Remember all those times the Enterprise was Late to the Tragedy? This is probably what that felt like.
WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked."As usual, Starfleet's getting people blown up left, right, and center."
— Petra Aberdeen, "The Stars At Night"
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Season 1
"Second Contact"
- The Cerritos is overrun by a Zombie Apocalypse. Humorous as it may be to have that happen in Star Trek, it results in Commander Ransom eating human flesh as well as numerous other horrific background events.
- Tendi is forced to manually pump a patient's heart with her bare hands in order to keep him alive. Subverted in that she considers it one of the cooler parts of her first crisis aboard the Cerritos.
"Moist Vessel"
- Tendi's new friend O'Connor transforms into an Energy Being, but it is shown to be a horrifying experience that may be a Fate Worse than Death, rather than a beautiful one like John Doe's ascension in TNG's "Transfigurations."
- For fans of Kingdom Hearts, it's extra horrifying considering that Haley Joel Osment is basically using his more recent Sora voice as O'Connor. You're basically hearing Sora scream in constant madness and agony.
"Cupid's Errant Arrow"
- There's a flashback where Mariner is forced to watch her friend Angie get eaten alive by her apparently perfect boyfriend (who's actually a Harvongian shape-changer). It is one of the few cases in Star Trek where blood splatter effects are used and not played for laughs.
- The downside of Seen It All? Having to see things like a Harvongian shape-changer devour your friend. Mariner freezes in sheer terror.
- The fact that Mariner is clearly really messed up by the experience but isn't receiving any apparent help for the trauma is downright disturbing. Even more so when it's revealed in later episodes that the ship therapist is horrifically incompetent.
"Terminal Provocations"
- Both Fletcher and Rutherford basically created murderous, chaotic A.I.s - Fletcher by trying to make himself smart with a mini-warp core, and Rutherford by showing Tendi an untested hologram program and then treating it badly.
- Fletcher is willing to put the entire safety of the ship in jeopardy so he wouldn't have to face the music for his screw-up, putting him in good company with the likes of Nick Locarno and Michael Jonas.
- Although it's played for laughs, Shaxs is way too eager to shoot the Drookmani ship's warp core, which would not only kill its crew but also potentially start a war.Shaxs: Phasers locked onto their warp core, Captain. Please, please let me shoot their warp core! I have been very good this month!
"Much Ado About Boimler"
- Tendi's "side project": she created a genetically modified Labrador Retriever
that's actually an Animalistic Abomination that creeps out Rutherford and Boimler with Lovecraftian Superpowers when she isn't looking.- Becomes somewhat Nightmare Retardant as Tendi admits she was fully aware of that aspect and wasn't aware Earth dogs aren't like that, though it does raise a terrifying question as to what animal she saw which would make her think that THAT'S normal.
- The Osler and its captain are incredibly ominous in ways most star trek villains never were, the ship is black, spiky and emerges from a nebula with creepy music and the captain is a Large Ham with an Evil Laugh.
- Then there's the fact that the patient's believed the ship was The Farm due to how long it takes to make its rounds which speaks of the sheer amount of accidents that happen to the Federation ship crews on a daily basis.
- The sheer amount of Body Horror from all of the patients on the ship. It's bad enough to see one kind of accident per episode, here we have to see several at once.
- The crew of the Rubidoux are absolute nervous wrecks when Ramsey and Mariner find them holed up in Engineering, with the power off and the doors manually sealed with phasers. Turns out they'd been invaded by an unnamed energy being that feeds on the ship's power. When an unaware Lt. Durga brings power back online, glowing tentacles suddenly stretch from under the hull and try to drag crew-members off.
- Before Rutherford manages to beam everyone off, everyone was trapped on the bridge with no means of escape. The entity starts crushing the ship so thoroughly that the viewscreen cracks and everyone almost gets sucked into the vacuum of space.
"Crisis Point"
- Mariner's rampage in the holoprogram she took over is this to Tendi, who had to watch the former vaporize half their shipmates, as well as cover both of them in Holo-Shaxs' blood. It's the closest thing you could get to a Grimdark fic in canon.
