I think the modern writers have forgotten that some of those gimmick episodes of TOS happened because they had a shoestring budget and had to reuse whatever cowboy or city set was available.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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Ahh so it's the reliance on gimmick episodes that you think is the real problem, not just the frequency of them. If that's the case, I'd have to actually go back and check ENT and VOY for this, because serialized episodes tend to rely on some kind of gimmick, especially in Star Trek where we often need a sci-fi whatzit to create an issue for the crew. I actually am curious if VOY had more gimmick episodes than ENT then, since it was far less interested in episodic storytelling overall, even if they did apply it sometimes. But then again, ENT was more reliant on "Star Trek" as an IP to exist, which got way more fanservicey than even the contrived Romulan, Klingon, and Ferengi episodes in VOY (but then "Regeneration," is one of its stronger episodes for exactly that reason).
I think “gimmick” has become the colloquialism that is used to describe this season. It may not be the most accurate. To me, a gimmick episode is like “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang,” the heist episode of DS9, or “Qpid,” the Robin Hood episode of TNG. They happen, they’re fun. They’re episodes where the series steps away from its normal tone and genre voice to have a little laugh. They aren’t every episode.
Time travel, MU episodes, and reality warping don’t make it a gimmick episode. It's when you can tell it's writing to be reminiscent of something else entirely for the whole episode. The problem is that the gimmick episodes don’t usually have as much substance. I really liked the soap opera episode because, at the end, we got to see Pike go to therapy and mourn his daughter. How much heavier could that have been if it was just a situation where thoughts were being manifested into reality with everyone on the ship being 'haunted' by the emotions that they're ignoring? To be fair though, DS9 did that with "If Wishes Were Horses."
This did happened in the horror episode that was trying to be Event Horizon and it didn't resolve anything. So maybe the issue isn't the gimmicks, Maybe it's just that they're laying the gimmicks on too thick and more often than not using them to try to hide some writing issues.
Stepping out of the show’s genre is fun, but it weakens the message (or it hides the fact that there isn’t one).