Star Trek / Tropes Q to T

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These tropes are featured across the entire Star Trek franchise. Please add tropes for specific works to their individual pages.

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R

• Ragnarök Proofing: Trek has its fair share of technologies that still work long after they should, often outlasting the society that built them.
  • On TNG, you have the Iconian gateway and computer system that still worked when the Iconians had been gone for 200,000 years, the Tkon Empire's automated border guard functioning 600 millennia after the empire blew up, and Data's severed head being easily reattached to his body to function as normal after lying in a cave below San Francisco for 500 years.
  • The abandoned Hur'q museum on DS9 in “The Sword of Kahless” still has functioning force fields and security systems. It's not clear how long it was abandoned, but it was found in an archaeological dig and the Hur'q were last heard from in the 14th century.
  • In "Living Witness", Season 4, Episode 23 of Voyager, the Doctor's program was bootlegged onto a storage device, and wakes up 700 years in the future in an alien museum, where all of the devices left from Voyager, such as a tricorder, the Doctor's holo emitter, etc., works perfectly after being buried and forgotten for over 680 years.
  • In one of the Star Trek: Short Treks, the Discovery is still in fine working condition after being abandoned for 1000 years. (This was before the third season established the DOT robots that could have potentially been used to maintain everything).
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
  • Deep Space Nine has a very motley crew compared to its predecessors, and at the start nobody on the station really wants to be there: Sisko originally wanted to transfer to civilian service, Kira resented working with Starfleet and was only comfortable blowing things up, Garak is barred from returning to his homeworld, Bashir is an illegal genetic experiment, Worf is hated by his homeland for siding with the Federation. And what's more, Quark was planning to split town altogether. He is a civilian; he's just there to sell beer and run gambling tables, but he usually gets dragged along on adventures anyway.
  • Voyager, of course. Janeway’s first officer and chief engineer (and half the crew) are insurgents she was sent to arrest, her helmsman is an ex-con out on parole because he knew the region where the former were hiding out, and her security chief happened to be working among them as The Mole. The Doctor is supposed to be a temporary replacement, Neelix happened to be in the neighbourhood and tricked Voyager into helping rescue his girlfriend, Kes claims refugee status out of boredom and Seven of Nine gets basically kidnapped.
  • Picard really cranks it up, since they aren’t even an official crew in Starfleet. Picard is retired and way too old to be doing this; Agnes doesn’t want to be there (and she’s been brainwashed to kill the man they’re looking for), Soji just found out she’s an android yesterday and her ex-boyfriend wants to kill her, Cris and Raffi are both ex-Starfleet — he has PTSD and she’s a drug addict. And that’s not even touching on the Romulan samurai raised by nuns, who’s there to work through his unresolved surrogate daddy issues with Picard.
  • This seems to be the general perception of the Cerritos crew (and the Cali class at large) by the rest of Starfleet In-Universe, but they aren't actually that bad. At worst you can say their security chief has anger issues, their X.O. is a little too obsessed with working out, their doctor swears too much and their counselor is kind of a dipshit. Freeman is a thoroughly competent captain, she just has a difficult relationship with her daughter who also happens to be a crew member (and whose rule-breaking shenanigans occasionally make her look bad).
  • Prodigy takes it even further with a cast of minors (and one hologram) who don't even know what they're doing. Dal is a selfish, anti-authoritarian teenage rebel who doesn't even know what species he is (turns out the answer is “all of them”), Rok-Tahk is a young child, Zero is an Energy Being piloting a self-built containment suit because their true form drives people insane, Jankom is thousands of light years from his species's home planet and Murf is a blob of slime who can't talk and doesn't even have arms at first. Gwyn gets dragged along as a hostage and up until a few weeks ago her dad was enslaving all the others, not to mention she's the last of an extinct race. None of them have ever belonged to Starfleet (and at the start probably wouldn't even be accepted as recruits) and they're flying around in a stolen ship with no help except Hologram Janeway, who's basically the starship equivalent of Microsoft Clippy with amnesia.
• Random Transportation: In the Trek Verse, wormholes can be used in principle for very long distance interstellar travel, but in practice aren't because they're unstable and can land you at any random location in the galaxy with no guarantee that they'll open up again to bring you back.
  • The wormhole in DS9 is notably stable, taking you from point X in the Alpha Quadrant to point Y in the Gamma Quadrant and back again every time; but that's because it was artificially created by the Prophets/wormhole aliens instead of being a natural phenomenon.
• Ray Gun: Phasers and disruptors.
• Raygun Gothic: TOS solidly fits this trope. By TNG, the Federation is in transition between Ray Gun Gothic and Crystal Spires and Togas.
• Recycled In Space: The franchise itself is, in the words of its creator, Wagon Train TO THE STARS!
  • In TOS, the Klingons are Russians IN SPACE! while the Romulans are the then-inscrutable Chinese... IN SPACE!
  • Vulcans are Elves IN SPACE!
  • Romulans are Dark Elves/Drow, Klingons are Orcs/Orks, Ferengi are Goblins, Tellarites are Dwarves, Borg are Undead, etc.
