Early Installment Weirdness / Star Trek

The Original Series

• The first season opening titles had William Shatner giving the "Space, the final frontier..." narration really fast, as if he was trying to finish before the Enterprise did its warp pass and the title appeared. As well, the intro didn't credit Gene Roddenberry as its creator and only credited William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. The second and third seasons would add DeForrest Kelley and add Roddenberry's name as creator. As well, the theme song was more subdued without the One-Woman Wail.
• In the early episodes, the Enterprise ran on lithium crystals (rather than fictional dilithium crystals) and the characters served under the United Earth Space Probe Agency rather than Starfleet. Before the United Federation of Planets was first mentioned, Federation bases were called "Earth bases", and they sometimes use the phrases "Space Command" or "Star Fleet Control" instead of "Star Fleet Command". It also takes some time to nail down the series's 23rd century setting: "The Squire of Gothos" suggested it was taking place in the 28th century. Both "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Space Seed" suggest a date in the late 22nd century. The only TOS episode that fixes a date of the mid-23rd century is "Miri", before The Wrath of Khan states that the events of that movie take place after the year 2283.
• It takes a couple of episodes at least to establish that Spock was half-human. In the second pilot, he referred to "one of [his] ancestors" having married an Earth woman, but didn't state outright that his mother was fully human. By the time of "The Corbomite Maneuver", it was established that his father married a human. He also displayed emotion on occasion in the early episodes, something the later Spock would almost never do openly... even as he once said "'Irritated?' Ah, I see, one of your Earth emotions." (He smiled as he said it, too.) In the episode "Charlie X", Spock smiles while he's with Lt. Uhura in the crew lounge. Naturally, this is well before the Vulcans' more complex relationship with emotion was known.
• In the first season episodes "The Corbomite Maneuver" and "This Side of Paradise", Spock refers to his father in the past tense, as does Kirk, as if he were dead. In the second season episode "Journey to Babel", we learn that Spock's father, Sarek of Vulcan, is very much alive, and reappears in The Next Generation.
• For parts of the first season, Spock is referred to as a "Vulcanian" rather than a "Vulcan".
• The earlier episodes (notably "The Cage" and "Where No Man Has Gone Before") have a very eerie, creepy mood. Much of the background music seems to be subdued and electronic (unlike the kitchy sixties era music that would become iconic in the rest of the series: the fight scene music from "The Gamesters of Triskelion" for example). There is little to no banter between the characters. This, of course was before McCoy was introduced and the core cast developed (Dr. Piper is the medical officer here played by Paul Fix). Scotty is a background character with few lines and no trademark character traits yet, Sulu is a physicist wearing a blue shirt and is not yet in his familiar helmsman role, and Uhura has not yet been introduced. Gary Mitchell and Lee Kelso are established as Kirk's close friends and Spock's mannerisms are not yet fully set in stone. Also, at this time, female Starfleet uniforms consisted of trousers instead of miniskirts. These early episodes occurred before the more hip era of the sixties started. (Roddenberry's vision was to explore themes more deeply in the manner of written sci-fi, and well-known sci-fi writers were commissioned for the early episodes, accounting for the variable tone. In the real world, networks were dismayed that their flagship show for color TV was a grey ship flying through black space; purple and green spotlights were thrown against the grey walls, and the campy tone was set for later.)
• "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is also weird for, besides the slow pace, the INCREDIBLY violent tone of the episode, even by TOS standards. Kirk and Spock spend much of the episode beating the hell out of the antagonist (a former buddy of Kirk's!), take turns toting a ginormous phaser rifle, then at the climax, Kirk stops just short of braining the antagonist with a rock, and ends the episode nursing a broken hand. WTF indeed! (In this episode Kirk's uniform top is yellow with a different collar; the exhaust pipes at the back of the ship's nacelles are arrays of smaller pipes; the phaser rifle is never seen again.)
