rare combination over the three seasons. Perfect hair, makeup, and revealing Raquel Welch-style animal skin outfit for Spock's love interest aside, of course. This would have been a pretty good place to go out.
3. "Let that be Your Last Battlefield" (15): A heavy-handed morality play on the ridiculousness of racism; did NBC not get that, or were they okay with such an overt political message by this point in the game? At core a good episode, if a bit over the top, but yet again hurt by a race of beings with telekinesis whose powers serve as a plot gimmick. What are the limits to their power? Not clear, again. It's also not clear why Bele has this power but Lokai doesn't. And 50,000 years? Really? That would, I think, make them among the very oldest beings encountered anywhere in the series. Echoes of Season One's "The Alternative Factor"; better drama, writing and execution, if less solid/interesting SF. For that matter, this is another episode that didn't really need a spaceship, though since the nonhuman aspects of the aliens are important, it definitely is SF.
4. "The Cloud Minders" (21): Another episode I had never seen before. I had no idea that we had a cloud city in ST:TOS. Also another heavy-handed morality play on the ridiculousness of racism (done just weeks before in "Last Battlefield"), this time with live civilizations and another beautiful young woman in an amazing costume who is attracted to Spock (this time, with no reciprocation).
5. "Requiem for Methuselah" (19): Not bad, but maybe forgettable. Well, Kirk falling that hard for Rayna in two hours is pretty over the top, but compared to some of the other things in Season 3 it almost goes unnoticed. Flint is only 6,000 years old, so a youngster compared to Bele and Lokai. This "immortal guy who was Leonardo and other interesting people back in the day" schtick feels old, almost trite, but I'm not enough of an SF historian to tell you where it comes from; it's possible this is a fairly early use of it.
6. "The Lights of Zetar" (18): Unprofessional of Scotty to fall so hard for a young lieutenant, and the spirits of other beings wandering the galaxy at warp speed is pretty dreadful, but for all that it produces good tension. Oh, and the United Federation of Planets can't afford to make a backup copy of Wikipedia?
7. "The Savage Curtain" (22): Another episode I had never seen, this is where Kirk meets Abe Lincoln and Spock meets Surak. But they (along with a 21st century tyrant, a Klingon, and a savage woman and Genghis Khan, the latter two of whom get no lines) are artificial constructs of lava-based aliens who can read our minds. And despite the fact that the aliens can read our minds, they still want us to fight it out, good versus evil, as humanoid species? A Roddenberry story idea, but this one's pretty bad.
8. "Whom Gods Destroy" (14): Well, maybe the best thing that can be said for this is that it's not "Plato's Stepchildren", but there is a level of ridiculousness here. By today's standards, not a particularly compassionate or insightful look into mental illness. Doesn't improve on "Dagger of the Mind", which it echoes.
9. "That Which Survives" (17): Androids in purple "I Dream of Jeannie" outfits can read human minds but have the job of killing specific humans to protect a ghost ship/planetoid where all the people died a long time ago and some automaton still runs things. Bad SF, which would be a shame since encountering dead/dying civilizations and galactic archeology are a great theme, but since we do it so often this one can just be discarded.
10. "The Way to Eden" (20): There were a couple of brief moments where I thought, "Maybe this isn't as bad as its reputation," but no, it's definitely bad. By far the most 1960s of the whole series, with an ironclad "Anti-establishment people can't survive in the real world," message to it. It's kind of a shame -- no, make that a real shame -- since a look into a sub-community of people who were dissatisfied with life in the Federation would have made for a fascinating topic. It just couldn't see past the counterculture of the 1960s itself.
11. "Turnabout Intruder" (24): I debated whether this is better or worse than the couple above and the one below, but they are all awful, so it doesn't much matter. The random alien technology that transplants human personalities successfully drags this down, although not as much as the implausible story. Would a former lover really try to lure Kirk across the galaxy and think she could get away with replacing him? Although I suppose various imposters have been an important theme of literature since time immemorial, this is still almost impossibly bad.
12. "The Mark of Gideon" (16): The start of this is illogical, but not dreadful, but by the time we get to the end the whole thing has fallen apart. People so crowded on the land surface that they have to keep walking, can't sit down or be alone? A replica of the Enterprise that Kirk couldn't tell wasn't the real thing?  Instead of just, well, capturing him? (We'll ignore that they insisted that the captain come alone -- that's never a red flag.) How did they get all the information to make such a perfect replica? Oh, never mind, there are a dozen things about this one that are equally bad.