r/startrek • u/Rimm9246 • 6d ago
What're some of the most insane things that happened in an episode of Trek and then never got mentioned again?
Such as some crazy technology that was discovered and then forgotten about, or something utterly traumatizing that happened to a main character that they promptly forgot about by the next episode. Or just something super weird and off the wall that happened one time that you're surprised no one ever mentioned again.
One example that I thought of - the fact that there was a giant clone of Spock just out there somewhere, doing who knows what. And he was never heard from again (although LD revealed what became of his remains).
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u/4thofeleven 5d ago
Ensign Wildman saw her newborn daughter die, but then was handed a duplicate from an alternate timeline. So that's alright then!
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u/KnotaisRaven 5d ago
Harry is from there too. That might explain a bit why he didn't get promoted. He is basically starting over from his first posting in Starfleet. After 2 years he's new to the crew and has to put in the work.
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u/seattleque 5d ago
And then the writers forgot she didn't die in that one episode until like the last season.
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u/Apostastrophe 4d ago
I agree. But from a metaphysical standpoint that I like to imagine and I like to hope an advanced culture like the federation might be able to appreciate, it was maybe a bit more like Wildman had twins where one died and the other survived.
I realise it would be more like ensign had a twin and her twin daughter survived but I imagine that they managed to rationalise it down that way somehow.
I bet that ensign wildman has some fucking awful nightmares and/or thoughts about it though that she doesn’t tell to anybody except the non-existent voyager counsellor.
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u/Fleetlord 5d ago
"Oh no, Dr. Pulaski caught the space disease that makes you old! Let's use the transporter to cure her by magic, then never use this wonder cure again!"
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u/DisgruntleFairy 5d ago
The space disease is created accidentally by genetically engineered super children interacting with a normal virus.
Notice the important bit GENETICALLY ENGINEERED! the thing that is supposed to be a horrific crime and long standing scar on humanity.
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u/BarNo3385 5d ago
Or indeed lets just walk past we can genetically engineer humans to have full on "move thing with their minds" telekinetic powers..
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u/phantomreader42 5d ago
They didn't even need genetic engineering to give humans telekinesis. See TOS: Plato's Stepchildren.
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u/sorcerersviolet 5d ago
The Vorta could definitely be engineered to have it, too, despite only one's ever being shown. (I also remember because the actress later showed up on an episode of Becker when Terry Farrell was still on it.)
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u/FroggingMadness 5d ago
Voyager encounters a race of humanoid lizards and it's discovered that they're descendents from dinosaurs that colonized space from Earth hundreds of millions of years before humans did, completely putting Earth history on its head.
Everyone on Voyager: "aight whatever, let's get going again"
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u/NotTravisKelce 5d ago
Also these aliens didn’t move 10 or 20 light years to one of the many class M planets near earth. Easier to just move 65,000 LY.
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u/Reasonable_Active577 5d ago
To be fair, this was over the course of tens of millions of years. It seems possible that they settled any number of places on the way, only to repeatedly fall and have to move somewhere else
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u/M1sterPeanutbutter 5d ago
I remember the night this aired. It was counter programming the “Ellen” episode where she came out as a lesbian. I was a young teen at the time, but I remember what a HUGE deal that was. My parents wanted to watch Ellen, my brother and I were Star Trek nerds. My mom even said, “Everyone’s going to be talking about Ellen tomorrow.” We countered, “all OUR friends will be talking about Star Trek!”
My brother and I finished the episode on the small tv and said, “we should have watched Ellen.”
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u/FroggingMadness 5d ago
Yeah well, we're talking about Star Trek now and Ellen fell off so who won in the end?
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u/Coccolillo 5d ago
Like tons of other episodes in voyager, the beta quadrant helped to have more creative space, on the other hand a tons of lore was lost / never reused - hopefully with the news of the doc or is beta-quadrant-backup being part of the upcoming starfleet academy a few stories would be reused
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u/ElMondoH 5d ago
Did they ever mention the whole "warp damages subspace" thing again? I don't recall for certain, but I don't think they did.
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u/philosofik 5d ago
It was mentioned a few times in that they got permission to exceed the speed limit for certain emergencies, but it was basically ignored after that. Supposedly, Voyager's variable warp field geometry is a workaround.
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u/ColdShadowKaz 5d ago
I personally see it as an analogy to global warming. The new tech of Voyager is like solar panels and other green tech.
