Star Trek The Next Generation / Tropes J To S

Star Trek: The Next Generation Tropes J to S

J-L

• Jerkass:
  • Q loves tormenting people, though he's more like an unruly adolescent than malevolent, at least after the first episode.
  • Most of the Cardassians that show up. The Cardassian culture actually values Jerkass qualities.
  • Bruce Maddox in "The Measure of a Man". Until the very end, he's completely dismissive toward Data, talking about him as if he isn't even there, and constantly refers to him as "it" (even granted Maddox doesn't believe Data is sentient, he very clearly identifies as male and is, ahem, "fully functional").
• Joker Jury: The onlookers in Q's "courtroom" cheer and jeer throughout the proceedings, trials apparently being used as a form of entertainment in the time period Q recreated.
• "Join Us" Drone: This series was the introduction of the Borg who sprouted the infamous line when going after new victims:
  "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile".
• Just a Machine:
  • "Measure of a Man". Fortunately for Data, they decide that no, he's not. It should be noted that the the judge's ruling is extremely specific: That Data is not the property of Starfleet. The ruling actually avoids addressing his sentience, innate free will and status as a lifeform. Data, both before and after the trial, viewed Soong-type androids as unique lifeforms, as does most of the crew.
  • In the episode "The Quality of Life" the crew discovers that a repair robot might be sophisticated enough to be considered alive.
  • "Emergence": The Enterprise computer begins using the ship's replicators and transporters to change its own circuitry around, culminating in the creation of some sort of offspring. Unfortunately, this premise mostly took place in a broken holodeck simulation.
• Just Between You and Me: A lot of enemy plots are foiled when their plans are revealed, only to have the crew member in question escape and foil the whole thing.
• Just Ignore It: The Stone of Gol in "Gambit": a device that can kill anyone with a single thought. However, it works by turning a person's violent thoughts against them, and is useless against those who have no such thoughts.
• Just Woke Up That Way: In "Face of the Enemy", Troi wakes up having been surgically altered to look like a Romulan.
• Kangaroo Court: "The Drumhead". Admiral Satie's inquiry into an act of sabotage spins out into a witch hunt, and she relentlessly hounds a crewman who is part Romulan, then puts Picard in the hot seat for criticizing the proceedings.
• Karma Houdini:
  • The solanogen-based lifeforms in "Schisms", who experimented on several crewmembers and caused the death of one of them, weren't really retaliated against. The crew simply sealed the rift into their universe. The writers decided they looked too non-threatening to ever be brought back, too.
  • Vulcan Ambassador T'Pel, who is really a Romulan spy called Sub-Commander Selok in "Data's Day".
  • Krola, the paranoid Malkorian defense minister, tries to make himself a martyr by putting a phaser in an injured Riker's hand and shooting himself with it. The phaser was set to stun and the Malkorian chancellor knows the truth, but Krola suffers no punishment, and he gets what he wanted: The Enterprise leaves at the request of the chancellor, who decides people like Krola need more time to catch up to the rest of their society.
  • Taibak, the Romulan scientist who brutally tortured and brainwashed Geordi in "The Mind's Eye".
  • In "The Next Phase", a Romulan ship thanks the Enterprise for their help by setting up a muon wave to destroy them as soon as they go to warp. As far as we see, nothing happens to those Romulans.
• Keeping the Handicap: Q tempts Riker by giving him the Q's godlike powers. He uses the power to grant some favors to the crew, such as giving the blind Geordi normal eyes, but they all ultimately refuse the gifts, saying that the price is too high.
• Kiddie Kid: In "Rascals", Picard, Ro, Keiko, and Guinan are de-aged into twelve-year-olds. They have the mentalities of adults, but when they (with the exception of Keiko, who never tries to act like a kid) try to act like children, they behave more like six-year-olds than twelve-year-olds. Picard, in an attempt to persuade a Ferengi to let him see Riker, stamps his foot and shouts, "Now!" over and over for instance, and Ro and Guinan jump on a bed.
• Kill and Replace: One episode had a Monster of the Week who was described as a "coalescent organism", a shapeshifter that preyed on other lifeforms by eating all their biomass and then assuming their forms to be beneath suspicion before it repeats the process. Interestingly, the two people suspected of being the coalescent turn out to be innocent, and it's revealed to have taken the shape of a dog.
• Klingon Promotion: Trope Namer. First explained in "A Matter of Honor" that an acceptable method of promotion on a Klingon ship is to kill one's superior if the superior has done something to deserve it.
• Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: "Suspicions" is the Trope Namer, featuring a Klingon scientist named Kurak who is very touchy for this reason. She's at a private demonstration for the research of a Ferengi scientist named Reyga (also an example) who hopes to overcome his race's stereotypical image and be taken seriously in the scientific community.
  Reyga: "After all, a Ferengi scientist is almost a contradiction in terms!"
• Killed Off for Real:
  • The show killed off Tasha Yar in the first season episode "Skin of Evil". Denise Crosby left the show because she felt her character didn't have enough to do in the episodes. The producers probably felt that there were too many characters anyway and needed to trim the cast a bit. So they apparently took it pretty well. In fact, they worked with Crosby to make her departing episode special in terms of Star Trek, the show that was responsible for the Redshirt trope. Also, driven home is the fact that Yar's death was somewhat pointless and understated and not the type of dramatic heroic death usually reserved for main characters. But then, there was the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise", which resurrects her in a way (only to kill her again) but in an alternate timeline.
  • Spock's father Sarek, who'd first appeared in the original series nearly 25 years earlier, died in "Unification I".
• Knight of Cerebus: Prior to late Season 2, the crew had always managed to beat the threat of the week via some combination of diplomacy, tactics, and technology. Then the Borg were introduced, and became the number one ultimate threat to the Federation for the entire series, despite appearing in only six episodes. In their first encounter with the Borg, the Enterprise was utterly defeated and on the verge of being dissected and assimilated before Q rescued them ^note After having exposed them to the Borg in the first place in order to give them a kick in their complacency.
• Knight Templar: Nora Satie in "The Drumhead". Satie's inquiry into possible sabotage quickly devolves into an ever-widening witch hunt. The Kangaroo Court becomes such a farce that one of the presiding officers simply stands up and walks out of the proceedings.
• Lady Land: "Angel One" features Human Aliens that have the women as the dominant sex.
• Lampshade Hanging: In "Ensigns of Command", while getting more and more frustrated in attempting to deal with the Sheliak— or even communicate effectively with them at all— Picard exclaims, "Ludicrous!" Troi calmly replies, "No, sir, the fact that any alien race communicates with another is quite remarkable."
• Language Barrier: In "Darmok", the crew encounters friendly aliens called the Tamarians who communicate solely in metaphors and cultural references. The Universal Translator completely fails^note Specifically, it does translate their words, it just can't interpret the metaphors the words describe into regular speech. It takes almost the whole episode for Picard and the Tamarian captain to understand each other.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: In "Clues", the crew wakes up after losing consciousness for 45 minutes. It turns out they lost quite a bit more, and were deliberately given amnesia to hide the existence of a xenophobic race.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In "The Price," the Federation and other powers are bidding on the rights to a wormhole. One of the diplomats, in league with the Ferengi, uses underhanded tactics to get the other delegates to drop out and secure the rights, with preferential treatment to Ferengi shipping. However, right afterwards, it's found that the wormhole is not as stable as was thought and so is completely useless.
• Last-Second Term of Respect: In the Season 4 Episode "Redemption" Data is tasked with commanding a starship that's part of a blockade keeping the Romulans out of the Klingon Civil War. His first officer is a Commander Contrarian because he believes that androids can't be ship captains. Data proves himself by going against orders and uncovers proof that the Romulans were aiding one side of the civil war. The first officer, Hobson, admits that Data is right and ends his apology (and final scene) by addressing Data as Captain.

  Hobson: They're changing course, heading back to Romulan space.

  Data: Make a full report to the flagship. Take the main phasers offline and begin radiation clean up on the affected decks.

  Hobson:: Yes, sir, Captain.

• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The season four episode "The Host" is about how there's something odd about Beverly's new boyfriend, an alien called a "Trill." The reveal is the surprise revelation that inside of him is a symbiotic organism, which has the memories of its previous hosts, and can survive after the host dies. This is a complete shock... unless you've seen Deep Space Nine, which has a Trill as one of the main cast and frequently makes mention of the symbiont's abilities.
• Late to the Tragedy: "Night Terrors." The Brittain's crew sends out a distress call and the Enterprise finds them 29 days later. The ship is adrift, most of the crew have gone insane and killed each other, and the only survivor is in a catatonic state and unable to explain what happened on the ship.
• Leitmotif: Aside from the standard Alexander Courage fanfare, which shows up throughout the series, and Jerry Goldsmith's TMP theme, which was featured in a few early episodes, Ron Jones wrote several, which he used in the episodes he scored.
  • The Enterprise and her crew had a three-note motif, similar to a cue from TOS, which appeared in the first two seasons.
  • For Worf and the Klingons, he used a truncated, brassy variant of Jerry Goldsmith's Klingon theme.
  • The Romulans had a sinister, repeating, four note motif which was introduced in The Neutral Zone and appeared in many episodes after, featuring prominently in The Defector.
  • One of the themes used to represent the Borg in The Best of Both Worlds got its start in Q Who?, cropping up in the climax of the episode.
• Let's Duet: In "Lessons", the normally reserved Captain Picard finds himself opening up to a female officer though their shared love of music. In a notable scene, they find a Jeffries tube with good acoustics and (with her on a portable piano keyboard and Picard on the flute) play a duet based on the tune he learned in "The Inner Light". The scene ends in their first kiss.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Yar and Data's fling in "The Naked Now". In her funeral speech, however, she tells Data, "It did happen!"
• Lighthouse Point: "Aquiel", which had a space lighthouse.
• Lightning Lash: Ferengi were originally armed with electric whips.
• Limited Wardrobe: The crew almost always wear their standard uniforms, without variation, no matter what situation they're in. Whether they're exploring a tropical jungle, surveying an icy tundra, entertaining diplomats or going on a commando raid, they'll be wearing the exact same outfits. Very rarely we'll see them wearing their dress uniforms, and this was mostly in season one.