• The Klingons of the original series bear no resemblance whatsoever to those of every other incarnation, including prequel Enterprise. This is the case not only in characterization— they were a Red Scare allegory instead of Proud Warrior Race Guys— but even physical appearance, in which they lacked the trademark forehead, making them Human Aliens. Their armor has also fluctuated from the original series forward. And there were no Trekkies fluent in Klingon when the original series ran, as the Klingon language didn't exist yet, except in reference (Klingons exclusively spoke English, and referred to their native language as "Klingonese"). The shift in physical characteristics would later be explained in Enterprise as being the result of a genetically engineered retrovirus. Sometime after TOS, the affected Klingons were returned to their original appearance.
• Star Trek: The Original Series started off as pure Wagon Train to the Stars with episodes focused on exploration and scientific theories especially in the early episodes, which often had themes similar to the film Forbidden Planet. The Enterprise was supposedly one of very few advanced "Starship-class" vehicles, with a nearly superhuman elite crew. About halfway through the first season, the episodes started featuring more Human Aliens and Rubber-Forehead Aliens engaged in galactic conflicts and diplomacy, parallel civilizations and other themes and elements more closely associated with Space Opera, incorporating elements from the unaired pilot "The Cage" which introduced, among other classics, the Green-Skinned Space Babe. Sort of a Subgenre Shift. And also a very odd example of this trope in that the early installment weirdness made the early aired show not only dissimilar to later aired episodes, but also very dissimilar to the unaired pilot, which featured mostly different characters, and somewhat more militaristic Starfleet. This would reappear later in mid-late Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spin-offs, as well as the film series featuring both crews, where it's clear that the Enterprise, though the flagship of the Fleet, is one of hundreds, possibly even thousands of vessels operating in the Alpha Quadrant.
• The idea that the Enterprise is the flagship is really only something that started with Star Trek: The Next Generation onwards. In the original series it was suggested that she is simply treated as one of 12 ships of her class in the fleet that are exploring where no man has gone before, and in the original series movies she was more often than not treated like an out-of-date ship that has been superseded by newer ones (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, for example, sees her being used as a mere training vessel attached to Starfleet Academy).
• The Klingon language was not developed. Klingon written characters were random and could not be translated.
• Both the Stardate and Warp Factor could exceed what was acceptable in the Star Trek: The Next Generation era. It was usually explained that the TOS time period used a different scale.
• McCoy makes an offhand reference to Vulcan being conquered in "The Conscience of the King", an idea which was quickly retconned.
• The episode "Turnabout Intruder" is not only jarring to modern audiences due to its apparent "women can't be starship captains" sexism but for the fact that female starship captains (no less competent for their gender) appear in later spin-offs, by the time of Star Trek: Enterprise effectively retconning the entire intended premise of the episode. It does help greatly that the only person making any of these claims is clearly insane and can be easily dismissed as such.
• In several early 1st season episodes, such as "Mudd's Women" and "The Corbomite Maneuver", communications officer Lieutenant Uhura wears a gold-colored (Command Division) uniform. Throughout the rest of the series, she wears a red (Operations Division) uniform.
• Contrary to the moneyless post-scarcity society portrayed from Next Generation onwards, more than one episode of the original series refers to Starfleet personnel being paid a salary, and on one occasion, Spock is able to cite to Kirk the amount of money Starfleet had spent on his own training. In "The Corbomite Maneuver", Kirk asks Scotty to analyze by speculation, and Scotty replies "I'd sell it if I had any", a reference to financial speculation, which is about as capitalistic an activity as you can imagine.
• The Original Series features far more Human Aliens than later series, which most often have Rubber-Forehead Aliens. It even has two planets that are duplicate Earths.
• The premise of "Assignment: Earth" is that the Enterprise has taken a trip into Earth's past to observe the late 60s. Time travel is never used so casually by Starfleet crews again.

