Shades of Gray

What I think made this episode bad was the fact that Riker's flashbacks were only limited to his last 2 years on the Enterprise. This was probably because the budget was very low at the time and so they can only recap earlier episodes. I think they should have hired younger actors to play a young version of Riker as a boy during his boyhood days in Alaska, and also a teen Riker entering the academy. That would have made some good flashbacks that would have helped develop a backstory of Riker but that never happened.

I've been rewatching the series after not having seen this show in over 20 some years - and missing most of these episodes before. I can see now why this episode has been called the worst of the series. There's really no plot, the actors don't really seem to be into it and the clips serve no purpose.

From Wikipedia:

At the end of its second season, Star Trek: The Next Generation had one more episode to shoot. However, Paramount cut that show's budget to make up for an episode earlier in the season that had gone over budget-and, similarly, over schedule, leaving only three days for principal photography. Because the season had gotten off to a slow start due to a writers' strike, the producers had no scripts set aside for future use as they normally would have. The result was "Shades of Gray", in which the "clips" were the induced dreams of a comatose William T. Riker.

"Shades of Gray" is a pathetic excuse for an episode for "Star Trek: The Next Generation"--one that insults the audience's intelligence and just looks like a lazy attempt to fill the time slot. It is so bad and so irrelevant that I recommend you skip it completely--you really don't need to bother with this one.

When the episode begins, Riker's leg is injured while on an away team mission. However, this is no mere scratch--the thing festers and cannot be eliminated using the transporter's bio-filters. Soon, Riker is dying and Dr. Pulaski is fighting to save his life.

This doesn't sound that bad, does it? Well, no...the concept isn't bad. However, this only takes up a tiny fraction of the show. Most of it consists of clips of Riker from other episodes--and they appear to be completely random in how they are used. Relevant or not--they are tossed into "Shades of Gray" and the sum effect is a show that obviously no one gave a crap about when they made it. A complete waste of time and the worst simply because there have been episodes with dumber premises (such as the baseball game episode from "Deep Space 9"), but at least they TRIED something different with these shows. Here, it's just an attempt to re-use old footage and otherwise take the week off from production! Awful.

UPDATE: By the way, it isn't just me who hated this episode. At the 50th anniversary Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, this was voted as one of the 10 worst of all episodes from every Trek franchise! That is some ignoble designation!

Watching this 30-40 years later - well bad idea probably. We're used to watch series in a binge sort of way or on demand. There was a time when there was only one episode per week and a season would take up to 24 weeks to be complete - sad if you'd missed an episode. I guess that's why someone thought flashback episodes was a good idea. But Rikas flashback was a pain to watch. The story around it was so poor and cringeworthy. Had to skip large amounts of clips in this episodes!