• Literal Change of Heart: Picard has an artificial heart as a result of a fight in which he was stabbed in the chest. During a near-death experience in a later episode, he was asked by Q if he would like to change that part of his past that led to that; however, by doing so, he wound up becoming a person who never developed any guts or took any risks.
• Living Ark: Picard becomes this trope in the episode "The Inner Light''. After being struck by energy from a mysterious alien probe, Picard begins to live out memories of being Kaminn, an iron weaver from a Non-Federation Planet of Kataan that was destroyed by a supernova a millennia prior to the present. Due to the alien race not possessing the technology to evacuate its people before their planet is rendered uninhabitable by the supernova, the race's leaders opt to place memories of the race inside the probe to be given to the one who finds it to keep the story of the race alive.
• Living Memory: Picard became one of these for a long-extinct people in "The Inner Light".
• Living Ship Gomtuu, and the shapeshifting life form from the pilot.
• Lizard Folk: The snakelike Selay in "Lonely Among Us". They look great but were probably too inexpressive by Trek standards, so the Cardassians eventually stepped in.
• Long Bus Trip: At the end of Unification, Part 2, Sela is still alive and well, though presumably she will be demoted and possibly imprisoned because of her failure. Many viewers expected her to return in later Romulan-centric stories (such as Star Trek: Nemesis), but she never did.
• Lost Aesop: The episode "The Masterpiece Society" involves the Enterprise contacting an isolationist human colony that is about to be destroyed by a stellar fragment. However, exposure to the outside universe causes some colonists to ultimately decide to leave, which is damaging to their carefully structured society. Picard spends much of the episode disapproving of their closed, meticulously planned culture. Then at the end he agonizes over the fact despite saving it from utter destruction, contact with them has irreparably altered that culture. Even more bizarre when contrasted with the earlier episode "Up the Long Ladder", wherein Picard and company enthusiastically, indeed almost gleefully, imposed change on not one, but two "backwards" human colonies that they similarly disapproved of.
• Lotus-Eater Machine:
  • "Future Imperfect": Riker is trapped in a Lotus Eater Machine by a benevolent captor who just wants to be friends with him. When he realizes it the first time, it creates a second Lotus Eater Machine, in which he's a prisoner of a recurring enemy Romulan who was behind the first one as well. Both times, inconsistencies in the simulation are what tip Riker off.
  • "Ship In A Bottle". During one of Data's Sherlock Holmes holodeck adventures, Moriarty gains actual sentience. He then theorizes that he must have come to life, and he should be able to leave the holodeck, which he does. The rest of the episode is Data and Picard trying to figure out what's going on until they realize everybody on the Enterprise suddenly is left handed, like Moriarty. They manage to escape the program, and create a small subroutine so that Moriarty, still living in his dream, can dream it for as long as he wants with the love he found in his Lotus Eater Machine, and a simulation of the entire galaxy to explore.
• Loveable Rogue: "The Outrageous Okona" has Okona treated like this by everyone in-universe. The audience doesn't get to see him do anything or hear any stories to confirm it though.
• Love Interest vs. Lust Interest: The two main characters who have expressed romantic interest in Captain Picard are Dr. Beverly Crusher and Ambassador Lwaxana Troi. While Crusher does admit to finding Picard "handsome", the feelings she has for him are more personal, since he's her friend as well as her crush, and her late husband Jack had served with him on the USS Stargazer. Troi, on the other hand, is mainly more into him because she's a very horny woman.
• Lower-Deck Episode: "Lower Decks", the Trope Namer, focuses not on the main characters, but on some of the junior officers.

M-P

• Made of Evil: Armus, the eponymous skin in "Skin of Evil", is a being made up of an entire civilization's discarded negative thoughts and emotions. He also killed Tasha Yar.
• Madness Mantra: "Sarek"
  "It would be ILLOGICAL for a Vulcan to show ANGER! ILLOGICAL! ILLOGICAL! ILLOGICAL!! ILLOGICAL!!
• Magic Pants: In the episode "Rascals", Picard, Ensign Ro, Keiko, and Guinan are in a transporter accident that beams them onto the Enterprise as 12-year-old children while their clothes all shrink to fit their child bodies perfectly. In the end, They show Picard turned back into an adult with the transporter and again, his clothes grow with him. Even Picard's artificial heart must be magical!
• The Main Characters Do Everything:
  • The Enterprise is not only a diplomatic vessel but it is also a civilian vessel, an exploration vessel, a battleship, a cargo transport, a transport for hazardous materials and whatever else the writers need it to be.
  • The standard away team for the show usually consisted of the First Officer, the Chief of Operations, and either the Chief Medical Officer, the Chief Engineer or the Chief Security Officer. Sometimes all of the above.
• Major Injury Underreaction: When he was younger, Picard's reaction to being stabbed in the heart by a Nausicaan was to laugh.
• Manchurian Agent: Geordi gets turned into one by the Romulans in "The Mind's Eye".
• Married in the Future:
  • In the future portion of "All Good Things" it's revealed that Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher got married...and divorced.
  • When Worf visited an alternate universe he discovered that he had formed a relationship with Deanna there. When he returned to his universe he decided to pursue it.
• Matron Chaperone: In "The Dauphin", Salia, the future queen of Daled IV, is accompanied by her governess Anya, who is very protective of her. When Wesley is attracted to Salia and they get together, Anya turns into a giant monster and breaks into Wesley's cabin to stop them.
• Matryoshka Object: In "The Chase", Picard's old archeology professor brings him a Kurlan naiskos as a gift. An ancient relic, the figure opens up to reveal several smaller versions of the figure inside.
• Mayfly–December Romance: In "The Survivors", an immortal alien has been married to a human woman for many years.
• May It Never Happen Again:
  • In "Skin Of Evil", after they save Troi from Armus, the Enterprise destroys the wrecked shuttlecraft and puts a beacon in orbit warning all ships to stay away from Vagra II.
  • In "Clues", aliens erase a day from the crew's memory so they won't find out about their existence. However, it doesn't work since the crew notices some things are out of place (Crusher's moss displays a day's worth of growth, Troi is dizzy and feels her reflection isn't herself, and Worf's wrist is injured). The crew decides to let the aliens wipe their memories a second time, but this time, ensure no clues are left behind so the conflict won't start again.
  • In "Schisms", some sensor modifications attract aliens from another dimension. Once they're dealt with, Geordi says that they'll change the modifications to not interact with that particular dimension again.
  • At the end of "Descent", Data dismantles Lore, his Evil Twin, so that he can no longer do any damage.
• Meaningful Name: "Data" is named for a word that means "facts and statistics". His evil twin is named "Lore", which means "superstition and legend", thus marking him as Data's symbolic opposite.
• The Meaning of Life: In the episode "The Offspring," the android Data constructs a "daughter" named Lal who asks him what her purpose or function is. He replies that it is to "contribute in a positive way to the world in which they live." This just raises further questions.
• Mechanistic Alien Culture: The Bynars and the Borg. The Borg were a Hive Mind of cybernetic life forms; the Bynars were linked into binary pairs and thought and spoke Binary language. Borg forcibly assimilate technology and people; the worst the Bynars ever did was hijack the Enterprise for a couple hours.
• Mega Manning: The Borg have the ability to rapidly analyze and assimilate technology and knowledge from other species. It is at the very core of their philosophy. As a result, most newly designed weapons or tactics will only be effective for a short period of time, until the Borg have seen enough to adapt their defenses in response.
• Mental Time Travel:
  • In the episode "Tapestry", Picard dies and to his horror is greeted by Q in the afterlife. After admitting that he regrets a lot of his brash actions as a young man, Q sends him back to the incident that gave Picard his artificial heart so he can change things.
  • In the series finale "All Good Things", Picard finds himself continuously shifting between three separate timelines, one in the "present", one several years ago when the Enterprise was just launched, and one several decades in the future when Picard is mostly retired.
• Mexican Standoff: A staple of later seasons. There is plenty of exposition at gun/disruptor/phaser-point.
• Mildly Military: The Federation, much more so than during the TOS era, and especially during early seasons — in-universe, before the Borg are recognized as a potential existential threat; out of it, before Gene Roddenberry got sick enough that he couldn't exert close editorial control over the series. Averted to marvelous effect in "Yesterday's Enterprise", in which we see an alternate timeline where the Federation has fought a long and bitter war against the Klingon Empire. While it's a little daffy (Enterprise is called a battleship, yet she's patrolling alone without any screen or escort) and slightly overplayed (stardates become "combat dates" and everyone wears sidearms, even on the bridge), for the most part it's an extremely effective contrast.
• Milky White Eyes: Geordi's blindness, later dropped in Star Trek: First Contact, where he gets cybernetic eye implants that instead gives his eyes a silverish color.
• Mind Probe: In the chilling episode "Frame of Mind", Riker finds himself shifting between two realities, one where he's a starship officer acting out a play about a man locked up in a mental asylum, and another where he's a man locked up in a mental asylum who imagines being a starship officer. He eventually concludes that both realities are a Lotus-Eater Machine as he wakes up in a laboratory where the aliens who captured him are trying to probe his mind for information. Riker's mind was trying to resist the probe and created the dream as a safety measure.
• Mind Rape:
  • "Violations". More specifically, memory rape. Actually going inside someone's memories and raping them. They even classify it as rape.
  • "Man of the People" involved an ambassador who was essentially a psychic vampire.
  • "The Mind's Eye" has a variation of this that finds Geordi on the receiving end at the hands of Romulans who condition him to be mind-controlled via his VISOR implants, starting with forcing him to see horrible atrocities to break his mind.
• Mind Screw:
  • In "Frame of Mind", Riker is shifting between different realities—one where's he's a Starfleet officer, another where he's insane. Not so much a case of Breaking the Fourth Wall as breaking the fifth, sixth and seventh walls. Into little pieces.
