Worst 100 Most Overused Star Trek Episode Plots

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These are the 100 Most Overused Star Trek Episode Plots ever used repeatedly by the writers of Star Trek. I blame unoriginality, but others blame Star Trek: Enterprise. It's your choice.

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103. Someone gets disfigured/altered/sick and then wastes the next forty minutes until they remember they can use the transporter to cure anything unless they are not important and die.

102. Worf gets the fuck beaten out of him.

101. Tribbles.

100. The crew all fall into a deep sleep caused by some alien or another, all except one senior officer who is mysteriously unaffected (probably because they’re the stereotypical "Mary-Sue" type character and they’re so perfect, yaddy-yaddy-yada…), who then wakes up the others and saves the day.

99. Some kind of transporter accident happens where a crew member becomes a ghost or two crew members merge to form a much more likeable character, but then have to revert back, unfortunately.

98. A selection of junior officers step into the limelight for just one episode and you realise how interesting they could be. (They’re never seen again.)

97. Wesley Crusher saves the day.

96. One of the senior officers with absolutely no command experience or talent is put into a position where they must control the ship. At first they think they’re totally incapable, but after some clever plot devices and a pinch of good luck they’re ready to change their holomatrix to include command subroutines, reroute the plasma conduits to the slushy machine, or to somehow become an all-around qualified commanding officer who won’t stop annoying the Captain until they’re given another shot at the job. And another. And another.

95. The lowest ranking officer is put in charge of the night shift where nothing actually happens apart from the dimming of the lights in order to tell them it’s night time. (Sometimes they suddenly think they’ve got what it takes to be Captain until something interesting actually happens and they call the real Captain (or other main character) to the bridge.)

94. A trusted friend of one of the senior officers is welcomed aboard the ship, but secretly has an ulterior motive and sets about stealing/sleeping with/poisoning something or other. They are found out by their friend, and their friendship is quickly terminated after at least one cliché combination is worked into the dialogue. (Usually: “I thought I could trust you!” followed by “It won’t happen again, I promise.”)

93. A naïve member of the crew, usually the lowest-ranking senior officer, meets a seemingly charming alien of the opposite sex, but is utterly distraught when the alien betrays them in some evil way or another. Another lesson learnt.

92. A member of the crew is unknowingly impregnated by a strange alien. The pregnancy obviously doesn’t last nine months like a human pregnancy because they’ve only got forty minutes to tie everything up nicely! It NEVER looks cute.

91. A member of the crew, other than the Captain, ignores Starfleet rules and has sex with an alien, catching a disease in the process. The Chief Medical Officer turns round and says: “I told you so!” Said character looks sheepish.

90. The Captain has sex with an alien without any side-effects whatsoever. The alien isn’t who they thought they were, however, and the Captain ends up being “married to their vessel” and never calls them again. (Except for Captain Sisko, who couldn’t possibly be married to a whole stationary space station = Kassidy Yates.)

89. The Captain has a flirtatious moment with the most senior officer of the opposite sex, but they agree to remain “just good friends”. (Funnily enough, you would think that this would lead to #90, but there is NEVER a connection.)

88. Two random members of the senior staff get it on after many episodes full of sexual tension. Everyone on the ship, including alien visitors/intruders/dignitaries/plants, realise that the two officers have the hots for each other long in advance of the characters themselves.

87. A member of the crew is stuck in some kind of time warp where they’re forced to experience random events of their life.

86. The crew take some much-needed shore leave, but still end up having to solve some mystery or another. Zoiks Scoob!

85. The Captain drinks too much coffee/Earl-Grey tea/Jesus Juice and becomes ill.

75. Somebody screws up and the ship becomes helpless and they spend the whole episode trying to fix the problem before the end of the episode and the problem gets catastrophically worse until somebody has an epiphany about untried theoretical technology (of which there are available parts lying around somewhere for) and fixes it.

74. The crew come across an abandoned vessel/space station and try to work out what happened to the missing inhabitants. (Dead, that's what.)

73. The crew come across another Starfleet vessel with a crew of questionable morals. They expose them and that’s that. How could a Starfleet officer be so evil?

72. The crew come across another Starfleet vessel lost in time and help them to get back to where they came from. No one ever mentions them and they never appear in the series again.

71. The resident crew member searching to be more human demonstrates some aspect of humanity.

70. The resident crew member searching to be more human has the Captain fight for their rights to be classed as “remotely human”.

69. A Vulcan onboard experiences the Pon Farr and won’t talk about it... to anyone... at all. “Leave me alone! We do not discuss it with off-worlders.”

68. The crew must infiltrate a pre-warp society in order to complete a mission, or simply to find something an idiot senior officer left behind, but are discovered and try to undo the damage that they’ve done. Despite the blatant deviation from the Prime Directive, they hardly ever receive a Court Martial or a slap on the wrist.

67. The Captain goes that one step too far and sticks his/her nose in to a battle between two individual species and must justify themselves to Starfleet Command. Nothing really happens.

66.5 The captain tells an entire worlds population and/or ruling class that their entire belief system, morality, code of laws and/or sexual practices are wrong. (Just say no to cloning.)

66. The crew end up trapped in Nazi Germany/Alternative Reality Alien Nazi Germany and must beat off SS Officers/Nazi Aliens to return to their own reality.

65. The crew encounters some random ass space anomaly that violates the laws of physics and the space-time continuum. One member of the senior staff saves the day by deciding to either repolorize the shields, or send a tachyon beam through the main deflector dish.

