"No human being (and by extension, no Cardassian) is one hundred percent pure evil. But there is a 'critical mass', if you will, where the dark deeds attributed to one person become so overwhelming that they swamp all the redeeming characteristics."
— Ron D. Moore on Gul Dukat, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Moral Event Horizon in the Star Trek franchise.
Television shows
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
- In "Paradise", Alixus crosses it with the reveal that a citizen was locked in a small metal box, without clothes and probably without food or water, for a full day, as punishment for stealing a candle. Any suspicions about the colony and Alixus vanish in an instant, for it's become clear she is an outright villain. And that's before it's revealed that she's the reason that the colonists are stranded on the planet, just to be guinea pigs in her social experiment.
- Admiral Leyton spends most of "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who truly believes he's doing a good thing with his conspiracy to take over Earth and put it under martial law. He even looks sorry when he frames his old protege, Ben Sisko, and has him put in a holding cell. Until three-quarters through the story, the station captures another conspirator and is bringing him to Earth on the Defiant to testify. Leyton tells his right-hand-woman that the ship was taken over by Changelings and needs to be destroyed.
- Even with the past atrocities of the Cardassians, nothing justifies Eddington stealing the replicators in "For the Cause". He treats the simple act of the Federation aiding the Cardassians after a war as amoral, as though being born a Cardassian is of itself a crime.
- The Dominion is revealed to have crossed this line long ago in "The Quickening", when they infected an entire planet's population with a slow acting but ultimately lethal bioweapon, purely to discourage other worlds from resisting. This was after devastating the planet with conventional weapons.
- In "Body Parts", Liquidator Brunt manipulates Quark into signing a contract that requires him to die to fulfill, or else live in disgrace and destitution. He even torments Quark about defiling his remains after he's dead. Quark even resorts to taking out a hit on himself in an effort to live up to his principles before, thankfully, he has an epiphany and stands up to Brunt.
- Gul Dukat was a mad, genocidal, sexually-ravenous dictator to begin with... and then he allied with the Dominion just to get back into a position of power, effectively setting off the chain of events that got his own planet razed to the ground.
- The last episode has the Female Changeling deal with Cardassian saboteurs by nuking Lakarian City; the resulting death toll is two million. When the Cardassian fleet learns of this, they perform a Heel–Face Turn and begin firing on the Dominion and Breen ships. How does the Female Changeling react to this?Female Changeling: I want the Cardassians exterminated.
Weyoun: Which ones?
Female Changeling: All of them. The entire population.
Weyoun: That may... take some time.
Female Changeling: Then I suggest you begin at once.
- Star Trek: Discovery:
- It's pretty hard to mourn T'Kuvma after he initiated a battle that killed over eight thousand Starfleet personnel, and kicked off an ensuing war with the Federation, simply to further his own personal advancement — whether or not it really was for the stated goal of unifying the Klingon Empire.
- It's all but said outright in "Choose Your Pain" that L'Rell raped Ash Tyler in exchange for sparing him from beatings, which is further detailed by Tyler's feverish flashbacks in "Into The Forest I Go". The perceived rape may or may not actually be Voq's memories, but "The Wolf Inside" indicates that she did have the real Ash Tyler fatally vivisected in order to use his organs to disguise Voq as Tyler, just so that Voq could infiltrate Starfleet and undermine the Federation.
- Voq absolutely plows past the MEH when he pulls off a Split-Personality Takeover while disguised as Ash Tyler, subsequently murders Dr. Culber when medical scans reveal the truth, and attempts to kill both his still-Klingon Mirror Universe counterpart and the prime-universe Michael Burnham.
- Whatever sympathy Mirror-Lorca might have had for his coup was swiftly lost when his New Era Speech proves him even worse than the Emperor he was planning to overthrow. Speaking of whom ...
- Emperor Georgiou herself literally eats aliens as a delicacy. And on top of that, she reveals in "Will You Take My Hand?" that she conquered the Klingon Empire in her universe by blowing up Qo'noS with a hydro bomb, before sending her fleet to exterminate the survivors as they tried to escape. If Lorca knew about that and still wasn't satisfied, then either he was deeply misogynistic or Discovery saved the Terran Empire, and the aliens oppressed by the Terrans, from the lovechild of Hitler and Pol Pot.
- Star Trek: Enterprise: Dolim crosses it in "The Council" by fatally stabbing Degra and vowing to do the same to his wife and children as he dies.
