WARNING: Spoilers are off.
- The early scene with the USS Kelvin where a crewmember gets sucked out of a hull breach, her screaming silenced when she ends up in the vacuum, she hits an object at the end and her body goes visibly numb.
- To further punctuate the scene, even the footage goes silent for a few brief moments.
- Flailing crewmembers being sucked into space seems to be the new continuity's equivalent of the Star Trek Shake.
- The Narada is about twenty miles long, hideously over-weaponed, and covered in blades and tentacles caused by uncontrollable Borg growths (if you accept Star Trek: Countdown as Canon). There is nothing accidental about the Narada's Nightmare Fuel.
- And remember, this thing is/was just a mining ship. What do the warships look like?
- The indistinct voices heard inside the Narada at one point.
- Everything about the Battle of Vulcan: Several Federation starships carrying graduating cadets obliterated and a whole planet with six billion Vulcans sucked into a black hole in less than an hour.
- Engineer Olson's death being pulled into the Narada's fiery drill beam completely incinerating him in less than a second.
- Nero tortures Captain Pike with a Centaurian slug, which is very similar to the Ceti eels from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. What's more terrifying than parasites being inserted into your ears? Parasites being inserted into your mouth.
- When Kirk finally rescues Pike, he has dried blood around his mouth—and it's blue.
- That Starfish Alien monster (called the hengrauggi, according to supplementary materials) on Delta Vega.
- Scotty being beamed inside the Enterprise's cooling system inside Engineering. Almost drowning and almost being turned into mincemeat.
- When Spock is choking Kirk to death for insulting his mother, itself already horrifying, there's a moment, just a moment, when there's a hint of a bloodthirsty smile on his face. It is creepy.
- And then you remember just what the Vulcans used to be like and why they adopted their logical stoicism. That's just a little bit of a Vulcan's unrestrained nature on display.
- Even in the midst of a berserk fury, Spock fights with a calculated efficiency, now married to a brutal ferocity. He effortlessly blocks Kirk's blows and counters with quick strikes to vulnerable spots, utterly incapacitating Kirk in a handful of strikes. An enraged Vulcan, three times as strong as a human, is terrifying. An enraged Vulcan who doesn't lose a speck of their formidable intellect and analytical thinking? Incalculably worse.
