What Do You Mean Its Not For Kids / Star Trek

• Star Trek series were generally aired during a family-viewing time (i.e. after five but before nine). Among other things, TNG alone was throwing out several episodes dealing with heads blowing up, heads being blown off, human laboratory experiments, bloody death scenes, psychological and physical torture (that were advised on by the folks at Amnesty International) and let's not forget the Borg... you have to wonder whether this was always a good idea.
  • Never mind that there was quite a large volume of Star Trek-themed toy merch during the heyday of TNG. Hey kids, don't you want a toy of the big cube filled with techno-zombies who want to rip open your flesh and take away your human soul? Sure you do!
  • DS9 is even worse. The series begins by showing us the horrific Battle of Wolf 359. In TNG, this happened off-screen, and we only got to see the aftermath. In Deep Space Nine, we see it up close and personal as thirty-nine ships are destroyed, resulting in the deaths of thousands. It only got darker from there. By the end of the series, it had featured racism, intolerance, a hefty dose of War Is Hell, Family Unfriendly Deaths by the dozen, genetic modification and slavery, Mind Rape, maiming, protest by suicide, a form of human hunting, PTSD, genocide, backstabbing politics, poisoning of entire planets, and lots of terrorism (with Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters being one of the series' central themes). And a lot of this was done by the heroes, with the show wavering between Grey-and-Gray Morality and Black-and-Gray Morality depending on the situation. Deep Space Nine was anything but meant for kids, likely being one of the darkest pieces of work to ever come out of the franchise.
• Also, there's Picard getting a sword through the heart, getting trapped as a program of pure information inside the ship's computers only to be erased in favor of another copy of himself taken just a few seconds ago according to Troi, Barclay merging with the Enterprise, Troi getting mind raped at least twice, Wesley nearly killing his mom at least twice (once on the Holodeck, another time in a collapsing pocket universe), following through on someone else and being fired for it, land developers committing genocide against native sentient grains of photovoltaic sand, Riker getting cloned and his clone joining the Maquis^note that last one took place on DS9, after TNG was over. Anytime Worf deals with anything about his own Proud Warrior Race, he suffers greatly for it, and his spine breaks twice just to prove the Badassery of the episode's Friend to All Living Things. Someone even tried to suck Dr. Crusher's Life Energy or whatever. Data is often damaged, only to casually continue, once even to the point of being decapitated for 400 years. Data is also easily brainwashed, put on trial for disassembly, and impersonated by his Evil Twin. The only one that relatively escapes this is Geordi laForge, until a brainwashed Data puts nano-cortical fibers into his forehead in preparation for Brain Uploading. And then there was that one time that he was mind raped and turned into a assassin.
• TNG in general was more "sexed up" than the classic series, which was already fairly boundary-pushing for 60's broadcast TV.
  • Riker tries to "lance" just about everything that is remotely female, alien and humanoid. Just having Deanna Troi onboard in her capacity as a therapist is unusual for a Star Trek series. Picard also travels back in time and his now much younger best friend Martha demands to be "lanced" and he does so, alienating her.
  • There were episodes like "Justice", which featured a society full of barely-clothed sexy people having a lot of sex most of the time, early episodes showed the crew getting extremely horny, and implied Tasha Yar, of all people, was banging one guy after another (including Data!), not to mention Crusher implicitly grabbing Picard's crotch. Later seasons were somewhat tamer, but "Man of the People" (Season 6) does have Deanna Troi in a decidedly sheer nightie through which her breasts (and we mean just about all of them) can be clearly seen.
• In the opening moments of DS9, we saw Jennifer Sisko, trapped under debris, dead or dying, the room burning around her as her husband desperately tried to reach her. By season five, they were including scenes of Starfleet officers dying from gruesome injuries. And then there's the Dominion War...