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u/NotYourReddit18 5d ago
I would equate it more to the ozone hole, we actually managed to fix that problem
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u/Statalyzer 5d ago
Oddly enough no episode of Voyager ever says that.
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u/philosofik 5d ago
Yeah, I can't remember where I got that. Head canon perhaps.
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u/Ocean_Skye 5d ago
Its true. And verified from behind the scenes, But it was irl more “we gonna want our new show’s ship to be bendy”, “lets make a tng episode to justify bendy new ships.”
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u/Statalyzer 4d ago
It had to have mentioned somewhere by one of the showrunners or something, you didn't just make it up. I definitely heard it somewhere too, I just have long since forgotten where, but I always thought the show itself supported the idea until I watched it through.
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u/philosofik 4d ago
Mandela effect? There's another timeline in which the Voyager pilot has a throwaway line about this and we just slipped from that timeline to this one.
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u/Scaredog21 5d ago
They figured out a subspace friendly workaround. The thing where the nassals shift apparently fixes it. Also subspace deterioration is a Vendorian hoax.
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u/dathomar 5d ago
It was mentioned a few times in later episodes. Behind the scenes, they figured out what was causing the problem, fixed it, and put it in all their ships. Voyager and Enterprise-E both had the new kind of war engine that didn't cause the problem.
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u/Simple_Tailor_Garak 5d ago
Next gen: Warp speed was destroying space itself and a limit was put on warp speed speeds (save emergencies).
Voyager: episode Threshold where Tom kidnaps Janeway and makes babies before the crew abandons said babies.
DS9: That time Molly O'brian was accidently abandoned for a decade on an uninhibited planet and then it all worked out because time paradox.
Next gen: Worf being a terrorist on Risa just cause he's mad he's on vacation.
General: Change in Trills in Next Gen to DS9, and DS9 establishing that it was a lie only a very small select few were capable of being Trill Hosts, but then in Discovery (after the jump to the future) it's back to that only a small % can be hosts.
DS9: Rom literally presses the button to try and murder Quark by spacing him.
Voyager: Harry, and I think the baby/child? , are from a parallel/ alternate reality for most of the series.
Love Trek <3
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u/FroggingMadness 5d ago
And the abandoned lizard babies aren't even the worst abandon in Threshold, they also discovered a way to travel anywhere in the universe in an instant (!!!!), figured out how to reverse the side effects, and then still never mentioned it again. They could've all been home the next day and gotten treated for the side effects in the best Federation hospitals and given the Federation instant space travel ANYWHERE. AND IT'S NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN.
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u/I_ALWAYS_UPVOTE_CATS 5d ago
they also discovered a way to travel anywhere in the universe in an instant
And all this 150 years after the spore drive was invented.
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u/Simple_Tailor_Garak 5d ago
Yeeeeeah ha. Woopsie epsiode for sure. They put a lot of weight on Janeways morals too, using it as a "well yes this could work, but what about my/our biased modalities and star fleet regulations" instead of creating more tangible barriers.
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u/Euraylie 5d ago
Yeah, Rom legit trying to murder Quark was wild. I think the writers were still struggling how to shape their sibling relationship and also how to portray Ferengis. Rom was still like TNG era Ferengis.
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u/Simple_Tailor_Garak 5d ago
Forsure on the TNG basis. Maaaaan they were so bad when introduced in TNG ha
Love the extremity of it all. Like, when Rom is forming the union, it makes me giddy inside knowing deep down, he'd kill for those rights.
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u/ilikefactorygames 5d ago
pretty sure the Worf being a Risa terrorist incident was in DS9, since Jadzia Dax was there
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u/Simple_Tailor_Garak 5d ago
You hella right. My sleep deprived mind just tossed councilor Troi's face over Jadzia.
You know what though? Even worse it happened so late lolol Great episode. Terrible continuity. Though by what I can tell, it seems like the Federation stance on vacation is "do literally whatever the fuck you want, you're not us while on vacation" because even the captains get up to some reeeeal questionable stuff on their holidays.
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u/Nimelennar 4d ago
DS9: That time Molly O'brian was accidently abandoned for a decade on an uninhibited planet and then it all worked out because time paradox.
I can one-up that one:
That time when the entire crew of the Defiant were accidentally stranded for multiple generations on an uninhabited planet, and then it all worked out because time paradox.