  • "Ship in a Bottle" has the crew defeat Moriarty, whose return threatens the Enterprise again, by creating a holodeck within a holodeck, then beaming him into an active memory core that will continue to run the program he's created with him unaware that the world he's in is not the real one. Picard later muses that Moriarty's new reality may be equally valid to there own and whether their reality is not just a story playing out in a box on someone's table. Barclay, once alone, pauses for a moment to actually check and laughs at himself when nothing happens.
• Misery Builds Character: Subverted in the episode "New Ground," when Worf tells his son Alexander that the rigors of Klingon schools are meant to build character — but that their staying together will be an even greater challenge.
• Mistaken for Afterlife: Ro thinks she's died and is a ghost in "The Last Phase", when actually, she's been cloaked.
• Mistaken for Brooding: In one episode, after losing a game, Data starts spending a lot of time in his quarters by himself. Troi and Pulaski think he's just being a Sore Loser, but in actuality, he doesn't even have emotions, being an android. The reason he was sitting in his quarters was because he believed his loss was caused by a malfunction.
• Mistaken for Insane: In "All Good Things", a future Picard keeps seeing people who aren't there and going back and forth in time. His friends wonder if he's going senile, especially since in this alternate reality he does have a brain condition that can cause senility, but it turns out he really is time-travelling.
• Mistakes Are Not the End of the World:
  • Played with in "Peak Performance". Data loses a game to an alien and checks himself for a malfunction over and over again. Pulaski and Troi reassure him that it's fine to make mistakes, but Data knew that already and even if he didn't, he wouldn't be discouraged as he doesn't have emotions— he just couldn't see how it was possible because he's an android. Eventually, he "wins" the game by causing a stalemate. It turns out that Data didn't actually make any mistakes, he was simply playing against a superior opponent. It is Captain Picard who finally gets Data to realize this.
    "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life!"
  • Picard snaps Data out of a similar funk in Star Trek: Generations, after Data experiences fear and hesitation thanks to his newly installed emotion chip, by basically informing him "congratulations, you're normal." Even more poignant for the fact that Picard himself is working through his own grief after learning of his nephew's death.
    "Part of having feelings is learning to integrate them into your life, Data, learning to live with them, no matter what the circumstances..."
  • In "Coming of Age", Wesley fails his Starfleet Academy entrance exam and believes he's failed his friends too, but Picard consoles him saying that it's okay to fail as long as you learn from it and do better the next time, a lesson that Picard knows from personal experience as he confides in Wesley that he, too, failed the exam the first time he took it.
    "Wesley, you have to measure your successes and your failures within, not by anything that I or anyone else might think. But, erm... if it helps you to know this... I failed the first time, and you may not tell anyone!"
    [Incredulous] "You? You failed?"
    "Yes. But not the second time!"
• Mobile Fishbowl: The Benzites are a semi-aquatic race who have a special attachment to their uniforms which blows a fine mist in the direction of their faces on a regular basis so they can continue to breathe.
• Monster of the Week: The show had stellar anomalies of the week that were always solved by a healthy amount of Technobabble. The first season started to become a ''god-like alien'' of the week show, but fortunately found sturdier footing in subsequent seasons.
• Moral Luck: In the episode "Brothers" a boy pranks his younger brother, which scares the brother enough for him to run and hide. While hiding, the younger brother eats a fruit that leaves him so ill he nearly dies. The older brother is severely scolded by numerous cast members for 'nearly killing' his brother. However, while a little cruel for a prank, there was no reason for the older brother to expect anything worse than his younger brother being frightened for a little while. This feels particularly horrible since a child that young would likely already be horribly guilt-ridden to the point of tears and any competent parent would go out of their way to tell the child that this wasn't his fault, rather than further scolding or blaming him.
• Mortality Ensues: In "Deja Q", Q gets punished by being turned into a mortal.
• Move in the Frozen Time: In the episode "Timescape" a set of aliens from another dimension lay their eggs in a Romulan warp core (long story...), which makes time "freeze" for the Enterprise and the Romulan ship (actually it's just moving very very slowly, but close enough to frozen for our purposes). Our heroes can't move on either ship unless they're wearing a protective shield. However, one of the aliens pretends to be a Romulan frozen like everyone else, until Geordi notices that he moved when they weren't looking.
• Motherly Scientist: Dr. Noonien Soong is the roboticist who created the androids Data and his brother Lore (in his own image, by the way) and regards himself as a father to both of them. A later episode reveals that he had a wife, Juliana, who helped him in his experiments as well as considered herself Data's mother, so they pretty much form a full nuclear family unit.
• Motivational Kiss: In one away mission, Data gets such a kiss from a local girl. He is perplexed.
• Mr. Fanservice: First Officer William T. Riker, and he knows it.
• Ms. Fanservice: Troi. Marina Sirtis said that she was thrilled with the role because "There's a little ugly girl inside of me going 'Yay! I'm a sex symbol!'"
• Mundane Fantastic: "Rascals" has Captain Picard and three other crew members turned back into children. Instead of examining the fact that they'd just discovered the proverbial Fountain of Youth, with the potential to change life as they knew it forever, the incident is treated as a droll annoyance by all involved.
• Mundane Solution: In "Contagion", he solution to the purging the Enterprise of a virus that was going to cause a warp core breach was...turning the ship off and on again.
• Musical Spoiler: In "Datalore", dramatic music plays as Lore uses the computer to do research. This foreshadows him as a villain before he actually does anything evil.
• My Biological Clock Is Ticking: "Manhunt". More like My Biological Clock Has Gone To Red Alert! Played for laughs with Deanna's mother Lwaxana. It is revealed that Betazoid women in late middle-age experience "The Phase". This is a source of horror to Picard (the target of Lwaxana's attentions) and a source of amusement to almost everyone else, especially Riker (which might account for why he put his relationship with Deanna on hiatus for a couple of decades).
  Riker: Yes, it's something Troi warned me about when we first started to see each other. A Betazoid woman, when she goes through this phase, quadruples her sex drive.
  Troi: Or more.
  Riker: Or more? You never told me that.
  Troi: I didn't want to frighten you. (Riker smiles...)
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • In "The Survivors", Kevin Uxbridge, an immortal being with incredible powers and a lifelong pacifist, admits that when he saw his wife Rishaun murdered by the Husnock, in a fit of blind rage he wiped out every Husnock, everywhere. And as heartbroken as he is about Rishaun's death, he's even more devastated by his retribution.
  • The terraformers in "Home Soil" are devastated to find out that there were lifeforms on Valera III after all.
  • Picard in "Galaxy's Child" after accidentally killing a cosmozoan in self-defense. The Enterprise ends up playing mommy to it's baby.
  • In "The Measure of a Man," Riker is forced to argue the case against Data's rights. Riker does his job very well, including a devastating moment where he turns Data off to prove his point. After sitting down, though, Riker silently laments what he's doing to one of his closest friends. Even after Picard wins the case, Riker is still hung up on his actions until Data reassures him that it's okay.
• Mystical Pregnancy: "The Child" may be the most perfect example of this trope ever committed to film.
• Mythology Gag: The first time we see Picard in the past during the series finale, "All Good Things...", he finds himself aboard a shuttlecraft approaching Enterprise piloted by Tasha Yar, en route to his first time setting foot aboardship. The name of the shuttle? Galileo, which is the best-known of all the shuttles carried by Enterprise during the original series. This was the only episode of Next Generation to feature a shuttlecraft Galileo.
• Name Order Confusion: In "Ensign Ro", Picard mistakenly addresses Ro Laren as "Ensign Laren", and she rather pointedly corrects him that Bajorans traditionally put their surname before their given name.
  Picard: I'm sorry, I didn't know.
  Ro: No, there's no reason you should. It's an old custom. Most Bajora these days accept the distortion of their names in order to assimilate. I do not.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Gul Madred. (His name isn't actually mentioned in the episode.)
• Naval Blockade: During the Klingon civil war the Federation put a blockade along the Klingon-Romulan border to keep the Romulans from supplying the Duras Sisters.
• Navel-Deep Neckline: Gender-swapped in "Angel One," where the men wear shirts with plunging necklines that expose most of their chest.
• Neck Lift: The first time by Data to Wesley was more of a "by the shirt collar." The next time to a Ferengi (may also be by the collar as we join him in progress with the Ferengi lifted above screen, flailing) in "The Last Outpost." The next, under alien influence, Data does this to Picard in the episode "Power Play," and under brotherly influence, to a rogue Borg before crushing its neck in "Descent, part one." Why? Both times because he got angry. Also done for The Worf Effect by Anya the Allasomorph to Worf in "The Dauphin."
• Negative Space Wedgie: Used throughout the series, especially in early seasons, when the characters and relationships hadn't yet quite jelled and writers needed an easy way to drive plots. Later episodes tended to use them as a foil to the characters, not so much a plot engine in their own right.
• Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer. In one episode Captain Picard calls up Riker and asks what's going on and all Riker can say is "Trouble."
• Never Had Toys: In one episode, Worf reveals that he never played with toys even as a kid. This fits with his gruff, Comically Serious personality.
• New Baby Episode
  • "Disaster" has a subplot about Worf having to deliver Molly O'Brien.
  • In "The Child", Deanna Troi has a weird, alien baby who grows into a schoolboy in only a few days. Unfortunately, he has to sacrifice himself to save the ship.
• New Media Are Evil:
  • "The Game" doesn't even try to hide its contempt for videogames, which is ironic given how many videogames the NG crew helped with later. The game itself is just a front for what is essentially a recreational drug, and a hugely addictive brainwashing drug at that. So there are two interpretations to this episode: either videogames are senselessly pointless and as addictive and damaging as a drug; or this trope is subverted and the point is that Drugs Are Bad and recreational drugs can look as harmless as a videogame but can be addictive as crack.
    • Considering that the WHO now considers video game addiction to be a thing, the episode might be seen as having been ahead of its time.
    • This is in contrast to the fact that the Enterprise already has the ultimate video game system, the holodeck.
  • The episode where Barclay was discovered to have a holodeck addiction (having created an Eden for himself with a sexy Troi and a bumbling midget Riker) that begins to interfere with the performance of his basic duties. Troi herself explains that everybody enjoys the fantasy of the holodeck, but it's self destructive to rely on it to the exclusion of REAL experiences and friends.
