Giant Freakin Robot

It’s happened countless times. You’ve got an otherwise great show or movie that’s firing on all cylinders… but there’s this one guy. This one bad apple who nearly spoils the whole bunch, simply by constantly doing stupid things or saying stupid things or hanging around looking at things with his stupid face. We’re not saying Carl from The Walking Dead was like that, but we are saying that if we had an awards show for that sort of thing, it would just be one long montage of Carl dying.

So, we’ve decided to celebrate some of the absolute worst, the characters from science fiction television who constantly made us want to punch a wall, especially if their head was between our fist and said wall. We’ll be measuring them against the accepted international unit of measurement for terribleness, Jar Jar Binks. (For purposes of this article, five Jar Jars is equivalent to going full Jar Jar, meaning you should nuke the site from orbit, because it’s the only way to be sure.)

One last note: we didn’t set out trying to populate this piece with so many kids, but it just sort of worked out that way.

Carl Grimes (The Walking Dead)

For all of its strengths, The Walking Dead can’t ever seem to get over the hill that is “strong character development.” There are likable characters and detestable characters, but Carl Grimes didn’t come from the mind of any mere writer, for he was created from the ashes of the former Tenth Circle of Hell. In Robert Kirkman’s comic series, Carl is a kid who is understandably having trouble coping with his trial-by-error education on survival in a post-apocalyptic world. In the TV show, Carl is a testosterone-free dip who is perpetually mad ’cause Daddy won’t let him hold the gun real close.

Seriously, I’ve been through an appendicitis exam that was less painful than watching this kid formulate ideas that he has an identity that’s worth more to the group than, say, a sock full of dead batteries. I don’t even blame the petulant performances from actor Chandler Riggs, because he’s not the one putting lines in his own mouth. For four seasons, Carl has been his own biggest threat, always finding himself in trouble after some adolescent tirade. He has yet to fuck it all up in Season 5, but as sure as the moon will rise tonight, it’s coming.

How We Would Kill Him Off: Just as he’s about to have sex for the first time, he gets thrown into a giant dumpster, where everyone forgets about him and he starves to death.

Whenever a beloved series gets cancelled, it opens up the doorway for the would-you-be-interested-in-more conversation. It feels like cast members of shows like Star Trek, The X-Files, Firefly, and others are destined to be asked this question in damn near every interview they do from now until the day they die. And I’m sure it has come up before, but someone recently asked Patrick Stewart if he’d be down for reprise his Star Trek: The Next Generation role of Jean-Luc Picard, and his answer is just about perfect.

Pumping up his new film, Match, where he apparently does a lot of cocaine, he took part in a Q&A session on Facebook. The topic of whether or not he’d be interested in revisiting the role he played for 176 episodes and a handful of movies came up, of course, and he gave this cheerful answer:

We know Christmas was two days ago, but, especially with a weekend right after, we’re all still in the shadow of the holiday, sort of working in the interim between the birth of Baby Jesus (and Sir Isaac Newton) and the start of the new calendar year. Christmas is the kind of holiday you can stretch out for as long as you want, and in that spirit, here is a video of Patrick Stewart wearing what is maybe the most ridiculous holiday hat you’ve ever seen. Enjoy.

You don’t normally associate NBC’s sitcom Parks and Recreation with science fiction. Sure, Adam Scott’s character Ben Wyatt is a total geek and has been known to expound on Star Wars, Star Trek, various comic book titles, and more, but outside of that, it’s pretty well rooted in the real world. You know, as much as any show on TV can be. As based in reality as it is, that’s not to say the gang from Pawnee, Indiana doesn’t have an eye on the future, and moving into their final season, they jump a few years beyond where we are now. And as you can see in this latest promo for the farewell season, it is a strange world indeed. We’ve also got a fun Parks and Recreation/Star Trek mash up if you’re interested in such a thing.

If you’ve always wanted to see Jean-Luc Picard swear or Commander William Riker chase an ensign down a hallway, today is your lucky day. This new video is a gag reel from season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation and gives you a different kind of look at the normally so prim and proper crew of the Starship Enterprise. Apparently things were not always so serious on set.

Coming from UPROXX, this footage is just a part of the bonus features that will arrive with the Blu-ray release of the seventh and final season of The Next Generation. The whole video is less than a minute long, but it’s totally worth it just to see Patrick Stewart curse as Gates McFadden’s Dr. Beverly Crusher stomp on his foot. And it just drives home the idea you probably already have in your head that the cast and crew had a really good time making The Next Generation. They always look like they’re having so much fun.

You might remember a while back when we ran a story about a mad genius who fiddled with footage from from Star Trek: The Original Series to show us what it would have looked like as a widescreen Cinerama presentation. He basically found scenes that included a long, one-take camera pan and edited them into a single widescreen image. The results were bloody gorgeous, and now artist Nick Acosta has done the same thing for The Next Generation, with equally stellar results.