The Next Generation

• In general, the show features a lot of weirdness in early episodes that often had to do with recycled plots from the original series. This was, of course, before it grew the beard.
• Characterization Marches On quite a bit from the early episodes.
  • While Picard was always very reserved, in early episodes he is aloof, cold and quick-tempered. He snaps at people and doesn't even bother to look at Riker when the man first arrives to take his post.
  • Riker is much more of a randy Kirk clone than the more rounded character he becomes. He Really Gets Around for the whole series, but he isn't a Kirk clone after the show grows the beard. Troi also calls him "Bill" a couple of times in the first season, which gets dropped in favor of "Will" later on.^note  Strangely enough, this minor detail might be pretty telling: most fans and critics believe that Riker (who was initially written as a clone of Kirk) was named "William" after William Shatner, who generally goes by "Bill". The showrunners may have chosen to give Riker the nickname "Will" (as opposed to "Bill") to distance him from his early roots as a Kirk clone.
  • Worf is more feral, often growling, losing his temper easily, and having to be calmed down by either Picard or Riker. He occasionally makes reference to not understanding human behavior and once reveals that he had a pet native to the Klingon homeworld, while later seasons establish that he was raised in a human family. The first season had him wearing a gold sash before he was given the more iconic silver and more metal baldric in Season 2.
  • Data frequently shows emotion. He grins elfishly at Wesley upon their first meeting and occasionally exchanges worried or amazed glances with others. Later episodes would establish that he has no emotions at all. His makeup is more mime-like, creating a sort of Unintentional Uncanny Valley effect. He also sometimes used contractions, until "Datalore" established that he can't. He is also referred to as the "science officer" early on, before later being referred to as the operations officer.
  • Wesley's first-season persona, a whiny, annoying child who often solved problems the trained officers couldn't, stuck in viewers' heads, and even after the character matured. On the flipside, the trained officers were often unable to solve the problems in these episodes not because they were explicitly less skilled than Wesley, but because they were often struck with a pig-headedness that made them unwilling to adapt or consider new ideas, the sorts of things which the main characters would largely all become famous for later on.
  • Troi's ability to sense emotions in others initially meant she herself felt the emotions, which could have the side-effect of incapacitating her (this was dropped after the pilot).
• Costumes changed over the course of the show. In the first season, some crew wore skirts, including a few on men in the background crew. In the pilot, Troi wears a short skirt and her hair down, making her look like a cheerleader. For the rest of the season, she wears a low-cut bodysuit and puts her hair up. Later seasons change her bodysuit slightly and have her wear her hair down again. Lieutenant Yar can be seen also wearing the skirt uniform in one episode. Dr. Crusher wears a helmet with a clear plastic eyepiece while operating in one very early episode. Wesley wears baggy knit sweaters throughout the first season.
• Worf and LaForge were not always department heads: they were both originally command officers (which, in TNG, wore red instead of gold, with gold reserved for operation officers). Worf would be promoted to head of security after Tasha Yar's untimely demise, while LaForge became head of engineering in the interim between the first and second seasons.
• There's no fixed head of engineering before LaForge receives that designation in the second season.
• The character of Miles O'Brien coalesces slowly over the first few seasons. He first appeared in "Encounter at Farpoint" just referred to as "conn", as he was controlling the ship. He wore the red command uniform and had the rank of ensign. He shows up again in the episode "Lonely Among Us" with no rank and donning the yellow operations uniform (The credits for the episode would list him as "First Security Officer"). At the start of the second season, he's now "Transporter Chief", still wearing yellow and with the rank of lieutenant. He wouldn't gain the surname "O'Brien" until the episode "Unnatural Selection" and become an Ascended Extra due to Writer Revolt. The episode "Family" would establish him as chief petty officer and give him the first name "Miles", but the pips he would wear would fluctuate through the rest of his time on TNG and halfway through DS9.
• In the pilot, Data's ops station and the conn station on the bridge are reversed from where they would familiarly be later on.
• Some sets are different. There are some different chairs on the bridge including the captain's own, some of the carpeting and wall colors are different to what they'd be later on, the briefing room doesn't feature information display screens at either end of the room, and in several of the earliest episodes there are additional corridors seen running through the middle of the engineering set. The engineering set also doesn't have the "pool table" in the middle until halfway through Season 1, and sets like Ten-Forward and the brig were not created until Season 2.
• The first Ferengi episode had them wildly hopping around the set like mad monkeys, and the pilot episode implied they ate people. Ferengi also had superhuman strength, and were unafraid of getting into physical altercations with the Enterprise crew. They also wore fur-covered togas and fur-covered boots over jumpsuits. Later seasons, and the later series as a whole, seems to ignore this, portraying them instead to be meek and weak cowards who prefer subterfuge and hired muscle in order to do their dirty work while wearing fancy outfits as a symbol of their wealth. Early episodes also showed Ferengi using gold in their dealings, while Deep Space Nine would establish that Ferengi see no actual value in gold beyond using it to contain the far more valuable liquid metal latinum because gold is easily replicated.
• Cardassians evolved their look greatly from their earliest appearances. They wear strange headgear in their first appearance that never shows up again. Their uniforms look like plate armor wrapped in brown leather rather than the sculpted black mesh it would eventually become. Physically, the Cardassians have brownish, more human flesh-toned skin rather than the ashy gray skin they eventually acquire. Gul Macet is also the only Cardassian to have facial hair.
