This... thing is from the first episode, by the way.
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Season One
- The shapeshifting alien that sucked the salt out of the victim's body. That thing has literally given people nightmares. And it was the very first episode to air!
- One of the scariest scenes in the episode is the attack on Kirk at the end. Now aware of what the alien is, Kirk comes into the room with a phaser and some salt crystals for bait. The alien, still in character as Nancy, plays on McCoy's emotions and gets him to defend her. While the two are struggling, "Nancy" seizes and gulps down the salt — and, now stronger and hungry for more, near-instantly paralyzes Kirk to continue sucking out his electrolytes. McCoy just stands there staring while the attack happens. When Spock comes to the rescue, he's unable to convince the doctor to shoot, or to keep the creature from belting him against the wall and going after Kirk again. Finally, as the alien places its hands on his face to finish its meal, the captain starts to scream in pain and/or fear, which becomes even scarier in hindsight given that Kirk undergoes multiple torturous situations throughout the series while barely making a sound. Luckily, this finally breaks McCoy's Shape Shifter Guilt Trip and he shoots it.
- Something about how Dr. Crater says that Nancy—or the creature, who can tell at this point?—lives in his dreams, walking and singing there, is extremely eerie.
- Charlie X removing a girl's face (along, it is implied, with those of other crew members) leaving the now blind, featureless girl to claw at the wall—at least until she dies of asphyxiation. Worse, the transformation doesn't prevent the sound of sobbing. And what did they do to warrant this punishment? They were laughing among themselves when he happened to walk by.
- Charlie X himself. He can age you, turn you into an iguana or leave your face quite blank, among other disturbing things. But that doesn't really do him justice. An Enfant Terrible Reality Warper Stalker with a Crush Mind Rapist.
- The aliens who gave him his powers and apparently raised him. They're apparently so creepy that Charlie himself is frightened of them. You know, the same reality warper who just spent the whole episode swaggering about invincibly, smugly confident in his own superiority, and now he's begging the same people he was just bullying not to let them take him away. Then the way his last plea of "I wanna stay" echoes when they teleport him off the ship...
- The music that plays when the Thasians show up does not help, and it gets replayed through the series when things get seriously spooky.
- For female viewers especially, Charlie's utter obsession with Janice and refusal to take no for an answer, going as far as to enter her private quarters.
- Gary Mitchell from "Where No Man Has Gone Before", especially the part where Kirk and Spock are monitoring him reading through the ship's library in minutes flat and he turns and stares at them with his creepy, silver eyes. Then there are his powers, being able to make an oasis in a barren wasteland, and wanting to use said powers to make himself a god.
- Not only is he reading fast, he's reading faster and faster each second. Eloquent visualization of Sulu's explanation of his power increasing exponentially. "Take a penny, double it every day" indeed.
- Kirk's evil duplicate, especially the scene where he tries to force himself on Yeoman Rand and stomps on a crewman for trying to stop him. It's even worse knowing that Grace Lee Whitney was later sexually assaulted by one of the producers.
- In a truly effective bit of Narm Charm, Evil Kirk's hammy ravings make him come across as genuinely unhinged and thus actually kind of scary.
- The close-up on his face during his Villainous Breakdown, just...
What Are Little Girls Made Of?
- Ruk, played by Ted "Lurch" Cassidy. Imagine an extremely intimidating giant who is extremely strong and yet also moves with such deadly grace that he can grab you long before you can react. Weirdly, his clothing adds to the horror. It's utterly bizarre to see a ruthless android casually murder Red Shirts while dressed in something
your grandmother might wear to bed. - The nightmarish ending of the episode also counts: the Andrea-bot, wielding a laser pistol, utterly at odds with her programming—unsure of whether to love or to kill, embraces her creator, Android!Dr. Korby, prompting him to pull the trigger, disintegrating them both. Kirk and Chapel look on in horror, as do we.