- The fact that Mariner's idea of therapy is a holonovel where she can fantasize about murdering her crewmates and destroying the ship, although Holo-Mariner being based on her personal logs does imply her rage is probably just misguided.
- And part of that fantasy is murdering her own mother with her bare hands.
"No Small Parts"
- The Pakleds have returned, and are a credible enough threat to have already wiped out one Federation starship, and are eager to take another.
- More terrifying is the fact that they appeared to be using a Borg tractor beam during the fight. The implications of that fact are that a race that steals tech from other species somehow got their hands on tech that can easily assimilate any new tech they steal. It no longer matters if they're dumb and can't understand how everyone else's weapons or systems work, since with Borg tech everything they get their hands on is essentially Plug and Play, which they demonstrate by grabbing a chunk of a destroyed Federation ship, then slamming it into their hull without hesitation.
- The destruction of the Solvang itself. One moment Dayton is fussing over screen protectors. The next, her ship is being torn limb-from-limb by enormous grapple claws wielded by a Frankenship light-years from any expected trouble. Her order to warp out proves fatal due to one of the claws being firmly clamped onto a nacelle; going to warp tears the ship into fragments and wipes out the entire crew.
- And the Cerritos would have suffered the same fate had Captain Freeman not deduced what happened at the last possible moment before trying the same strategy.
- Between the Pakleds posing a genuine threat and the teaser focusing on how the inhabitants of Beta III reactivated the Landru computer, plus the handful of known instances of things Starfleet missed because of their lack of follow up (in particular, Khan), it makes you wonder what other threats are out there for Starfleet that they are responsible for, simply because they couldn't be bothered to go and check up on things - how many of the Esoteric Happy Endings from across the franchise are waiting to bite Starfleet in the ass just because the situation seemed resolved, while leaving untold fallout in its wake?
Season 2
"Strange Energies"
- Ransom gets zapped by a precursor artifact and goes full Gary Mitchell, wreaking havoc on the planet around him, deleting its moon from existence, and transforming its population into mindless "Ransomites", all while declaring A God Am I. Then he detaches and enlarges his head and tries to eat the Cerritos in orbit, crew and all.
- The official poster for the episode looks like an acid trip nightmare◊.
"Kayshon, His Eyes Open"
- Remember Kivas Fajo? Apparently there is an entire guild of people just like him, and according to Captain Freeman each one attempted to kidnap Data for their collection. Keep in mind, Fajo was so vile and dangerous that he managed to provoke Data into killing him, and the guild members we get insight into don't seem much better.
- Judging by Siggi's reaction to Rutherford, they're not above "collecting" Starfleet personnel as long as they're rare enough.
- While the end result is played for laughs, Kayshon getting turned into a puppet looks to be a very Painful Transformation, and the fact that T'Ana later hooks him up to a biobed indicates that he's somehow still alive, and perhaps conscious, in that form.
"We'll Always Have Tom Paris"
- Rutherford's hallucination of multiple Shax's is pretty creepy. And when he actually tries asking him how Shax returned from the dead, we only hear the beginning, but judging by Rutherford's reaction when asked about it later, These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.Shaxs: Okay, so death is the first thing that happens, and then – oh, wait. You do know about the Black Mountain, right? The Black Mountain is a spiritual battleground your soul goes where you have to fight three faceless apparitions of your father... The surviving father makes you eat your heart...
"Where Pleasant Fountains Lie"
- Like Landru from the previous season, we're introduced to a new manipulative, warmongering supercomputer. How many of these things are there out there, across the galaxy? Especially since the Daystrom Institute has a literal storage facility where confiscated megalomaniacal supercomputers sit imprisoned, only staying there because they're too narcissistic and hostile to one another to work together? In a sense, it's a surprise the anti-Synth backlash of the mid-2380s didn't happen sooner.
- The fact that Billups' mother keeps trying to trick him into having sex that he clearly does not want is concerning on a number of levels.
