Star Trek's Most Skippable Episodes, Ranked by Fans
Thirteen series, 960 episodes, one sprawling galaxy: with so much Star Trek, even diehards plot a skip course on rewatches. Here are the installments fans most often bypass—and why skipping them doesn’t always mean they’re duds.
Star Trek has been on TV long enough to rack up 13 different shows and 960 episodes (and counting). That is a lot of space bureaucracy. Even diehards start skipping a few on rewatches, and not always because they hate them. Sometimes an episode just doesn’t move the ball forward, or it hasn’t aged well, or it’s one of those one-and-done curiosities that felt like filler the day it aired.
Fans are comparing skip lists
Two recent Reddit threads asked people to name the episodes they always bypass. One thread kicked off with a Voyager rewatcher admitting they finally skipped an episode for the first time. Another post got specific right out of the gate, saying they dropped Voyager’s ʹTwistedʹ because nothing happens, and that they always step around Enterprise’s finale ʹ These Are the Voyagesʹ and Strange New Worlds’ musical hour ʹSubspace Rhapsodyʹ. From there, the comments turned into a greatest-hits (or least-hits) of Trek episodes people are fine never seeing again.
"DS9’s mirror universe episodes. They went back to the well too many times and the whole shtick had greatly diminishing returns."
What people skip, and why
- Voyager: ʹTwistedʹ — Classic reset-button TV. There’s a problem to solve, sure, but the stakes are paper-thin, nothing changes when it’s over, and it doesn’t touch plot or character arcs. On a full-series rewatch, it’s the definition of skippable.
- Enterprise: ʹThese Are the Voyagesʹ — The series finale that plays out on a holodeck and sidelines most of the main cast. Fans wanted closure; they got a TNG-flavored framing device instead, which landed as a letdown.
- Strange New Worlds: ʹSubspace Rhapsodyʹ — The musical one. If you’re into it, great. If musicals make you itch, this is an easy pass by design.
- Deep Space Nine: the mirror universe run — A chunk of commenters said they skip the entire batch. In a heavily serialized show like DS9, these detours rarely impact the main story, often feel like pure fan service, and drift into goofy logic compared to the series’ usual moral complexity. Even some fans who liked the first throwback to TOS tapped out as the returns diminished.
- Voyager: ʹTattooʹ — Centered on Chakotay, a Native American character played by Mexican-American actor Robert Beltran, the episode leans into what many critics have called stereotypical and muddled portrayals of Indigenous culture. One commenter summed up the frustration by calling it a mash-up of ʹfake Indigenous-nessʹ with Ancient Aliens- style mythology.
- The Next Generation: ʹCode of Honorʹ — Still the go-to answer for worst TNG episode. Its depiction of a Black-coded alien culture has been condemned for decades as offensive. More than one fan labeled it flat-out unwatchable and inexcusable.
So, is skipping fair play?
With 960 episodes on the board, of course it is. Not every hour of Trek is built to be essential, and a few are tough to sit through now. Some are harmless filler, some swung big and missed, and a couple are just landmines of bad choices. If you’re curating a rewatch, these are the ones fans keep leaving on the cutting-room floor.