- These children have been left without adult guidance for centuries. No one to calm their fears, or to show them how to survive as the infrastructure around them crumbled and decayed. No one to protect smaller children from bigger children who would exploit and abuse them. Infants starve to death as woefully-unprepared pre-adolescents attempt to care for them; these children in turn must deal with the trauma of watching their younger brothers and sisters die despite (or perhaps even because) of their best efforts. Puberty and adolescence becomes not a time of growth and new experiences, but a harbinger of death. The novelization makes it clear that the children face starvation as the preserved food they'd been scavenging from the ruins runs out. If the Enterprise had arrived just a few weeks later, the entire population of the planet would have succumbed to famine. Once these children do finally grow up, they face a lifetime of psychological trauma and dislocation.
- The Neural Neutralizer. The device was originally intended to cure profound mental illnesses, but one scientist decided to make a few..."minor adjustments". Not only does it inflict as much pain as the agony booth, but the operator can make changes to a patient's personality and memories. In the off-chance someone taps into his or her true self, they are inflicted with intense pain, as shown by poor Dr. Van Gelder. Probably the worst part is when a person is in the chamber with the device at full blast and no operator present...Kirk: Can you imagine a mind... emptied by that thing?
- What Helen and the Doctor use it for when it’s Kirk’s turn, Helen puts it into his mind that they had a one night stand (the script said he just flirted with her, accidentally thinking she was a visitor), which is bad enough, but the doctor makes it worse, making Kirk think he’s in love with Helen. He stays shaken up about it at the end.
- After Kirk shows Heroic Willpower in not dropping his communicator and alerting the Enterprise, Adams increases the intensity, reducing him to sobbing from the pain while Noel screams.
- Balok. Both as young Clint Howard with that adult voice and the alien dummy he pretended to be were scary. The latter even more so because they put that image at the end of every closing credits: you had to see it if you watched every episode from the second season on!
- The rather nasty state that Christopher Pike is in: A very deep burn on the right side of his face, pale skin and hair due to delta radiation poisoning, his face stuck in a permanent zombie-like expression, bound to the 23rd-century equivalent of a wheelchair, and, despite presumably having the full capacity to think, inability to communicate with anything besides one beep for yes, two beeps for no. No wonder he chooses to retire in a world of illusions in the next episode.
- Add to it the fact that he is aware of what Spock is planning and its consequences for the Vulcan. The penalty for the crime Spock is about to commit is death. If Pike is anything like his Kelvin Timeline version, his guilt and horror at seeing his protegee take such a risk for him...
- Lenore's Sanity Slippage, as she really does believe she's doing the right thing by killing the survivors of her father's massacre, when he's horrified and never wanted blood on her hands too.
- Everything about the massacre of Tarsus IV. The thousands of lives lost, the fact that it turned out to be All for Nothing, the idea that a crazy eugenicist bastard like Kodos would be in charge of a Federation colony in the first place...
- The revelation of the Romulans' superweapon which can implode cast rodinium and make it like brittle plaster. Definitely this effect on our crew, if not the audience.
- Though not clearly explained in-episode, the "Festival" is basically the sole time of the year that everyone on the planet gets to unleash their repressed emotions and desires. The result is utter pandemonium for 12 whole hours, resulting in the street being thrashed by the people, who are more akin to a mindless frenzied mob than their eerily-calm-if-friendly demeanor from earlier... and that's just the stuff we see. One poor girl was implicitly assaulted - or worse - and is in hysterics the next morning; not even Landru's influence can keep her calm. The situation isn't dissimilar to that of the The Purge... note
- It's especially frightening to consider just how many women on the planet might have been impregnated against their will during "Festivals", and how many people on the planet were conceived due to rape over the thousands of years Landru ruled Beta III.
- Khan Noonien Singh. Granted, he would get much worse in the second Star Trek film, but even in his introductory episode, "Space Seed", the man was frightening. During his attempt to take over the Enterprise, he makes it clear to Kirk that he isn't screwing around by locking Kirk, Spock, and Uhura in the bridge and shutting off Life Support there in order to get them and the crew to surrender. When that doesn't work, he forces them to watch each other die, one by one, via suffocation in Sick Bay's decompression chamber.
- Nobody deserves the hell that Khan and his followers were forced to endure between "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan. How many people were attacked by the Ceti Eel before they figured out what was happening? Oh, right:
- Khan: It killed twenty of my people... including my beloved wife.