    • Borg are more specifically Horror Film Zombies IN SPACE!
  • Nicholas Meyer, director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, describes the series as "Horatio Hornblower IN SPACE!"
    • Gene Roddenberry described James T. Kirk as a space-age Horatio Hornblower in the book The Making of Star Trek (1968).
• Red Shirt: The Trope Namer! Members of the Operations Division (engineering and military services) were particularly likely to be used as the "victim of the week," as their jobs made them particularly likely to fall afoul of traps or the latest alien monster and this was an easy way to build drama by killing off nameless or clearly minor characters. Strictly speaking, the name of the trope is only accurate in TOS; whilst differing shades of blue were standard for the Science/Medical Division throughout all the series, Operations and Command were red and gold in TOS and then switched colors from TNG onwards.
• Rejection Ritual:
  • The Klingons have Discommendation, in which a Klingon is ceremonially shunned and reduced to an honorless pariah in their society. In the ceremony, the Klingons present cross their arms in front of the discommendee and turn their backs on him.
  • In the TNG episode "Sins of the Father", Worf was subjected to this as a result of the charges brought against his family by the Duras family.
  • Star Trek Online deconstructs this in the episode "Warzone", mission "The House Always Wins". Chancellor J'mpok orders Councillor Torg to be discommendated and the House of Torg dissolved for conspiring with the Romulan Star Empire to destroy the rival House of Martok. The Klingons present ritually turn their backs on him, but Torg decides on Taking You with Me and attempts to backstab Worf. Worf's son Alexander jumps in front of the knife and bleeds out in Worf's arms.
• Restricted Expanded Universe:
  • The comics do this. At one point, even new characters couldn't be used because of fears that they would become Canon Immigrants that required royalties.
  • Also a problem in the novels, although the Star Trek: New Frontier and I.K.S. Gorkon series dodge it by having new crews based on one-shot characters, and the Titan series does by being set after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis.
  • It seems that Paramount has given the writers more freedom in changing the status quo in post-Nemesis stories, as Admiral Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager Ascends To A Higher Plane Of Existence in Before Dishonor.
  • The complete anhilitation/liberation of the Borg in the Destiny trilogy was only possible because new canonical material coming out was deemed unlikely at the time.
  • Star Trek novels have gone back and forth between Restricted and non-Restricted a couple of times. The novels of the '70s and early '80s tended to give authors a lot of freedom to interpret Star Trek in their own idiosyncratic ways, though the books rarely referenced or built on one another. By the later '80s, Pocket Books' Trek authors began referencing popular novels like Diane Duane's Romulan/Rihannsu books and John M. Ford's Klingon epic The Final Reflection, and authors who did multiple novels increasingly carried continuity arcs forward within them, so an overall book continuity gradually began to emerge. But once Star Trek: The Next Generation was on the air, Paramount began restricting the books and comics, forbidding them from referencing anything but the live-action canon, which killed continuity between books. Those rules began to relax in the late '90s, and by now, with all the shows off the air, the books have built up an elaborate, interconnected continuity. However, the new movie continuity (J. J. Abrams) operates under rules so restricted that only prequels to the movie have been allowed to be published so far.
  • Star Trek Online is set in the prime universe post-dating the Hobus supernova from Star Trek (2009). However, due to a confluence of legal issues —the license comes from CBS rather than Paramount—, it can only use story details, not visuals. CBS also has veto power over Cryptic's ideas, and they're also restricted in their use of TV-canon characters because, while the character belongs to CBS and is thus usable, the likeness belongs to the actors so Cryptic has to negotiate with them separately or use an Off-Model (the latter of which they've mostly stopped doing). They also have to negotiate separately to use elements from other works in the Star Trek Expanded Universe (although they do often get permission).
• Revisiting the Roots:
  • For better or for worse, Star Trek: Voyager was this for the franchise: A lone Federation starship exploring the dangerous unknowns and meeting new life and new civilizations.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds even more so: a return to the tone of 1960s/'80s Trek, the same premise as TOS, with episodic storytelling rather than the lengthy plot arcs used by Disco & Picard, and set on the original Enterprise no less.
• Robots Enslaving Robots:
  • The Borg Collective is an interesting aversion of this. Although it has no compunction sacrificing drones to adapt to phasers and forces individuals to act against their will, it would not outright order individuals like Picard/Locutus or Hugh to die when they became a threat... it prized them too much, like limbs. It was effectively a hydra that liked some of its heads. Part of this is because, at least in earlier depictions, the Borg — despite appearances — value diversity. Uniqueness allowed it to expand its own capabilities. However, born and raised Borg like Hugh that undergo a period of individuality can grow to reject the Collective's absolute stranglehold on them, and even infect other drones with The Evils of Free Will.
  • However, the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact and Voyager is a straight cyborg example of this trope. She sees herself as the pinnacle of perfection, knowingly enslaves her drones to make them fit her view of perfection by squashing any individuality and will thoughtlessly sacrifice thousands of drones to capture and coerce individuals like Seven of Nine or attacking the invincible aliens in Fluidic Space.
