Star Trek lists their spookiest underrated episodes but do they hold up?

Star Trek is getting fans into a spooky mood ahead of Halloween.

Star Trek is getting fans hyped for the Halloween season by suggesting some of the most underrated and spooky episodes ever produced by the Trek brand. While Trek isn’t known for its frights and delights, it is a series that can often times dabble in them.

Star Trek as a brand is purely science fiction but science fiction doesn’t have to just be about science. Any number of genres can be blended into that. Romance, adventure, noir, and even horror can all be integrated into Star Trek, among so many other genres.

So it’s not surprising that Star Trek has some horror episodes and Star Trek’s dot com has listed nine that they feel are underrated.  Here’s their list, and I urge you to go to the website to see why they selected those ones.

• The Original Series – “The Galileo Seven”
• The Next Generation – “Night Terrors”
• The Next Generation – “Schisms”
• Deep Space Nine – “The Assignment”
• Voyager – “The Haunting of Deck Twelve”
• Enterprise – “Regeneration”
• Lower Decks – “Much Ado About Boimler”
• Picard – “Monsters”
• Strange New Worlds – “All Those Who Wander”

Do any of these really hold up as spooky?

As far as Star Trek horror goes, while they do dabble in it from time to time, they don’t do it well that often. Of the nine on this list, three would be the ones I would recommend. “Schisms” from TNG, “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” from Voyager, and “Regeneration” from Enterprise.

“Schisms” is pretty haunting in a “Fire in the Sky” type of way. While the episode predated the movie, the story the film adapted, was released 15 years prior. It’s such a horrifying story, and most modern alien abduction tails have borrowed from it, even unknowingly. Even though Star Trek deals with aliens often, it’s more of a West Wing type of situation, not so much evil abduction situations. That’s what “Schisms” brought. That idea of horror to an encounter.

“The Haunting of Deck Twelve” is less scary, and more spooky. Neelix tells kids about a ghost on Deck Twelve but it turns out to be an alien that attacked the ship, after the ship accidentally destroyed its, well, house. It’s a bit more complicated than that but basically, it’s a retelling of the events that led up to why all the kids and Neelix are cooped up telling ghost stories.

Finally, “Regeneration” is basically a sequel to Star Trek: First Contact, where we see several Borg drones left over from Enterprise’s trip to the past a while later. With outdated tech and a vengeful space zombie on the loose, the crew of the Enterprise is up against a force that is all but supernatural.