- The people just walk into the disintegration chambers, like they're off to work.
- The Forever War between Eminiar and Vendikar. Anan talks about how the war has allowed both planets to avoid destroying each other. Yet it's clear this has done nothing to avoid the horror of the war between the two planets by allowing it to keep going for hundreds of years, with both planets viewing deaths as nothing but figures on paper.
- The fact that both planets will drag visitors into their war. The Enterprise was destroyed in a simulated attack, so Anan decrees its crew are to be executed. Easy to see what happened to the last ship that approached the planet and why the area is considered too dangerous.
- Kirk threatens to have the Enterprise carry out General Order 24. We don't know if he was bluffing, but the fact that the supposedly idealistic United Federation of Planets might even have a procedure for wiping out all life on a planet speaks volumes about a darker side to it.
- The Horta: imagine a giant pizza out to kill you — one armed with acid that can melt through solid rock in a matter of seconds. No wonder Spock panicked when he realized Kirk was alone with it.
- The two Lazaruses being doomed to forever fight each other in between the two universes.
The City on the Edge of Forever
- McCoy during his injection-induced paranoia; he's wild, insane, and irrational, and entirely unable to recognize former friends. But we also see he's very good at stealth, and drops the transporter chief with an expert attack, meaning he retained all his learned skills, including physical training and basic transporter operation. And Spock's nerve pinch later in the episode only kept him down for one minute, where most are out for an hour or more. In short, if that paranoia had been directed at anyone or anything specific, who knows what kind of damage he could have done...
- "Good cranial development. No doubt considerable human ancestry."
- Then there's the part where the hobo McCoy runs into takes his phaser after he's finally collapsed. The guy tinkers around with it for a little while out of curiosity, before inadvertently disintegrating himself with it.
- Those gigantic brain cells made Spock scream. Spock. Just trying to imagine the level of pain that would require is Nightmare Fuel all by itself. And to add further weight, Spock himself thought permanent blindness was a fair trade for not having to face that pain again. Luckily for him it wasn't permanent, but still...
- Moreover, remember that Kirk's nephew, not a Vulcan, is facing potentially far worse pain, should he awaken from his coma—and despite the joking around at the end, Kirk still has to tell the kid that his parentsnote died in agony, along with a sizable amount of everyone he knew.
Season Two
- The whole episode is horrifying from Spock's perspective. Losing your mind, losing your self-control, hurting your friends...To make it worse, Heroic Willpower and The Power of Friendship have next to no effect.
- Kirk talks to Spock while the Vulcan is tensely clutching a knife behind his back. After this has been going on for several minutes, Kirk notices Spock's hand shaking and sees the knife in it. His tone sells that he has just realized something is horribly wrong. There are two possible explanations for the Vulcan's behavior, neither of them favorable for him or his captain:
- One possibility: Spock seems to be visibly struggling to keep himself from attacking Kirk. Whatever the pon farr is doing to Spock's mind, it's powerful enough that Spock, whose iron-clad mental discipline has been a plot point on several occasions, is barely able to restrain himself from murdering his best friend for no rational reason. It also serves as a nasty foreshadowing of what's going to happen once he and Kirk are pitted against each other.
- Alternately, Spock didn't have the knife for attacking others. He's undergoing a very nasty descent into insanity with no apparent hope of escape. Kirk might have been one snapped nerve away from seeing his best friend commit suicide rather than die as a raving shell of his normal self.
- T'Pring picking Kirk as Spock's opponent. Unlike Kirk, a visitor with virtually no knowledge of Vulcan culture or customs, she knows full well that either Spock or his captain will have to die.
- Spock's very demeanor demonstrates the horrifying change that happens to a Vulcan in the blood fever. At one point, Kirk knocks him down. A second later, he's up again, crouching like a wild lion ready to pounce.