• In a similar vein, Enterprise's "Unexpected" is also about rape as a joke. It falls somewhere between date rape and child molestation. Sure Trip's an adult, but the lizard lady's dialog just screams "I've got candy in my van". Calling her sexing up of Trip "a game we play" when he doesn't know what's happening.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • "The Siege of AR-558" features the Dominion's shock troops attempting to reclaim a communications outpost that had been seized months earlier by the Federation. The Defiant shows up to provide supplies at first, but the crew remains behind when The Jem'Hadar sneak attack Nog and they realize a siege is inevitable. He winds up losing a leg due to that and what follows is a quite violent fight against a horde of shock troops, all while classy jazz music plays, thanks to Bashir having a recording of Vic Fontaine singing.
  • Prior to the actual battle we get an up close look at one of the most accurate depictions of combat stress on television ever as the crew that has been holding this base has their numbers whittled down over non-stop combat for months without rest or reinforcement. Quark points out to Nog in all seriousness that these humans have become indistinguishable from Klingons.
• Then there are The Borg and Species 8472. The former feature Body Horror, You Will Be Assimilated and Fate Worse than Death. The latter are Omnicidal Maniac race that makes hills out of severed Borg heads for breakfast and blows up planets for dinner. They also feature Body Horror and Fate Worse than Death, though in ways different from the Borg. Did we mention they both feature Nightmare Fuel?
• The Original Series wasn't all that friendly either:
  • How about the episode "The Paradise Syndrome" where Kirk gets married to a woman, gets her pregnant, and then she gets stoned to death. On camera. Yeah.
  • "Miri", with its facial disfigurement, homicidal mania, and children under threat, caused a big row in the UK when it was first broadcast. This led to it and three other episodes being left out of UK showing of the series until the 1990s.
  • "Charlie X" features the titular character, who can be summed up as Anthony Fremont IN SPACE, and with even worse fates for anyone who crossed him (at least Anthony's victims were Released to Elsewhere after their transformations). Oh, and he blew up a ship, stalked a yeoman and killed her when she slapped him, and forced Spock to recite poetry instead of fighting. And the race that adopted him terrifies him, to the point where he's begging the same people he was just bullying not to let them take him away.
  • "Patterns of Force" had appearances from the totally kid-friendly Nazis! Complete with racism! Germany had this banned until at least the late 1990s (and even then, it was edited and changed so Nazis wouldn't be mentioned or seen).
  • "Operation: Annihilate!" has Kirk's relatives and a good many other people die horribly, with the only survivor being Kirk's nephew.
  • "Space Seed" introduced everyone's favorite madman Khan Noonien Singh, who was introduced by suffocating Kirk, Uhura, and Spock in the Sickbay Room. And he got worse in the sequel.
  • And "The Enemy Within" features the totally family-friendly Attempted Rape of Janice Rand. And by an evil version of the good captain himself, no less.
  • Really, TOS's scariness is best reflected on its Nightmare Fuel page.
• The Paramount+ shows, being in a streaming service rather than cable television, have more adult content:
  • Star Trek: Discovery encountered this attitude upon its debut in September 2017 as the first made-for-streaming, TV-MA rated Star Trek series, with higher levels of gore and adult language (including the franchise's first use of the F-word). Although the show remains tame compared to other streaming series, and a case can be made that its TV-MA rating is arbitrary rather than accurately reflecting its content, the fact it is the first explicitly non-family-friendly Trek series has led to some complaining from fans. In Canada, where the series airs in a traditional broadcast format rather than streaming, home broadcaster Space was actually reprimanded by the country's broadcast standards watchdog for airing an episode of a franchise considered family-friendly too early in the evening; the episode in question was cited for violence and also contained the aforementioned first use of the F-word.
  • Star Trek: Picard also took advantage of being made for streaming services, with the inclusion of more violence, a more cynical and depressing tone and a more liberal use of the F-word, which led to some backlash from more traditional fans and parents.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks is assumed to be a juvenile animated series due to its lighthearted comedy and friendly-looking characters, but there are frequent references to adult situations (Mariner's Establishing Character Moment has her tease Boimler while drunk, sex between crewmembers is shown more and more frequently as the series goes on), and the freedom of animation means that the violence is much more graphic than in other Trek shows. The majority of the profanity is bleeped out, although this is due to Rule of Funny rather than making things family-friendly.

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