• Ruder and Cruder: Most of the Star Trek TV series don't have any profanity stronger than "hell" and "damn," however, Star Trek: Enterprise has "ass" and "son of a bitch" and Star Trek: Discovery even occasionally gets away with "shit" as well as the franchise's first F-bomb. Star Trek: Picard fires off the profanities like photon torpedoes (including multiple F-bombs).

S

• Sapient Cetaceans: A frequent theme in the series.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • "Does it look good on screen" is always the rule for multi-ship scenes. Though it's established in dialogue that most ship-to-ship encounters take place with dozens or even hundreds of kilometers of separation, external shots will usually put ships within two ship-lengths or less.
  • Voyager cruising over a planet's rings in the opening credits. Why does it take sixty years to fly back to the Alpha Quadrant? All they have to do is walk from one side of the ship to the other.
• Screens Are Cameras:
  • All viewscreens behave like this in every show.
  • On DS9, the producers rolled out a new invention: a portable 3D holocommunicator. Instead of conversing via a viewscreen, two actors could share the same room and still appear to be talking over great distances. Ironically, this looks even cheaper than the viewscreen did, despite being more time-consuming and expensive (due to various camera trickery to make the 'effect' look less blatant). The device only shows up in two episodes, "For the Uniform" and "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?"
  • Discovery brings back the hologram conversations, creating a bit of a Continuity Snarl as to why other shows in the franchise never used them. It's stated they take up a lot of bandwidth and after a severe computer malfunction Pike orders Number One to "rip them out" of the Enterprise (which sort of explains why we never saw them on TOS, at least). Could be a case of Boring, but Practical; in Real Life, Nazi Germany had working videophones but the technology didn’t come into widespread use until the 2010s.
• Screen Shake: The usual method of showing impact. Shake camera, shimmy actors.
• Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: This comes up twice with James T. Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru scenario:
  • In the Backstory of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, he reprograms the simulator so he can win. This is generally applauded (he says he received a commendation for original thinking).
  • Star Trek (2009): Kirk reprograms it less plausibly and Academy Instructor Spock brings formal disciplinary action against him for cheating. Later, when Kirk meets prime universe Spock:
    Kirk: You know, coming back in time, changing history... that's cheating.
    Old Spock: A trick I learned from an old friend.
• Secular Hero: Gene Roddenberry firmly believed that humanity would eventually abandon religion, so this is the default status for human characters in the franchise, although various alien characters (particularly Klingons and Bajorans) are shown to have religious or spiritual beliefs and practices. The only major human exceptions are Sisko, whose major character arc is his gradual acceptance of his status as a religious figure to the Bajorans, and Chakotay, who has some Magical Native American tendencies thanks to series co-creator Michael Piller's interest in New Age spirituality (in general, Native Americans in the Trek franchise seem to be the exception to the "humans are secular" rule).
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: They must teach the "destroy your ship rather than let aliens take it" method at Starfleet Headquarters, seeing as every single Captain uses it at least once in a series. Janeway must have threatened to use it 30 times.
• Self-Made Orphan: Uses this trope in Klingon mythology. According to it, the gods created Klingons, who then turned around and killed them for the trouble.
• Sexy Dimorphism: The Orion women are Green Skinned Space Babes considered among the most beautiful of all humanoid females, and their men are big bruisers (sometimes as much as twice the size of their women), usually ugly and not very smart.
• Shakespearian Actors:
  • Patrick Stewart was briefly the butt of jokes in England for putting his career on hold to do Star Trek; the press assumed he was having a mid-life crisis and just wanted a fat pension and swarms of fangirls all over him. Most charmingly, he retorted he considered his years in the "training" for his role as Picard. But in reality, the franchise is famous for casting many stage actors over regular TV guest actors. Actors who lacked theater experience (Terry Farrell, Kate Mulgrew) are sometimes disparaged in fandom and even felt like the odd man out on occasion.
    Joe Ford: I have heard people dismiss Mulgrew’s performance in the past because she is a TV veteran and not a Shakespearean actor or from an impressive theatrical background, but in all honesty she is one of the strongest actors in the Star Trek universe. I would happily squeeze Mulgrew into the arsenal of talent that fronts DS9 because she is far too good for a show like Voyager and I do feel they were lucky to have her.
  • They all seem to do their best work when immersed in the Shakespearean politics of the Klingon Empire. According to J.G. Hertzler, "They tend to go with people who can operate in a strangely heightened reality and somehow make it as close to reality as you can. That's sci-fi; that's what you need".
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare: Many characters quote the Bard. Alien cultures tend to admire him too, even claiming him as their own.
• Sighted Guns Are Low-Tech: Hand phasers, at least. Heavy-duty phaser rifles usually have a sight.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Star Trek is a fairly idealistic franchise.
• Slow Electricity: The console displays always go on/off in sequence around the bridge. If there's a ship-wide outage, expect an outside shot of windows lighting up/going out one at a time.
• Slow Laser: Common throughout the franchise, although beam weapons move faster in later series, particularly Enterprise. Hand Waved in most instances, as the weapons used are not actually lasers (which are described once as terribly obsolete), but particle beams that move at sublight speed.