• The Klingons are initially different. Early on they still use TOS-era ships. Khitomer is pronounced "Khitomar", and the Klingon homeworld is called "Kling" instead of the later Qo'nos. There is also an episode in which Wesley says the Klingons had joined the Federation, and when a Klingon is hailed on the main viewscreen, the symbols for both the Federation and Klingon Empire are displayed right next to each other.
• The policies of the Prime Directive had yet to be firmly established early in the series, so Picard and Co. often beamed down to planets with pre-warp civilizations that in later seasons would almost certainly have been protected by the Non-Interference clause of the Prime Directive.
• Holodecks:
  • The first episode showcased that Holodecks used replicators in part, so when Wesley fell in the water and was dragged out of the Holodeck, he was still dripping wet. Later episodes would firmly establish that Holomatter instantly dissolved when leaving the Holodeck. Granted, we see people eating on the Holodeck, but nothing prevents people from bringing in food from the outside (though this doesn't explain the "crumpets" Dr. Pulaski stuffed herself with in the season 2 Moriarty episode).
  • In the first season episode "The Big Goodbye", when a holodeck malfunction is fixed and the characters from Picard's Dixon Hill program find out they're holodeck characters, two of the bad guys leave the holodeck intending to loot the ship. They're able to exist outside the holodeck for about 10 seconds before slowly dematerializing. Later episodes established that holographic characters dematerialize instantly upon leaving the holodeck.
• When the Borg first appear in "Q Who", the presentation is much different from what we see later.
  • Borg produce no life signs (in "I Borg," life signs are identified from the crash site even before they know it's the Borg). The Borg pointedly have no interest in organic life at all, only in technology (assimilation is introduced later as a unique case with Picard, before being broadened/retconned into their single and solitary purpose).
  • The Borg ship is described as a completely undifferentiated construction (compare to Voyager's endless talk of central nexi and central plexi).
  • Q describes a Borg as "not a he, not a she," implying that Borg are gender-neutral (perhaps cause for a rude awakening for Picard when he was assimilated).
  • There's even "the Borg nursery," implying that, even if they aren't conceived in the typical way, Borg are produced and grown by other Borg. Once the assimilation concept took hold there was no need for Borg to be born. This was later retconned into "maturation chambers", where assimilated children and infants are artificially accelerated to adulthood over the course of a couple of weeks. Star Trek: Voyager had an episode where five Borg children were brought onboard the ship - one of them was a baby, and in all cases, the assimilation was incomplete (early in the episode, Seven of Nine finds a man who died in the process of being assimilated because the children's nanoprobes weren't fully developed). The Seven of Nine character is actually a deconstruction of the Unfortunate Implications, as she was assimilated as a child; other Borg reclaimed from assimilation (including Picard and the entirety of Unimatrix Zero from Voyager), while they certainly would have a serious case of PTSD, generally do not exhibit such difficulty returning to normal life. Decades later, Lower Decks would later feature the maturation chambers and Borg babies again.
• Spot, Data's cat, initially had longer fur and was darker in colour.
• The Trill who appear in "The Host" are radically different from how they appear in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, both physically and culturally.
  • In "The Host" they are depicted as Rubber-Forehead Aliens rather than the familiar spots - a change made specifically because DS9's producers didn't like the rubber forehead look on Terry Farrell.
  • As a species, they are presented as almost completely unfamiliar to the Federation, to the point that no one even knows they are two creatures conjoined, while in DS9, they remain fairly uncommon but are far from unknown, and are suggested to be at minimum longtime Federation allies and possibly even Federation members (and one of them helped broker the peace with the Klingons in Kirk's era). The Expanded Universe tries to square this by suggesting the Trill were long-time Federation members, but had various reasons for keeping their symbiotic nature secret (which fits with DS9's portrayal of the Symbiosis Commission as prone to secrecy and cover-ups even when dealing with other Trill).
  • The relationship between the host and symbiont is depicted completely differently. In TNG, the Trill is simply a Puppeteer Parasite and always the same person no matter what body it's in, replacing the personality of the host body completely. In DS9, Trill form a unified personality with its host, becoming a new person. Each time a Trill moves to a new host, it keeps the accumulated wisdom and experience from all its previous lives.
  • Because there's no synthesis of personalities, there's no suggestion that Trill change their names when they transition to a new host, whereas DS9, Trill keep their given name and replace the family name with the name of the symbiont.
  • It wouldn't be until DS9 that the idea that Trill maintaining romantic relationships after switching hosts is taboo would be developd, as Odan in TNG is more than happy to hit on Beverly no matter what body it's in.
  • A plot point in "The Host" is that Trill cannot use transporters, which can kill the symbiont because the system's biofilters would detect the symbiont as a parasite and try to remove it - specifically because the Federation is not aware of the host/symbiont relationship.
• In "Ensign Ro", the plural of "Bajoran" was "Bajora". It's "Bajorans" in all later episodes, and all of Deep Space Nine.
• Two in "The Measure Of A Man":
  • While the senior staff playing poker would become a regular fixture of the show, O'Brien would not be shown at the table again.
  • The show is still a little sketchy on the economics of the Federation. While the season one finale established that humanity no longer prizes the acquisition of wealth, it's later established that money literally doesn't exist in the Federation. This makes it weird for Louvois's Running Gag of who pays for their dinner (but there are still credits, which they might use to "pay" for things- it isn't clear how this works though).

