What is the biggest plot hole you know of in Star Trek? It can be in any series and could just exist in one episode or over a few episodes/seasons/series.
How the death of one alien in ENT "Stormfront II" could bring about the end of a Temporal Cold War that spanned centuries.
Star Trek: Generations – why didn't Picard just leave the Nexus at an earlier point in time and caught Soran while he was on the toilet or something? He even could have saved René ...
True, the Nexus thing is truly a plothole. What about the duration of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor? It's 60 years, 50 years or what? How come they don't know that? 10 years is a long, long time.
^ AFAIK, the Cardassians came to Bajor 60 years prior to DS9, but didn't start *occupying* it until 10 years after that. There was a brief period of relatively normal relations. As for the TCW: It wasn't just the death of one alien that ended it. Vosk stepped into his machine and it exploded - wiping out all of the alterations his people had made, but the actual ending of the TCW happened 'behind the scenes' as it were.
That's fairly easy to explain because depending on whoever was talking, it could've been solar years, Bajoran years or hell even Cardassian years. Biggest plothole > ST:GEN, Picard leaving the Nexus and returning to an earlier point and not finding his earlier self there already. 2nd place: ST VI: They lure Valeris to Sickbay on the pretense the conspirators are still alive and ready to talk, so she goes there to kill them--why would she expect Sickbay to be empty? They had just summoned court reporters to Sickbay! 3rd place: VOY "The Voyager Conspiracy" - they never explained what happened to the Caretaker array's power source or why it got tractored into subspace.
Star Trek: Nemesis....why didn't the Remans see a huge ship near their planet and what happened to the Tal Shia (sp?)
A century without an Enterprise between ENT and TOS, and yet Starfleet decides to decommission NX-01 Enterprise only after ten years of service... Just what the hell did Archer do to make Starfleet forgo naming a new Enterprise with the next class of ship? I could see 20 years, but nearly 100?
The biggest plot hole : The whole idea of everything being "free" in the federation. How could money not exist ? It was touched upon a bit (First Contact) but honestly they somehow needed to show how this everything is free idea works.
Easy, replicators. Why bother using a currency based system when you have machines that can make anything you want? When nothing is truly unique anymore they lose their value and importance. The non-replicable stuff is still valuable, so the Feds have currency that can be used outside the Federation but their credits don't have any value within the Federation.
Replicators aren't a magical cure-all for everything. They need energy, maintenance and bulk matter to operate. And not everybody has or wants a replicator anyway. Picard's brother refused to allow them in his home. Yet the Picards did all right with their wine business...
Okay, you could explain the Cardassian Occupation thing like that... but when do they ever use Bajoran or Cardassian years? The way time's measured is always the human one- years, minutes etc (and I'm aware that the Bajoran day is 26 hours long- but it's still human hours of 60 minutes each). But you can explain it like that to forget the fact that it is indeed a plothole.
I think we're getting confused about what constitues a plot hole and what is actually more of a discrepancy. I'd say the Cardassian Occupation dates are just a case of a mix-up by the writers which actually has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. And as earlier in the thread has been explained away. A plot-hole is when a character's actions make no sense in the story's context, such as the old 'why didn't Picard leave the Nexus at an earlier point and get rid of Soran before he caused so much trouble' (which doesn't really bother me that much, but it is a plot-hole). My favourite one has to do with why in the hell did the Xindi launch their test-WMD on Earth, thus alerting Earth to their presence before the actual weapon was complete? Although that can be explained away by saying the Xindi didn't anticipate Future-Guy dobbing them in to the humans. Though, still it is a little glaring. What's more glaring is the revelation the Sphere Builders don't actually travel in time but simply monitor timelines, attempting to create the best outcome for themselves. But then, how did a piece of 26th Century tech get into the Xindi's 22nd Century test-weapon? Again, it was revealed later that the Sphere Builders must have some sort of time-travel tech because the Xindi were able to travel back to 21st Century Earth. Though if the SB had time travel tech why were they so bothered by the Enterprise stopping the Xindi planet-killer? They've got time-travel tech, surely they can just go back and try again? But that's the thing about time-travel stories, they're full of plot-holes!
The Pasteur - the plot hole here is when Geordi says the three beams come from identical ships - a bit of an oops moment. Thats a genuine goof though - most of the holes here can be rationalised away.
Relics. The Enterprise was trapped in the Dyson sphere unable to break away from the sun (IIRC), but when the Jenolan got the door open, they just turned around and left. Then of course they beamed Scotty and Geordi through the Jenolan's shields and torpedoed the Jenolan in one shot with its shields up
In Voyager when that alien supposedly stole a Tetryon reactor from the Caretaker array when Voyager blew it up, what the heck was all that about.