"Shades of Grey" was called so bad that it almost killed Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek isn't always perfect. Any long-time fan can tell you that. There are so many episodes and films from this franchise that just outright stunk, we'd be here all day listing all of them. Some are so bad they're funny, like the Original Series episode "Spock's Brain" or Voyaer's "Threshold". Others are just bad, like the fifth film in the franchise, The Final Frontier. Yet, it's hard to say that an episode or movie was so bad it nearly killed a part of the franchise.

WatchMojo would like to enter the chat with their pick, however. In a new video called "30 TV Episodes So Bad They Almost Destroyed Their Shows", the long-running and super popular YouTube channel picked one from Star Trek: The Next Generation that they think is truly terrible.

That pick is "Shades of Grey". In the episode, William Riker has to be put into a coma to deal with an illness. He recovers. That's all the plot of the 40+ minute episode. Why? Well, it's a clip show. For those not familiar with a clip show, it's a device that writers use when they're out of ideas or money. They reuse past episodes in small portions as a way to make a story. That way they can meet the expected episode count ordered for the season. They were very common before the advent of streaming, and rarely ever liked.

Usually, it comes as a way to give the writers a break, but in the Next Generation's case, it was a vastly different reasoning.

For The Next Generation, "Shades of Grey" existed due to a lack of money to make episodes. This was one of the last, if not the last episode that the show worked on for the second season and sadly came out as the series' season finale for that year. Due to the lack of money, they were handcuffed a bit, and thus a clip show episode was born.

This is the first time that any Star Trek series did a clip show, though some may mistake the two-part episode "The Menagerie" as a clip show, as they used similar techniques. The only difference here is that they re-used footage from the original pilot, which had never before been seen, as part of telling a new story. That's not what The Next Generation did, instead just reusing footage we'd all seen before to tell a new story.

And we're being generous by calling "Shades of Grey" a new story. Normally, a clip show wouldn't be so reviled, but keeping it in the context of the time, we get the designation. This served as the second season's finale. It's really easy to turn fans off a series, even in the late 1980s, and if this was the last episode you saw for four months, you might be inclined to skip the next season altogether.