- Spock apparently kills Kirk, snapping himself out of the pon farr, and resolves to turn himself in. From what Spock tells T'Pau, it's clear that facing the Starfleet authorities is the least troubling thing about the disaster. The "I shall do neither" comment suggests that he is planning to commit suicide. (There's no death penalty for murder under Federation law.) Considering what is shown about Vulcan mental powers, self-induced Death by Despair is quite possible. On top of that, for all he knew, he had just killed his best friend!
- Almost everything about NOMAD, from its genocidal mission to "sterilize imperfect beings" to sending Spock into a mind meld induced Madness Mantra, to wiping Uhura's brain and then to killing Scotty when he tried to defend her.
- Regarding the above, every time Spock uses a mind-meld, he requires physical contact to get more than just brief impressions yet can break it at will (give-or-take a few seconds of mental preparation). Here, once his Madness Mantra begins, he slowly pulls back from NOMAD, but even after doing so the link doesn't break; Spock can't break it because NOMAD isn't letting him go. Thank god Kirk had enough influence over NOMAD to command it to stop.
- And there's no Reset Button for Uhura! In the James Blish novelization, NOMAD specifies that she still remembers her life experiences, but her ability to communicate, either through normal speech or "illogical" music, has been removed. Quite frightening to suddenly not know how to communicate with anyone.
- It's also the first in a series of adventures that showcase the unintended message of Star Trek: all the probes we send into space are either going come back to kill us (The Changeling, Star Trek: The Motion Picture), or accidentally wipe out entire civilizations (Friendship One).
- The agony booth from the episode that introduced the Mirror Universe.
- In the non-canon book Dark Victory, the mirror version of Kirk left Chekov in an agony booth with the pain level set to the equivalent of "a dull toothache throughout your whole body. Bearable, but most uncomfortable". It took Chekov thirteen days to die.
- There's no peaceful United Federation of Planets in the Mirror Universe; instead, there's a power-hungry Terran Empire that goes around conquering planets, the exact opposite of Federation Starfleet's Prime Directive.
- Officers in this version of Starfleet can gain promotions by assassinating their superiors; better watch your back if you're a starship captain...
- And the agonizers, the torture devices that crew members carry around on their own belts, forced to surrender them every time a high-ranking officer is displeased with their performance.
- And the Tantalus Field. One touch of the button and anyone on the Enterprise simply... disappears.
- Mirror Sulu's incredibly creepy advances on Uhura, the way Marlena presents herself as a "captain's woman", and the even skimpier outfits that female officers wear seem to indicate that the Terran Empire has some very regressive views on women.
- There's something extremely disquieting about the people of Vaal being commanded to kill Kirk and his officers, mostly because to them, it's simply "a thing to do, like feeding Vaal".
- There's the classic "The Doomsday Machine", where a giant, bluish-green horn-of-plenty-like machine is consuming everything in its path and the mighty USS Enterprise can't seem to stop it. Not to mention its massacre of the crew of another ship, identical to the Enterprise, whose captain the experience had driven completely mad.
- The machine is pretty much a preview of the Borg—unthinking, unfeeling, and feeding its insatiable hunger by devouring whole planets for unknown ends. Add to that that it is made of metal so dense that the entire Federation fleet could unload its entire arsenal on the machine and it wouldn't be phased, and is, by a wide margin, the most powerful weapon ever seen in the franchise (more-or-less on par with the Death Star) and you have one pants-shittingly scary machine. And we never find out who built it, what they built if for, or if there are more of them out there somewherenote .
- Then you see Commodore Decker doing a Suicide Attack on it in a shuttlecraft, and you see every emotional expression of a man doing that to completion. Guaranteed to give you childhood nightmares. Then Kirk tries a slightly safer version with him maneuvering the USS Constellation with a timer priming it to explode in the maw of that horrific planet killer, and the transporter has just broke down as a building suspense musical score is building to the big climax.
- In an extremely subtle way, the remastered version makes the damn thing worse with the addition of little details, and by making it actual scale to what's been stated ("-a maw that could swallow a dozen starships."), whereas the original didn't have the budget to show this much. It appropriately dwarfs the shuttlecraft Decker pilots, with all three screens open instead of one as the thing bears down on him, and is still several scales bigger than the Enterprise + Constellation combined.