• Night and Day Duo: "Masks" features artifacts from a civilization that has two major deities: Masaka representing the sun and Korgano representing the moon. Only one can be in control at a time. Their powers are unknown, being embodied in Data and Picard respectively, but it appears that the mythology is based on them being balancing forces for each other.
• Nightmare Sequence: The terrifying visions and paranoia in "Night Terrors" are caused by aliens who simply don't understand the effect their method of communication has on the human brain.invoked
• No Adequate Punishment: In the episode "The Survivors", an ageless Actual Pacifist Sufficiently Advanced Alien is attempting to live a normal life on a colony of a planet. When said colony comes under attack by 'a species of hideous intelligence that knew only aggression and destruction' and his human wife is killed he, in a brief moment of anger, wipes out not just the attackers, but their entire species with a single thought in retaliation, and immediately afterwards has a major My God, What Have I Done? moment. Picard cannot even conceive of a punishment, and merely leaves the being alone on a planet in his self-imposed punishment.
  Picard: Captain's Log, stardate 43153.7 - We are departing the Rana system for Starbase 133. We leave behind a being of extraordinary power and conscience. I'm not certain if he should be praised or condemned; only... that he should be left alone.
• No Antagonist: After the first few seasons, most episodes were like this.
• "No Rules" Racing: Happens in "Tin Man" as the Entrprise races some Romulans to reach a Living Ship and make First Contact first - the Romulans win by blasting the Enterprise so they're unable to continue.
• Nobody Ever Complained Before: In "Half a Life", the entire species of people who ritualistically kill themselves on their 60th birthdays seems shocked and baffled when one of their own refuses to do so so (because he needs more time in order to save the whole planet - also, he'd fallen in love with Lwaxana). Apparently none of their 60-year-olds had ever had any qualms about dying before. Or alternatively, looking at how closed-off and ritualistic the society is, we don't know that no one has ever complained before. No one is going to check that all these suicides aren't occasionally... "assisted."
• Noodle Incident:
  • Despite her showing up a lot throughout the series, we never do find out just what it is that Picard did to so completely earn Guinan's trust and vice versa.
  • We never find out why Q is so wary of Guinan.
  • We also never find out what exactly led to Jack Crusher's death, nor how Picard was involved.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Jean-Luc Picard, a Frenchman played by an obviously English actor using Yorkshire idioms. Patrick Stewart had tried speaking in a French accent but sounded so ridiculous that he gave up. He very rarely will even acknowledge his French background, such as occasionally saying "merde!"
• Not Named in Opening Credits: Dr. Pulaski.
• Not Now, Kiddo: Wesley gets this treatment sometimes, most notably in "Where No One Has Gone Before", where he tries twice to tell Riker some important observations of their mysterious Alien of the Week. To his credit, Riker owns up to his mistake when he realizes what happened.
• "Not So Different" Remark: In "The Vengeance Factor", as a means of building a bridge between Sovereign Marouk and Gatherer leader Chorgun, Picard notes the two really are quite similar as they are wise, intelligent, responsible leaders to their groups and seek what is best for them.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: In the aptly titled episode "Imaginary Child", an alien takes the form of a young girl's imaginary friend. The imaginary friend disappears whenever an adult comes near.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Quite a few instances of cargo containers not being confined or strapped down (including ones marked with radioactive or biohazard warnings!). For instance, Worf gets paralyzed by a falling container in one episode, and Riker would've gotten creamed by one rolling off a catwalk in "True Q", had he not been saved by timely intervention. There're also railings in Engineering too short to keep a person from falling off, and the long-lampshaded lack of seatbelts and circuit breakers.
  • Not to mention the outrageous frequency of safety failures that seem to occur on Starfleet ships. Holodecks, transporters, the ship's antimatter containment. They all supposedly have tons of redundant safety features (particularly the warp core, which is the 24th century equivalent of a nuclear reactor), yet Rule of Drama dictates that they will all fail utterly at a moment's notice.
  • Geordi almost falls down a long shaft after getting dizzy in "Cause and Effect", and is only in one peice because a crewman was around to grab him. One wonders why Starfleet has abandoned the use of harnesses, as OSHA would require for repairs under these conditions.
• No Poverty: Or money, either. Replicators and antimatter generators with a new social philosophy did away with poverty.
• No Sense of Humor: Data repeatedly attempts to understand humor as part of his quest to become more human.
• No Sense of Personal Space: Q. If he finds you interesting....you, uh, know.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The Crystalline Entity is an Obliviously Evil space-faring creature that is feared for its ability to scour entire planets of life, but Picard defends its right to exist on the basis that it is merely feeding, as any lifeform must to survive.
• Not Himself: Data in "Clues". Troi in "Man of the People" is Not Herself due to Mind Rape.
• "Not How I'm Dying" Declaration: Subverted by the Klingon phrase "Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam" (It is a good day to die). Klingon culture values going out during a ferocious battle, especially against mightier foes. However, that's the only death they consider honorable; any other forms of going (such as through disease, natural causes, etc) are seen as horrible ways to die.
• Not Me This Time:
  • In the episode "Firstborn," Lursa and B'Etor of the House of Duras are suspected of an assassination attempt against Worf. It turns out a future version of Alexander, Worf's son, had traveled back in time to stage this attempt so as to motivate the young Alexander to become a Klingon warrior.
  • In the episode "True Q", Q offers Amanda Rogers the choice to remain with humans if she can resist the temptation to use the powers of the Q. Amanda agrees, but almost the moment she and Picard leave the ready room, all hell breaks loose on the planet they're orbiting, endangering the lives of millions of people, as well as Riker and Geordi on the surface. Picard immediately suspects that Q had something to do with it, but he shrugs and says, "Not this time, Picard." Of course, Q's not only an inveterate liar, but he's also omnipotent. So even if he didn't have anything to do with it (which is dubious), he could easily have known that something was about to happen and waiting to offer the choice until that precise moment.
• Not Wanting Kids Is Weird: In a rare male-on-male example, Wesley Crusher thinks the reason Captain Picard doesn't have kids is because he's a Child Hater.
• Not Where They Thought:
  • Invoked in "Ship in a Bottle", when Moriarty tricks the Enterprise crew into thinking they're in engineering when really they're still on the holodeck. He also assumes he's on a boat when really it's a spaceship.
  • "Future Imperfect": After passing out on an away mission, Riker wakes up on the Enterprise with the medical staff claiming he's now the captain, having suffered Laser-Guided Amnesia of the sixteen years that have passed since the mission. Riker eventually realizes he's been tricked: the Enterprise turns out to be a holodeck illusion created by his Romulan captors. The Romulan captivity itself turns out to be a holodeck illusion cast by a lonely alien child, whom Riker takes back to the Enterprise.
  • Zigzagged in "Frame of Mind", when it's unclear whether Riker is on the Enterprise and hallucinating that he's in an asylum or the other way round until the very end.
  • In "The Neutral Zone", three people from the late 20th century, who had been frozen in stasis, are woken up on the Enterprise four hundred or so years later. When they hear they're on a "ship", they think it's a boat, but it's a spaceship.
  • Invoked when Worf's adoptive brother Nikolai kidnaps some aliens and transports them to another planet, but uses the holodeck to make them think they're still on the same planet and travelling by foot to skirt the Prime Directive.
• Novelization: Unlike TOS and TAS, which saw every episode adapted in some form, only a handful of key TNG episodes were novelized, including its first and last episodes, and a few key episodes in-between such as the TOS crossovers "Relics" and "Unification".
• The Nudifier: One Ferengi transporter does this when transporting women.
• Obsessive Hobby Episode: In "The Game", Riker brings home a game you play with your mind that turns out to be addictive and mind-altering, so soon everyone but Wesley who did the research and Data who Dr. Crusher turned off are obsessed.
• Obvious Stunt Double: This happened frequently but was particularly noticeable during the first season.
• Oddball in the Series: Season 5 (1991-92) is the only one without any Q episodes. Some were proposed, but didn't materialize.
• Offscreen Reality Warp: How Worf knows he is traveling through different parallel universes in "Parallels."
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The classic episode, "The Best of Both Worlds". The Borg kidnapped Captain Picard and are ready to conquer the galaxy, having turned Picard into their mouthpiece, Locutus of Borg. Riker steels himself and orders the Enterprise to fire its main deflector dish, a jury-rigged Wave-Motion Gun capable of vaporizing a small continent. — "Mr. Worf... FIRE." The ship cuts loose with its Doomsday weapon... which does precisely jack shit against the Borg. The moment is beyond words as it slowly dawns on the crew that they've come up against the one enemy they will not defeat. Locutus even taunts them over it:
    Locutus: "The knowledge and experience of the human Picard is part of us, now. It has prepared us for all possible courses of action. Your resistance is hopeless...Number One"
  • In "I, Borg", the entire senior staff has one when they realize that the wreckage they are investigating is a Borg vessel, and there's a survivor. Picard is so shocked, he briefly entertains Worf's suggestion that they kill the drone, make its death look like an accident, and get the hell out of there. That honor-obsessed Worf is the one to suggest that course of action speaks to the horror of the situation.
  • In the episode where Barclay is introduced, Capt. Picard accidentally calls him "Broccoli". His reaction is quite expressive.
  • Implied in "Parallels", where a Bajoran ship begins attacking the Enterprise in a universe where they're becoming more aggressive. Cue interference with the temporal fissure causing thousands of Enterprises (at least) from other alternate timelines to suddenly appear. The Bajoran ship immediately stands down. One can only imagine this is what that ship's crew were thinking...
• Ominous Adversarial Amusement: Young Picard starts to laugh, seemingly without any reason, after a Nausicaan has stabbed his heart. Picard survives, but his heart has to be replaced by an artificial one. Many years later, this artificial heart brings Picard into a potentially lethal situation, and in what may or may not be limbo, Q offers Picard the bargain that he will live if he goes back in time (replacing his younger self) and prevents the situation that got him the artificial heart in the first place. Picard does just that, but discovers that this has steered his life into a completely different path—an unbearably boring one. After Picard has learned his lesson about not regretting your past choices, Q allows him to go back in time once again and restore the original timeline. And this time, Picard actually has a reason to laugh when he gets stabbed.
