• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers What's the craziest thing Trek has done?

F. King Daniel

Fleet Admiral
Admiral
BIG SPOILER ALERT FOR ALL RECENT TREK MEDIA

Right now it feels like the Borg joining the Federation at the end of Picard season 2 is the most insane crazy thing Trek has ever done.

Possibly also the 20 years+ of Star Trek Novelverse annihilating itself and killing every main character in a 3-book orgy of death.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
From a storytelling perspective I really don't think Trek has ever done anything particularly crazy, which is both a compliment (even their retcons generally fit the overall storylines) and a negative (Trek plays it safe. Always has).

Nothing in Trek has ever had me up off my couch shouting "Holy shit!" which has happened with other franchises.
 
The USS Discovery going to the Mirror Universe with its mushroom drive that rides space fungus mycelium threaded throughout the entire universe where they discovered that Michael Burnham's dead captain is both the Emperor and her mother, and that she had built a ship that would've destroyed all life in the multiverse if they hadn't turned up at that moment to stop it.

That's my definition of insanity.
 
Last edited:
In 2002 I'd have said the same thing about the Romulans in NEM, especially as the whole movie was littered with far crazier ideas.

And it's sad to think that I'm not sure if the Borg joining the Federation is worse.
 
Even though I have issues with the Kelvin Universe, deciding to do a sort of sideways-reboot of everything could be characterized as crazy. I remember that when Vulcan was destroyed in Star Trek 09 thinking "WTF?" in the theater. And, credit to JJ Abrams, it was a moment for the audience where you knew that this was not going to be the same Star Trek universe as you knew it.

The biggest "crazy" moment for me as a kid watching Trek, where I had no idea how they were gonna resolve it, was “Best of Both Worlds” and the “Mr. Worf, fire” moment. Years later, it was interesting reading some of what was going on behind-the scenes, where at the time there was speculation that maybe the entire thing was connected to contract negotiations with Patrick Stewart, and the Borg storyline may have been an attempt to write him off the show and turn TNG into a Riker show if the negotiations fell through.

Deep Space Nine has 3 that come to mind, but they're more character-centric.

Sisko poisoning the Maquis colony in "For the Uniform" seemed like a crazy way to resolve the conflict in the episode, and I've seen people argue about it online. But when it's coupled with Sisko's actions in "In the Pale Moonlight," it points to the part of Sisko's character where he's able to bend the rules for he considers the greater good. Whether people agree with his intentions or not, the result is that writers turned the lead character into a murderer. The final lines of the episode (i.e., So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it… Computer, erase that entire personal log.") leads to an interesting argument of whether Sisko can really live with it and that's why he's erasing evidence, or if his deleting the log points to the fact that on some level he can't and never will be ok with it.

Dukat's fate in "Sacrifice of the Angels" is something I thought was different, really good, and crazy when I first watched it. Because I thought it was the end of the character, and that basically we had watched the character's entire ego be destroyed over the course of 40 minutes.
 
Not the most crazy, but notable for me is the time Worf joined a puritanical sect of Risans in some terrorism via weather machine manipulation, and then we find out he pretty much “Of Mice and Men”d another kid while playing peewee soccer as a child.

Either of those things would be fairly bonkers, and them happening/coming up one right after another in a single episode of DS9 had an amplifying effect.

And Final Frontier has always felt pretty nuts to me, with Spock’s half brother being a religious zealot who hijacks the Enterprise so that Kirk can first tell off God, and then prove that God isn’t God, is fully bananas to me, and ‪‪I love it.
 
The most crazy thing that Star Trek (TOS) ever did was survive beyond an ignominious cancelation. 50+ years on and we have 13 movies, 3 animated spinoff shows, 8 spinoff shows... About 1000 hours of Star Trek spun out of these 79 episodes. For something that was dead in the water circa 1969, Star Trek is in rude health and the path it too to get here is fascinating and strange.
 
The USS Discovery going to the Mirror universe with its mushroom drive that rides space fungus mycelium threaded throughout the entire universe where they discovered that Michael Burnham's dead captain is both the Emperor and her mother, and she had built a ship that would've destroyed all life in the multiverse if they hadn't turned up at that moment to stop it.

That's my definition of insanity.
This sums up why I'm not a huge fan of Discovery. Also, Burnham is Spock's adopted sister. And her mother is a time traveler etc etc etc.
 
I've only heard about what happened to the Novelverse, but it sounds horrible for the fans who've been getting the books. I don't think there was any reason they couldn't have given it an ending without making it the end of all things.
 
The entire Star Trek universe being heavily implied to be in the imagination of an institutionalized author in the 1950s.


Establishing that the transporter can make you immortal, then never mentioning it again.

The OP's suggestion isn't so crazy for me, as it
isn't the Borg Borg, but the Cooperative "willing assimilation" group that Jurati/Queen started. Their members presumably have self determination.
 
Last edited:
The entire Star Trek universe being heavily implied to be in the imagination of an institutionalized author in the 1950s.

I have to admit that Far Beyond the Stars continues to intrigue me... I'm not sure if there's ever been another episode that attempted to deal with alternate-reality in such a way... outside the box for sure...
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top