- Korob and Sylvia relied on classic Nightmare Fuel.
- The part where the Red Shirt of the week beamed up to the ship, and then dropped dead? And then a scary voice came out of his dead mouth? Yeek.
- The whole episode is meant to be scary, being essentially a Gothic Horror story in space, but those three witch faces that appear out of nowhere are beyond mildly creepy.
- The cloud creature. It's capable of space travel, phasers don't do squat against it, it can silently sneak up on its victims pretty much anywhere, and if it catches you, it basically sucks out your blood without even leaving a mark. Furthermore, it returns in a DC Star Trek Graphic Novel written, IIRC, by Chris Claremont.
- According to story “The Greater Good”, mirror verse Kirk apparently was humiliated by Captain Garrovick, and he arranged the deaths by the cloud creature, sleeping more soundly that night than he had in years.
- The idea that a seemingly immortal being had been possessing and killing people for thousands of years just to feed on their fear. The episode itself hasn't exactly aged well (it claims that women are more easily scared than men), but the aforementioned premise remains terrifying to this day.
- The terrified screams just before the murders.
- Redjac has taken over the ship and could easily kill everyone on board, but he wants to frighten all of them first by laughing maniacally while telling them in gruesome detail what he wants to do. To add to this, he's played by John Fiedler, better known as the voice of Piglet. Hearing that voice laughing while screaming, "Die! Die!" just might kill your childhood.
- McCoy declaring Mr. Hengist dead, if only because of the implications. We've seen/heard that Redjac can possess bodies like it did with Scotty, but it can't spontaneously kill the host just by leaving them, and Kirk certainly can't have killed Mr. Hengist just by felling him with one punch (which he even lampshades)... meaning Mr. Hengist must've been dead from the start, and Redjac was wearing his body the whole time the cast interacted with him.
- The Novelization of the episode gives a more concrete version of Redjac appearing as swirling blobs of color on the viewscreen monitor. A view not unlike Dante's vision of Hell. The vision ends with Satan getting up out of the ice of Cocytus, silently laughing while standing on an inverted cross, as if mocking the crucifiction. When Yeoman Tankris fearfully asks, "What could it be?" Kirk replies, "A vision of hell." It is almost as if Redjac was showing where it was born.
- The episode is mostly a lighthearted comedy, but the scene at the end where dead tribbles fall on Kirk until he's standing nearly waist-deep in them is very... disturbing. It's the equivalent of opening the door to the attic and being bombarded with dead kittens, and they just kept falling as Kirk was standing there, probably from being casually tossed aside by Dax and Sisko. And it was played for comedy. Twice!note
- Because the tribbles are featureless balls of fluff, the true horror of this scene doesn't always land with some people. But imagine unexpectedly finding yourself covered in the corpses of literally any other animal. Hundreds of them. And while most are recently deceased, Spock's dialogue implies that some of them could have been dead for as many as three days; which would put them well into the initial stages of decomposition. Nobody would blame you for crawling fully-clothed into the nearest shower with a large bottle of whisky.
- Extra points for the guy covered in starved/gorged tribbles is also the one who went through a famine and massacre when he was fourteen. With the episode starting as a disaster distress call just to protect grain, no wonder he’s so snarky at the Federation for once.
- An enormous space amoeba devours the USS Intrepid, the same class vessel as the Enterprise, not to mention crewed entirely by the uber-efficient Vulcans.. What must have gone through the minds of the all-Vulcan crew when they realized that their curiosity and logic had failed them? Worse—like any other life form, the space amoeba can only exist as part of an ecosystem. There are no doubt more space amoebas...and they may be at the bottom of the interstellar food chain...
- Spock actually explains what went through the Vulcans' minds: astonishment. They simply couldn't comprehend what was happening to them until it was too late.
- Spock sensing the death of the Intrepid. The stoic Vulcan looks clearly horrified, for a long moment unable to even frame a coherent explanation. "The death cry of four hundred minds..." Imagine hearing a mental scream like that.