• Ominous Message from the Future:
  • In the episode "Time Squared" the Enterprise picks up a shuttle and is surprised to find it crewed by a future version of Captain Picard too incoherent to understand, while the shuttle's logs show the Enterprise being destroyed. The crew then needs to work out what sequence of events caused the destruction, and avert it.
  • After the crew figures out they're in a time loop in "Cause and Effect", they're able to analyze "temporal echoes" and hear the future destruction of the ship.
• One-Episode Fear: In "Realm of Fear", Reg Barclay comes to terms with and eventually drops his fear of transporters that apparently he's always had. Despite being a bit of a Lovable Coward, we'd never seen him be afraid of transporters before because the only time we'd seen him beamed before, he was unconscious.
• Old-Timey Ankle Taboo: An episode has the Enterprise pick up a colony who live like stereotype Irishmen from centuries ago. In one scene, Riker is having a conversation with one of the women from the colony and she lifts up her skirt to show her ankles, indicating she wants a relationship with him.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: In "Future Imperfect", Commander Riker is trapped inside a virtual reality simulator. Once he realizes the reality is strange and doesn't make sense, he is moved to another level of "real" world, but the setting has simply changed to a new illusion. The shift between several illusions uses distortion with little squares.
• Once a Season: Q episodes, Lwaxana Troi episodes, Borg episodes (except season 1), and the Holodeck Malfunctions.
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: "Darmok" ends up working this way in practice if not in theory.
• One Character, Multiple Lives: In the series finale, Captain Picard is living in three alternate timelines, one in his past, one in his present, and one in his future, at the same time, and has to use information gathered in certain timelines to aid others.
• One-Hour Work Week: Troi rarely seems to do any actual councilling.
• One-Sided Arm-Wrestling: Data vs a Klingon
• One-Way Visor: Geordi's visor is an aversion; he's blind, and the visor enables him to see.
• The One Who Made It Out: Tasha Yar was originally from the planetary equivalent of Bosnia, but managed to get a job with Starfleet.
• Only One Finds It Fun: When Riker makes scrambled eggs for his friends, only Worf likes them, which isn't much of a compliment because Worf is both not human and eats unusual stuff.
• Ontological Mystery: Used in "Clues" and "Conundrum" to great effect; both are generally seen as among the better episodes of their seasons, if not of the series as a whole.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: During the 3rd season episode, Hollow Pursuits, Capt. Picard accidentally calls Barclay by his unofficial nickname Broccoli. Data tries to put a positive spin on the situation by referencing psychology but really only makes the situation worse.
• Oppressed Minority Veteran: Data has won numerous medals and awards from Starfleet, but he is still put on trial by them to determine if he is merely property.
• Orderlies are Creeps: In "Frame of Mind", Riker wakes up in an alien asylum where he is a patient and told that the Enterprise is an elaborate fantasy his mind created to cover up the truth about an extremely violent murder he committed. The burly orderly who supervises him doesn't have enough sense to not openly taunt the potentially psychotic person about this. Of course, this causes Riker to freak out and lash out at him before being sedated.
• Orient Express: In "Emergence", the train appears on the Enterprise's holodeck.
• Orphaned Punchline: The Bolian barber, Mr. Mot, has one of these in "Schisms".
  Mr. Mot: ...and she said, "If they're not squirming, I won't eat 'em!"
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • Barclay's holographic duplicates of the main crew in "Hollow Pursuits"
  • Thomas Riker is this to William Riker in "Second Chances."
  • Leah Brahms in "Galaxy's Child" is extremely angry about her holographic duplicate from "Booby Trap".
• Our Dark Matter Is Mysterious: "In Theory" features the Enterprise exploring a dark matter nebula which caused bits of the ship to randomly vanish. This caused activity from Spot (Data's cat) exiting Data's room without using the doors to a crew member falling through the floor after it vanishes and then getting killed when it comes back.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Borg, arguably, with their grey pallor, soulless hive-mind and slow relentless movement. Even moreso in the movie they appeared in, where they are able to assimilate anyone they touch by injecting assimilation nanites, a sci-fi version of a zombie bite.
• Out of Focus: Vulcans rarely appear in TNG. This was a deliberate choice by Gene Roddenberry to differentiate it from The Original Series.
• Pals with Jesus: Q, to Picard's chagrin.
• Pardon My Klingon:
  • Worf occasionally uses Klingon curse words.
  • Combining the two, during a tense on-screen moment on a Klingon planet, the governor of this planet accuses Picard of speaking "the lies of a taHqeq" (He claims to have confiscated Federation weapons used by separatists—they turn out to be Romulan replicas), which prompts Picard to get right up in his face and unload a barrage of unintelligible but vile-sounding Klingon back at him... leaving the dignitary (favourably) impressed enough to comment: "You swear well, Picard. You must have Klingon blood in your veins."
  • A perfect example is an exchange involving Worf, Riker, and the eponymous Romulan admiral in the episode "The Defector":
    Jarok (posing as "Setal"): How do you allow Klingon pahtk to walk around in a Starfleet uniform?
    Worf: You are lucky this is not a Klingon ship. We know how to deal with spies.
    Jarok: Remove this tohzah from my sight.
    Riker: Your knowledge of Klingon curses is impressive. But, as a Romulan might say, only a veruul would use such language in public.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Of the nine series regulars who had their names in the opening credits for all or part of the show's run, only Geordi had two parents as of the series's opening (and his mother died in the final season). Worf, Beverly, and Tasha were all orphaned as children (though Worf wound up with a great set of adoptive parents). Riker, Troi, and Wesley each lost one parent when they were children (Riker's mother, Troi's father, Wesley's father). Picard's parents were both dead long before he became captain, though they probably died when he was an adult. The inventor who built Data disappeared when his home planet was attacked and was presumed dead until the middle of the episode "Brothers," then really died just a handful of scenes later. We also get to meet a woman who claims to be Data's "mother" in the Seventh season. She really is, after a fashion. She's actually an android duplicate of the (long-dead) woman who was both Data's co-creator and Noonien Soong's wife.
  • Guinan's family either died or were assimilated when the Borg all but destroyed the El-Aurians. Alexander, the only semi-regular child other than Wesley, lost his mother as a toddler (and was raised by her alone up to that point). And whenever there was a one-off guest star whose parentage was some sort of plot point, be it a child (Jeremy Aster, Salia) or an adult (Amanda Rogers, Jason Vigo), they had an excellent chance of being Conveniently an Orphan.
  • Quite a number of children featured in the series also had one or both parents dead or not around. "The Bonding" had a boy Jeremy whose mother died on an away mission. His father died earlier. Clara in "Imaginary Friend" only had a father. Alexander, Worf's son, initially only lived with his mother until she died. Worf then sent him to live with his adopted parents. Jake and Willie's parents were on a sabbatical in the episode "Brothers". The nine and eleven-year-old brothers stayed on the Enterprise.
• Parenthetical Swearing: Worf engages in this every few episodes, usually when speaking of something which offends his Klingon sensibilities, like diplomacy.
• Phlegmings: Fek'lhr, the guardian of the Klingon hell, as seen in the episode Devil's Due.
• Phrase Catcher: Whenever Data starts rambling on about some trivia, Picard will cut him off by saying, "Thank you, Mr. Data."
• Pilgrimage: In the episode "Rightful Heir" Worf has a crisis of faith, so he travels to the Klingon monastery on Boreth. He returns to it after the Enterprise-D is destroyed in Generations because he doesn't think he has a place in Starfleet anymore. Klingons also believe in meditation, albeit with the addition of hallucinogenic drugs.
• Powered by a Black Hole: The season 4 version of the Writers' Technical Manual for this series states that the Romulan D'Deridex-class warbird is believed to be powered by x-ray emissions from a captured microsingularity, rather than fusion and matter/antimatter reactors like most other ships. Star Trek canon has usually adhered to this since then, Depending on the Writer.
• Planet of Hats: The episode "Samaritan Snare" featured the Pakleds. They're a bit of a zig-zagged example, as while they are genuinely stupid, they're still smart enough to go for Obfuscating Stupidity so they could steal technology. Pakleds do show up as non-speaking characters in later episodes, all in positions which would require at least some basic intelligence (such as mechanics — the Pakleds in "Snare" had problems with basic maintenance of their ship), it's also likely that the "Snare" group of Pakleds were dumb even by Pakled standards.
• Planetary Core Manipulation: In the episode "Inheritance", the core of the planet Atrea IV has begun to cool down and solidify, which is causing havoc on the surface. The Enterprise crew have to reignite it by injecting superheated plasma into a series of underground lava pockets.
• Planetary Nation: played straight usually, but one episode had an aversion. The planet was ruled by two separate governments, the Kes (not to be confused with the character on Voyager) and the Prytt, who were engaged in a cold war with each other. The Kes were applying for Federation membership and Picard lampshaded this trope when he mentioned planets that join the Federation are usually unified. It's never said whether or not the Kes would be admitted but it's implied they won't be.
• Planetary Relocation: "Deja Q" has the crew dealing with a moon that has somehow been knocked out of orbit and is about to fall on a populated planet, as well as Q, who has been seemingly stripped of his powers and dumped on the Enterprise. The crew attempt to readjust the moon's orbit by generating a warp field to adjust its mass so the Tractor Beam can handle it (inspired by Q's suggestion to alter the gravitational constant of the universe), but it fails. By the end, Q has been restored to his place in the Continuum, and after he leaves, the crew realize that he's also fixed the moon's orbit for them.
• Poking Dead Things with a Stick: In "Reunion", when the Klingon chancellor dies, before beginning the process of choosing a successor, they hold a traditional ritual known as "Sonchi" ("he is dead") in which the appointed arbiter of succession and the contenders for the position all take turns challenging the corpse to fight and jabbing the body with a "painstik" (a high-powered electrical prod) to confirm that the chancellor is actually dead — presumably because, being Klingons, they'd be risking civil war if he turned out not to be.