Deep Space Nine

• Rom changed quite dramatically from the first season - In "Babel", Odo says Rom is an idiot who couldn't fix a bent straw, in "A Man Alone", Rom is Quark's sexist brother and Nog's domineering father and in "The Nagus", Rom outright tries to murder Quark so that he can inherit the bar. This is very different from the jittery maintenance engineer who supports women's rights and his son's decision to enter Starfleet in later seasons.
• Dax has surprisingly little screentime or character development in the first season, with her role being mostly limited to filling in bits of Sisko's backstory and being an object of lust for Bashir. Conversely, Jake and Nog seem like a Spotlight-Stealing Squad at times, with nearly every B-story from the season revolving around one or both of them. In latter seasons Dax would have a much bigger role, while Jake was slowly Demoted to Extra, and Nog fell more in line with the other recurring characters in terms of screentime.
  • In the first season, Dax's characterization more or less boiled down to "old man in a young woman's body", with a relatively subdued tone of voice, limited animation in her body movements, and much more reference to her centuries of life experience adding up her being a font of wisdom. It wasn't until partway through the second season that the writers saw that this approach wasn't working and Jadzia became a much more active, animated character who believably behaved as a young woman would be expected to, with her past Trill life experience and memories taken more as a separate resource than something that defines her. This is justified in-universe, as it was established that she was only recently joined to the Dax symbiote perhaps a year or two before the series began, and it can take a long time for a symbiote and its host to come into a new equilibrium. In particular, she seems much more comfortable with herself following her zhian'tara ritual in "Facets."
• While the Trill in general had been heavily reworked from TNG, there was still some cultural aspects that hadn't been completely nailed down - several early episodes refer to them as the "Trills", despite later the word "Trill" being used both singular and plural. One character refers to the "Trillian government", the only time that term is used.
• Doctor Bashir spends most of the first season filling the role of the series Ensign Newbie: A young, naive wide-eyed newcomer who managed to offend Kira with his description of the medical billet on DS9 as a wilderness, remote frontier posting. In addition, he spends an inordinate amount of time hitting on Jadzia even when she refuses his advances. It isn't until well into the second season that he sheds his flighty persona and is more defined by his sense of duty and medical responsibility.
• Odo's face makeup in his first couple appearances give him a much more gaunt, textured appearance. By midway through the first season, it had settled on the unnaturally smooth, rounded Uncanny Valley look that he'd bear for the remainder of the series.
• The first two or three seasons all feel very different from the rest. The first two seasons don't have the Defiant, and many seem like TNG episodes, which felt slower and more out of place because they would either involve two or three crew members on a Runabout encountering a new planet, or it would have the "problem of the week" come to the station, rather than a starship coming to it. Sisko isn't bald and doesn't wear a beard, and the Dominion isn't around at all.
• A few early episodes have Sisko talking about his father in the past tense as if he's dead, even mentioning at one point how he watched the old man grow weaker and weaker. However, later episodes feature his father, Joseph, very much alive and in good enough health to even visit the station.
• One early episode had someone accept a payment of gold-pressed latinum in weight (as in "pounds of gold-pressed latinum"). Later episodes would institute the standardized denominations of slips, strips, bars, and bricks.