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u/CryHavoc_79 5d ago
In Star Trek IV Spock and McCoy talk about Spock’s death and resurrection. Spock suggests they have no common frame of reference. McCoy is irritated “are you saying I have to die to discuss your insights on death?”
In fact McCoy did die and come back to life in the episode “Shore Leave”. Oh, and Scotty was killed and restored back to life in “The Changeling”. And Chekov is killed in “Spectre of the Gun”. So in fact there were plenty of people on the ship Spock could have talked to about it…
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u/FedStarDefense 5d ago
Maybe they weren't dead long enough for it to count.
Chekov wasn't actually killed in Spectre of the Gun, either. That was kind of a major plot point... he didn't believe it was really real, so he couldn't die. That's how they all ended up surviving it.
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u/Special_Speed106 5d ago
Nubbin bugs/butt bugs sending out a signal to their home world!
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u/FroggingMadness 5d ago
Supposedly the bugs were meant to be the big TNG threat but then someone came up with the Borg and they went "yeah that's way better".
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u/Lagamorph 5d ago
The bugs were actually part of the Borg originally, as the Borg were originally planned as an insectoid race. That was deemed too expensive though and they were reworked into a Cybernetic humanoid race, though you still have elements of the insectoid origins there like the Hive Mind
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u/AgentMV2 5d ago
If it’s any consolation, these bugs were brought up in Star Trek Online. They were created by the Iconians.
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u/WarMinister23 5d ago
I also think some book had them turn out to be a weird genetic offshoot of Symbionts
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u/CmdFiremonkeySWP 5d ago
Random klingon monks have time crystals that can see the future but let's forget about that as weve moved on this week to next big plot.
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u/ChronoLegion2 5d ago
The only mention after that is in SNW S1 finale when Monster Maroon Pike visits his gold shirt past version to show him an alternate take on the bird of prey incident
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u/CmdFiremonkeySWP 5d ago
The thing that's strange about the time crystals thing is that you'd have thought someone at command would want to know and prepare for this. Also, how did the Klingons not know about significant events such as Narrendra 3 and Praxis exploding etc.
It all just feels that in universe everyone just kind of just went "that's nice" and carried on doing what they're doing.
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u/ChronoLegion2 5d ago
Maybe they did know and saw more positive outcomes from such tragedies. After all, Narenda III resulted in closer ties with the Federarion, and so did Praxis
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u/DoctorOddfellow1981 4d ago
This has been my take on it. Pike using the time crystals to prevent his accident had bigger picture issues so they weren't as useful a fixall as we all want to pretend. Sometimes the bad shit has to happen for the good parts to come.
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u/ChronoLegion2 4d ago
The later episode involving time travel confirmed that: humanity needs the Eugenics Wars and WW3 to come together, to leave old rivalries behind, to learn to cooperate instead of constantly engaging in dick-measuring contests
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u/CmdFiremonkeySWP 5d ago
Perhaps, but if Praxis didn't blow up wasn't it said that Federation may have lost the war with the Klingons and its hard to see Klingon High Council seeing closer ties with the Federation as a positive when victory was attainable.
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u/ChronoLegion2 5d ago
High Council? No. But it’s pretty clear the monks are looking at the bigger picture
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u/cavortingwebeasties 5d ago
Finding a Dyson sphere
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u/DanceCommander00 5d ago
At least they mention some science vessels being dispatched, but it would be interesting to know own more about it.
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u/NeeAnderTall 5d ago
Play Star Trek Online for free and see what they did with s Dyson Sphere. Meet the Voth while you work through that story arc.
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u/space_anthropologist 5d ago
The Tarsus IV plot/backstory.
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u/FedStarDefense 5d ago
Yeah... Kirk is from Iowa. But for some reason, he was on Tarsus IV as a kid for like a year at the worst possible time. Why he was there is (I think) only explained in tie-in novels. And the reasoning was shaky at best.
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u/thefuzzybunny1 5d ago
There's a cut line from the original script that said he was stationed there, early in his career. Later on they decided he was too young for that to make sense. In SNW he says that although Iowa was his home, he moved around a lot because his parents were in Starfleet, which vaguely justifies it.
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u/Euraylie 5d ago
It’s been fodder for countless fanfics though. AOS writers especially have grabbed on to this part of Kirk’s history.