"I, Excretus"
- Some nasty-ass bureaucrat can just barge in and tear your crew apart just for the sake of saving her own job, and if you're on an unregarded vessel like a Cali-class your only hope of getting through it is outsmarting her.
- There's apparently a metric shit-ton of Crystalline Entities out there. If you know what a single entity can do this thought should give you a lot of restless nights.
- Seeing her friends and the rest of the crew in a wild naked orgy was enough for Mariner to throw herself willingly out the airlock. Boimler appears to be the tipping point.
- Even getting assimilated by holographic Borg destroys your sense of self sufficiently for the trauma to linger after the program is over.
"First First Contact"
- The Archimedes is crippled by what is essentially an EMP and sent drifting towards a collision with an inhabited world, leading to a potential Apocalypse How. Captain Gomez and her crew are trapped aboard, utterly unable to save themselves or the planet.
- One of Rutherford's memories is a Surprisingly Creepy Moment of sinister shadowy figures installing his implant and potentially setting him up to be a Manchurian Agent.
- Boimler dons a space suit and swims through the water-filled corridors of Cetacean Ops to get to the release for the last panel, but his suit is damaged and he gets stuck trying to get back out, with his suit slowly filling with water. Fortunately, Kimolu and Matt are able to rescue him.
- The very end of the episode drops the bombshell that the Pakled homeworld has been destroyed by a Varuvian bomb planted in their capital city. They may have been planning to do the same to Earth, but still, goddamn. And to make it worse, Captain Freeman has somehow been framed for the attack. If Starfleet was responsible for either... or both...
Season 3
"The Least Dangerous Game"
- We are introduced to K'Ranch, a Kromsapiod. Think a family-friendly Yautja. They're decked out in black armor covered in red Tron Lines to give them deep, intimidating voices. That would be unnerving enough, but they are also a naturally predatory species that will literally go mad if they can't periodically hunt something. To initiate their hunts, they rip out one of their own teeth and mark their prey with their blood, then spend an hour preparing all sorts of weapons to aid in the hunt. And once the hunt begins, their pursuit is relentless, and they will stop at nothing until their prey has been caught and wounded. This is only mitigated by the fact Kromsapiods respect life above all and have no intention of killing their prey
"Mining the Mind's Mines"
- While the crew's fantasies and nightmares are played for laughs, their affect on people who touch them is not. Stevens in particular gets petrified, then falls several stories and shatters.
- Werewolf-Jennifer enters the scene by grabbing Fantasy-Jennifer and ripping her in half. Mariner goes full Deer in the Headlights in response, and nearly gets her head bitten off before Boimler drags her away to safety.
"Room for Growth
- A blink-and-you-miss-it moment: When Mariner, Tendi and Boimler visit under hydroponics, there's a skeleton tangled in the roots. If you look closely, the skeleton is that of the Doopler Ambassador copies! They didn't get everyone back.
"Reflections"
- The revelation that Rutherford's implant wasn't his choice gets some major follow-up: he was working on some kind of project when he was severely injured, and the supervising officer who arranged for the implant made sure that all of Rutherford's memories of the project were erased. What the hell were they working on?
- Not just his memories of the project — his entire personality was forcibly suppressed, and has spent every day since then trying to re-assert itself. All those times Rutherford's implant glitched out and made him act like a Jerkass? That was his old self trying to come back. And if that personality's statements can be trusted, he was conscious that whole time. One can't help but be reminded of Get Out.
- Worst yet, it succeeds. The original Rutherford undergoes Death of Personality after losing the race to Present Rutherford. From a certain point of view, that version of Rutherford was murdered. There just happens to be somebody else residing in his corpse.
"A Mathematically Perfect Redemption"
- When her plot's revealed, Peanut Hamper tries to call the frigging Borg down on Areolus out of pure spite. While the Cerritos crew blocks her signal, one wonders what would have happened if she'd actually succeeded. The Areore might have some pretty neat ships from their distant past, but absent a full understanding of their own technology, they likely wouldn't have lasted very long...