• Ketracel-White was not yet conceived when the Jem'hadar was introduced in their self-titled second-season finale. It wouldn't be until later that their distinctive Ketracel-White-feeding neck-tubes and chemical dependence were shown. In addition, the Vorta Eris in that episode is shown to possess telekinetic abilities. No other Vorta would have such abilities, and Word of God would later confirm that she was the only one to have them.
• In the first episode, "Emissary", O'Brien implies that Kira's grumpiness is because she's a Bajoran woman, and her actress initially thought so too. At that point, the only other Bajoran woman known was Ro Laren, for whom Kira was created as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute, who was also grumpy. However, later episodes would introduce Kai Opaka, Kai Winn, and Leeta, who were all Bajoran women yet had relatively positive attitudes, suggesting that Ro and Kira just shared a personality trait.
  • In their first couple of appearances, the Prophets are depicted as Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who barely even comprehend the concept of corporeal life, and don't particularly like what they do understand. Likely due to concerns that this made them too much like the Q, they were later rewritten into Benevolent Precursors who had been carefully guiding the development of Bajoran society, and even Sisko's conception. This one was at least reconcilable: they experience time in a non-linear fashion, so it was Sisko who inspired them to become Benevolent Precursors... millennia in our relative past... and then arrange for Sisko to come and teach. It does make a kind of sense.
• Unlike other series where he showed up frequently, Q himself only shows up once in the first season and never shows up again. According to John de Lancie, he didn't like how the character was written on DS9 and requested not to be in any other episodes of the show because of it.

Voyager

• A number of plot points from the pilot "Caretaker" did not survive into the series proper. The first half of the episode (co-written by Michael Piller, who also wrote DS9's pilot) suggests a much darker show than what actually made it to air:
  • Neelix is established as a Con Man (in the vein of Quark) who deceives Voyager to save Kes and then screws over the local Kazon tribe on the deal they made, including taking the Kazon Maje hostage. Afterwards, Neelix is never portrayed as anything other than a harmless goofball.
  • Tom Paris is treated like a pariah by the crew of Voyager and even among the Maquis, with only Harry Kim to call a friend. This was quickly papered over by even the second episode, "Time and Again."
  • B'Elanna was a hair's breadth away from killing Janeway after the Captain gave the order to destroy the Array. Immediately after, she became Janeway´s staunchest advocate and is ready to pummel anyone who questions her leadership.
  • The scarcity of water is a plot point in the pilot, making it seem important, but it never comes up again.
  • Chakotay is depicted as being slightly older, with visibly graying hair.
  • The crew should mention how Janeway destroyed the Array and shifted the balance of power in the Quadrant forever each time she gets out the rulebook.
  • Janeway pronounces "Kazon" with a hard "kh" sound ("KHazon"), and also seems to put an extra syllable in the second half of the name, so we get "KHazon-Ogala? Who are the KHazon-Ogala?" Neither Janeway nor anyone else uses this pronunciation ever again.
  • Tuvok wears the rank insignia of a Lieutenant Commander while he is still a Lieutenant. He later gets promoted. (This one is particularly weird, given that the ranks were already clearly laid out on The Next Generation.)
• Kes's hair is a pretty bad wig through much of the first season. It starts to look more natural in the latter episodes.
• In the first season episode "State of Flux", Tuvok is able to identify a Kazon-Nistrim ship based on the silhouette of its hull design, not any distinctive colors or markings. It would later be revealed that the Kazon neither designed nor built their own ships — they stole them from the Trabe — so there's no way the design specs could be specific to any one sect.
• Sometimes the ship is referred to as "the Voyager" in the first season, while later episodes generally refer to the ship as "Voyager" or "the starship Voyager".

