Star Trek The Next Generation / Tropes T to Z

Star Trek: The Next Generation Tropes T to Z

T

• Tainted Veins: A side effect of inoculation with Borg assimilation nanomachines, albeit less so in TNG than in later outings, whose improved special effects could make it look considerably more horrifying.
• Take a Third Option: In "Samaritan Snare", the Pakleds capture Geordi and demand access to the Enterprise's computer. Their options, summarized by Data, are, "We can either respond to the Pakleds' demands, or not. We can either use force, or not." Riker ultimately comes up with a ruse, communicated to Geordi in code — Geordi would seemingly arm the slow-witted Pakleds with sophisticated weaponry, and when the Enterprise released harmless plasma through the Bussard collectors, he would disarm the Pakleds' weapons, claiming that the Enterprise's "crimson force field" had done it.
• Take That!: "Relics" chimes in on the iconic "Kirk vs. Picard" argument (specifically, which is the better captain) that tends to plague the fandom by the simple expedient of having Montgomery Scott brought back from the transporter pattern buffer to comment on Kirk's more active, aggressive, and decisive command style versus Picard's more measured, careful style. The verdict: Both styles have their places - but look! Picard can do both!
• Talking Is a Free Action: in a notable example in Encounter at Farpoint, Picard is somehow able to record a log in the middle of his first encounter with Q, while Q is right in front of him, and without moving his lips.
  Picard: The question now is the incredible power of the Q being. Do we dare oppose it?
  • Averted in "Data's Day" since Data is the only character who could maintain a perfect mental record of his own internal dialog.
• Tall Is Intimidating: Discussed in "Hollow Pursuits". Will Riker is offended by Reg Barclay making a holodeck version of him who's short. Deanna Troi says that, considering Reg's personality and Riker's height, perhaps Reg was afraid of Riker because Riker was tall.
• Tantrum Throwing: According to Worf, this is a stock feature of Klingon courtship.
• Teasing Parent: A dark version. In "Violations", Jev's father Tarmin finds amusement in publicly humiliating his son by deriding his telepathic abilities while boasting about his own. It's implied that revenge for this is the reason Jev turned to Mind Rape and attempts to frame his father for it.
• Technical Euphemism:
  • In "Up the Long Ladder", Worf passes out on the bridge due to having an illness which Dr. Pulaski likens to measles. Worf objects to her use of the term "fainting" to describe the incident, since fainting is considered shameful among Klingons (his species). So, she says that he "suffered a dramatic drop in blood pressure, his blood glucose level dropped, there was deficient blood flow resulting from circulatory failure. In other words, he curled up his toes and lay unconscious on the floor."
  • In "Rascals", when Ro and Guinan (along with two others) have been turned into kids, Guinan asks Ro if she plans on going to her quarters to "pout". Ro says that while she may physically be twelve years old, she's actually not, and thus she's not pouting, but "contemplating her situation".
• Technobabble: Teraquads of it. While it's only very rarely at all concerned with any correspondence to reality, it is for the most part internally consistent; you can actually follow the scientific discussions between characters, which is of course the primary purpose of technobabble. (Besides, there's only so close to real science that a sci-fi show with FTL travel can hew.) Even Reverse the Polarity is used in the correct context.
• Teleporter Accident: Lots! A recurring plot device, often handled with a surprising degree of subtlety.
• Teleport Interdiction:
  • In the episode "Attached", the Enterprise's transporters are redirected by an alien force, so Picard and Crusher end up on the opposite side of the planet from where they intended.
  • In another episode, the Enterprise is in a confrontation with a Romulan warbird. There is a severely injured Romulan on board the Enterprise who can't be beamed to the Romulan ship unless the ship not doing the beaming lowers its shields.
• Temporal Suicide: One episode involves Picard meeting his past double and killing him with a phaser set to "kill" to keep the timeline smooth.
• Temporary Substitute:
  • After Gates McFadden quit the show after the first season, Dr. Pulaski took over as the Chief Medical Officer of the Enterprise, with Dr. Crusher being explained as being transferred to a space station. Following the poor reception to Pulaski, McFadden was convinced to return.
  • The final script draft for "Haven" contained several lines for Worf and Wesley that were either cut or reassigned to other characters.
  • Geordi only appears via Stock Footage in "Suddenly Human". LeVar Burton had surgery shortly before filming began on "The Best of Both Worlds (Part 2)" so his scenes for that episode were shot in post-production, and many of his lines were given to O'Brien. "Suddenly Human" was the first episode filmed after "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II", but was switched in order and aired after "Family" and "Brothers".
