History YMMV / StarTrekTheNextGeneration

** Sure, it may seem silly that in "Unification," the Romulans were planning to use only two ''thousand'' troops (essentially a single regiment) to annex an entire planet...until 2014, when {{UsefulNotes/Russia}} quickly annexed the Crimean Peninsula by using small groups of special forces to secure key areas and force out the Ukrainian military. Perhaps this is where UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin got the idea.

** The episodes involving Romulus have gained a little bit of a bittersweet overtone since their airing. "The Defector" had a disgraced and banished Romulan general who'd defected to stop an all-out Romulan/Federation war [[spoiler:(actually part of a ploy by Romulus to ''start'' said war, albeit the general didn't know that)]], leaving behind a suicide note to be delivered to his child; the ending played up the hopes that, one day, relations would eventually be good enough between the two sides that the Federation could deliver it personally. The two-parter "Unification" ends on a hopeful note that the young of Romulus will eventually replace their warmongering elders and embrace their relationship with Vulcan on far more friendly terms. [[spoiler:Neither will happen; the Romulus of this universe was canonically vaporized by a supernova in ''Film/StarTrek2009'', giving Nero the impetus to go back in time and screw around with the alternate universe of the Abrams films. Though ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'' has a slightly more hopeful take on the situation, with the Romulan "commoners" off-world building a new, democratic government, and allying with either the Federation or the Klingons.]]

** In "Descent, Part I" Admiral Nechayev has the events of "I Borg" explained to her. She [[PunishedForSympathy dresses down Picard]] for letting a potential opportunity to destroy the Borg Collective slip past, that being using the rescued Borg drone Hugh as a TyphoidMary to destroy the Collective with a cyberweapon, and leaves him with standing orders that if he gets another such opportunity he is to bury his conscience and take advantage of it. While Picard had done it because he had come to see Hugh as a person, and the episode is framed for us to agree with him and treat Nechayev as yet another InsaneAdmiral, consider this: The Borg have killed billions, minimum, and are inherently required to do so by their core programming, and thus represent an apocalyptic threat to every thinking creature in the entire galaxy. [[GodzillaThreshold At that point]], one must consider Spock's old standby that "{{the needs of the many}} outweigh the needs of the few or the one." [[spoiler:If the events of Literature/StarTrekDestiny are canon, then Picard's refusal to use Hugh in this way did in fact have dire consequences - the final Borg/Federation war resulted in the deaths of over 70 ''billion'' sapient beings.]]

* CompleteMonster:
** "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E22TheMostToys The Most Toys]]": Kivas Fajo is a CollectorOfTheStrange with the attitude of a [[PsychopathicManchild sociopathic brat]], who uses his job as a trader to cover for his thievery of unique and valuable objects. After desiring to add Data, the only known sapient android in the galaxy, to his collection, Fajo [[WaterSourceTampering poisons an inhabited planet's water supply]] so [[PoisonAndCureGambit he can kidnap Data and cover it up as an accidental death while trading over the antidote]]. When Data is in his care, Fajo [[ItIsDehumanizing doesn't care about his sapience]] and degrades and humiliates him into catering to his whims, insistent that he's just another shiny object. When Data refuses to comply, Fajo eventually forces him to obey by threatening to kill his broken, co-dependent slave girlfriend Varria with a Varon-T Disruptor, which is illegal to carry in the Federation due to the [[AgonyBeam agonizingly slow and torturous]] way it kills its targets from the inside out. When Varria helps Data escape, Fajo murders her with it and [[NeverMyFault pins the blame on Data]]. He then threatens to continue killing more of his own servants if Data keeps refusing to obey him, and even dismisses Varria's death by stating that he can easily find a replacement. Among the series's one-shot villains, Kivas Fajo is without a doubt among the worst.
** "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS5E12Violations Violations]]": Jev was a [[MindRape serial mind rapist]] who was part of a Ullian delegation, led by his father Tarmin, that specialized in telepathic memory retrieval, a process that restores lost memories. Jev first [[RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil assaulted]] Counselor Troi by using his telepathic powers to rewrite her memories of a romantic moment between her and Riker into a rape and then replacing Riker in the memory. She fell into a coma after a mental attack. Later he assaulted Commander Riker and Dr. Crusher, making them experience their worst nightmares to keep them from exposing him. When Troi regained consciousness and can't remember her attacker, Jev "helps" by using the memory retrieval process and uses it to frame his father Tamrin, who is arrested. Then he goes to Troi's quarters, ostensibly to apologize for his father, but really to rape her again. This time she's able to hold him off long enough for Worf and his security team to arrive and he's finally brought to justice. What makes Jev even worse is that it's established the crew of the Enterprise are simply the latest in a very long line of his victims, with Geordie and Data's research turning up multiple cases of people who he left in comas, dating years back and spanning several different planets.

** The series itself, with one of its lead characters being the TropeNamer for GrowingTheBeard.

** Ron Jones, one of the composers for the first four seasons, was literally ''fired for being too good at his job'', as Rick Berman thought his music was too distracting from the writing.

* SeinfeldIsUnfunny:
** It can be so very hard to understand how hard-hitting and ''terrifying'' the {{Cliffhanger}} ending of "The Best of Both Worlds Part I" was, especially after ''TNG'' and the subsequent ''Trek'' spinoffs ''[[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine Deep Space Nine]]'', ''[[Series/StarTrekVoyager Voyager]]'', and ''[[Series/StarTrekEnterprise Enterprise]]'' started making regular use of such endings, and then pretty much every dramatic television series after that. Hell, it's easy to forget now that viewers had to wait ''three months'' just to see how the two-parter would resolve and whether Creator/PatrickStewart really would be returning! It was all nerds talked about over the summer of 1990 and made "[=BoBW=] Part 2" a ratings goliath when it aired.
** Also, as noted a bit here, ''Wesley'' gets a weird version of this: in the [=21st=] century and experiencing the show through on-demand streaming at one's own pace, it can be a little hard to understand why people had such a negative reaction to Wesley, when you can easily skip over a few of the episodes, you know that things like "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS5E19TheFirstDuty The First Duty]]" are right there and you know that Wheaton is a bit of a geek icon. It's very easy to lose sight of the fact that the original period between "Farpoint" and "First Duty" was ''four and a half years'', in real time; viewers tuning in weekly had to put up with The Wesley Episodes for four continuous seasons, and if you were trying to catch the show on reruns and you weren't fond of Wesley, you had to pray that the network hadn't decided to air a Wesley Episode. The realities of pre-streaming syndicated television made Wesley a lot harder to escape, back when the show was still active and just entering reruns, and is what contributed to his infamous reputation, which are conditions that largely no longer exist in the Internet era.