• Smart House: The ships behave much like this from TNG onward.
• Soldier vs. Warrior:
  • Starfleet approaches warfare as a professional military with soldiers; this is what gives them an advantage over aggressive alien races like the Klingons who are self-described warriors who lust for battle. While the Klingon military might be the fiercest offensive fighting force in their part of the galaxy, they have no stamina whatsoever for fighting a war of attrition. Starfleet by comparison will fight and never lose hope until the last soldier is dead. A Ferengi character points this out, that a Starfleet soldier is more dangerous than the most bloodthirsty Klingon warrior when pushed to the cliff edge and forced to fight for the lives of all the innocents who are depending on him.
  • The first time the legendary Starfleet resolve was nearly shattered in a full scale war was when the Federation faced off against the Dominion: an empire with the one mission of subjugating all of known space, that has literally engineered its soldiers to be little more than biological robots who fight because it's their only purpose.
• Some Kind of Force Field: Characters are always touching the force fields to show the audience that they are there.
• Sons of Slaves:
  • Slavery was just one of the cruel practices inflicted on the Bajorans by the occupying Cardassians. Post-Occupation Bajorans are portrayed as the Trek universe's equivalent of both freed slaves and holocaust survivors.
  • In the classic episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", Lokai accuses Bele's race of enslaving his own. Bele doesn't deny it, and in fact, tries to rationalize it by saying Lokai's race were savages. Does This Remind You of Anything??
• Space Cossacks:
  • The Maquis. Average Federation colonists who found themselves under the Cardassians after a treaty in which they had no say. They won numerous engagements against both the Cardassians and Starfleet, with large numbers of Starfleet officers even defecting to join the 'good fight.'
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Tasha Yar was raised by human dissidents on Turkana IV, where various factions were constantly at war and gang rape was a common occurrence.
• Space Fighter:
  • Fighters are rare, but do turn up now and then — especially in DS9, where they were used by the Maquis before being adopted by The Federation. They are generally avoided because typical starship defenses are both fast firing and extremely accurate, making it difficult to justify using them.
  • Picard introduces the Romulan Snakehead fighter, a single-pilot scout ship that packs a lot of firepower for its small size.
• Space Navy: Starfleet.
• Space Sector: The original series often used "quadrant" instead of "sector" (with references to the Enterprise being "the only ship in the quadrant") but by the Next Generation era named sectors ("the Archanis Sector") or numbered sectors ("Sector 001") are firmly established as regions of space. Other parts of the franchise also refer to "sector blocks", large groupings of a hundred sectors. "Quadrants" are also still used, but now more logically refer to one of four divisions of the entire galaxy.
• Spaceship Slingshot Stunt: A common trick for time travel no less.
• Special Effect Branding: This trope is avoided in most cases: for instance, both Klingon and Romulan ship-mounted disruptors use green effects, and both Cardassian and Federation phasers are the same yellow/orange color. (Despite their similarities, "phasers and "disruptors" are different technology). However, transporters generally follow this trope, having similar, but distinct special effects: blue transporters for Starfleet, red transporters for Klingons, green transporters for Romulans, and so forth. DS9 made a special point of this, as the titular station, although operated by Starfleet, was of Cardassian origin and used Cardassian transporter effects.
• Spies Are Despicable: Intelligence agencies have a distinct tendency to overlap with State Sec or Secret Police groups, and are inevitably portrayed in a negative light. Regardless of whether it's the Obsidian Order for the Cardassians, the Tal Shiar for the Romulans, Section 31 (or other various paranoid security/intelligence groups) for the Federation.
• Standard Sci-Fi Army: Codified the use Security personnel. Follows the visual media model of focusing mostly on Infantry.
• Standard Sci-Fi History: Earth's history follows this.
• Standard Sci Fi Setting: One of the most famous Trope Codifiers.
• Standard Starship Scuffle: The Trope Codifier, especially the final battle in The Wrath of Khan.
• Standard Time Units: Stardates.
• Starfish Aliens:
  • While the series is often mocked for excessive use of Rubber-Forehead Aliens, special mention must be made of the Tholians that appeared in the TOS episode "The Tholian Web", who were so strange, while visible only partly through the main viewscreen during negotiations, that the writers themselves (like anyone else) couldn't figure out what they actually were implied to be for the better part of 30 years, even while being passingly mentioned once or twice in different series. Only toward the end of Enterprise did they finally settle on the head being a carapace, and the Tholians as a race of advanced arachnids.
  • For a show with a limited budget, even TOS featured a decent number of non-humanoids. Apart from a bunch of Energy Beings, it also had the Horta, Yarnek, the Melkotians, a few shapeshifters like Sylvia and Korob, and the Kelvans, whose real forms were non-humanoid. Each of the later series added a few more to the list. The show that far and away had the most non-humanoids was the one where budget limitations could not hinder creature design: Star Trek: The Animated Series.
  • Discovery adds to the lineup with Unknown Species 10-C, who eventually turn out to be bizarre, cephalopod / dragon things that live in gas giants.