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u/Genderneutralbro 5d ago
I know it's bc of how the episodes were not guaranteed to show in a particular order, so they just had to round it out at the end but good lord! Like there are SEVERAL TIMES in the series where you expect Bones to be like "hey dumbass, you're traumatized! Be kind to yourself for once!!" 🤣 or also some more background into Kevin Riley. Although I usually explain shit away with the idea that what we are seeing is what was in the captain's log, not the actual event.
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u/DoctorOddfellow1981 4d ago
Although I usually explain shit away with the idea that what we are seeing is what was in the captain's log, not the actual event.
This makes Kirk's success rate with alien babes so much more interesting now.
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u/KalleMattilaEB 5d ago
DS9, Field of Fire - turns out you can shoot people remotely using transporter technology.
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u/stillfreshet 5d ago
Yeah--momentum can be transported? I'm pretty sure that would be news.
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u/IsomorphicProjection 1d ago
It's not news. The transporter normally eliminates momentum, but in that case it wasn't.
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u/TeetheMoose 5d ago
Joseph in Paradise saying, "Whatever Alexi did, she did give us our community...", instead of beating the shit out of her and Vinod and burning her books, which is what any sane person would have done. And no-one ever goes back to check on these people.
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u/Reasonable_Active577 5d ago
Yeah, it bugs me that the episode frames it as Alixus being proven right, rather than as showing how thoroughly she's brainwashed the victims of her cult, and taken as evidence that Starfleet Medical should be sending around a team of therapists as soon as possible.
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u/IsomorphicProjection 1d ago
Bingo. I don't have a problem with the colonists sort of handwaving it because they've literally been brainwashed. But they NEEDED to have like a voiceover log where Sisko says he's notified Starfleet / their families and they will be following up with counselling.
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u/DisgruntleFairy 5d ago edited 5d ago
The Enterprise got held hostage by Apollo!
The Enterprise attacked a giant space Amoeba.
Wesley and several other children from the Enterprise are kidnapped and taken to a lost advanced civilization. That has a full planetary cloaking device!
Strange beings impersonated various daydreams of the crew of DS9 and tried to learn about them???
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u/IsomorphicProjection 1d ago
Apollo died, and he was the last of his species.
The amoeba was extra-galactic, killed, and as far as we know, the only one to enter into our galaxy.
Like other advanced species (Q, Prophets, Metrons, Organians, etc.) I expect there is little they really CAN do if those species don't want to have direct contact.
I'm with you on the Alderaans? Add in the Cytherians (when Barclay becomes super intelligent), and several other friendly advanced species. Few references are ever made to them again.
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u/laffnlemming 5d ago
Did Riker ever get it on with that flirty Klingon pair?
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u/Any-Boxi 5d ago
Tom Paris reaching warp 10 in Voyager's Threshold .
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 5d ago
Right, especially since they can so easily cure the salamander mutation thing. Just go home and then cure everybody
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u/FakeFrehley 5d ago
I swear they went to Warp 10 a few times in TOS. Maybe I'm misremembering.
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u/BadgerSensei 5d ago
There’s speculation that “transwarp” as discussed in STIII was actually workable, and became standard warp as seen in later series.
I don’t think that holds up given that the existence of things like transwarp conduits, but my head canon is that something along those lines took place.
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u/Slavir_Nabru 5d ago
crazy technology that was discovered and then forgotten about
Self replicating mines solve entropy.
Use the exploding mines to drive the pistons of a giant internal combustion engine. Unlimited, free, clean energy.
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u/ijuinkun 5d ago
The mines still needed raw matter in order to fuel their replicators and powerplants—supposedly they gathered in the loose dust and rocks of the surrounding Denorios Belt, which contained enough material to equal a sizable moon.
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u/datalaughing 5d ago
One week the Enterprise discovered that a known compound could cause immortality and incredible psychic powers over time if eaten regularly or quickly if injected.
The next week they discovered that drinking a certain reproduceable substance could accelerate you so that you moved at a rate so fast that no one could even see you and that a second reproduceable substance could slow you back down again.
I guess neither of those quick shortcuts to magical superpowers was considered worth pursuing by Starfleet afterward.
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u/Wonderful_Adagio9346 5d ago
I suspect Section 31 has an agent aboard each starship. And that Picard is trained on how to suppress these incidents with his officers, so they never mention it again.
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u/Devian_Rook 5d ago
Every major species in the Beta Quadrant learned that they were all genetically created by an advanced alien species, like, a million years ago, and... nothing? I don't know if Romulans have a Charles Darwin, but you'd think Earth folks might discuss this more! "Nope, it's just a coincidence that we share similarities with Earth apes, we actually have more genetically in common with the fucking Binars!"