• Test of Pain: The show's expansion of Klingon culture includes showing important tests that involve pain:
  • The Rite of Ascension is a two-step ritual which formally recognizes a Klingon as a warrior. In the second step, the Klingon must demonstrate the depth of his inner strength by walking between eight warriors wielding painstiks, who deliver powerful jolts to the Klingon's torso while he expresses his most deeply-held feelings. Worf undergoes this step in "The Icarus Factor", since he hadn't had an opportunity to go through it at the time that a Klingon normally would.
  • The first step in the Rite of Succession is the Sonchi ceremony. The Arbiter of Succession and all those who are vying for the position of Chancellor give a formal challenge to the corpse of the former Chancellor and shock him with a painstik. The thought process is that between the pain from the painstik and the challenge, no living Klingon would dare back down lest he lose his honor, and this confirms that the former Chancellor is indeed dead and not faking it. This ceremony is shown in "Reunion" being done to K'mpec by Duras, Gowron, and Picard (named Arbiter by K'mpec before his death due to suspicions that Duras was the one who masterminded his poisoning).
• That's No Moon: In "Encounter at Farpoint" we get our very first empathic reading inside the phony space station (later revealed to be a shapeshifting alien) when Troi looks like she’s straining under terrible pain or anger from a creature nearby.
• Theme Tune Extended, since the theme music is taken from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which has a longer theme.
• There Is No Cure:
  • When Vulcans reach around 200 or so, a rare few develop a condition called Bendi Syndrome, where every emotion they've bottled up gets telepathically transmitted to everyone within range, causing them to act violently and angry. Sarek is revealed in the titular episode to experience this condition, and continues to decay when he boards the Enterprise-D for a diplomatic mission. Since there is no treatment or cure, all Picard can do is willingly mind-meld to take the brunt of these emotions on himself until Sarek can complete his mission. Sarek later succumbs to the disease in Season 5.
  • In the episode "Reunion", Klingon Chancellor K'mpec reveals that his enemies have poisoned his bloodwine. He's rather cavalier about there being no cure, since he keeps drinking it even as he talks to Picard about it.
  • In "All Good Things", Picard's older self in the Bad Future is suffering from Irumodic Syndrome, a degenerative neurological disease which causes delusions, and which has no known cure.
• 13th Birthday Milestone: In "The Icarus Factor", Worf explains that the first of two rounds of the Rite of Ascension, where a young Klingon is accepted as a warrior in training, is supposed to happen on or before their 13th birthday.
• This Is My Chair:
  • Picard to Wesley in the pilot. "Get out of my chair!"
  • Played with the time Worf was temporarily put in command of the Enterprise to deal with recently thawed Klingon Popsicles who were unaware that the war between the Empire and The Federation was over.
    Riker: How did you like your first command?
    Worf: ...Comfortable chair.
• This Is Not My Life to Take: Inverted in an episode: the life of his enemy's son may be Worf's to take, but that means it's also his to spare.
• This Page Will Self-Destruct: A somewhat humorous example in season 1 episode 10, "Haven"; a message from Deanna Troi's mother takes the form of a box with a talking head on the side, and one side explodes off of the box after the message is complete, revealing wedding gifts in the form of jewelry.
• Throw-Away Guns: While this happens with about as much frequency as any other TV show, one particuliarly notable case occurs in "Time's Arrow," where the crew is shown a revolver from the late 19th century at a site on Earth with evidence of Ancient Astronauts. After the crew winds up in the 1890s, it is revealed that Mark Twain, suspicious of the time travelers' motives, threatened them with it and left it behind.
• Tidally Locked Planet: The term is never actually used on-screen but two Planets of the Week fit the bill.
  • Dytallix B in "Conspiracy" was a world inhabited only by the Dytallix Mining Company. Due to the temperature extremes on the two faces of the planet, the company placed its facilities in the twilight region.
  • "The Dauphin" had one distinct culture develop on the day side of Daled IV, and a different one on the night side. Their differences led to a world war that the Enterprise is trying to put an end to.
• Time Is Dangerous: In "Timescape", Picard is injured when he sticks his hand across the edge of a "time bubble", which causes his fingernails to age faster than his arm. Later, he experiences symptoms of "temporal narcosis" due to a malfunction of the equipment protecting him from being frozen in time.
• Time Travel Episode: There's "Time's Arrow", where the Enterprise find Data's centuries-old head lying in a cave in San Francisco in the 24th century. It turns out Data went back in time to the 19th century to follow two aliens and became Trapped in the Past.
• Time-Traveling Jerkass: A Matter of Time features a time traveler from the future named Rasmussen who wants to observe the Enterprise at a historic mission, but spends most of the trip stealing equipment from the crew, badgering them with annoying questions, and even inappropriately hitting on the ship's doctor. It turns his real mission from the future is a sham, he killed the real time traveler and stolen his machine to use for fun and profit.
