The first episode of Star Trek debuted on September 8, 1966. Since then, the successful franchise spawned 13 movies, but Star Trek has seen most of its success on the smaller screen. By 2022, Star Trek will have spawned eight live-action series and three animated series. Watching every series of Star Trek would take over 600 hours, without including the movies.
Star Trek remains a beloved franchise because most of its hundreds of hours are extremely watchable. But like any large franchise, not every episode in Star Trek's history lives up to its standards. Some Star Trek episodes struggle with plot, while others have not aged well. Even the most devoted fan of Star Trek has to admit that some episodes are just weird.
9 DS9: Move Along Home Is Truly Puzzling
For Deep Space Nine, one of the worst offenders is Move Along Home, the tenth episode in the first season. When the crew of the station tries to make first contact with the Wadi, the aliens end up in the station's bar. They promptly realize that Quark has cheated them out of a fair win at a gambling table. In retaliation, the leader of the Wadi challenges Quark to play a complicated board game. In this game, the godlike Wadi place the station's senior crew in a deadly and confusing labyrinth.
To escape the game safely, the crew has to solve a number of puzzles – like having to mimic the songs and hand motions of a little girl playing hopscotch. In the end, the crew agrees to blame Quark for the weirdness of the experience and not the aliens who imprisoned them.
8 DS9: Let He Who Is Without Sin Tries To Add To Worf's Character, But Subtracts Instead
The Next Generation does a decent job explaining how rough Worf's childhood was, and DS9 goes into deeper detail. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work, and in its efforts to explain the impact of his traumatic upbringing, the series has Worf mistreat Jadzia badly. Worf's behavior is explained in Let He Who Is Without Sin, but the explanation doesn't justify his actions.
Jadzia and Worf's trip to the vacation planet, Risa, is a time for them to discuss their relationship problems. Worf is so jealous that he works with a cult to design a device to attack the planet's weather grid to drive visitors away. The true weirdness of the episode is as Jadzia forgives him and there are no ramifications for a Starfleet officer attacking a planet's weather grid.
7 TNG: Genesis Offers A Baffling Take On Evolution
In Genesis, the TNG crew turn into prehistoric creatures who spit green venom. Genesis has a completely inconsistent understanding of DNA. Spot the cat turns into a lizard, Worf into a prehistoric Klingon, and Troi into an amphibian. The technobabble explanation is that a synthetic t-cell is rewriting the crew's DNA. But Riker, Barclay and Picard are all the same species, so the molecular attack should have a somewhat similar effect on them. Instead, the episode gives us a series of different primates and then a giant spider.
Everyone is cured in the end, thanks to a crew member's amniotic fluid. Genesis' weirdness occurs as mutated Picard leads Worf on a chase through the corridors of the Enterprise while spraying Troi's scent to entice Worf into following him, definitely one of the most bizarre sequences in science fiction.
6 TOS: And The Children Shall Lead, A Bizarre Story About Possession and Murder
Although The Original Series has some classic episodes and well-crafted science-fiction plots, its third season isn't its strongest. In And The Children Shall Lead, the crew lands on a planet and discovers all of the adults have been murdered, and the surviving children seem unbothered.
The children summon a glowing being named Gorgan, who gives them special powers, including mind control. In the midst of this story, Spock discovers that the children are actually possessed by Gorgan. To break the hold Gorgan has, the crew plays back images of the children in happier times with their parents, immediately followed by images of the dead moms and dads. In the end, Gorgan is defeated and the children are ushered off into much-needed therapy.
5 Enterprise: These Are The Voyages To The Holodeck
The final episodes of TNG and DS9 are widely loved by long-term fans. Star Trek: Voyager sent the crew home, giving a glimpse of how they might live their lives once they returned to Earth. For Enterprise, These Are The Voyages brought very little of the satisfaction audience members expected.
Little time that is spent on the Enterprise crew, revealing that the characters haven't developed. Trip and T'Pol's relationship stalled, one of the most gifted engineers in Starfleet can think of no better plan other than to blow himself up and barely any of this crew mourns his death. It is a truly weird way to end the show.
4 TNG: Rascals Demonstrates Regression In Age And Plot
Transporter accidents are a fond tradition for Star Trek. In Rascals, Picard, Riker, Keiko and Guinan get turned into children after a transporter mishap. Their bodies regress in age and they still have their adult memories. Unfortunately, Rascals cannot decide if this means they should act like children or adults.
Keiko in the body of a twelve-year-old wants to resume her intimacy with her husband, Miles, who is horrified at the idea. Picard relieves himself of duty because Dr. Crusher warns him the accident could start to affect his mental abilities. These two serious plots are contrasted as Guinan and Ro go jump on beds to reclaim Ro's lost childhood. The haphazard approach to seriousness levels ruins any attempt at coherency, which makes Rascals odd at best.
3 TNG: Sub Rosa Goes Where Dr. Crusher's Grandmother Has Gone Before
Sub Rosa shows Dr. Crusher going through her late grandmother's things, and notes that her 100-year-old grandmother had been having an affair with a 34-year-old man. Sub Rosa reveals that the lover of Dr. Crusher's grandmother was a ghost. He tells Dr. Crusher he loved her grandmother, and now he loves her.
Dr. Crusher allows her curiosity to get the better of her and she tells Picard she wants to quit Starfleet and live on the planet to be close to her ghost lover. In the end, it is revealed that Dr. Crusher and her grandmother did not have a ghost lover, but rather an alien who needed the two women to light a special candle so that he could continue to exist – which is why he compelled them to fall in love with him.
2 TOS: Spock's Brain Demonstrates No Sign Of Intelligent Life
In Spock's Brain, an alien woman beams aboard the Enterprise and examines the entire crew's brains. She decides Spock's brain is the most valuable and takes it to her civilization, where it is known as The Controller. The Controller tells the Eymorg living underground everything they need to know, so that they remain childlike, yet more advanced than the brutal above ground Morg.
With only 24 hours to find Spock's brain, Kirk and McCoy take a remote-controlled brainless Spock with them to a war-torn planet to look for it. The Eymorg also have a giant helmet (known as The Teacher) that transfers all of the knowledge of their civilization into the mind of anyone who wears it. McCoy wears the helmet and gains the knowledge of how to put Spock's brain back into his body. Spock lives and the brain-nappers are offered the Federation's help in ending their war.
1 VOY: Threshold Mutates Any Coherent Plot
Stuck deep in the Delta Quadrant, the crew of Voyager are desperate to get home. In Threshold, Paris comes back to the ship, falls ill and dies. No worries, though, because he quickly comes back to life and mutates into a lizard.
He is a violent lizard – kidnapping Captain Janeway, stealing the shuttle, and running off on a warp 10 adventure. The captain also mutates into a lizard, and when the crew finds them again, they have successfully reproduced healthy lizard babies. Fortunately, the Doctor is able to reverse the mutation on Janeway and Paris. Paris certainly achieved his desire to go down in the history books, as this episode remains the weirdest in Trek's history.