- As Kirk and Bones set out to find the former's friend, they're just walking along... and then out of nowhere, a Mugato jumps them, yelling with the most terrible, demented screams you could conceive of. And not only is it strong like its gorilla-like frame implies, its bite contains a lethal poison, with Kirk getting the full dose before Bones kills it.
- Bones has to get Nona (who drugs men to do what she says) to save a dying Kirk. The instant she tells him that Kirk belongs to her now, he starts worrying, and even more when Kirk is in denial. It all comes off like watching your friend go into an abusive relationship for a while.
- With the knowledge that his body being puppeted around is killing Kirk, Sargon taking the time to perv on his new host, praising Bones for “maintaining” his body like the captain is just an object, is very disturbing. Furthermore, Sargon is the most reasonable and decent of the trio. After possessing him for a few minutes (possibly to communicate in the first place), he leaves Kirk to make up his mind about the request. Later, he even uses his powers to save Spock's life before having to depart because he knew that the loss would devastate Kirk. Thalassa and Henoch are not so principled.
- The Kelvans, who reduced a young yeoman to a polyhedral cube and then crushed her to dust. And while their adapted to human form, their true ones are apparently immense, with at least a hundred tentacles... and sufficient mental contact with one was enough to physically throw Spock away from his mind-meld; thankfully he was uninjured.
- The “neutralizing” of the crew the Kelvans deem non-essential. The look on Kirk’s face when he’s told, and his soft “No...” of fear. You just know he’s picturing what happened to Yeoman Thompson happening to everyone else under his command.
- The USS Enterprise discovered the empty USS Exeter with all the crew dead, leaving only loose uniforms strewn about, containing only crystals of the base chemicals the make up carbon based life-forms when all body moisture is removed.
- The Apocalyptic Log left behind:
Exeter's CMO: (suffering through extreme dehydration) ...if- if you've come aboard this ship... you're dead men! Don't go back to your own ship! You have one chance: get down there, get down there now! Captain Tracy is... (speech fails him, and he falls from his seat with a weak scream; the log abruptly stops)
Kirk: ...prepare to beam down to the planet, fast.
Kirk pauses, looking at the remains near his feet - those of the same man.
Season Three
- Kirk and the gang are trapped in a nightmarishly surreal world where the clock is ticking to an unavoidable execution and there is seemingly no escape to that conclusion.
- Chekov under the effects of the Hate Plague. Seeing the goofy Plucky Comic Relief character with a bad accent suddenly start attacking everyone and attempt to rape some poor lady while whispering creepy things to her was really... disturbing.
- A lot of people consider the episode to be hilarious, what with the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum song, tap dancing, self-slapping, and Kirk giving a pony-ride to a very small man in a toga. While it's understandable to see it as funny on the surface, consider for a moment a race of people who can force you to do anything. Anything. On a whim. And not only that, but they can force you to feel anything, too—they have Spock laughing and crying. Spock himself says it best: they could seriously injure or even kill you just because they wanted to or you made them angry. Without even breaking a sweat, with the power of their minds alone. And these people seem to have no moral compass. At all. Imagine the sheer horror of being forced to humiliate yourself and be caused pain just because someone else was selfish, bored, and could. Not helped that those assholes (the psychics) more or less make Dr. McCoy watch the whole thing in an attempt to make him stay on the planet as their physician, not long after he saved their leader from dying.
- The sheer scale of power a single one of them can possess. Parmen's psychokinetic delirium not only threw around furniture and statues in the room, it physically jolted the Enterprise—a starship in orbit, mind you—with extreme turbulence. And for pretty much the whole episode, every instrument on the ship is frozen and the ship is locked into its orbit. No one seemed to show any signs of stress/effort while doing that either... we should be grateful their powers couldn't be combined.
- The flamenco the Platonians forced Spock to do almost ended in him stepping on Kirk's face and possibly killing him. When they let him go, the Vulcan collapses—all his strength and willpower were expended keeping his foot those precious few inches away from Kirk's skull. Not only can the Platonians hurt you themselves, but also they can force you to hurt those you care about, completely conscious of what you're doing yet unable to stop it. Not to mention that this could have built on trauma from previous times Spock has been forced into nearly killing his best friend...
