GameRant recently published their list of Star Trek’s darkest storylines but missed some.
Star Trek is a wide and long-ranging property and it’s hard to stay on top of 60 years of content that range from shows to films to comics to books to video games. It’s a deep deep dive into lore that can be hard to grasp. Just watching the gone show won’t even give you a fraction of the knowledge needed to keep on top of Star Trek.
So it’s important to always compare notes and that’s essentially what we’re doing today with GameRant. They recently did an interesting article where they looked at the darkest storylines in Star Trek history, listing 10 and definitely ranked.
We don’t agree with the order, but the issue is that they either haven’t seen enough of the franchise, or they chose to omit some of the most disturbing things for reasons unknown to us. So while their Top 10 list is written as a definitive one, one that you can read here; we don’t delve into definitives.
When we talk about Trek, we talk about just some portions of a larger picture. So we would like to add three storylines that deserve to be remembered for their darkness, but remember as always, these are just some of them. Let us know on Facebook or Twitter what storylines you think deserve to be mentioned as well.
Three more dark storylines in Star Trek
The Abduction of Seven of Nine
The story of how Seven of Nine came into creation is one of the hardest to watch. Seven, then known as Annika Hansen, was out in space exploring the galaxy with her parents when the Borg happened upon them. See, her parents were looking for The Borg, and they found them. The parents and Annika were assimilated by the Borg, a moment that haunts Seven of Nine still to this day.
Threshold’s Salamanders
We don’t talk about Threshold very much, at least positively, because it’s bad. Tom Paris starts rapidly evolving into a salamander-type monster, one that wants to breed. So he kidnaps the captain of the Voyager, Kathryne Janeway, and forces her to undergo the same metamorphosis that he went through. They then disappear. When they’re found, they’re both full salamander-type beings…with offspring roaming about. We don’t want to start tasking the questions that usually come with this episode, and that alone should tell you how dark things are.
Any number of times that a Star Trek character got mentally hijacked
One of the key plot devices in Star Trek is watching a character get hijacked. Whether it’s by space ghosts in Star Trek: Enterprise, or by the Borg in the last season of Picard, mind control is often used for plot reasons, but it’s often a horror that often gets underrepresented. Imagine all the times a person gets drugged and loses hours of their life. Now imagine an alien that’s able to do this whenever they want. The emotional trauma would be unparalleled, and wouldn’t be so cavalry thrown away if it really happened to people. Especially in some episodes, like Voyager’s “Nemesis” or “Memorial” where members of the crew are implanted with memories that aren’t real. How does reliving moments of trauma that aren’t yours not make the darkest storyline list?
Just imagine what Miles O’Brien went through in Hard Times, but now it’s happening to others as well. That’s terrifying.