• State Sec: Romulans and Cardassians both got their own versions in the form of the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order, respectively. Arguably Starfleet's Section 31. The Ferengi's FCA might also qualify given their cultural bias.
• Stealth in Space: The Romulans developed a cloaking device in the time frame of TOS, which was soon stolen by the Federation; subsequently, the Treaty of Algeron prohibited the Federation from using or developing any cloaking technology of its own.
• Stock Star Systems:
  • One of the first Earth colonies outside the Sol System is in the Alpha Centauri System (the closest system to ours, in fact).
  • Janeway's father drowned on Tau Ceti Prime.
  • The Andorians and Vulcans come from Procyon and 40 Eridani A, respectively.
• Subspace Ansible: All of the space-faring civilizations have this. (Radio is explicitly referred to as "old-style" because transmission speed is only the speed of light). The exact speeds are never explicitly given, but it's implied to be measured in Warp factors and it definitely takes days to send a signal across several parsecs. Signals also degrade long before they travel across the galaxy.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Star Trek has probably the largest and most diverse variety of these out of any science fiction franchise, including a multitude of races of Energy Beings, Physical Gods and the flat-out omnipotent Q.
• Super Doc: Any Sickbay doctor.

T

• Technical Pacifist: The Federation aspires to peace above all and will always take a diplomatic solution to conflict where possible, but is fully prepared to defend itself if attacked. DS9 deconstructs this with revelation of Section 31, a shadow organization that does the Federation's dirty work for them in secret.
• Technobabble: More or less the Trope Codifier. In the script it would be labeled as [TECH] and they had a separate writer to put in whatever seemed appropriate.
• Technology Porn: A staple of the series.
• Teleportation with Drawbacks: Transporters are severely range-limited and highly plot-sensitive with frequent failures, problems of signal interference, and needing to lock onto the target, along with personnel needing to be sent from a special room because otherwise they could simply be beamed out of any problem.
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Day Of The Dove", when Klingons have taken over the Enterprise, Kirk decides the only way to stop them involves intra-ship transporting, with Spock warning him, "It has rarely been done because of the danger involved. Pinpoint accuracy is required. If the transportee should materialize inside a solid object, a deck or wall..".. In the later Trek productions, intra-ship transporting is seen more often due to the technology having improved since the 23rd century. Star Trek (2009) has Spock Prime explaining to the alternate universe's Scotty that his Prime universe counterpart eventually developed an equation that made it possible to safely transport much further distances to a ship even while traveling at warp speed.
  • The Ansatan separatists in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The High Ground" use a folded-space transporter called an "Inverter", which allows them to transport through shields, prevents their enemies from tracking them, and makes them resistant to normal transporters. But repeated use of the device causes cellular damage, eventually warping the user's DNA beyond recognition and killing them.
• Teleporter Accident: Transporters work by literally disassembling an object (or person) into energy, shooting it some distance away, and reassembling that object at the new location. Contrary to popular opinion, the transported object is indeed the original, but the reintegration process can be rather dangerous. There have been some grisly accidents in each iteration of Trek: two Enterprise crewmen died agonizing deaths (TOS: The Motion Picture) after being re-integrated incorrectly, Riker (somehow) unwittingly twinned himself when he tried beaming through a distorted atmosphere (TNG: "Second Chances"), Scotty's transporter pattern was stuck in limbo for 75 years (TNG: "Relics"), and another crewman's body was mixed with rocks and foliage while attempting to beam out during a fierce windstorm, although he survived (ENT: "Strange New World"). Sabotage of the transporter buffer is not uncommon, either. If you hide a remat detonator (described as being 2 square millimeters in size) on their person, you can disrupt the passenger's transporter pattern as they beam up, leaving a smoking, half-finished corpse on the pad. Yech.
  Weyoun:: You were supposed to be on that transporter pad with him.
  Damar: I was called away. An urgent meeting with the Central Command.
  Weyoun: How convenient.
  Damar: I always was lucky.
• Teleport Interdiction: It's not possible to transport through Deflector Shields (most of the time: once in a while the screenwriters forget). This is used as a way to add drama — with the ship having to drop its shields briefly in the middle of battle in order to beam back any crew who are off ship, ^note  Whether landing party, away team, or other.or the away team/landing party not simply being able to flee danger because there's a shield between them. There are numerous other technologies and natural phenomena with can also interfere with transporters, but the deflectors are the most commonly cited.
  • The original Enterprise NC-1701 had an "old-style" sensor array which acted as a sonar. By waiting for the right point in a scan cycle, a ship could de-cloak and beam over to the Enterprise before cloaking again, without being detected. This only works when the ships are parked and the deflector array is down.
  • In
• Test of Pain:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: in "You Are Cordially Invited", O'Brien and Bashir are looking forward to debauchery at Worf's "bachelor party". They are dismayed to learn that said party is really the four-day Klingon ceremony of Kal'hyah. The group is expected to fast, endure brutal heat, shed blood, and pass other tests of pain and endurance, which leads to some dark humor when O'Brien and Bashir begin to crack under the pressure. They get to take it out on him later: part of the marriage ceremony involves the groomsmen attacking the newlyweds with sticks, in homage to how Kahless's wedding was attacked by one of his enemies.