• Tin Man: Played absurdly straight with Data. In "I, Borg", he not only notices and is concerned by Picard's unusual behavior in the wake of an away team having found and rescued an injured drone, but with a Meaningful Look passes Troi a suggestion that she follow him into his ready room and try to talk it over with him. If he understood emotion as poorly as he's so often at pains to suggest, even the former would be unlikely at best, to say nothing of the latter.
• Tinman Typist: Also played absurdly straight with Data, in too many episodes to enumerate here.
• Title Drop:
  • "Skin Of Evil":
  Armus: I am a skin of evil, left here by a race of titans, who believed if they rid themselves of me, they would free the bounds of destructiveness.
  • "Ship in a Bottle":
  Moriarty: Your crewmates here in my little ship in a bottle, seem a bit more optimistic.
  • "Tapestry":
  Picard: There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of... there were loose threads... untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads... it had unraveled the tapestry of my life.
  • "All Good Things...":
  Q: Goodbye, Jean-Luc. I'm gonna miss you... you had such potential. But then again, all good things must come to an end...
  • Q: The time has come to put an end to your trek through the stars.
• Too Awesome to Use: The Borg were this for the show's creators. The Borg were so awesomely powerful (and impossible to negotiate with) that they only got used four times (6 episodes, because of 2-parters) over the entire 7 seasons of the show. It was just that hard to come up with a way to defeat the Borg without making them seem less awesome. Of those 4 times the Borg show up, the crew is saved once by essentially Divine Intervention, once they are merely facing an individual drone and the challenge is to make him an individual, not to defeat him, and only twice during the run of the TV series do they actually defeat the Borg.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Tasha Yar frequently loses her temper with great potential for lethal results, including screaming at Q until he freezes her. Could be argued that her stupidity is what finally got her killed.
  • When someone is hurt, Dr. Crusher is prone to just running right up to them and administering treatment, WITHOUT bothering to take simple precautions like scanning the area for hostiles, toxins, and so forth, or just beaming the person and herself directly to the ship right at the beginning. This tendency has gotten her kidnapped and/or nearly killed several times.
    • Similarly, when Worf was stabbed with a bayonet, Wesley rushed to his side without regard for, you know, the aliens surrounding him with more bayonets, one of which promptly impaled him. He would have died if Riker hadn't healed him with the power of the Q.
  • There was an inversion in which an alien was too dumb to die. He attempted a Thanatos Gambit by shooting himself with Riker's phaser in order to frame Riker for his murder. There were a couple of holes in his story: Riker was near death at the time of the supposed murder and Crusher could tell from the angle of the blast that the shot was self-inflicted. On top of that, his suicide attempt failed because he didn't know how the Federation's phasers worked and shot himself with the phaser set to stun.^note On a Black Comedy note, it could have gone the other way; if he upped the setting to maximum, he wouldn't have just died, he would have been disintegrated, and could have instead just left everyone wondering "where did he go now that the aliens are actually here?"
• Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: In "Imaginary Friend", Troi feels guilty about trying to wean a little girl off her imaginary friend, so she doesn't want her cake.
• Torture Always Works: Deconstructed in the episode "Chain of Command." The Cardassians capture Picard, trying to find out information for the defenses of a system. Picard literally knows nothing about the defenses, giving all the other information he has under drugs, but unable to give information he doesn't. They torture him to try to get the information and Picard resists, but it becomes very clear that the information isn't the reason they are doing it anymore; they simply want to break him.
• Torture Is Ineffective: Zigzagged in "Chain of Command". Gul Madred initially tortures Picard for information which Picard doesn't actually have, but it soon becomes clear that the Cardassians just want to break him mentally. Picard confesses to Troi that Madred nearly succeeded, but being freed brought him back to his senses enough for his final, defiant "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!"
• Touched by Vorlons
• Toxic Phlebotinum: In "The High Ground", the Ensata terrorists resort to using a teleporter device called an inverter to carry out their attacks on the occupying Rutian forces without being tracked, although the downside is that it caused severe cumulative distortions in the cellular chemistry of anyone using it, a process which, with prolonged use, could prove fatal.
• Toy-Based Characterization: In the episode "Booby Trap" Captain Picard compares visiting an ancient starship to "climbing inside the bottle." Nobody present, other than Chief O'Brien, has any clue what he's talking about. Riker thinks O'Brien is feigning knowledge to suck up to Picard, but O'Brien defends his knowledge. The interesting thing is that ships in bottles characterize Picard and O'Brien in different ways. For Picard, they represent a more romantic age and the opportunity to dream about the possibilities of exploration. For O'Brien, they represent pride in constructing something that is intricate and beautiful because it is more than the sum of its parts.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Counsellor Troi is always eating chocolate desserts, or drinking hot chocolate.
