Star Trek has a history of making people suffer. In fact, if you look through series, up until Star Trek: Discovery and the Nu Era of Trek, you'll see that one character often gets it the most. Just about every series comes for one character more than any other, and in doing so, comes up with just the most twisted concoctions you can put someone through.
We're talking about the type of stuff that makes you feel existential dread just watching the episode play out. The kind of stuff that makes you just wonder how anyone can live with themselves after that type of thing happens. The moments that are so profoundly messed up, that it seems impossible to recover from.
So today, we're looking at just three of the most traumatic stories that Star Trek ever told, starting with the inspiration for the list.
Deadlock (Voyager) - This episode lives rent-free in my head. Voyager essentially gets duplicated, yet the two ships are stuck together. The more one pulls away, the more the other gets damaged. This leads to the deaths of Harry Kim and an infant Naomi Wildman on one of the ships. Eventually, the other ship knows its time is up and sends their Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman over to the duplicate ship before their own ship blows up. Now, despite Harry and Naomi being back, everyone, Harry included, has to live with the knowledge that this isn't his ship and these aren't his friends. He's a duplicate on a strange ship and everyone is just pretending that it's not some messed-up scenario.
Hard Time (Deep Space Nine) - Getting stuck in prison for a crime you didn't commit is hell enough. Getting stuck in the prison of your mind for 20 years is even worse. Knowing that it in reality, that mental prison that lasted decades only lasted a few hours has to be one of the harder things in life to accept. That's the hell that Chief Miles O'Brien dealt with in the episode "Hard Time". He lived a lifetime in prison, killed his cellmate, and longed for his family for decades, only to find out that none of it happened. He now has decades of memories of things that weren't real that he'd have to deal with for the rest of his life.
The story of Christopher Pike - We live with the gift of the unknown. We have no idea what's coming around the bend for us, and it allows us to sleep at night. What if you knew your destiny? More importantly, what if you knew you were fated to have a miserable and painful life, one where your own body was a prison and your mind was forced to rot in it? What if you knew how it would happen when it would happen, and knew that if you didn't commit yourself to that life, others would die? Would you be able to live with yourself? Well, that's the reality that Captain Christopher Pike has to deal with on a daily basis and the fact that overwhelming terror doesn't crush him constantly is a testament to him as a man.