    Bashir: It's working. I'm having a vision... about the future... I can see it so clearly...
    O'Brien: Yeah?
    Bashir: I'm going to kill Worf. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to kill Worf. It's all so clear to me now. Kill Worf... kill Worf...
    Both: Kill Worf... kill Worf...
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Painstiks are Shock Sticks used by Klingons in two important rites:
    • The Rite of Ascension is a two-step ritual which formally recognizes a Klingon as a warrior. In the second step, the Klingon must demonstrate the depth of his inner strength by walking between eight warriors wielding painstiks, who deliver powerful jolts to the Klingon's torso while he expresses his most deeply-held feelings. Worf undergoes this step in "The Icarus Factor", since he hadn't had an opportunity to go through it at the time that a Klingon normally would.
    • The first step in the Rite of Succession is the Sonchi ceremony. The Arbiter of Succession and all those who are vying for the position of Chancellor give a formal challenge to the corpse of the former Chancellor and shock him with a painstik. The thought process is that between the pain from the painstik and the challenge, no living Klingon would dare back down lest he lose his honor, and this confirms that the former Chancellor is indeed dead and not faking it. This ceremony is shown in "Reunion" being done to K'mpec by Duras, Gowron, and Picard (named Arbiter by K'mpec before his death due to suspicions that Duras was the one who masterminded his poisoning).
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: "Charades": One of the Vulcan engagement rituals involves the groom-to-be making tea for the bride's parents, wherein they are required to pour the boiling hot kettle bare-handed—a test of their ability to suppress their emotional response to pain. While rehearsing this with the temporarily biologically human Spock, his mother Miranda Grayson mentions that living among Vulcans involves hiding a lot of pain.* Tie-In Novel: A huge range of novels based on all eras of the franchise (and the spaces in between) exists, including novelizations of several episodes and Star Trek: New Frontier. Other than the novelizations, these are all officially declared non-canon by Paramount and Gene Roddenberry. When Jeri Taylor was the invokedWord of God on Star Trek: Voyager, her original novels about the crew's history were considered canon. They aren't any more.
  • Pre-Nemesis, authors had a standing order not to kill any character that had appeared on-screen. Afterwards, because Nemesis was seen as the last time the original timeline was to be seen on-screen before Discovery was announced as being set there, all bets are off. (Still non-canon, however).
• Time Police: The Federation of the 29th Century and Daniels' faction from the 31st Century. They aren't very effective at this.
  • Janeway is described as casually flaunting the timeline so frequently it actually managed to drive Captain Braxton ''insane''. He comes up with something called "The Janeway Factor," meaning that you can fully expect her to blunder into any time-sensitive activities going on.
  • Also, the time police hate Kirk; when Sisko gives his report about "Trials and Tribble-ations," and first mentions Kirk, the two operatives exchange a look which says, "we hate the Kirk cases".
    "Seventeen separate temporal violations! The biggest file on record!"
• Time to Step Up, Commander: A frequent device (often in the disaster episode) is to have a member of the secondary bridge crew or even the counselor forced to take command when the captain is knocked out or cut off from the rest of the ship.
• Time Travel Taboo:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: A series Ur-Example of the Time Travel Taboo involves the planet Gateway, from the episode "City on the Edge of Forever". After the Federation was nearly wiped out by McCoy saving a 1930s woman who delayed the US' entry into World War II, the planet was placed under strict quarantine. Some non-canon licensed works upped the ante to the same death penalty used for Talos IV. Funnily enough, this taboo did not seem to apply to the rest of the series, where intentional time travel occurred twice (and once in the films).
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduces a Department of Temporal Investigations, which seems to at the very least try and ensure Starfleet personnel aren’t altering history all willy-nilly (though that doesn’t stop Kira from casually using a religious artifact to go back in time and find out if Dukat banged her mom).
  • Star Trek: Voyager establishes that Starfleet of the 29th Century has “timeships” tracking and eliminating any anomalies that might mess with the timeline. Star Trek: Enterprise takes this one step further with a “Temporal Cold War” where the Federation acts as the Time Police, constantly trying to prevent other factions from changing the past for their own benefit.
  • Star Trek: Discovery shows that in the 32nd Century all forms of time travel are now very illegal after a horrific series of Temporal Wars, to the point even Section 31 refuses to use it to stop Mirror Georgiou from dying a horrible, painful death.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Across the franchise as a whole, the exact nature of Time Travel and its relationship to The Multiverse is never really clarified. Are Alternate Universes the result of time travelers changing history? Naturally occurring phenomena? The creations of bored Q entertaining themselves at the expense of Starfleet captains? No definitive answer is ever given despite the fact that travel through time and between parallel universes is far from unusual, and in many cases used as Applied Phlebotinum for solving otherwise unsolvable problems.
