Nightmare Fuel / Star Trek: Enterprise

You're gonna need a bigger phaser.

WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.

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Season 1

Strange New World

• Most of the episode is creepy, but the worst is when they beam up Crewman Novakovich during a storm and he materializes with sticks and debris embedded in his face and body.
• Trip’s paranoid hatred of T’Pol (who is the only one not hallucinating and thus, not believed when she says there’s nothing) gets to terrifying levels, especially when he’s violent with her.

Unexpected

• This episode becomes this once you realise that the only way that baby is leaving Trip's body under normal circumstances is straight through his chest Alien style. And in some ways the fact that this is at the hands of a pretty lady is even more terrifying than at the hands of a monster, because you aren't on your guard around the pretty lady...

Silent Enemy

• The Starfish Aliens in, pictured above. They come out of nowhere, say nothing, and are extremely unpredictable in how they act. They're also shown to be capable of effortlessly crippling and toying with Enterprise. When they actually board Enterprise, we get to see them... And you'll wish you hadn't. One shudders to think what would've happened if they had managed to capture the Enterprise crew...
  • We indeed get to see what would've likely happened in Star Trek Online: These aliens, called the Elachi, reproduce by infesting prisoners with spores, which proceed to consume the victim entirely (and slowly) and then use the accrued mass to merge into a new Elachi, a process that makes Borg assimilation seem pleasant by comparison.
  • Meanwhile, the novels, in their own separate cannon, make them slightly less unpleasant, but still creepy: There, they're called the Vertians, and because they developed on a planet far from its star, they see and communicate very differently. From their point of view, they're experimenting on animals. All that fighting back? Basically a lion trying to claw your face off when you've upset it, not a sentient being trying to defend itself.
• After the above encounter, Enterprise tests its new phase cannons on a nearby asteroid... only to suffer from Explosive Overclocking due to sabotage. The aliens knew they were building those cannons and wanted to taunt them with the knowledge it wasn't going to work!

  Reed: They're toying with us... they want us to know they can destroy us at any time, even with our own weapons!

• Their taunting message made from an edited version of Archer's own speech, showing whatever they are, they know damn well what they're doing.
  You - are - defenseless - prepare to - surrender - your - vessel.

Fusion

• We get one of the emotional Vulcans, Tolaris, and his Mind Meld with T'Pol that quickly turns into a Mind Rape. She very plainly tells him to stop, and he refuses. It's viscerally unpleasant to watch. ("Stigma" makes it worse with The Reveal that he infected her with the equivalent of an STD, like being raped and coming down with AIDS as a result.)

Acquisition

• Imagine waking up to just another normal, boring, unremarkable day. You brush your teeth, you put your clothes on, you have breakfast, you take your seat behind your desk... and then completely out of nowhere you are gassed into unconsciousness and then sold into sex slavery. That was very nearly the fate of the female members of the Enterprise crew. But its OK, right? Your captain commands the most powerful ship in the fleet. He'll be right over the horizon to come and save you. There is only the very small problem of the fact that no one on Earth will know who the Ferengi are for about a hundred years and said ship has just had a considerable amount of its parts and supplies stripped from it. No one is coming to your rescue. And even if by some miracle they do, these aren't your jokey Ferengi from the future. These are the Ferengi who will go on to cripple the Stargazer and nearly destroy the Enterprise-D.

Season 2

Shockwave, Part 2

• T'Pol undergoes Cold-Blooded Torture at the hands of Silik. Seeing the normally-composed Vulcan shivering and barely coherent is troubling.
  T'Pol: ...the science Vulcan directorate has determined that time travel is...not fair.

Dead Stop

• The automated repair station that turned out to kidnap crewmembers and fake their deaths so it could use their brains in its computers. Archer blows it up in the end...but the final scene shows it beginning to put itself back together.
• Even more terrifying, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, one of the species that is seen hooked up to the central computer is a Vaadwaur, a species from the Delta Quadrant that, according to Star Trek: Voyager, went into prolonged hibernation in the 15th century following a war with the Turei and didn't wake until the 24th century. How did a Vaadwaur get aboard the automated repair station in the first place?!

Singularity

• The episode seems like a "Naked Time"-ish episode, where everyone is obsessed with tiny tasks and becomes extremely agitated. T'Pol is unaffected, so she goes to check if Phlox is also all right. He isn't. He has become so obsessed with Mayweather's headache that he's going to vivisect his brain, seeming identical to the Mirror Universe Phlox, and threatens to kill T'Pol for getting in the way of his experiments.

Stigma

• In addition to what T'Pol's already going through after the events of "Fusion," the Vulcan doctors apparently think nothing of running tests on her without her knowledge or consent using a DNA sample they tricked her into giving. Her right to privacy seems to bear no weight at all, purely because Dr Phlox's questions made them suspect she has a particular illness. Which all raises serious questions about patient rights in Vulcan society.