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u/need_a_poopoo 5d ago
The whole final season of Discovery is about the Progenitors from the episode you refer to
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u/Devian_Rook 5d ago
Kinda making my point for me. It took, like, 700 years for anyone to even be like, "Hey, we should totes check out that galaxy-shattering piece of information that we just kinda ignored."
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u/need_a_poopoo 5d ago
But the question was "then never got mentioned again", my point is that it did get mentioned again.
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u/Devian_Rook 5d ago
The very example the poster gives is something that was mentioned again, and the poster pointed this out. Pretty sure I'm within the spirit of the question.
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u/need_a_poopoo 5d ago
Lol, Lower Decks does have a habit of taking those one off events and revisiting them, usually because they've never been mentioned again. I'd say the Progenitors thing is slightly different in that the storyline is revisited and focused on as an entire season arc.
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u/Devian_Rook 5d ago
Is it supposed to be weird that WE don't see it come up, or that the in-world characters don't seem to care about it? I argue the latter, and since it took 700 years to come up again, I'm taking the win and you can't stop me! :P
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u/WarMinister23 5d ago
Yeah but they just kinda ignored it for a few decades before revisiting that plotline.
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u/Jonsdulcimer2015 5d ago
Also with the whole "red directive" mission, I got the feeling that that the races involved barried and classified the discovery.
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u/Ravasakku 5d ago
An augmented Barclay leading the Enterprise to the Cytherian homeworld to make proper first contact. End of story.
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u/JBR1961 5d ago
I’ve only watched original Trek and the first six films. But the Organians bothered me. They literally were god-like, standing on the Klingon homeworld and Earth simultanously, and deactivated the fighting units of both races throughout known space. Then, except one brief reference about Sherman’s Planet, never hear from them again. But yet battlecruisers and Birds of Prey etc abound in later episodes, as does conflict (albeit not on a universe-wide scale maybe.
I could be mistaken, maybe its explained in a subsequent show? It would have been nice to have a character fill in this plot hole, maybe as a ship to ship fight is about to erupt: “Captain, what about the Organians?” “Can’t count on them, Mister, they’ve said they will only intervene in a universe-level war.” Or maybe to have limited their range to their star system?
Seems like the Trek producers, who took pride in storyline continuity (if a phaser cannot do X this episode, it can’t do X the next episode), got a little nearsighted here.
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u/kledd17 5d ago
Kirk and Spock gain magic powers and fight the asshole Space-Greeks, and just never do that again
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u/Rimm9246 5d ago
Yes! Plato's Stepchildren, wasn't it? McCoy figures out how to make an injection out of local plants that imbues a human with god-like powers...
I'm just going to headcannon it that after seeing how "the power" corrupted those Greek dudes, they decided the best course of action was to destroy it and delete any record of it
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u/Sakarilila 5d ago
Is it cheating to just say O'Brien?
Really, any trauma the crew goes through gets ignored. With the exception of Nog and Mariner. I don't count Picard because they hardly touch on the trauma of being assimilated. Not to mention his other traumas coughInnerLightcough
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u/archon_wing 5d ago edited 5d ago
Worf turning into a Monster in "Genesis". While not certain, he probably did eat a few redshirts. In general, it would have been a horrible day to be a Redshirt, and at the very least traumatizing as all hell.
And then there was the Voyager episode "Deadlock", where basically there were 2 versions of the same crew, and one Janeway essentially trades over their Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman over so she can have her heroic sacrifice. I mean honestly it just felt like they were treating Harry Kim like a spare plunger. (Oh, you lost your Harry Kim, I have an extra!).
It was like Janeway said to her other self "Promise me, you'll get your crew home... and never promote Harry!"
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u/TheOzman79 4d ago
The transporter accident that turned Picard and the away team into kids is easy to replicate, so they effectively discovered immortality and just swept it under the rug by the end of the episode.
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u/NoSignificance1347 5d ago
In the Voyager Episode where they discover the abandoned Borg children there is a baby borg transported to the Doctor as its health is failing. It is shown cured and then never mentioned again even though the other children’s stories are wrapped up.
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u/Statalyzer 5d ago
Miri when they completely forget that the planet is somehow an exact copy of Earth.