• To Be Lawful or Good: One of the most common sources of conflict in the series. The Prime Directive produces seemingly endless cases of characters having to decide whether to follow the rules and allow an atrocity to occur, or ignore them and abandon the Federation's principles. Often made more complicated by the fact that the Federation and Starfleet Command are not above Moving The Goal Posts when it comes to application of the Prime Directive.
• Token Heroic Orc: Most of the "Big Bad" species produce a black sheep who sees the light, defects to the good guys, and becomes a bridge officer.
  • TNG: Worf is a Klingon, the primary antagonists from TOS, who was raised by humans and is the Enterprise's security chief. Captain Kirk would be shocked.
  • DS9: Nog becomes the first Ferengi to join Starfleet and serves on both the Deep Space 9 station and the Defiant.
  • VOY: Seven of Nine is a Rogue Drone from the Borg Collective who becomes part of Voyager's crew. Having a Borg on a Starfleet vessel would be unthinkable for Captain Picard.
  • PIC: Elnor is the first heroic Romulan character who's part of the main cast, being a member of Picard's motley crew and is even the latter's surrogate son. The Romulans were the Big Bad in TNG (and they still are in this series), so the younger Picard could not have predicted that his elderly self would embrace a Romulan as family. Elnor is the most un-Romulan Romulan in the franchise because he follows the Way of Absolute Candor as taught to him by the Qowat Milat.
  • LD: D'Vana Tendi is the first Orion series regular in the franchise and the first Orion Starfleet officer seen in the prime timeline. Her species is mostly portrayed as villainous criminals.
  • Interestingly, we do see Romulans and Cardassians among Starfleet's uniformed ranks, but only in alternate realities. On rare occasions, Starfleet officers turn out to have Romulan ancestry as well (If Saavik had appeared in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, this would have been her reason for supporting the conspiracy.)
• Touch Telepathy: The Vulcan mind meld.
  • Spock touches the heads of the listed people in the following TOS episodes while doing a Mind Meld with them.
    • "Dagger of the Mind": Simon van Gelder, to find out what deviltry is going on at Elba II.
    • "The Devil in the Dark": The Horta in order to communicate with it.
    • In "Requiem For Methuselah": Kirk, in order to remove his memories of Rayna Kapek.
    • "Spectre of the Gun": Kirk, McCoy and Scotty, to convince them that the situation they're in isn't real (so the simulated bullets can't kill them).
    • "Mirror, Mirror": Evil!Spock does it with Dr. McCoy so he can find out what's going on.
    • "I, Mudd": He tries it on Norman, but fails because Norman's a robot.
    • "The Return of The Archons": He tries to do it on McCoy but fails because of Landru's Mind Control.
    • Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: He melds with the humpback whale, Gracie. He learns that Gracie is pregnant.
  • Several other characters perform it, as well: Miranda to Spock in "Is There In Truth No Beauty?", T'Pau to Spock in "Amok Time".
  • The lack of a Vulcan main character on TNG and DS9 reduced the frequency of the mind melds, but they still occasionally crept in. Sarek to Picard in "Sarek", and Spock to Picard in "Unification". Additionally, a failed attempt was made by a Maquis rebel on Gul Dukat in the DS9 episode "The Maquis".
  • The reintroduction of a Vulcan main cast member in VOY and ENT reintroduced frequent melds. Tuvok on VOY did it in the following episodes:
    • "Ex Post Facto", to Tom Paris to learn the secret of the crime for which Paris had been accused
    • "Meld", with Ensign Suder, to try to understand what drove the man to commit murder
    • "Flashback", to Captain Janeway, to let her help investigate his own memory
    • "The Gift", to Kes, to attempt to help stabilize her powers
    • "Random Thoughts", to a black marketer who traded in violent thoughts
    • "Infinite Regress", to Seven of Nine, to help cure her induced multiple personality syndrome
    • "Unimatrix Zero", to both Janeway and Seven of Nine, to allow Janeway to enter the Platonic Cave that Seven had recently remembered.
  • In the prequel series Enterprise, the idea of mind melds are initially discussed in Vulcan society as something of a taboo, that only heretics and rebels would ever perform. Nonetheless, it was performed at least four times, two of which involving main character T'Pol (once by her, once to her against her will)
  • On Picard, Zhat Vash mole Commodore Oh performs one on Dr. Jurati to pass along the Admonition (a severely traumatic psychic warning about artificial intelligence). It's so effective it convinces Agnes to murder her ex-boyfriend Bruce Maddox, though in season 2 we learn she was found not guilty by reason of “mind-meld-induced psychosis”.
  • Hoping to deepen their relationship, Spock & T'Pring (on Strange New Worlds) perform an unusual one that causes them to switch bodies for awhile.
• Translator Microbes: The Universal Translator. We occasionally get to see the Translator in action, such as in "Sanctuary" where the aliens' gibberish gradually turned to English.
  • And of course, "Darmok" famously subverted it by having the aliens talk in allegories, which aren't so easily translated.
