UGLY

“For all his growing reputation as a shallow sensationalist, Millar was an altar boy at heart; he used the language of the lowest common denominator to preach hellfire. ‘Wanted’ was an epic attempted exorcism, but its raw admission of Millar’s own dark-side dreams and its flirtation with a genuinely nihilistic endorsement of every antivalue as the way to “make it” in This World suggested a demon big enough to leave sizable bite marks in any Augustine cassock.

‘Wanted’ articulated a new myth for the hordes of suddenly cool under-achievers who’d been lionized by the rise of “nerd culture.” Big business, media, and fashion were, it seemed, so starved of inspiration, they’d reached down to the very bottom of the social barrel in an attempt to commodify even the most stubborn nonparticipants, the suicide Goths and fiercely antiestablishment nerds. 

The geeks were in the spotlight now, proudly accepting a derogatory label that directly compared them to degraded freak-show acts. 

Bullied young men with asthma and shy, bitter virgins with adult-onset diabetes could now gang up like the playground toughs they secretly wanted to be and anonymously abuse and threaten professional writers and actors with family commitments and bills to pay.

Soon film studios were afraid to move without the approval of the raging Internet masses. They represented only the most minuscule fraction of a percentage of the popular audience that gave a shit, but they were very remarkably, superhumanly ANGRY, like the great head of Oz, and so very persistent that they could easily appear in the imagination as an all-conquering army of mean-spirited, judgmental fogies.”

Excerpt From

Supergods

Grant Morrison

A website called Agony Booth cited this episode as 

The Absolute Worst Star Trek Episode

in their list of 

“The Worst of Trek"

In their recap, they commented, 

"This episode completely destroys Archer, making him out to be an incompetent, childish moron. 

As such, it's probably responsible in no small part for sending Enterprise into a ratings death spiral." 

"There have been times I've disliked a character. There have been times when I think the writers ruined a character, or undid a lot of a character's development, purely out of laziness. But this… this is all-out character destruction the likes of which I have never seen before. It takes active, aggressive hatred for your own creations to annihilate them to this degree."

 "It's not terrible in the way most of the movies featured on this website are terrible, in that the filmmakers didn't know what they were doing, and just stumbled into making a horrible movie as a result of their own incompetence. It's terrible in that Epic Movie kind of way, where it seems everybody knew better, but the writers just hated the characters, hated themselves, hated their jobs, and most of all hated you for wanting to watch the shit they write."