• Powering Villain Realization: Picard realizes that an ancient Vulcan weapon that a terrorist group has been trying to reconstruct was discarded by the ancient Vulcans because the weapon relied on the aggressive emotions of the victim to power it, and the Vulcans had no use for it when they embraced a path of total logic. He orders his security team to empty their minds of any aggressive thoughts, including Lt. Worf who manages to do so, rendering the weapon utterly harmless against them.
• Precision F-Strike: Picard utters the French swear word merde (which means "shit") several times during the run of the series.
• Prefers the Illusion: In "Homeward", A group of relatively primitive people are tricked into thinking that they are still on their home planet when in fact they are inside a holodeck, and are the only survivors of a cataclysm that destroyed their world. When one discovers the truth, he's offered a chance to remain on board the Enterprise. Instead, he commits suicide.
• Pretend to Be Brainwashed: In the episode "Conspiracy", Picard uncovers an alien plot to infect the leadership of Starfleet with Puppeteer Parasites in preparation for an all-out invasion. He goes straight to Starfleet Command to scope out which of his superiors haven't been infected, but he walks into a trap and is captured. Then Riker appears and seems to have been taken over by a parasite, but it was really a ploy so he could help Picard take them out (he couldn't reveal this to Picard without blowing his cover).
• Principles Zealot: Captain Picard (and thus his crew) in "Homeward" where he chose to let an entire civilization die, one that they could easily have saved. They commit this genocide-through-inaction for the simple reason that the rules say so. Of course, it doesn't take long before a sympathetic civilian The Professor character goes all What the Hell, Hero? on them.
• Private Eye Monologue: Parodied in "The Big Goodbye". At the denouement, after Riker asks Data what happened in the holodeck, Data puts on an exaggerated Humphrey Bogart-esque voice and manner and begins to monologue "It was raining in the city by the bay. A hard rain. Hard enough to wash the slime —" before Picard tells him to shut up and he meekly turns back to the Ops console (while still wearing his 1940s gangster costume).
• Psycho Prototype: Lore, with Data as the production version. Their creator disassembled Lore before the start of the series, to stop him doing any further damage, but it didn't last, resulting in several reasonably good episodes and a lot more range for Brent Spiner than he'd otherwise have had opportunity to employ.
• Public Secret Message: The name of Data's creator ("Noonien Soong") was Roddenberry's third (and last) Real Life attempt to attract the attention of his World War II buddy, Kim Noonien Singh.
• Punctuality Is for Peasants: In Chain of Command, Captain Jellico keeps a Cardassian waiting for an hour before meeting him as a "show 'em who's boss" gesture. Troi can sense that for all his bluster and hardlining, Jellico has zero confidence that he can stop a war and can only hope intimidation will work.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Picard's "THERE! ARE! FOUR! LIGHTS!!" from part 2 of "Chain of Command".
• The Punishment Is the Crime: In "The Survivors", the Enterprise crew encounter an alien entity posing as an elderly human man who committed genocide against a warlike species after they killed his human wife during an attempted conquest of the couple's colony. Picard decides the only thing they can do is to leave the immortal energy being alone. The Enterprise has no way to pass sentence on him, but he's already mad with grief over his wife's death and filled with remorse for his crime. His self-imposed isolation is its own sentence.
• Puppeteer Parasite: In "Conspiracy", a race of parasitic worm aliens use various Federation members as their own puppets.
• Put on a Bus: Dr. Pulaski, though no one really explains how or why she's gone. She's only even reference a few times in the rest of the series.

Q-S

• Racial Remnant: The early episode "Haven" has a shipful of Tarellians, the last survivors of a deadly plague.
• Random Passerby Advice:
  • After Lt. Barclay gained (and later lost) huge amounts of knowledge, as he's talking with Counselor Troi they pass by a chess game. He moves one piece and says "checkmate in nine moves."
    Troi: I didn't know you play chess.
    Barclay: I don't!
  • In the Grand Finale, Picard is in the past, on the first voyage of the Enterprise-D. He demands something of the engineering crew, and O'Brien says that they'll have to "burn the midnight oil." Data happens to be passing by and mentions that it would not be advisable to do so.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: In "Starship Mine," The Captain takes on a team of intruders on his own.
• Rash Promise: In the episode "Hide and Q" Picard asks the Q-empowered Riker to promise not to use these new powers, and he does. It doesn't take long before he regrets it, as on an away mission he finds a recently deceased child that he could save if it weren't for this vow.
• Ray Gun: Phasers return, bearing multiple forms and up to sixteen settings for handheld phasers alone:
  • The Paralyzer - Settings 1-3, to different levels
  • A generic heat ray on settings 4-6, capable of varying degrees of damage
  • Death Ray - setting 7
  • Disintegrator Ray - settings 8 through 10
  • Stuff Blowing Up - settings 11 through 16, exclusive to type-2 phasers and above. Worth noting is that setting 11, which features a blast radius of ten cubic meters, is considered "slight explosive effects"... and this is for a handheld phaser!
• Real Award, Fictional Character: A future version of Data in "All Good Things..." holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. This post has been held by such real-world luminaries as Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, and Charles Babbage.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • The characters received new two-piece uniforms starting in Season 3 because the original one-piece suits were intentionally made one size too small (to look good on camera) and were causing serious back problems.
  • "The Defector" was supposed to open with another Sherlock Holmes pastiche, but legal issues forced the writers to retool it into a holodeck simulation of Henry V. This doubles as foreshadowing: Jarok, like King Henry, is forced to go undercover as a 'commoner' in this episode.
  • "The Best of Both Worlds" introduces a job opening for Riker on another ship, as well as a new female commander for him to butt heads with. The showrunners were grooming Riker to take over as Captain if Patrick Stewart didn't want to return.
• A Real Man Is a Killer: Let's face it, Picard was lectured to this effect many times over the years. (This was Worf's primary function, repeatedly getting shot down when he suggested hitting people.) Whenever the Federation indulged in this philosophy, the results were less than satisfactory; Data's forced relocation of human settlers in "The Ensigns of Command" paved the way for a similar problem with Maquis, opening up a whole new can of worms.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The fighting style used in the series of striking with open palms and the base of the hand is often mocked as ridiculous and unrealistic by audiences. However striking in this manner is widely recommended in self-defense training as it minimizes the chances of breaking one's own hand when hitting someone's face.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • At the end of "Ethics", Beverly has a beautifully scathing one for Dr. Russell, and does it without even raising her voice:
  Dr. Crusher: I am delighted that Worf is going to recover. You gambled. He won. Most of your patients aren't so lucky. You scare me, Doctor. You risk peoples' lives and justify it in the name of research. But genuine research takes time... sometimes a lifetime of painstaking, detailed work to get results. Not you— you take shortcuts... right through living tissue. You put your research ahead of your patients, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a violation of our most sacred trust. I'm sure the work you've done here will be hailed as a stunning breakthrough. Enjoy your laurels, Doctor. I'm not sure I could.
  • Q also delivers a doozy to Picard in "All Good Things", which also doubles as Lampshade Hanging since he is basically providing a summation of common fan complaints about the show:
  Q: Seven years ago, I said we'd be watching you, and we have been - hoping that your ape-like race would demonstrate *some* growth, give *some* indication that your minds had room for expansion. But what have we seen instead? You, worrying about Commander Riker's career. Listening to Counselor Troi's pedantic psychobabble. Indulging Data in his witless exploration of humanity.
• Reclaimed by Nature: "The Arsenal Of Freedom" has the Enterprise visit the very green planet Minos to investigate the disappearance of the starship Drake. Scans indicate no life forms anywhere on Minos, but an away team finds signs of an advanced civilization there, all long overgrown by native flora. The planetary defense system, still running in demonstration mode, is the only active thing on that world that isn't vegetation.
• Recorded Spliced Conversation: In the episode "The Naked Now", Wesley has created a device that can splice together sound bites that he's recorded from the ships comm system. He uses it to create recordings of Picard "ordering" the Chief and Assistant Chief Engineers away from Main Engineering.
• Remember the New Guy?: The Cardassians are introduced in the season four episode "The Wounded," where it is explained that it has been only a year since the end of the long, costly war between the Federation and the Cardassian Union. However, this information means that the first two years of the show occurred during a war that was never seen, heard or experienced. Just where, exactly, was the flagship of Starfleet while the rest of the fleet was engaged in active operations?
• Really 700 Years Old: Guinan. In "Time's Arrow" Data notes that he knew that Guinan's species was long-lived, but he had no idea that she was actually on Earth during the 19th Century.
• Repressive, but Efficient: In "Justice," the Enterprise crew encounters a Planet of the Week with this as its hat. The place initially seems to be a Crystal Spires and Togas utopia of peace, plenty, and easy sex, until it turns out that the penalty for crimes as minor as stepping on the grass is death. Picard even credits their near-utopia to their draconian system of punishment in his Patrick Stewart Speech before going on to conclude that it's not worth it.
• Residual Evil Entity: "Skin of Evil". On an uninhabited planet, the Enterprise crew encounters Armus, a being that looks like an oil slick. It says that it is the result of a process that the original inhabitants of the planet used to shed all of their negative traits. It acts in a capriciously evil way, including murdering Tasha Yar.
• Restricted Rescue Operation: In the episode "Qpid" Q sends the crew to Sherwood Forest to prove to Picard that he does Love Vash, by casting Vash as Maid Marian who has been taken hostage by the local Lord, and Picard as Robin Hood must save her. Unfortunately for both Q and Picard's plans Vash isn't interested in being rescued by Picard and turns Picard over to the Lord when he's discovered sneaking into her chambers to rescue her. This throws the whole scenario so off the rails even Q is powerless to get everyone back on track with his goals, though he is more amused by this turn than outright angered.
