Enterprise: "These are the Voyages..."

[GreyICE]

I mean Shatner tried his best, he really did. He was very good at making even banal scripts fun to watch. People lambast him, but it's actually good acting of a theater variety - he's making it fun for the audience. And Turnabout Intruder, if he's going to be possessed by a crazy woman who thinks she should have been Starship Captain, then dammit, he's going to show why she would have been an awful Captain (and make it about something other than her gender). And he tries his best to channel Mutiny on the Bounty and have fun with the part. For the record, Shatner and Nimoy both thought it was offensively bad and sexist at the time, so everything you are seeing is Shatner being the most melodramatic, over-the-top, campy "crazy character" he can be.

But it's a solid half hour of William Shatner acting like a crazy person, and reciting the most cliched, terrible dialogue you could write, while somehow his best friends, his crew, and literally everyone wonders "what's wrong with the captain" - in a show that features mind control, mirror universe, robot duplicates, hell Kirk got replaced so often you'd figure they'd have code phrases to check for it. You could take, maybe, 10 minutes of it but it drags on and on and on. Then at the end, does his crew realize and save the day? Oh no. Janice Lester (in Kirk's body) collapses because women can't handle the stress of being captain.

The sexism elevates it the way that racism elevates Code of Honor, but in both cases the base episode was pure trash anyway. Oh. But it was written by Gene Rodenberry. Gene Rodenberry wanted us to know that women can't be starship captains. And oh that makes it very hard to see any redeeming value in at all. At least the fucker who did Code of Honor was booted off the show and never came back. He didn't get to show up simpering a few years later and calling himself a feminist.