  Riker: Chocolate ice-cream, chocolate fudge, and chocolate chips. You're not depressed are you?
• Tragic Intangibility: Georgi and Ensign Ro's intangibility in "The Next Phase" makes it impossible for them to interact with their friends and co-workers as they begin to mourn them. The whole incident causes Ro a bit of religious crisis, since she assumes their status is the first stage of passing into the afterlife.
• Training the Pet: In one episode, Geordi babysits his friend's cat, only for her to cough up a hairball and break a vase. He tells said friend, Data, that Spot needs to be trained, so Data tries verbal commands, but they don't work. We never learn what became of Data and his attempts to train Spot.
• Trapped in TV Land: In malfunctioning holodecks.
• Translation by Volume: The episode "Darmok" deals with Universal Translator failure and an encounter with friendly, yet absolutely incomprehensible aliens. Both crews and especially captains try this approach of speaking slowly, clearly and somewhat loudly. It slightly works, but both could grasp only very, very little.
• Trashcan Bonfire: Episode "The Vengeance Factor". While searching for the Gatherers, the Enterprise crew explores a facility with several barrels full of burning material.
• Trickster Mentor: Q... usually. Sometimes he's just screwing with them, but often he teaches the crew, Picard in particular, something in a roundabout way. "Tapestry" is a prime example, when he helps Picard see that the mistakes he regrets from his youth shaped him into the man he is today.
• Truce Trickery:
  • "The Wounded" revolves around the captain of the USS Phoenix going rogue after accusing the Cardassians of trying to subvert the recent ceasefire in the border dispute between them and the Federation by shipping additional weapons to the front lines. Though he's stopped and arrested by the Enterprise, Captain Picard tells his counterpart Gul Macet that he thinks the accusations are valid and warns him to get his government to knock it off. "We will be watching."
  • The Romulan Star Empire is established to have signed an additional treaty with the Federation since TOS, the Treaty of Algeron—which keeps the peace in exchange for the Federation banning its own use of cloaking devices—but repeatedly pushes the limits of it during the series up to and including trying to launch an invasion of Vulcan in "Unification, Part 2". Conversely, in "The Pegasus", we find out that the eponymous ship was experimenting with cloaking technology, likewise violating the treaty (which the captain in question opposed).
• True Companions: It was inevitable the characters would become this way, because the actors were as well. This extends to even how they treated the set: Patrick Stewart was The Captain, and his chair was the captain's chair; the only people who ever sat in it, besides Stewart himself, were either guests visiting the set or actors whose characters had been asked to do so. (Even decades later, Wil Wheaton, hosting a Star Trek aftershow, hesitated to do so (on a recreation of the bridge built for season 3 of Star Trek: Picard) until one of the others, in this case Jonathan Frakes, gave him permission.)
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: Lwaxana Troi, Daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Riix, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed.
• Turing Test: Data, as a very sophisticated AI, often demonstrates he passes this test.
  • Data tests this out on Juliana Tainer when he realises that Doctor Soong recreated his wife, and Data's mother as an android.
• Two Girls to a Team: Deanna Troi and Beverly Crusher, after Tasha's death. Both had maternal and supportive roles, being the ship's head counselor and chief medical officer respectively, but Troi was more exotic while Crusher was more of a down-to-earth character.
• Two-Keyed Lock: Used for the auto-destruct.
• 2 + Torture = 5: "Chain of Command", with lights instead of fingers. (Done well enough that a memetic quote of the episode has been made an honorary redirect to the trope.)

U-Z

• Uncertain Doom: Geordi's mother. She was last seen on a ship called the Hera, which disappeared, but there were no bodies or debris found. In "Interface", in which she disappears, Geordi thinks he's seen her, but it turns out to be an alien, so he gives up. While the books explain what happened to her, they're non-canon, so it's still a mystery.
• Un-person: Subverted in "Remember Me". People begin disappearing from the Enterprise, leaving no trace whatsoever of their existence. However, it is not because of any conspiracy, but because they were never real to begin with, and the entire universe is a false reality created by an Applied Phlebotinum experiment gone wrong.
• Uneven Hybrid:
  • In "The Drumhead", Simon Tarses, an enlisted man in the Enterprise's medical department, is hounded by an admiral on a Witch Hunt on suspicion of being a spy because he has a Romulan grandfather. Tarses had claimed on his Starfleet entrance application that his grandfather was Vulcan.