- Shortly before Spock is forced to do this, Kirk is forced to the floor, back-first... then out of nowhere just gives a bloodcurdling scream, his body jerking like it's on fire. When he tries to rise again, his voice and his muscles are weak, as if this had actually happened to his nerves.
- Twice, Kirk tries to support his friends, telling Bones that no matter what they make him and Spock do, to not give in, and to reassure Spock when he’s forced to show emotions. In response, the Platonians force a Shut Up, Kirk! on him, making him beg to be a slave in the former and to act like a horse in the latter.
- Everything the Platonians try to manipulate Bones, Kirk and Spock with, is straight out of the abuse handbook. Kirk gets one line of apology for being “used” after made to slap himself followed by a Hurricane of Excuses for a bad temper, they all get gifts in an effort to make them stay, and after Kirk is forced to crawl and Spock cry, Bones is blamed for the Platonians doing this to them.
- McCoy's injuries. After being tortured he looks like he went 10 rounds with Muhammad Ali. What's worse is that we don't see exactly what happened to him during that time.
- A number of smaller moments just really increase the creepiness of the Vians. First their setup looks a lot like a torture chamber, then the party finds the two men previously at the outpost in grotesque contorted poses, and then the waiting tubes for Kirk/Spock/McCoy themselves...
- The chains that held Kirk up when he was tortured, left nasty, weeping sores on his wrists (and later Gem’s when she takes his pain).
- How, when Elaan’s drug tears touches his hand, Kirk tries to get away, tries to fight it but ends up kissing her and having sex with her anyway. For all the producers talk about it being a “love story”, the acting plays it as something Kirk doesn’t want, and will be traumatised about for a long time.
- The Zetarians. Non-corporeal energy beings who zoom around the galaxy so fast the Enterprise can't outrun them, searching for someone to possess so they can live out their lives. And if they can't possess you, they'll just kill you horrifically while trying. The woman who dies on the station spends several seconds with her face writhing uncontrollably and glowing several different colors, possibly in a very great deal of pain, before she dies. Even with the long-out-of-date and obvious special effects, the shot is still unnerving.
- The ironically named Eden, where every single plant is poisonous and will leave horrible chemical burns on bare skin. Chekov and several of the hippies suffer the effects, and they're the lucky ones. Adam, the affable, goofy idealist who's been bonding with Spock the entire episode, ends up dead from consuming the fruit before the Enterprise and her medical staff can arrive.
- The Constitution-class ship is kind of bright and cheery with the red doors and uniforms and such, right? Well, when everyone on it is dead or almost dead, the emptiness is kind of creepy, creepy like an Abandoned Hospital. Specifically, the Defiant from TOS: "The Tholian Web" and ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly" and the Republic from Star Trek: 25th Anniversary were messed up real bad. It didn't help that Kirk and his landing party on either ship were stuck there without the ability to transport to the Enterprise—that's right, no escape route despite being on ships falling apart at the seams. And in the former case, on a ship that is phasing in and out of reality as you know it.
- The idea of an entire crew gone stark raving mad to the point where they all killed each other.
- It was also a bit bad when Kirk is stuck on an eerily empty Enterprise. Loneliness is a sort of hell, particularly for an extreme extrovert like Kirk. Oh, and hello, right before the first ad break, a bunch of pallid faces fade onto the viewscreen without warning, just staring...
- Both Spock and Kirk seem perfectly aware that what Gideon kidnapped the latter for (to be kept as essentially a STD Sex Slave spreading a pandemic) is a Fate Worse than Death.
- Lester’s sheer joy at the tables being turned, and having a stronger body so she can finally punish her ex boyfriend, gives big shades of Domestic Abuse. She also makes it into a joke at the hearing later, asking how a small woman could ever overpower a muscled man like Kirk. To a viewer decades afterwards, it rings uncomfortably of a female domestic abuser using her gender to convince people she couldn't possibly be culpable for what happened to her boyfriend/husband.
- Also when she tries to kill him. She tells him he must have wanted to kill her and he was always so afraid, but she’s not, making the move to strangle him while all he can do is make scared whimpering noises.