64. The episode starts out with [insert bad guy of the week] who gets easily apprehended by the collective effort of the senior staff. (Usually the resident Vulcan will use the Vulcan neck pinch.) Then, while the senior staff grapples with the moral dilemma of holding the bad guy, he/she/robot/hologram somehow brakes out the brig and then over powers security. (I mean come on, Starfleet has the worse security out of all sci-fi shows. They might as well hire storm troopers as mercenaries.) Then of course the senior staff saves the day and the episode ends with a witty one liner as the ship jumps to warp.

38. The crew gets a visit from Doctor Who in his TARDIS and wonder what the hell is going on.

37. A member of the crew wakes up in the past and thinks the past ‘x’ months/years have been a lie until that niggling feeling inside of them becomes to strong and they work out they’re in a holographic simulation run by aliens.

36. A member of the crew wakes up in the future and finds everything has changed until that niggling feeling inside of them becomes to strong and they work out they’re in a holographic simulation run by aliens.

35. A member of the crew wakes up in the future where everything has been destroyed and there’s no way back until the smart-alec that brought them there turns up and magically finds a way to create new technology to get them home.

34. A human member of the crew finds out they’re actually an alien and are embraced by other members of their new race, only to discover they’re not actually an alien and the alien race made it up.

33. Several main characters and one never-before seen bridge officer beam down to the planet, and everyone treats the newbie like he's as good as any of them, and in the end it turns out he's an alien spy who secretly wanted them all dead. They defeat him anyway, escape, and no one seems to care that their old 'friend' will never be seen again.

32. One or several members of the senior staff travel to Risa to take a break from the crises that happen every week on their ship, even though every time a crew member goes to Risa, something bad happens (except for Hoshi. What a whore! I bet she has almost as many alien STDs as Kirk!)

25. A blurry fuzz of light flies through the wall of the ship and controls/infects/impregnates one or more members of the crew (usually including the guest star). Though the captain attempts to get rid of it, the fuzzball manages to stay a step ahead of him until thirty seconds before it's diabolical scene is completed, when the captain convinces it to leave because of some moral issue it didn't originally care about.

24. The ship gets stuck in some sort of anomaly, the captain orders the engines to be put on full blast, causing the engines to break down. Then the crew spends the rest of the episode trying to get out of the anomaly, which would take only 5 minutes if their engines were still working. For some reason they never add "if your ship gets stuck in an anomaly, do not wreck the engines trying to muscle your way out, you stupid douche!" to Starfleet Regulations.

23. The captain meets his/her childhood hero (usually someone from the 20th century or before) and gets all weepy when the historical figure ends up dead or left behind - despite being an illusion or hologram to start with.

15. The subplot where Kirk refuses to acknowledge the obvious sexual tension between himself and Spock.

13. The Captain and resident Vulcan raise the issue of “logic vs. emotion”. It turns out that an amalgamation of the two saves the day, and they have new-found respect for one-another, even if the Vulcan doesn’t show it.

12. The holodeck fucks up. Again. NB: one would have thought that the safety-protocols should always be the last thing to malfunction if the Holodeck goes wrong, but no-one ever seems to notice or report this rather obvious Health & Safety Issue.

11. A highly robotic member of the crew learns to develop an individual personality.

10. Most of the senior officers are stuck in the holodeck and must play out the programme for them to be set free.

9. A member of the crew develops a terminal illness, but it saved at the last minute by ground-breaking medical advances made by the ship’s CMO (Chief Medical Officer), who is never recognised for their achievements (or is, but never actually wins anything).

8. Q comes aboard the ship talking with Picard, or about Picard, and has the power to solve all the crew’s problems but just annoys the hell out of everyone.

7. They encounter the Borg who assimilates ‘x’ member(s) of the crew, but are eventually defeated by a pathogen.

6. An alien member of the crew must decide between their loyalty to their Captain and their heritage.

5. The resident android/hologram/Vulcan is given an emotion chip/subroutines/a life and learns what it’s like to be human, before choosing to reject the changes, but call upon them in a later episode. (They NEVER play like a little kid.)

4. Two senior officers take a shuttle to investigate a seemingly harmless spatial anomaly and crash land on a planet, having to wait three days for the crew to rescue them. They get to know the pre-warp inhabitants during their stay and/or go completely insane.

3. The Captain and First Officer take a shuttle to investigate a seemingly harmless spatial anomaly and crash land on a planet, having to wait three days for the crew to rescue them. They get to know the pre-warp inhabitants during their stay and tell them their entire belief system, morality, code of laws and/or sexual practices are wrong.

2. The crew are sent back to the late 20th century and must find a way to get home. Using common tools found in the area. Making future technology like MacGyver. (Usually set in Los Angeles or Pepperland).

1. The ship is sent thousands of light years from Earth by a strange alien entity. Male Captains plead with the entity until some kind of lesson has been learned, and the ship returns home within forty minutes. Female Captains destroy the entity so that it can’t ruin any other peoples’ lives and spend the next seventy years trying to get home.

0. Grues invade the ship and prepare to viciously devour Mr. Spock, but then due to the most recent infestation of Grue-eating Tribbles they all flee into space where they are snap-frozen dead.

-1. All the crew time-travel back into the 1960s, where they take hallucinogens and turn into Blue Meanies.

-2. The Transporter accidentally creates a duplicate character who is more likeable than the original. Damn writers keep the original.

-3. The Transporter fucks up (again) and sends somebody to the mirror universe, which is more interesting than the regular Star Trek universe.