• Transparent Tech: The usual manifestation of the trope—the transparent display screen—was exceedingly rare before Discovery, but Force Field Doors seem to be standard equipment for brigs in Starfleet for much of the franchise's history.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: While numerous fans, as well as authors of RPG's and other supplementary materials, have tried to translate Warp Factor into a firm measurement of speed, actual writers of episodes and films tend to ignore such efforts and simply have ships take however long the plot requires to get from place to place. This is paralleled by the many conflicting maps of the galaxy that have been produced over the decades, which inconsistently depict the locations of major planets and non-Federation space nations.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: The three pillars of Klingon philosophy are duty, honor, and loyalty. Officially, the Klingons play this trope straight.
  • Worf does, but he's a particular case. Firstly, his parents died in a treacherous attack by the Romulans who had Klingon accomplices. Secondly, since he has been adopted by human parents, he developed an idealized conception of the Klingon way of life.
  • This aspect wasn't yet established during TOS, but the trope is still played straight by Kang. He has always respected scrupulously the Organian treaty, so he's pretty angry when his ship's disabled by what seems to be an unjustified attack from the Enterprise.
  • Overall, a lot of treacherous Klingons appear on screen. Sometimes, their strategy is accusing the adversary of treachery.
  • In Klingon society, losing honor is officially worst than being killed and traitors are usually stripped of their honor. Actually, honor and dishonor are tools for political maneuver. That's why Worf's family, the House of Mogh, is dishonored, then vindicated and dishonored again.
  • There's also the episode "The Drumhead". Of course, that starts with a Klingon who did an espionage job for the Romulans, so Worf is personnaly engaged, but there's also the fight between Admiral Satie who considers the end justifies the means to find imaginary traitors and Picard who point out her methods betrays the principles on which Federation justice are based.
• Trouble from the Past: We have the Eugenics Wars of the mid-1990s, the "sanctuary districts" of the early 21st century where the homeless, jobless, and mentally ill were left to rot, and the post-atomic horror following World War III in the late 21st century.
• Truce Trickery:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • The Federation has a peace treaty with the Romulan Star Empire that established a demilitarized zone along their mutual border, the Romulan Neutral Zone. "Balance of Terror" revolves around a string of Romulan raids on Federation listening posts along the Neutral Zone, meant to test the Federation's willingness to retaliate for breaches in the treaty.
    • "The Savage Curtain": Kirk points out to Colonel Green that he was notorious for striking his enemies while in the midst of negotiating with them.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • "The Wounded" revolves around the captain of the USS Phoenix going rogue after accusing the Cardassians of trying to subvert the recent ceasefire in the border dispute between them and the Federation by shipping additional weapons to the front lines. Though he's stopped and arrested by the Enterprise, Captain Picard tells his counterpart Gul Macet that he thinks the accusations are valid and warns him to get his government to knock it off. "We will be watching."
    • The Romulan Star Empire is established to have signed an additional treaty with the Federation since TOS, the Treaty of Algeron—which keeps the peace in exchange for the Federation banning its own use of cloaking devices—but repeatedly pushes the limits of it during the series up to and including trying to launch an invasion of Vulcan in "Unification, Part 2". Conversely, in "The Pegasus", we find out that the eponymous ship was experimenting with cloaking technology, likewise violating the treaty (which the captain in question opposed).
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • The series begins shortly after the Cardassians were forced to concede defeat in their occupation of the planet Bajor and withdrew, and the Bajorans invited the Federation to establish an embassy and military presence. In the three-part season two premiere, a Civil War breaks out on Bajor between the interim government and ultranationalist extremists called the Circle, but it's revealed in "The Siege" that the rebels were being covertly supplied by the Cardassians, who hoped to reoccupy Bajor once the Federation had been kicked out and the Bajorans had exhausted themselves.
    • "The Maquis": A guerrilla war breaks out in the Federation-Cardassian Demilitarized Zone between Federation and Cardassian settlers, with the Cardassian Empire eventually proven to be arming its own settlers to prosecute a deniable Proxy War against the Federation despite the peace treaty they signed late in The Next Generation. This ultimately leads to the formation of the Maquis, a militia raised from among the Federation colonies that then also turns its guns on Starfleet when the Federation refuses to resume hostilities despite the Cardassians' repeated blatant disregard for the treaty.
  • Star Trek: Discovery: In "Battle at the Binary Stars", Klingon leader T'Kuvma verbally agrees to a ceasefire with Starfleet Admiral Anderson, and then promptly sends a ship on a ramming attack against Anderson's flagship just to show what he thinks of the Federation's preference for peaceful dialogue (as well as decapitating the Starfleet response force).
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds:
    • "A Quality of Mercy" revisits the Romulan raids on Federation border outposts from "Balance of Terror" in defiance of the treaty, this time with Captain Pike in the Enterprise's command chair. He misjudges the Romulans' intentions and a full scale war breaks out.
    • Feigned in "The Broken Circle". A group of renegade ex-Klingon and -Federation soldiers fly a salvaged Federation starship in a false flag attack on a Klingon D7 battlecruiser. This is supposed to look like a breach of the ceasefire between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, meant to restart the war and increase profits from the dilithium mine the renegades are guarding. The Enterprise destroys the ship before it can do any damage and Spock is able to convince the Klingon captain that the Federation wasn't involved.

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