- Star Trek: Lower Decks:
- "The Stars at Night": If erasing Rutherford's memory, trying to sabotage Freeman's career, and setting up the Cerritos to be attacked by the Breen didn't push Buenamigo over the line, he most certainly crosses it when he decides to straight-up murder Freeman and her entire crew to keep them from exposing him.
- In the same episode, the Aledo crosses it at transwarp when it attacks the station and gets its sister ships to join in.
- "I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee": The displayed humans cross it by knowingly unleashing a Killer Rabbit onto the station in the hopes that it'll kill Narj and they'll be able to take over the menagerie. In addition to Narj, their actions get the Pyrithian swamp gobblers killed and endanger the Cerritos away team.
- "Old Friends, New Planets": Locarno crosses it when he tries to murder Mariner in cold blood. Before then, his worst crimes were kidnapping and manslaughter, and Mariner thought he had the potential for a Heel–Face Turn. It's this that cements Locarno as irredeemable.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- "The Most Toys": Fajo indisputably crosses it when he shoots and kills Varria with a Varon-T disruptor. Even Fajo himself seems momentarily shaken by that act—he immediately tosses the disruptor away after firing. Unfortunately, he soon recovers and threatens to use the horrific weapon again. He nearly becomes an Asshole Victim as a result.
- "Transfigurations": If Sunad hadn't already crossed it for wanting to kill John Doe (and possibly having already killed his comrades) for supposedly being a threat, then trying to murder everyone on the Enterprise definitely puts him over the edge.
- "The Ensigns of Command": Gosheven interrupting a meeting between Data and some dissenters would just be him being a stick in the mud, until he attempts to deactivate Data by electrocuting him with a stun-rod. Not cool, Gosheven, not cool!
- "The Drumhead": Picard gave Satie a chance to redeem herself, and what does she do instead? Not only does she blithely ignore his Kirk Summation, but she then shames him over being Mind Raped by the Borg. Major dick move.
- "The First Duty": Part of the reason Nick Locarno was replaced with Tom Paris for Star Trek: Voyager is because the writers, and Robert Duncan McNeill, felt Locarno had crossed this. It's not hard to see where they're coming from; Locarno pressured the rest of Nova Squadron into performing a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that was banned by Starfleet Academy because the last squad to try it were all killed, and then after a practice session went pear-shaped and got one of them killed, decided to pressure his surviving squadmates into a Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit. Although he does take responsibility eventually, it's only because Wesley spilled the beans after Picard confronted him over the cover-up, and he goes on to blame the Academy faculty for the tragedy on the basis that they didn't let Nova Squadron practice.McNeill: I think Locarno was a bad guy who pretended to be a good guy. Deep down inside, he was rotten.
- Star Trek: The Original Series:
- "The Conscience of The King": Kodos the Executioner had murdered half the population of a colony world, picking the survivor half with Social Darwinism having convinced himself it was the only way to alleviate a famine
- "The Omega Glory": Tracey was already tap dancing on it, but he crossed it when he killed Galloway.
- "Turnabout Intruder": From Chekov's and Sulu's point of view, Lester-in-Kirk crosses the line when s/he begins to order executions.
- Star Trek: Voyager: The aliens in "Scientific Method" come across as an entire civilization who crossed the Moral Event Horizon long ago and have just kept on going. They routinely do medical experiments on sentient creatures, mutilating, torturing them, and even killing them if they feel it will benefit their medical research to do so. They feel completely justified in their actions and not only do they feel no remorse or regret over their actions, they feel that what they do is noble and beneficial. Genetically deforming, maiming and killing the crew of Voyager is the Nightmare Fuel evidence of their crimes and that is only the tip of the iceberg. What is really terrifying is that their flimsy justifications allow them to murder entire societies with impunity and go on torturing and killing as many sentient creatures as they feel is necessary for their "research."
Films
- Well, by the time he shows up in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, we know Khan Noonien Singh is a bastard, if a magnificent one, especially if you've seen Star Trek: The Original Series. But when he starts putting worms in people's ears, you realize that perhaps he's kicked it up a notch on the Evulz scale; but you say to yourself that he's intelligent and charming and surely he can be reasoned with. But...when he listens to a minion kill himself and doesn't so much as blink, merely ordering the surviving minion to hurry up and carry out his orders, you realize this guy ain't coming back from the horizon. Khan also certainly reminded the audience that he was evil when he activated the Genesis device instead of surrendering to the Enterprise. He knew that he would take down at least one of the Enterprise's own, if not the entire freaking ship. He would have wiped out many people just to satisfy a longtime desire for revenge. It wound up that Spock, Kirk's closest friend, sacrificed himself to save the Enterprise.