Regeneration

• The episode presents a pair of Borg that are less formidable than in previous appearances, yet manages the feat of making them considerably scarier than they had been in quite some time. They almost reach a kind of Villainous Valor as they attempt to make their escape, infecting anyone they can with nanoprobes (whose effect on Phlox is Nightmare Fuel all by itself) and cleverly disrupting Enterprise's systems in order to buy enough time for them to modify their obviously-inferior ship enough to pose a threat.
• What really makes the episode work is following the scientists for the first act as they investigate the Borg debris. It plays entirely like a horror movie, where the audience knows that the monster is coming and the characters are completely unaware. When one of them remarks that the unknown aliens could be entirely friendly with earnestness, the audience knows better, and every second something doesn't happen ramps up the tension for when it finally does.
• "Regeneration" works beautifully as an example of a perfect circle, acting at once as a sequel and a prequel not only to First Contact, but TNG's "Q, Who?" where the Borg signal penetrates deep into the Delta Quadrant. It begs an interesting question: Did Q simply drop the Enterprise-D into Borg-controlled space, or did the Enterprise-D meet a Borg cube that was already on its way to assimilate humanity?
  • The last exchange between Archer and T'Pol:
    T'Pol: I doubt there's any immediate danger. It would take at least two hundred years for a subspace message to reach the Delta Quadrant, assuming it's received at all.
    Archer: Sounds to me like we've only postponed the invasion until, what, the twenty-fourth century?

Season 3

The Xindi

• The Xindi-Insectoids are enormous computer-animated ants. Industrial Light and Magic gives us all the detail on them you'll ever want and then some.

Impulse

• The episode has a crew of Vulcans who have all gone insane, and T'Pol isn't getting much better, getting more and more unhinged throughout the episode and even pulling a phase pistol on Archer. They manage to get her back to Enterprise and she's expected to make a full recovery, but she sees the dead Vulcans on the ship. One attacks her in the turbolift. And then she wakes up and ONE IS STANDING RIGHT OVER HER before she wakes up again. That last minute does a good job of making it clear that she'll recover, but it won't be a fun couple of days. Making it worse is the fact she never fully recovers, as her ensuing trillium addiction demonstrates.

Exile

• Think Serial Killer drama combined with Beauty and the Beast. First, Tarquin tries to entice Hoshi with a form he thinks will be attractive to her...while whispering in her skull, making her hallucinate him on all the viewscreens in the command center, and generally causing her to think that she's losing her mind (again). When he does make contact, he makes her stay in his house in exchange for his help and demonstrates that he's been rifling through her memories to the smallest detail (never once asking her permission to do this, even her more painful memories) and tries using them to convince her to stay. When that fails and she finds the graves of his previous "companions," he creates an illusion of Archer essentially ordering her to stay and then attacks Enterprise itself. She has to threaten to break his telepathy amplifier to make him let her go. Freudian Excuse or not, that is some major-league creepiness.

Doctor's Orders

• Phlox experiences hallucinations whilst he and T'Pol are the only members of the crew awake for a trip through radiation that is dangerous to humans, including a horrifically disfigured Hoshi and Xindi-Insectoids prowling the Enterprise's corridors. At the end, it's revealed that Phlox was hallucinating T'Pol as well. She was really sleeping along with the rest of the crew.
• The above two examples, Phlox's decision to support what is essentially genocide-by-inaction in "Dear Doctor" and his Mirror Universe counterpart being one of the least radically different in terms of personality, has lead more than one viewer to suggest that Phlox is actually a dangerous nut seconds away from cracking and going on a killing spree!

Azati Prime

• The much more graphic portrayal of what happens to victims of Explosive Instrumentation when the NX-01 gets attacked. Other Trek shows and movies have the Star Trek Shake and the occasional sooty He's Dead, Jim person; Enterprise has things like people on fire and screaming, or crewmen blown out into space when the hull is breached, twitching for a bit, and then stopping.
• The Xindi blast Enterprise into a floating wreck, perfectly demonstrating just how bleak things have become for our heroes in their search for the Xindi superweapon.

Season 4

Storm Front

• Those Wacky Nazis are winning World War II. From the sight of the White House draped in swastikas to a newsreel of Adolf Hitler in New York...brrr.
  • What happens to Daniels as a result of the Time Crash. Different parts of his body are different ages, so he's got the head of an old man, the limbs of a kid, and the organs of a baby. Like him or not, no-one deserves to have that happen to them.

Cold Station 12

• The episode shows a man being subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture via Symbalene blood burn. Between the Blood from Every Orifice and the agonized pleading for release, even Dr. Soong (who is allowing it to happen) is disturbed by his suffering.

Observer Effect

• Trip and Hoshi's faces when they are sick. So was the possibility of them dying, and the non-physical aliens, but the biggest scare provider was Hoshi of all people. She was delusional, made speaking in foreign languages seem scary, threw up at one point, making it worse because Trip was also sick but he didn't throw up, and once mentioned that she broke somebody's arm.

In a Mirror, Darkly

• The episodes take the agony booth and shows what prolonged exposure can do to a person. Mirror!Archer is apparently insane after ten hours in Mirror!Reed's invention; it's just that the culture of that particular universe is so toxic nobody can tell, and even if anyone can tell, they dare not say so aloud; with Forrest dead, he's now captain.

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