  • Worf's son Alexander Rozhenko is one quarter human, from his half-human mother's side.
• Unexpected Kindness: In one episode, a man is suspicious of Troi, since she describes herself as a "counsellor", and that was also the job title of a man who abused him. Troi, however, is nothing less than helpful to the guy.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension:
  • Riker/Troi and Picard/Crusher run through the whole series. Riker and Troi are married in Star Trek: Nemesis. Picard/Crusher is never fully resolved, although a Deleted Scene from the end of Nemesis hints that they might have Hooked Up Afterwards. The third season of Star Trek: Picard confirms they did.
  • Data and Tasha Yar gave hints of this after they hooked up in "The Naked Now", but this was curtailed by his being an android unable to express emotion, and her eventual death.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The solution Worf comes up with against the formerly-frozen Klingons in "The Emissary" is an example of this.
• Unwanted False Faith: In the episode "Who Watches the Watchers" Picard inadvertently becomes a deity to a group of vaguely-ancient/medieval-tech-using Vulcanoids.
• Updated Re-release: The series got a "remastered" version similar to the one done for TOS, with an HD film transfer and redone special effects.
• Vengeful Vending Machine:
  • Picard orders tea from the replicator, only for it to produce a flower in a tea cup.
  • Lwaxana Troi orders tea, but the replicator produces sausages.
  • A deleted scene from one episode has one of Wesley's friends get hurt after a blast of energy is fired from a malfunctioning replicator.
  • Bugs in Data's programming cause various malfunctions aboard the Enterprise. One of them is that replicators only produce cat supplements, meals for Data's cat Spot.
• Viewer-Friendly Interface: All over the place, played mostly straight. Notably, the series mostly averts the "gorilla arm" problem by putting its touchscreens in a natural position for touching.
• Villainy-Free Villain:
  • Bruce Maddox from "The Measure of a Man" wanted to disassemble Data in order to find out how to replicate his design. Although his goal is noble, Data refuses when it becomes obvious that Maddox doesn't have a very good idea of what he is doing, and Maddox spends the rest of the episode trying to legally force him into compliance. This is mostly because Maddox does not see Data as a self-determining individual and does not believe he has the right to refuse. He comes around at the end.
  • Christopher Hobson, briefly Data's first officer, constantly second-guesses his orders under the assumption that an android would not be a competent leader. He justifies this with the idea that some extraterrestrial species are naturally more or less suited to certain tasks, which does have some validity, but since Data is one-of-a-kind and Hobson has no real knowledge of what Data is or isn't capable of, his opinion comes off as arbitrary and bigoted. Like Maddox, Data eventually manages to earn his respect.
  • Admiral Nechayev and Picard don't see eye-to-eye on matters of policy, since Nechayev is more hawkish than Picard. Whenever she appears in an episode, it's usually a sign that she's about to browbeat Picard over his latest command decisions. However in the later seasons, Picard manages to make peace with her, and their relationship is much improved, though she's still often relegated to delivering bad news and hard truths.
  • Captain Edward Jellico could be considered a subversion of this trope. He is given command of the Enterprise during the "Chain of Command" two-parter and obviously doesn't get along well with the crew. His brusque and demanding style of command makes him easy to dislike, both for the crew and the audience, and he even relieves Riker of his position. Despite this, Jellico is vindicated by his success in resolving the crisis of the day, saving Picard from the Cardassians and averting an armed conflict.
• Virtual-Reality Interrogation: Subverted an episode where Riker thinks he is a victim of one (he is supposedly in the future but his supposed wife is a woman of his dreams, that he knows never existed outside the holodeck). The hostile aliens reveal themselves when he calls them out on it. However, as it turns out the aliens aren't real either - there is just one alien, highly psychic and very lonely, keeping Riker in a Lotus-Eater Machine to have some company and conjuring things from his mind - the whole espionage plot was accidentally created by Riker's own fears.
• The Virus:
  • "The Best of Both Worlds" introduces the Borg's ability to "assimilate" life-forms, implanting them with cybernetic components which override the life-form's free-will.
  • "Identity Crisis" has a species which reproduces by spreading some kind of parasite which turns other humanoids into them.
• Volcanic Veins: The aliens in "Identity Crisis" have glowing blue veins all over their bodies.
• Was Just Leaving: In "The Vengeance Factor", Deanna excuses herself so that Riker and Yuta can have some private time.
• Water Source Tampering:
  • In one episode, Data — who has amnesia and doesn't know about his own history or Starfleet — is accused of poisoning a well in the village he's living in, but he's really trying to cure them of radiation poisoning by putting the cure in the drinking water.
