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There are Engsub Archivesa lot of great Star Trekepisodes.

I still watch the show all the time -- the original series, The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine. (Let's not talk about Enterprise.)

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So when I heard about Star Trek: Discovery, which premieres Sept. 24 on CBS, I was pretty excited. It's got sleek visual effects, The Walking Dead's Sonequa Martin-Green, and brand-new aliens.

If anything, it looks toosmooth -- like its Klingons' foreheads. High production values and slick action scenes are great. But part of the reason we all love Star Trekis for the corny, so-bad-they're-good episodes involving holodecks gone awry and time travel.

There's so much serioussci-fi and fantasy these days -- Game of Thrones, The Expanse, and a million gloomy superhero shows.

So let's take a moment to savor the goofier, most enjoyably bad episodes in Star Trek's history.

1. The Original Series, 'Arena'

This has to be the slowest, most awkward battle scene in the history of television, and that is precisely what makes it so perfect.

Imagine being the director filming the scene below and thinking, "Yep, we got it."

Via Giphy

Kirk could just briskly walk for 10 minutes and be out Gorn's reach forever. Instead, like some kind of Space MacGyver, he finds diamonds, bamboo, and some minerals he turns into gun powder, and finally shoots the thing.

Absolutely perfect.

2. The Next Generation, 'Sub Rosa'

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Also known as the episode Beverly Crusher has sex with a green Scottish alien smoke ghost. I don't really know what else to say about it.

3. Deep Space Nine, 'Take Me Out to the Holosuite'

Yes, someone wrote a Bad News Bearsepisode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- and that someone happened to be Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galacticaand Outlanderfame.

Capt.Sisko and the crew play baseball against a crew of vulcans for ... reasons?

In the end, they lose, but they learn a very valuable lesson about TEAMWORK. And along the way, Doctor Bashir utters the phrase, "Now, that is a fancy dan!"

Sci-fi at its best.

4. Voyager, 'Future's End'

In this two-episode arc, the Voyager crew goes back in time to Los Angeles in the 1990s, where they team up with Sarah Silverman against an evil PC maker played by Ed Begley Jr.

Oh, and you better believe someone says, "The question isn't where we are ... but when?"

It's like the Star Trek equivalent of JNCO jeans: bloated, garish, and absolutely marvelous.

5. The Next Generation, 'In Theory'

Speaking of Data, in Season 4, we finally get the answer to the question, "What if androids were capable of emotionally unsatisfying relationships with coworkers?"

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Yes, Data dates a fellow member of the Enterprise. And yes, there are scenes where he seeks love advice from Picard, Whoopi Goldberg's Guinan, and a typically swarthy Commander William T. Riker.

No, it doesn't work out. Hopefully Tinder for androids exists in the year 2364.

6. Voyager, 'Virtuoso'

Aliens. In the Star Trek universe, they're just like us, but sometimes with ridges on their foreheads. In this case, the Qomar have also never heard music -- until The Doctor belts out "I've Been Working on the Railroad" in sickbay.

They go absolutely nuts and swamp Voyager with fan mail, line up to watch him sing opera with a mini version of himself, build a concert hall, and try to convince the holographic doctor to ditch his crew and stay on the planet permanently to perform.

Good thing Brian McKnight never visited their planet. The entire civilization would have descended into complete chaos.

7. The Original Series, 'Mirror, Mirror'

The episode where TV audiences learned a character + goatee = evil twin. Shiny sleeveless vests are also evil.

Via Giphy

Hmm, looks strangely familiar ...

Mandatory Credit: Photo by REX/Shutterstock (4587034z) Backstreet boys 'Larger Than Life' music video, Orlando, America - Aug 1999 Backstreet Boys - 1990s Credit: REX/Shutterstock

That means somewhere, in another dimension, there's a version of the Backstreet Boys that isn't evil.

8. Deep Space Nine, 'Little Green Men'

The Ferengi subplots onDS9are always the most ridiculous, and this is no exception. Nog, Rom, and Quark head to Earth and are thrown back in time to 1947. Their ship crashes in ... dum dum dum ...Roswell, New Mexico.

The hu-mons try to communicate with "the Martians," but the universal translator is broken, leading to all kinds of wacky misunderstandings. So wonderfully cheesy.

9. The Next Generation, 'A Fistful of Datas'

At some point, you dedicate a team to make sure the holodeck is functioning properly.

In "Fistful of Datas" -- like in so, so many other episodes -- the safety protocols are disabled or malfunction. Worf and his bobblehead of a son are confronted in the "ancient West" by a horde of Datas playing different characters.

It's like TheNutty Professor II: The Klumps meetsWestworld.

Via Giphy

And it's totally bonkers, in a kind-of-good way. At least Capt. Picard's terrible Dixon Hill character doesn't show up.

10. Voyager, 'Someone to Watch Over Me'

The My Fair Lady plot involving Seven of Nine, everyone's favorite reformed Borg, is great. (It involves The Doctor giving a slideshow on human mating rituals.)

But Scott Thompson, from Canadian comedy legendsKids in the Hall, is the real star here.

He plays a visitor from a prudish, puritanical alien race who goes on a total bender after he discovers the holodeck and synthehol.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

True story: I literally cried laughing the first time I saw this episode after The Doctor -- who, remember, is a hologram -- told this joke.

“You know I don’t drink. I don’t have the stomach for it.”

Get it? Because he's a holographic projection? Ohhh, good times.

11. Deep Space Nine, 'His Way'

Vic Fontaine is a swinging '60s lounge singer who knows he's a hologram -- and he's here to solve Deep Space Nine's love problems.

Odo, the emotionally repressed shape-shifter, transforms into a suave piano player and then goes on a date with a hologram version of Kira. Then he's tricked into going on a date with the real Kira. And then they have a big romantic kiss.

Truly, the Sleepless in Seattle of terrible Star Trek episodes.

12. The Original Series, 'The Trouble with Tribbles'

You know the one we're talking about. The episode where the Enterprise crew is bewitched by cooing, rapidly reproducing balls of fur.

Via Giphy

Eventually, Scotty transports the creatures to a Klingon ship right before it goes to warp, "where they’ll be no tribble at all." It's good to see, even in the future, that humans solve ecological crises by simply making them somebody else's problem.

Let's hope, for the sake of Star Trekfans everywhere, that at least a few tribbles -- if not a rogue hologram or an impossibly slow-moving man in a lizard suit -- make an appearance on Star Trek: Discovery.

UPDATE: Sept. 21, 2017, 12:57 p.m. PDT An earlier version of this post stated that Star Trekcreator Gene Roddenberry wrote "Take Me Out to the Holosuite." It was written by Ronald D. Moore. We regret the error, but we mostly blame imdb.com.

Want to watch all of the above so-bad-they're-good episodes? You can stream them on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. New episodes of Discovery will appear on CBS All Accessexclusively after the premiere.

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Topics Star Trek