Why is ‘Sub Rosa’ the worst ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ episode?

Star Trek: The Next Generation is known for some of the most thoughtful episodes of television sci-fi ever made. From classics such as “The Inner Light” and “Yesterday’s Enterprise” to thrilling action pieces like “The Best of Both Worlds,” the series is often considered one of the peaks of TV sci-fi.

Of course, with 178 episodes, not every one was guaranteed to be a hit. Even then, you wouldn’t expect an episode quite like “Sub Rosa,” a disasterpiece with a plot that can be most charitably described as “confused.” The episode is notorious among fans for being one of the worst, if not the worst, of the show’s seven-year run.

“Sub Rosa” is set partly aboard a deep-space Federation colony which has, inexplicably, been created in the image of 17th-century Scotland. The Enterprise takes a break from its mission of exploration to visit the colony and attend the funeral of Dr. Beverly Crusher’s grandmother, Felisa Howard. At the funeral, Beverly spies an enigmatic yet alluring man standing on his own far from the crowd. The episode goes completely off the rails when the man turns out to be “Ronin,” a centuries-old Scottish ghost who lives in a “plasma candle” (which was, somehow, first lit in Scotland in the 1600s).

Ronin

Ronin has the appearance of a man in his mid-30s, and has, we learn, been madly in love with every female ancestor of Beverly Crusher for the past 700 years. Beverly decides to stay overnight on the colony in her grandmother’s cottage, and soon Ronin’s disembodied voice booms through the cottage, with the type of flashing green lights normally reserved for a haunted house. Ronin, now a green CGI mist, envelops Beverly and delivers an orgasmic experience (in Beverly’s words, “he knew exactly how I liked to be touched”). This experience is so intensely exciting that Beverly immediately hands in her resignation to Starfleet, planning to stay in the cottage forever.

Picard and Troi’s suspicions are raised, not least because Ronin is also causing a thick fog to appear on the Enterprise’s bridge. In an exciting confrontation, Picard challenges Ronin but is knocked to the ground, leaving Beverly to pursue Ronin into a spooky graveyard (where her grandmother’s corpse has reanimated and beat up Geordi and Data). Breaking free of Ronin’s control, she blasts the candle with a phaser, and then scatters Ronin to the wind. She reflects that maybe Ronin wasn’t all bad, since he did at least love her grandma.

So ends one of the most bizarre episodes of Star Trek ever produced (and that’s really saying something, given the franchise’s infamous history of kidnapped brains and people de-evolving into lizards). While the episode is pretty much objectively terrible, it enjoys a large fanbase simply because of its sheer absurdity, especially given its place in the often somewhat bland seventh season. While “Sub Rosa” isn’t going to win any awards for thought-provoking writing, it is probably one of the most laugh-out-loud hours that the franchise has ever produced.

Gates McFadden, who plays Beverly Crusher, told TrekMovie in March that she now considers the episode “hilarious” and often jokes about it in her podcast, saying: “it turned out to be this cult thing. You know, you just have to laugh at yourself and laugh at what’s gone on.”