  • In the episode The Most Toys, also dealing with Data, an unscrupulous trader poisons a water supply with a specific substance so that the Enterprise would have to deal with him as he (conveniently) had a supply of the extremely rare antidote.
• Watsonian vs. Doylist: Early in the shows' development, people were talking about whether the Enterprise should have a cloaking device (being a well established piece of technology with the Romulans and Klingons, as well as several instances of acquiring such an item they could study) and Roddenberry was against it, saying that Starfleet are scientists and explorers, they don't go sneaking around. In part because of all the fan questions, it wasn't until the seventh season episode "The Pegasus" where an In-Universe explanation was given; a treaty between the Romulans and the Federation decades prior banned the Federation from using or developing cloaking technology. When illegal development of Federation cloaking technology was discovered, Picard affirmed that the treaty kept them in peace. In later episodes, various circumstances permitted the use of cloaks on Federation ships:
  • A future depicted in the TNG Grand Finale "All Good Things..." said that the Romulan Empire was overthrown by the Klingons, rendering the original treaty obsolete and the Enterprise had a cloak.
  • In Deep Space Nine, every local Alpha Quadrant superpower had a vested interest in the discovery of the Dominion in the Gamma Quadrant and the Romulans loaned a cloak to the Starfleet ship Defiant with a dedicated Romulan operator and with the caveat the cloak could not be used in the Alpha Quadrant.^note Both provisions of which eventually fell by the wayside, with Defiant first losing her Romulan officer, and later the restriction on cloaking in the Alpha Quadrant being abandoned entirely.
• We All Die Someday: In an episode, a historian from the 26th century comes to watch what happens during a crisis on the Enterprise back in the 24th. Picard wants him to tell him what the future says happened, but he's reluctant.
  Rasmussen: You must see that if I were to influence you, everything in this sector, in this quadrant of the galaxy could change. History, my history, would unfold in a way other than it already has. Now what possible incentive could anyone offer me to allow that to happen?
  Picard: I have two choices. Either way, one version of history or another will wend its way forward. The history you know or another one. Now who is to say which is better? What I do know is here, today, one way, millions of lives could be saved. Now isn't that incentive enough?
  Rasmussen: Everyone dies, Captain. It's just a question of when. All of those people down there died years before I was born. All of you up here, as well. So you see, I can't get quite as worked up as you over the fate of some colonists who, for me, have been dead a very, very long time.
• Weaponized Offspring: The "Bluegill" neural parasites were controlled by "mother-creatures" — large parasites — that appeared to produce the smaller mind-controlling bug-like parasites.
• We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies: The mid-90s ad "We Didn't Start the Series".
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Tasha Yar's actress Denise Crosby felt she wasn't useful and asked to be let go. Her death was so sudden that it took a while before you realized she wasn't coming back. A Time Travel episode briefly brought her back and the subsequent timeline screw-ups resulted in a recurring enemy that looked exactly like her.
• We Have Become Complacent: The Federation thought they were prepared for anything. Then Q introduces them to the Borg.
• We Will All Be History Buffs in the Future:
  • In order to be a Starfleet cadet you already have to be the best and brightest the Federation has to offer. Study of various historical periods seems to be something of a hobby amongst Starfleet officers. Picard and Janeway both loved Earth's history and were trained terrestrial and xenoarchaeologists.
  • In the episode "The Royale" the away team finds an old astronaut's spacesuit that has the United States flag on it with 52 stars. It is Riker who instantly tells the years when that number of stars was in use, even though Data is accompanying him. The reason is that Riker was born and raised in the United States, so he probably got US history classes at school.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • We never do find out the final fate of Geordi's mother, whose vessel completely vanishes without a trace, in "Interface".
  • The alien in "Future Imperfect". At the end of the episode, he beams up with Riker, with Riker promising he won't be alone, and is never seen or mentioned again.
  • The clone of Kahless from "Rightful Heir". It's set up as though he'll have a fair amount of indirect influence on the direction of the Klingon Empire, but he's barely ever mentioned after this episode.
• Wham Episode:
  • Fifteen minutes into one episode, the crew beam down to rescue Deanna trapped inside a crashed shuttle. A strange alien lifeform is blocking the way. The crew try to reason with it, as per usual. The creature isn't very friendly with them. Then, it kills Lieutenant Yar.
  • "The Best Of Both Worlds". In two parts, we see the arrival of the Borg way ahead of schedule. They proceed to invade Federation space, defeat any and all attempts by the Enterprise crew to defeat them, convert Picard into Locutus of Borg and then Riker orders the crew to fire on said converted captain, all in the first half. The second opens up with that failing followed by The Battle of Wolf 359.