• Retirony: An interesting example - the person doesn't die, and we actually find him after it happened: before being rescued by the Enterprise, after being stuck in a teleporter stream for over 75 years, Montgomery Scott wasn't even serving on the ship he was trapped on: he was on his way to be dropped for his retirement. He decides not to after the events of the episode.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: "The Battle" has Ferengi Captain Daimon Bok gift the derelict Federation ship Stargazer to the Enterprise. The captain's underlings murmur that gifting a prize is "bad business." The Captain has plans to avenge his son's death by creating in-fighting between the Stargazer and the Enterprise via Mind Control. The scheme unravels, and Captain Bok is relieved of command by his First Officer for "conducting an unprofitable venture."
• Reversible Roboticizing: Picard's extensive Borg implants are removed offscreen and he physically looks back to normal afterwards, though the psychological scars persist.
• Revival Loophole: Used to save Tasha's opponent in "Code of Honor".
• Robo Family: Data has a 'brother', Lore, and even creates his own android 'daughter' Lal. There's an android copy of his "mother" out there as well, who believes she is the REAL woman and is designed to age and eventually die like a human being.
• Robosexual:
  • Data and Yar, on one occasion only, which provided the trope's current page and left a lasting impression on Data. That, in turn, made a critical difference in an otherwise unrelated circumstance later on.
  • Data and Jenna D'Sora in "In Theory", though not the sexual part. (And not really the "relationship" part, either, since Data couldn't really hold up his end, try though he did.)
• Robot Hair: Data, and his brothers, who are androids designed to be superficially similar to human beings in many ways. Their hair is made to look artificial by heavy application of gel, and keeping Brent Spiner's hairline sharply trimmed.
• Robots Think Faster: Data can process sixty trillion linear operations per second. On a number of occasions, he uses this speed to make decisions and calculations far faster than the average human.
  • In "In Theory", Data dates a human woman. Near the end of the episode, she kisses him passionately, then asks what he was thinking of in that moment. She breaks up with him, among other reasons because she realizes that she will never truly have his full attention.
    Data: In that particular moment, I was reconfiguring the warp field parameters, analyzing the collected works of Charles Dickens, calculating the maximum pressure I could safely apply to your lips, considering a new food supplement for Spot...
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Riva, crown prince of Ramatis, is a successful diplomat, bringing peace to warring factions no matter how long it takes, even when the telepathic "chorus" who allow him to communicate despite his deafness are killed by one of the factions.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: So much so that it is often difficult to tell alien species apart.
• Sacrificial Planet: The Borg's arrival in Federation space is heralded by several heretofore unseen planetary outposts being wiped out and scoured of all technology.
• Sapient Cetaceans: A frequent theme in the series.
  • The Diane Duane The Next Generation novel Dark Mirror involves an alien race that's essentially dolphins IN SPACE! (They're not related to the whales IN SPACE from Star Trek IV.)
  • The Star Trek The Next Generation: Technical Manual notes that the Cetacean tanks on board contain the dolphin and whale navigational specialists. This is pretty much shout out to Gunbuster, where cybernetically enhanced dolphins form the main navigational computer of the Eltreum.
  • One The Next Generation novel had a dolphin as a supporting character, who held the rank of commander in Starfleet. At one point, after having failed in several other attempts, Riker gets its attention with a loud cab-hailing whistle. This earns Riker a compliment on his grasp of swearing in Delphine.
• Satanic Archetype: In the episode "Devil's Due", an alien claims to be the Devil-figure from any number of worlds' mythologies (including Klingon) and "proves" it by taking their forms.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: In "Time's Arrow" Data is carrying an anvil with one hand. His assistant (who doesn't know he's an android) is surprised at this feat of strength. Data quickly tries to cover by letting the anvil pull his arm down to the ground. He grabs his shoulder as if it's been strained and says "ouch".
• Scary Science Words:
  • In the episode "Genesis", Reg Barclay the neurotic engineer thinks that he's got a terminal disease when he actually has the flu. He freaks out when Dr. Crusher tells him that his "K three cells" and "electrophoretic activity" are abnormal because he doesn't know what those words mean.
    Reg Barclay: "Electrophoretic activity? Is it serious?"
  • In the episode "Violations", Troi and Riker go into comas shortly after some telepathic aliens visit. Dr. Crusher brings Keiko, whose mind was voluntarily read by the aliens, to Sickbay for a checkup and tells her that there is no indication of "electropathic residue". Keiko nervously asks, "Is that good?". Crusher says that it is; the residue was found in the coma victims, so since Keiko has none, she's fine.
• Scratchy-Voiced Senior: In "All Good Things", we see the future versions of the characters and they're all elderly. They talk in their regular voices, but when Q mocks them for being old by acting like a stereotypical old man, he speaks in a high, croaky voice.
• Screaming Birth:
  • If your midwife was a Klingon, you'd be screaming too.
  Worf: [consults tricorder] Congratulations. You are fully dilated to ten centimeters. You may now give birth.
  Keiko: THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN DOING!
  Worf: [Beat] Why has it not begun?
  Keiko: I DON'T KNOW! I DON'T THINK IT'S UP TO ME! IT HAPPENS WHEN IT HAPPENS!
  Worf: The computer simulation was not like this. The delivery was very orderly.
  [later]
  Worf: Push, Keiko! Push! Push! PUSH!
  Keiko: I AM PUSHING!
• Searching for the Lost Relative: In "Interface", Geordi seeks out his mother, who disappeared along with her entire spaceship. Eventually, however, he gives up after finding an alien pretending to be Mrs. La Forge.
• Second Coming: "Rightful Heir", with the return of Kahless through a clone.
• Secret Test: These occur in the episodes "Encounter at Farpoint", "Lower Decks", "Sins of the Father" and "Coming of Age".
• See the Whites of Their Eyes: This trope is most prominent with this show as most ship-to-ship conflicts were tense stand-offs rather than the more action oriented battles of later series.
• Self Botched Catchphrase: In "Unification", a dying Sarek tries to say, "Live long and prosper", which is what all Vulcans say. However, due to his senility, he can't remember what goes after "live long and—".
• Self-Healing Phlebotinum: In some episodes the dilithium crystals can develop cracks if overused, but will heal themselves as long as the warp drive is rested for a while.
• Self-Soothing Song: "The Wounded", Capt. Ben Maxwell is reminiscing about the war with the Cardassians with Chief O'Brien, and recalls a young man who was killed during the war, who went by the nickname of "Stompy", and the song he used to sing. As Maxwell is preparing to surrender to Picard, he and O'Brien begin to sing that same song, The Minstrel Boy.
• Sense Loss Sadness: "The Loss", where Counselor Troi loses her empathy.
• Sequel Episode: "The Naked Now" is a direct sequel to TOS' "The Naked Time". (Surely the oddest request anyone has ever given Data is to look through all known records for an instance of Starfleet officers showering in their clothing.) George Takei wasn't too impressed with this one; his opinion of the episode is one you should seek out. Funnily DS9 also had a stab at this sort of episode ("Fascination") and it wasn't too hot, either.
• Sequential Symptom Syndrome: In "Realm of Fear" Barclay has the computer read the symptoms of "transporter psychosis" and acts out the symptoms as he hears them.
• Serious Work, Comedic Scene: The Offspring is a very sad episode since it involves the Death of a Child. There is, however, one scene where said child (before she dies) mistakes a man kissing a woman as her biting him.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • "Yesterday's Enterprise" highlighted the morality of both sending the Enterprise C back and whether any timeline is more valid than another.
  • Most of the episodes where someone from the Enterprise went back in time, this trope was invoked. "Time Squared", "Timesape" (barely fits), and "Firstborn" are three examples.
• Set Wrong What Was Once Made Right: Q once gave Picard a chance to go back to his college days and avoid a near lethal stab to his heart (he survived, the heart did not). The resulting timeline ended up too boring for Picard's taste so he redid the incident a 3rd time.
• Shout-Out:
  • Due in large part to Rick Steinbach being a huge otaku, there are tons and tons of shoutouts to 80s anime, in particular Dirty Pair and Gunbuster, some blatant, some very very subtle.
  • Episode 80 of Next Gen begins with Picard reporting in his log that they just left the same planet that TOS visited in their 79th and last episode.
  • "The Mind's Eye" borrows heavily from The Manchurian Candidate, most notably with a scene where Geordi is instructed to kill a holographic version of Chief O'Brien.
  • In "QPid", Q transforms the crew into characters from the Robin Hood stories. Geordi is Alan A'Dale, and as a result gets a lute to play with. After a few minutes of tuneless strumming, Worf can't take it anymore, and gets up and smashes the instrument, then hands it back to Geordi, muttering, "Sorry." Much like a certain seven-year pre-med student did once.
  • In "Arsenal of Freedom", when asked by a computer-generated image of Captain Rice what ship he's come from, Riker responds that he's serving aboard the Lollipop. "It's just been commissioned; it's a good ship."
  • The Nebula-class starship was the first new design of Federation ship seen in the series (besides the Galaxy-class Enterprise), and is similar in configuration to the Miranda-class starship (the class that the U.S.S. Reliant is), which was the first new design of Federation ship seen in the first series and the first new Federation design of the franchise.
  • In "The First Duty", the motto of Starfleet Academy is "Ex Astris Scientia" ("From the stars, knowledge"), which was derived from Apollo 13's mission motto "Ex Luna Scientia" ("From the moon, knowledge"), which, in turn, was derived from the United States Naval Academy's motto "Ex Scientia Tridens" ("From knowledge, sea power").
  • "A Fistful of Datas" should be pretty self-explanatory. The episode also borrows from Shane (which director Patrick Stewart watched to get a feel for westerns) and Westworld (wherein the holographic outlaws take the form of Data, giving each of them android-level strength and agility).
  • In "Up the Long Ladder", there is a ship listed as the SS Urusei Yatsura.
  • In "Phantasms", Data has a nightmare where Counselor Troi is a cake being eaten, which is an awful lot like the music video for Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More".
  • In The Nth Degree Barclay who has integrated his mind into the computer responds to an order from Picard with "I'm afraid I can't do that, sir," in a manner very reminiscent of HAL9000.
  • In "The Naked Now" Geordi ruminates on how unfair it is that he's never seen a rainbow.