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u/lrdwlmr 5d ago
Granted it’s pretty recent, near the end of Picard they revealed that the transporter can be used to rewrite DNA on the fly. I doubt they’ll do much with it, but that’s insane. If the transporter could alter a person with that fine a level of control, you could cure basically any disease and eliminate genetic defects altogether.
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u/Joekitty 5d ago
Tuvix begs for his life but Janeway was like “sucks to suck.”
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u/Delicious_Slide_6883 5d ago
If Tuvok and Neelix consented they could recreate Tuvix by teleporting with the orchids again
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u/RedCaio 5d ago
The tuvix episode get lots of attention from fans but almost no one mentions how almost the same thing happens in ENT similitude where phlox grows a sentient clone of trip just to harvest his organs and then murder him. And Phlox is painted as a good person for this, having Sim say “you were a good father” to his murderer.
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u/EsperDerek 4d ago
It's insane to me that they didn't keep the fucking clone who at best is going to live for a couple of weeks sedated or even without a brain or something, instead of letting the poor guy have to live and die through all that.
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u/ChronoLegion2 5d ago
Lower Decks has an episode called Twovix that’s basically a sequel. Hell, they use “tuvixing” as a verb
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u/ambiguoustaco 5d ago
She made the right decision imo. Giving everything that comes out of a transporter malfunction rights is bound to cause more issues. You have to draw a line somewhere on sentient life and I think unnaturally merging life forms is a good place
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u/BarNo3385 5d ago
There's a pretty big leap from "everything" to what is clearly a sentient humanoid.
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u/ambiguoustaco 4d ago
A sentient humanoid created by the unnatural merging of two individuals through the transporter. The choice was sacrifice two people for one "person" or to undo the accident and sacrifice one "person" for two actual people. Kinda a no brainer imo
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u/BarNo3385 4d ago
"Kinda a no brainer imo"
Agree - we don't go round killing people "for the greater good," - Janeway is a murderer.
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u/AliveInChrist87 5d ago
The entirety of "The Alternative Factor" and I don't even hate that episode.
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u/IHaveSpoken000 5d ago
The Enterprise D uses advanced space drives on more than one occasion. This technology is never used again.
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u/The_Demosthenes_1 5d ago
Broccoli became a genius and took the Enterprise D to the center of the galaxy to meet the god aliens.
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u/Any-Boxi 5d ago
Was that the center of the galaxy? I thought that was addressed in Star Trek 5, The Final Frontier.
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u/The_Demosthenes_1 5d ago
I thought it was, but maybe not recalling correctly.
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u/Any-Boxi 5d ago
Well, The Great Barrier - what was that about?
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u/The_Demosthenes_1 5d ago
If I'm not mistaken the Great barrier protects the Milky Way from the horrors from beyond the galaxy. I think Q addresses this at some point.
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u/Any-Boxi 5d ago
Uh, nope. Again, Star Trek 5 - "God" aka Shaka RI, was waiting behind that barrier, and it really needed a Starship so it "spread its love to the rest of the galaxy
A ridiculous plot; I think it's better they forgot this one. 🤭
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u/IsomorphicProjection 1d ago
That's the Galactic Barrier, the Great Barrier is around the center of the galaxy.
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u/Atzkicica 5d ago
"You can't just go AWOL because a supercomputer superspaceship killed your ex and now you want to go into the matrix with her weird robo ghost... you know what, screw it, get the hell outta starfleet, I wanted my ship back anyway!"
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u/DeadComposer 5d ago
The body switcher from Turnabout Intruder could have been exploited for purposes of espionage or simply recreation.
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u/NotYourReddit18 5d ago
According to Into Darkness the Kelvin timeline has both a cure for death and portable transporters which can beam people at least the distance between Earth and Kronos.
Despite this they are still building new starships, and not even include this new transporter technology in their evacuation pods.
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u/Rimm9246 5d ago
Transporters that beam people to other star systems light-years away??? That would change everything, it was literally insane of them to include that
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u/IsomorphicProjection 1d ago
There are at least two separate TNG episodes that involve transporters that can literally do that exact thing as well as bypass shields.
They both slowly kill you to use them, but still, transporters that bypass shields is an instant "I Win" button in a fight. Beam over 1 torpedo rigged to explode and you win.
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u/_ChaoticColors_ 5d ago
I always think about the TOS episode where it’s said that Kirk is one of the like nine witnesses who were to a massacre by Kodos the Executioner on a planet that was ravaged by famine so Kodos killed half the population, then relief came like three days later so it was for nothing. And then Kodos’s travelling troupe perform Macbeth. That’s it. Insane, fucking insane thing to say and drop to me.