- Star Trek: Nemesis: Shinzon went from "Attempt to make a TNG version of Khan" to "complete and utter dickwad" when he mind raped Troi as she was having sex with Riker. He does this just to get rid of his sexual frustration and to scare Troi, and the writers use this to try and prove that he still is capable of evil. This just went too freaking far.
- The destruction of the planet Vulcan and most of its 6 billion inhabitants at the hands of the Romulan villain Nero and his crew avenging the death of their own planet in J. J. Abrams' Star Trek (2009). The death of Spock's mother Amanda as he helplessly reaches out for her just heightens the tragedy. What makes it worse is that he's getting revenge for something that 1) hasn't actually happened in this timeline and 2) wasn't Spock's fault in the first place: future-Spock did nothing to harm Romulus and simply arrived too late to save it, and worse yet, past-Spock has done nothing pertaining to the incident at all. Nero's pretty clearly off the deep end.
- Star Trek Into Darkness:
- If his plot to start a war with the Klingons didn't do it, Admiral Marcus definitely crosses the line with the revelation that he never intended to spare the Enterprise or her crew, no matter what Kirk said or did.
- John Harrison/Khan crossed it by betraying Kirk, then attempting to murder the Enterprise crew after his people were returned to him (or so he thought), at a point where none of the crew posed any threat to him.
- In Star Trek Beyond, Krall crosses it during his attack on Yorktown Station; not only intent on killing everyone inside, but to effectively cripple the diplomatic element of the Federation because he didn't like it becoming peaceful.
Literature
- Star Trek: A Time to...: Prime Minister Kinchawn crosses it rather early, after he uses his illegally-acquired weapons (see: Government Conspiracy, above) to shoot down 10 Klingon ships in orbit of Tezwa, killing 6,000 warriors. If this didn't represent his crossing the line, his casual willingness to see millions of Tezwans killed in a Klingon counterstrike, including his own family, certainly does. What makes it worse is his apparent self-image as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, when he's really totally Drunk with Power. He sees his own children's death as merely a means to acquire more sympathy and thus more support and power, and seems to truly believe this is somehow reasonable.
- And then there's Federation President Min Zife and many of his cabinet, who provided Kinchawn with these weapons, and then not only made every effort to bury the secret but, in their desire not to have the Klingons even know about this heavily armed threat on their border, allowed the destruction of several Klingon ships and the deaths of thousands of Klingon troops.
- In response to what the Zife administration has done, Captain Picard and Admirals Ross, Necheyev, Jellico, and Paris uncomfortably decide to cross their own event horizon and demand that Zife and his people step down or they expose this - meaning they either, effectively, engage in a military overthrow of their own government (no matter the reason) or they give the Klingon Empire and its militant factions already chafing with allying with the Federation cause to sunder the Khitomer Accords AGAIN and plunge the Alpha Quadrant into YET. ANOTHER. bloody war.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch: After spending all of the Left Hand of Destiny duology dancing around it, Gothmara crosses it after mutating her own son into a Hur'q.
- Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch: Section 31 deciding to let Maltuvis take over Sauria in the name of realpolitik.
Video games
- Star Trek: Bridge Commander: Legate Matan is a slippery Manipulative Bastard who turned the otherwise peaceful Kessok against the Federation and has them construct House Arterius a massive fleet to fight for him. However, he loses all sympathy when he plans to destroy a sun to wipe out a helpless Kessok colony as well as all of his troops currently attacking it.
- Star Trek Online has a number of characters who cross this line, very befitting of the series.
- The first you encounter is Ambassador B'Vat, who seeks to bring a Forever War between the Klingon Empire and the Federation. How does he plan to do that? By finding and unleashing a Doomsday Machine (the same type from Star Trek: The Original Series) on the Federation. Thankfully, the player character stops that plan. He tries again by kidnapping Miral Paris, who is said to be the Klingon Messiah, dragging her to the 23rd Century, and using their future tech to alter time so that the Klingons ruled over the galaxy and restore the alterations of the Klingons at that time. He only succeeds in the first.
- Before, there were actually missions where you could actually fail them and be deemed a traitor of the Federation. This has since been removed.
- General Hakeev of the Tal Shiar. What did he do? Oh, nothing major, just be the reason that Romulus and Remus are now asteroid fields. Oh, and the reason he does this? Because he's working with the Iconians, a vicious race of aliens that are ready to take back the galaxy. Oh, and they crossed the line, too, by being the ones who gave Hakeev the means to blow up the planets.