  • In "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I," the Borg are confronted at the Federation colony world of Wolf 359.
  • "Redemption: Part II" has a subtle nod to the Horatio Hornblower novels, which were a significant inspiration for the characterization of Star Trek captains. Data is placed in command of the Sutherland and set to blockade duty, where he behaves as a Military Maverick, hearkening to Hornblower's assignment in Ship of the Line.
  • Picard is a fan of Shakespeare and will occasionally quote or reference him. This was clearly written in because Patrick Stewart is a trained Shakespearean actor.
• Shown Their Work:
  • With the exception of the pain-inducing implant, all the Cold-Blooded Torture practices Gul Madred uses on Picard in "Chain of Command: Part II" are taken directly from Amnesty International archives. Patrick Stewart, who is a strong supporter of Amnesty International, was pleased by this.
  • in "The Battle", Data begins a surprisingly accurate and Techno Babble-free description of a checksum, a computer science technique used to verify the authenticity of a piece of data—before being cut off by Riker saying he doesn't need a computer science lesson. The subject of the checksum issue is a forged log entry.
• Significant Name Shift: Worf initially only calls Deanna Troi "Counselor Troi", but when they start dating in later seasons, he begins calling her "Deanna".
• Silicon Snarker: Lore is an android, who is often insulting others, teasingly mimicking them, and saying rude rhymes.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil:
  • In "The Measure of a Man", there is a hearing to determine whether the android Data should legally be considered a person or the property of Starfleet. The captain adjudicating the hearing is on the fence, until Picard suggests that declaring him property would be tantamount to slavery. The mere suggestion of this is enough to have her err on the side of caution and judge that even if she is unprepared to declare definitively that he is a person, she is unwilling to declare him property either.
  • In "The Most Toys", Data is captured by a Collector of the Strange and treated as just another piece of property. This is the only villain whom the Technical Pacifist Data ever attempts to kill in cold blood, as opposed to self-defense. It should be noted that Data did not attempt to kill the villain to free himself — it was because the villain had already horribly murdered one of his subordinates with an extremely painful weapon and indicated that he was willing to do so to the rest of his subordinates to punish Data for his disobedience. Data was effectively trying to protect innocent lives. He even said "I cannot permit this to continue."
• Sliding Scale of Continuity: The series generally operated at level 3 (Subtle Continuity). Most episodes focused on the Enterprise and its crew discovering new planets and alien species, and solving the problem presented in each episode. However, a few of the episodes build up Foreshadowing elements that culminate in a bigger story arc later on.
• The Smurfette Principle: The show started with three women - after the security chief died, all that were left were in rather stereotypically feminine roles as the doctor and counselor. Recurring females were Keiko (botanist), Ogawa (nurse), Ro Laren and Guinan. Only the latter two were of any real importance, and the first eventually settled into the role of O'Brien's wife.
• Society-on-Edge Episode: In "Force of Nature", warp drive (which powers all Federation starships) was found to be damaging to the fabric of subspace. At the end of the episode, the Federation decided that until they can figure out a way to counteract the rifts in space, all ships can't go above Warp 5 except in emergencies. Word of God is that ''Voyager'' was the first starship to permanently address the issue.
• Solar Flare Disaster: A recurring issue in the show.
• Somber Backstory Revelation: In "The Wounded", O'Brien, in the first episode to really flesh out his character beyond a background extra, is talking to a Cardassian observer about his experiences on Setlik III, and how he had been forced, for the first time, to kill someone in the line of duty. It hadn't even been an intentional act. O'Brien had grabbed a phaser to defend himself, not knowing it was on its highest setting and not stun. He'd had to watch as the Cardassian he'd fired on was vaporized in front of him.
  O'Brien: It's not you I hate, Cardassian. It's what I became because of you.
• Soulful Plant Story: Downplayed for "The Inner Light", where Picard is being sent telepathic messages from a planet that was destroyed years ago, via a probe, and he sees himself as one of these deceased aliens. The aliens have a tree which is said to symbolise hope, but the tree is only a minor part of the plot.
• Soulless Bedroom: Downplayed for Data's quarters. He does have the odd painting on the walls, but there still aren't that many decorations, to the point where Troi described them as "Spartan". In addition, Data isn't creepy, he's just an emotionless (but morally righteous) android.
• Soup Is Medicine: In the episode "The Icarus Factor", Dr. Pulaski says that a flu patient can be cured with a foreign hypospray and some P.C.S., which stands for Pulaski's Chicken Soup.
• Space Cossacks: 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 Clothes:
  • The uniforms worn by the engineering staff (a tunic-miniskirt one-piece and knee-high boots, to be specific - and yes, men and women wear the same uniform) and several other crew members during the first season are truly astonishing.
  • Civilian fashion zigzags this. While futuristic jumpsuits have become very popular in the 24th centuy, most civilian fasion seems to try very hard to avert this and look very old-fashioned rather than futuristic, making characters resemble 18th century farmers rather than space cadets. Tunics seem to have come back in a big way.
• Space Friction: Averted for the most part, as in "Cause and Effect", where the plot's central crisis revolves around Enterprise and another ship, both unable to maintain steerage way, repeatedly finding themselves on a collision course resulting in the destruction of Enterprise.
• Space Is Cold: Played more or less straight, as in the first-season episode "The Naked Now", wherein a ship's crew, intoxicated by the same infectious disease as in the TOS episode "The Naked Time", shut off their ship's life support system. Not long after, the Enterprise crew finds them frozen solid, complete with a thick layer of snow all over everything.
• Space Is Noisy: As with most sci-fi of the era and before, space combat features plenty of "pew pew" noises and loud explosions as phasers fire and photo torpedos hit their targets.
• Space Jews:
  • The Ferengi. Alternatively, they could be interpreted as Space Americans (Eagleland, negative version) or Space Capitalists, down to a strong interest in controlling other civilizations' natural resources, and at least one episode with a Ferengi being a Hawaiian-Shirted Tourist.
  • "Code of Honor" features an alien race that looks indistinguishable from human black people, and their culture has a stereotypical African flavor. The fact that its values are portrayed as extremely regressive makes the episode come off as rather racist.
• Space Mines:
  • Appear in "Chain of Command Part II".
  • In "Booby Trap" the Enterprise is trapped in an asteroid belt seeded with "acceton assimilators".
• Spaceship Slingshot Stunt
• Speed Echoes: The "Picard Maneuver", wherein a ship performs a short-range warp jump directly in front of an enemy vessel, is an example. For a brief moment, the ship appears to be in two locations simultaneously: its location before the warp jump and its location after. Ships with low-grade sensors, such as the Ferengi vessel Picard was facing off against when he first used the maneuver, may also erroneously register the ship performing the maneuver in two locations, rendering them vulnerable to attack.
• Spiders Are Scary: The seventh-season episode "Genesis" had Barclay devolve into one for a Jump Scare.
• Spinoff Sendoff: "Encounter at Farpoint", with a visit from The Original Series' Dr. Admiral McCoy, who inspects the Enterprise-D and gives it his blessing.
  Dr McCoy: Now she's a new ship, but she's got the right name, y'hear? Treat her like a lady, and she'll always bring you home.
  • And Captain Picard sent off DS9 by having Sisko come to terms with Picard's involvement in Wolf 359 (where Sisko's wife was killed).
• Standard Alien Spaceship: Romulan ships ("warbirds") resemble giant avians, green in color. Klingon and Cardassian ships skirt the edge of this trope: they're hard-edged for the most part, but their hulls are painted green-grey and yellow-beige in color, respectively.
• Staredown Faceoff: Sarek deals with the titular Vulcan whose emotions are bleeding out into his surroundings due to an exotic brain disease, finding new hosts in the people in his vicinity. At one point leads Picard and Riker to go from talking to the crew in the cockpit to facing each other, voicing irritations and concerns with increasingly louder and louder tone of voice, to the point of shouting, neither backing down before Data snaps them out of it.
• Start X to Stop X: In one episode, a scientist intentionally causes a tear in space with a self-destructed warp drive, just to convince the Federation to stop using warp travel so she can prevent that very type of tear from occurring elsewhere.
• Status Quo Is God: While often played straight, it was first seriously averted by the episode "Sins of the Father", which episode writer Ronald Moore cited as the series' turning point towards ongoing story arcs. While permanent changes had happened before (like the death of Tasha Yar), "Sins" really sparked Worf's entire character arc, leading to "Reunion", "Redemption" and more.
• Story Arc: Both the pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint" and the finale, "All Good Things" feature Q putting Humanity on Trial;
  Q: The Trial never ended, Captain! We never reached a verdict. But now we have. You're Guilty!
• Stealth Pun: Picard orders to "fire at will" during a training exercise. Cut to Will Riker.
• Two Decades Behind: Wood paneling. 'Nuff said.
  • Ishara Yar's haircut also qualifies.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: The Tamarians in "Darmok", who speak mostly in metaphor. The universal translator can easily deliver the literal meanings, but without knowledge of the myths upon which the sayings are based, it's still near-impossible to understand.
• Styrofoam Rocks: In "Ethics", Worf's spine is broken when a cargo container falls on him. The way it falls and bounces indicates that it's so light it wouldn't even hurt a human, let alone a big, sturdy Klingon.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The entire race of Q, and the mysterious creature in "The Survivors", as well as several other incorporeal species and Energy Beings.
• Surprise Party: In "Parallels," the senior staff of the Enterprise D throws Worf a surprise party for his birthday after he comes back from a bat'leth tournament. The party manages to catch him off-guard, because Riker lied to him and told him that there wasn't going to be a surprise party. However, the story is about Worf shifting through various parallel realities, and whether or not there was a party varies based on which reality he's in. When he returns to his proper reality, it turns out that Deanna Troi talked Riker out of throwing the party because she didn't think Worf would like it, but the two end up spending some time together over champagne in Worf's quarters.
• Sympathy for the Devil: In the episode "Skin of Evil", both Picard and Troi express their sympathy for Armus for spending untold eons on a dead planet in pain and rage after his creators abandoned him, while nevertheless acknowledging that he is a malevolent liquid of pure evil.