  • "Descent: Part 1": Data begins to feel emotions after coming across a splinter group of Borg who exhibit individuality. Data becomes so addicted to the feelings of anger and pleasure he felt when killing one Borg that he is coaxed by another Borg into meeting "The One", the splinter group's leader. That leader is revealed to be none other than Lore, Data's Psycho Prototype brother, whom Data has joined...
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The plot of "Measure of a Man" is Picard has to prove that Data is a sapient being.
• What Measure Is a Non-Unique?: Many unique and rare lifeforms, Data included.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Riker and Pulaski in "Up the Long Ladder" get mugged for DNA by a race that propagates by clones. Sure, that's bad, but their response is to massacre the clones! The Prime Minister is highly upset with them^note This becomes even worse in DS9, where a character attempts to frame Odo as having killed him, by killing a clone of himself. When found out, Odo arrests him while pointing out that "killing your own clone is still murder!".
  • Picard's refusal to commit genocide on the Borg gets him chewed out by his superiors.
• What Would X Do?:
  • In "Pen Pals," Riker gives some sage advice to Wesley Crusher when the latter is given his first command: "In your position it's important to ask yourself one question: 'What would Picard do?'"
  • In "The Best of Both Worlds", Picard is captured and assimilated by the Borg. Riker is placed in command. One of the first things he does is walk into the now-his Ready Room, look at the chair and ask "What would you do?" Then walks in Guinan and tells Riker that he has to think for himself now, as the Borg now know all of Picard's tricks.
• White Glove Test: In "The Ensigns of Command," as the Sheliak are urgently trying to hail the ship, Picard casually wipes at some imagined dust on the bridge as he delays answering them and makes them sweat a little.
• White Sheep: Thanks to being raised away from his people, Worf subscribes to an idealized version of his culture. The truth is, for all their talk of honor, there's a lot of dishonor at the highest levels of Klingon society, and Worf stands alone as a truly honorable warrior.
• Will Not Tell a Lie:
  • Betazoids, to other Betazoids at least, as lying to a fellow telepath is about as sensible as it sounds.
  • Vulcans are reputed to have this trait in-universe, but in fact freely do so if they believe it to be the logical thing to do.
• Witch Hunt: "The Drumhead" centers on a witch hunt against a Starfleet member whose grandfather was Romulan. When Picard speaks in the defense of the accused, the accusers turn their attention to him, bring up when he accidentally handed a Romulan spy over to enemy forces (the events of "Data's Day") and his short-lived assimilation into the Borg to question his loyalty. They also bring up the times he's violated the Prime Directive, but he says each incident is detailed in a report to Starfleet, leaving implicit that Starfleet agreed with his decisions, or at least didn't disagree strongly enough to reprimand him formally. They answer that they'll be looking very closely into those reports.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The nigh-omnipotent Q spends a few of his early episodes as a malicious prankster, but he gets temporarily stripped of his powers by the Q Continuum for abusing them. In the episode "True Q," he reveals that the Q Continuum feel responsibility to rein in the use of their powers. The evidence of this is the fact that the universe seems to run along by itself without noticeable interference from the Q.
• Would Hit a Girl: Subverted by Worf in "Hide and Q". When Riker (temporarily in possession of Q's powers) conjures up an attractive Klingon woman for Worf, after a bit of mutual snarling he promptly backhands her, throwing her several feet across the room. Everyone looks horrified until they realize that they're not fighting; this is what Klingon foreplay looks like.
• The Worf Effect: Trope namer. To establish that a problem can't be solved simply by attacking it, Worf usually tries and fails.
• Working Through the Cold: Justified in "The Naked Now", when Dr. Crusher still works on her cure for the disease that makes the victim uninhibited despite being infected. She may have been infected, but she was the only one qualified.
• Working with the Ex: Will Riker & Deanna Troi are ex-lovers.
• Worth It: After Worf kills Duras at the end of "Reunion", in revenge for Duras' killing K'Ehlyr, Picard calls him out and puts a formal reprimand on his record. Worf's attitude makes it clear that he doesn't really give a shit about the reprimand.
• Wrote the Book: In "The Best of Both Worlds part 2", Guinan and Riker have an extended discussion of their strategy centering around this metaphor.
• Yandere: A piece of Phlebotinum turns Troi into one in "Man Of The People".
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: "The Inner Light" has a variation that happens in a Mental World.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Q, a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, more or less feels this way about Picard. At every possible chance he gets Q makes fun of the inadequacies of the human race, but shows special interest in Picard whom he frequently tests to prove the worth of the human species. As Picard passes these tests Q praises Picard for his abilities and tells him that he above all other humans he has met proves the potential for greatness that humanity possesses. Beyond even that Q actually went so far as to say Picard is the closet thing he has to a friend in all the universe, above even his own race!