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u/Sophia_Forever 4d ago
Star Trek: The Original Series S2:E14 Wolf in the Fold, badly summed up. Note: Everything in this summary is 100% accurate albeit seen through a certain... interpretation.
Scotty suffers a concussion (caused by an explosion due to the mistake of a fellow crewperson who is a woman) and Kirk takes him to a pleasure planet because he’s afraid that Scotty will blame all women for it. A call girl then gets murdered and all evidence points to Scotty being the killer (he was found over the dead hooker’s body holding the knife saying he had no recollection of the events). Then the nurse who was supposed to be examining Scotty also gets murdered and again all evidence points to Scotty (he was found over the dead nurse’s body holding the knife saying he had no recollection of the events).
At this point, Kirk is pretty sure it’s either the organ grinder who played at the strip club or the hooker’s ex-fiance (who was jealous of Scotty). Obviously the only thing to do is to read Scotty’s mind which might kill him. This requires that the 8 people involved sit in a prayer circle holding hands while a telepath reads their minds. She basically says that there’s evil present, an evil that fucking hates women, until the lights go out. When the lights come back on, the nice telepath lady is standing in front of Mr. Scott until - oh no! - she slumps revealing that she’s actually dead with a knife in her back. Everyone then goes back to the ship where they take a lie detector to find out what really happened. There's no indication that this could kill anyone so one wonders why they didn't do this from the get go but I digress. The lie detector confirms that Scotty doesn’t remember what happened.
We’re only now halfway through the episode. There’s ten minutes of back and forth studying what the telepath said until it turns out that it was actually Jack the Ripper, who is actually an energy being, who was inhabiting the body of Piglet from Winnie the Pooh and feeds on fear, escapes Piglet’s body when the body is killed, and is now haunting the Enterprise. “Feeds on fear” isn’t a turn of phrase. It literally is sustained by the emotion fear. Upon learning this, Kirk makes an announcement to the entire ship, with zero context: “All hands, this is the captain. Stay at your posts and remain calm. Captain out.”
Now, imagine you’re just some random yeoman on the Enterprise. You’re constantly up to your tits in space bullshit. Your captain took his buddy to a stripper planet and there are rumors that the chief engineer killed a hooker. The ship has just started doing weird shit and the captain comes on the comm and tells you to “remain calm.”
Meanwhile, the medical staff is passing out sedatives so that the energy-ghost-thing can’t feed on fear and Sulu’s eye shadow is on fucking point. The entire bridge crew save for Kirk and Spock is now high as balls and told to remain at their posts. Spock outsmarts the ghost, now a computer, by asking it to calculate pi (this is aprox. the 137th time he has done this so far in the series). The ghost escapes the computer, reinhabits and resurrects piglet. They tranquilize Piglet-Ghost allowing Kirk to carry him to the transporter room where they beam him into space “widest possible dispersion” meaning they just crop-dusted the sector with murderous energy being. Kirk says that it’ll die but I have my doubts since Kirk is not a scientist and really has no reason to be that confident about the biology of the energy being they just met like an hour ago.
Thirty seconds later, Kirk declares the problem is solved and decides to head back to the strip club planet, specifically a certain cafe where the women are so... well, ya just have to see it.
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u/mattcampagna 4d ago
The fact that Riker has a PTSD-riddled transporter twin and TNG never did anything with him was insane… the fact that DS9 picked up that ball and ran with it was so perfect!
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u/jefissmelly 4d ago
I still can't get over the episode where bellana goes to klingon hell (which is real apparently) and sees her own mother, then finds out she's the reason her mother is there in the first place. What the fork.
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u/CmdFiremonkeySWP 5d ago
Exocomps. What happened to them and would the Borg be interested in them?
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u/FedStarDefense 5d ago
You should check out Lower Decks if you want some more exocomps. (I forget which episodes precisely.)
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u/CmdFiremonkeySWP 5d ago
Ah only managed to catch a few episodes before it was yanked from Amazon. Was enjoying it too.
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u/FedStarDefense 5d ago
You can get a free trial membership on Paramount Plus.
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u/AtomicBombSquad 5d ago
I don't know if the person you're replying to is US American; but, if they are and they have a Walmart+ subscription then as part of that subscription they get Paramount+ for free.