Enterprise

• "Broken Bow" features Enterprise using a blaster-like pulse weapon against the Suliban. It would never be seen again, with the ship's armaments being phase cannon and spatial torpedoes, and later on, photonic torpedoes.
• Similar to the Voyager example above, a couple of early episodes would have characters referring to their ship as "the Enterprise". Besides one mention in "The Augments" no one would subsequently refer to Enterprise with the definite article.
• In "The Andorian Incident", a member of Malcolm's security team is shot twice by an Andorian rifle and survives. It would later be established that Andorian weapons don't have a stun setting.
• "Bound" introduces the idea that female Orions have pheromones that control males and make other females feel ill. Despite this, this subsequently rarely comes up in the franchise: later episodes in the same season Enterprise depict Orion women serving on the Mirror Universe Enterprise with no apparent issue, and in Star Trek (2009), Uhura has a female Orion roommate who obviously doesn't give her a headache and while she sleeps with Kirk, doesn't appear to exert any unusual influence over him. Star Trek: Discovery features an Orion Big Bad in Season 3, Osyraa, who does not show any signs of being able to do this at all. Lower Decks splits the difference by revealing that saying not all Orion women emitted or utilized such pheromones, nor were all Orion women even capable of doing so (with the Orion officer Tendi getting annoyed at the stereotype that all Orion females have this ability).
• A minor one, but in the show's second episode, "Fight or Flight", T'Pol calls Hoshi by her first name, whereas in all later episodes, she calls her "Ensign Sato".

Discovery

• In Season 1, Saru describes his home planet of Kaminar as a Death World with no food web: one is either predator or prey, and the Kelpiens are constantly being hunted by apex predators, hence their Super Strength and Super Speed. Season 2 retcons this into a fairly different situation: Kaminar is an idyllic world where the Kelpiens live in total harmony with their environment, but are ritualistically culled by the technologically-superior Ba'ul species when they begin a biological process called vahar'ai.
• In the first season's "Choose Your Pain,” an original Klingon design is described as being a "D7-class battle cruiser,” evidently meant to be a retcon of the classic TOS design. In Season 2's "Point of Light,” however, the classic D7 is introduced as a brand new model of Klingon warship, with no mention whatsoever of the one seen in season one. (According to source material, the ship from Season 1 is actually a Sech-class, and was erroneously identified In-Universe as a D7.)

Other Series

• Star Trek: The Animated Series:
  • "The Slaver Weapon" introduces the Kzinti, who have apparently been at war with the Federation for over 200 years, a timeframe that seems patently absurd given subsequently-established canon (Star Trek: First Contact establishes that the Federation itself has barely existed for 200 years in Kirk's era).
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • The pilot episode "Second Contact" is significantly faster and more frenetic than later ones, with the characters often shouting their lines and over-talking each other — even during the normal dialog sequences — and the humor in general having a Denser and Wackier feel. The pacing in future episodes would still be faster compared with the live-action shows (mostly because its episodes are typically half the length), but not to nearly the same extent as here.
  • Mariner's first scene is drunkingly attacking Boimler with a bat'leth, chopping a chunk out of his leg. Later episodes Mariner would be energetic and rush into danger but extremely protective of her friends, and would take actually hurting them seriously. Her relationship with Boimler was also that of a domineering personality against an Extreme Doormat but evolves more into a Military Maverick vs By-the-Book Cop, helped through Boimler's Character Development making him more seasoned and assertive.
  • The first season shows Captain Freeman and the rest of the bridge crew to be dismissive and even cruel to the Beta Shifters, with the first episode having Freeman cheer Dr. T'Ana for creating an antidote for a rage virus, though Boimler had found it and his contribution was ignored. Later episodes would tone this down and focus more on the senior officers servicing as mentors for the Beta Shifters.