• You Are in Command Now:
  • Picard leaves La Forge in charge during "The Arsenal of Freedom".
  • "Disaster" sees Troi in charge of the bridge, albeit while it's cut off from the rest of the ship.
  • Dr. Crusher gets her turn in "Descent", fighting off the Borg.
  • Data takes command during the season 7 two parter, "Gambit."
• You Have to Believe Me!: In the series finale, "All Good Things," Picard finds himself jumping back and forth between different points in his life a la Billy Pilgrim. Unfortunately, in the future he's an old man with the beginnings of an Alzheimer's-like disease. If he wasn't Jean-Luc Picard, no one would give his ravings about temporal anomalies and the destruction of humanity a second thought.
• You Keep Using That Word: For a species so obsessed with "honor", many Klingons depicted in the series seem to be perfectly comfortable with stabbing each other in the back to get ahead. Worf gives several epic verbal putdowns on just why this sort of behavior is hypocritical and just what having true honor actually means.
• You Know Who Said That?: Jean-Luc Picard, facing a Witch Hunt of a trial, quotes the prosecutor's father speaking out against just such actions. The prosecutor doesn't take her father's quote being thrown in her face well.
• Your Head Asplode: Remmick near the end of "Conspiracy". Quite gruesome for Star Trek.
• Your Mom:
  • Riker invokes this when speaking to a holographic representation of Captain Rice in "Arsenal of Freedom", which is trying to get as much tactical information about the Enterprise and its mission as possible. When the faux Rice asks who sent them there, Riker says, "Your mother. She was worried about you."
  • In "Samaritan Snare," Picard mentions this as one motivation for his fight with some Nausicaans in his Academy days:
  "I stood toe-to-toe with the worst of the three and I told him what I thought of him, his pals, his planet and I possibly made some passing reference to his questionable parentage."
• You Need to Get Laid: This is the real reason why Riker asked Picard to buy him a Horg'ahn on Risa in "Captain's Holiday" — turns out having this on display is a signal that you're looking for some loving.
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo: Riker falls in love with an alien woman who gets really hated by her own people for their love. Not because he's a human, but because he's a man. Her culture require her and her partner to both be intergender. Essentially, it's a fear of having a gender at all.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The episode "The High Ground" dealt with the "you say terrorists, we say freedom fighters" issue. The Ansata separatists are trying to overthrow their Rutian oppressors "by any means necessary", including suicide bombers (while the government they're fighting makes use of indefinite detention, and in the past, simply killed people). During this episode, Data notes the "historical fact"^note as decreed by Paramount, in contrast to the original script that Ireland was reunified in 2024 after a successful terrorist campaign (which is why this episode wasn't broadcast in its entirety in either Britain or the Republic of Ireland until years after.)
• You See, I'm Dying: Evil Twin android Lore is about to walk out on his creator, Dr. Soong, when the latter reveals that he is dying — as Lore, for all his faults, does have emotions, this makes him stop.
• You Were Trying Too Hard:
  • "Booby Trap" features a starship trap in the form of an field that prevents the victim from moving. The designers figured that most people's instinct would be to try to generate enough power to break free, so the trap is designed to counter any increase in power. The solution turns out to be using maneuvering thrusters to gently extricate themselves.
  • "Hero Worship": The Enterprise keeps getting hit by waves that are powered by, it transpires, their own shields. Increasing power to the shields makes it worse.
• Zeerust:
  • So far the show's managed to avoid falling into this trap quite as hard and as quickly as TOS did. Mind you, there is a general sense of fashion victimism on the Enterprise. The bridge set feels like the epitome of Eighties luxury, all beige leather seats and wood paneling, and cozy-looking seats that lounge waaay back... given that all they are doing is pushing the odd button on an armrest, it's surprising half the crew doesn't fall asleep.
  • The biggest exception, though, is painfully noticeable to the kind of computer nerds who tend to love Trek. In the late 80s and early 90s, the LCARS computer interface looked incredibly slick and high-tech (touchscreen controls?!)... but as of the 21st century, many people would wonder why there doesn't seem to be tabbed displaying, the apparent inability to have multiple applications running at once, and the laughably slow speed at which text appears on screen, line by line, although the latter could easily simply have been implemented as a form of Extreme Graphical Representation.
  • The PADDs are another example. While the show did predict tablet computers almost two decades before their rise in popularity, the tablets seen in the show were already less functional than real tablets upon their invention. The show versions do not appear to offer two-way communications functionality (in particular video) and, like the main computer stations, cannot seem to run multiple applications. It is not unusual in-universe to see people who are multitasking using more than one PADD, with each one being used for a single task.