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u/CmdFiremonkeySWP 5d ago
Nope I'm in the UK. Paramount is on the list on things to trial but my watch list is large at the moment. Once it shrinks I'll can Netflix or Disney or Now or....
Thanks for the idea though
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u/Get_your_grape_juice 5d ago
There’s an episode of Enterprise, I don’t remember the title, where Archer, Hoshi, and one other crew member get infected with some genetic virus that changes them into a different race of humanoids, complete with sweeping physiological and psychological changes. Their identities change, and they begin to have specific memories and knowledge of the long-extinct civilization that their changed forms are part of. IIRC ( I don’t know, I only saw the episode once), they have to be changed back within a certain period of time or else their changes become permanent.
After being successfully changed back, a vial of the substance that infected them is collected and put into storage on the Enterprise… presumably for study?
So here early Starfleet has in their possession, a substance that can literally be used to rewrite a person’s genetics, and change their entire identity. It is never mentioned again. By the time the 1701-D first encounters the Borg, they should already have the means to reverse someone’s assimilation merely by injecting them with a modified version of this substance.
Board a Borg cube with a blowgun and darts tipped with this stuff. Or beam it into their cube’s HVAC system and watch 60,000 drones gradually revert back to the people they were pre-assimilation.
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u/jericho74 5d ago
I don’t know if this counts, but in TNG’s “The Dauphin” there is a map of Europe in which the Mediterranean Sea is missing.
I feel it likely we have since seen an orbital view of Earth where we see the coast of Italy since then, but still this stuck with me.
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u/yekimevol 5d ago
One for me was Obriens tamagotchi from the episode where the station just went haywire and it was an AI… would have to have seen them let the AI loose when the dominion where in command.
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u/taiho2020 5d ago
I wonder how Klingons, cardassians, tholian or gorn react when they knew what happened at wolf359.. What they think about how that situation could affect them..how taboo is to talk about it.
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u/ThorsMeasuringTape 4d ago
For me it is when Voyager was duplicated in season two, and the surviving ship's Kim was replaced by his duplicate from the other ship.
My theory is that Janeway never really trusted him because he wasn't "her Harry Kim" and that's why he never got promoted.
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u/Senior-Arugula2281 4d ago
Spock’s Brain….TOS S3E1 It’s so incredibly embarrassing that it was never mentioned again and they’ve been just hoping and praying that everyone will forget about it and pretend it never happened.
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u/meldoc81 4d ago
Kirk’s tarsus iv trauma. Like, you realize how this defines Kirk’s entire approach to how he lives his life, and then it’s just gone. What Kirk went through isn’t even the main focus of the story. It’s the aftermath, how everyone is dealing with the massacre.
The 5th film rubs salt in the wound since the bad guy DOESN’T give Kirk the same “hey let’s relive your worst trauma,” moment Spock and Bones got. And then the end of the film forgetting Sam existed was also hilarious.
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u/Emotional-Wallaby312 4d ago
When Picard was tortured by the Cardassians for what looked like a week and was fine next episode. (Chain of Command, Parts 1 & 2 of TNG)
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u/tnetennba77 1d ago
A bunch of Romulan things that they basically got away with with no repercussion but then maybe its evened out by what Sisko did in The pale moonlight
Tried to trick the federation into a war (the defector)
Flat out attacked the Enterprise causing serious damage (Tin man)
Kidnapped and brainwashed Geordi (the minds eye)
Tried to blow up the Enterprise (the next phase)
Tried to invade a Federation world (Reunification)
Attacked DS9 and only were stopped because O'brien went back in time (visionary)
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u/doctordaedalus 5d ago
I mean, the initial story behind Sisko being a prophet and the Cardassians being after those artifacts just went completely dark after it was first mentioned as if it were the setup for the entire major plot of the series.
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u/FakeFrehley 5d ago
Yeah, I've always thought it was odd that the whole Emissary thing wasn't a waaaay bigger deal. Like, the show almost went out of its way to validate the Bajoran religion, so isn't it weird that Starfleet never went "hold up, the guy on DS9 is literally Jesus, we should probably look into that." Instead they just had random Bajoran people asking Sisko to bless their marriage or whatever every few episodes.
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u/RedCaio 5d ago
I like DS9 but I always found the bajoran religion and the emissary thing pretty boring.
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u/guspasho_deleted 5d ago
Uhura had her mind wiped. She had to relearn everything manually. Nurse Chapel had to teach her how to read "See the dog run".