- At the end of the episode, Peanut Hamper is placed in the same Daystrom Institute storage facility where all the malevolent AIs are kept, and then it's shown that the AI next to her is none other than AGIMUS, who proposes her an alliance. Peanut Hamper gladly accepts, and they immediately start scheming on how to escape.
- The fact that Peanut Hamper's fake redemption plan almost worked perfectly. Had it succeeded, she would have been taken back to Starfleet with her record wiped clean, able to do who knows what kind of damage going forward.
"Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus"
- According to T'Ana, Boimler clinically died from dehydration while on the holodeck.
- Say what you will about Stevens, but those warp core burns he suffered looked painful.
"Trusted Sources"
- The return of the Breen, not seen since the end of Deep Space Nine. They're first introduced vaporizing a terrified Brekkian, and quickly show how incredibly terrifying they are as an enemy. Not to mention that for the first time we see crew members of the Cerritos die when a Breen weapon strikes the ship.
- Notably, the Breen are portrayed with almost no comedic aspects whatsoever, appearing just as intimidating as they were in live-action, and almost feel jarring compared to the usual fare in this show where even the Borg Queen (or at least a hologram of her) was played for laughs. Shaxs even tells everyone not to bother negotiating as the Breen never take prisoners.
- The Breen hailing the Cerritos is honestly deeply unnerving. As always, it's completely untranslated, but with zero context to even imply the meaning. To the Cerritos, it just comes across as deafening static. Perhaps worse, the message is very brief and the Breen cut it off without waiting for a reply, implying that the message wasn't a warning or an ultimatum, but a simple statement of Prepare to Die.
- The fully-automated Texas-class ship is impressive, certainly... but it can't help but call to mind M-5 and the events of "The Ultimate Computer".
- And as we see in the next episode, the control interface for the Texas class is very reminiscent of M-5.
- There's also Peanut Hamper and the other Daystrom Institute inmates. Them getting out and hijacking a fleet of these would be a disaster.
- Not to mention that the Texas-class make the Zhat Vash look a lot less paranoid and a lot more justified in their anti-AI fears. Data, the Exocomps, and the EMH? Okay, they're demonstrably people. The barely-sentient worker drones at Utopia Planitia? Creepy, wrong, and hypocritical as hell from the Federation, but not that big a deal. AI-run drone warships? Now THAT is something to be very, VERY worried about.
- Given the quick response of the Aledo amidst the lack of distress signal by the Cerritos, a theory has formed that Admiral Buenamigo knew about the Breen presence at Brekka and was willing to risk an entire starship and crew, one captained by an old friend of his no less, in order to prove that his new ships were viable. A theory that is proven in the next episode.
"The Stars at Night"
- Starfleet's distrust towards AI is proven correct once again when Buenamigo gives independent control to the Aledo. The first thing it does is obliterate Buenamigo with a phaser shot right through his office. Then it activates its sister ships Dallas and Corpus Christi and they proceed to turn Douglas Station into swiss cheese. They also makes short work of the Sovereign-class Van Citters before the Cerritos lures them away. The Aledo survives a warp core explosion and would have easily destroyed the Cerritos if it wasn't for Mariner and the California-class fleet.
- The effects of starship phaser fire on unshielded hulls and even people is graphically demonstrated. When the Aledo fires on Buenamigo's office, the beam cuts right through his torso, horrifically disintegrating him just before the office explodes. And Titmouse animated this; there's a horrific Freeze-Frame Bonus of Buenamigo's internal organs exploding as the phaser blast hits him. When the Aledo and its sister ships start to attack the rest of the station, there are multiple shots of people trying and failing to flee as fiery death punches through the hull once shields are down.
- The Cerritos gambled everything on using the ejected warp core as a mine to take out the drone fleet. It worked for all but the Aledo, but the ejection and resulting forced exit from warp space wrecked the ship, leaving it utterly helpless as the Aledo barreled towards them and opened fire, tearing into the ship. The Oh, Crap! reaction to seeing the Aledo arrive was utterly justified.
- Somehow, seeing Badgey reborn as a single-minded automaton who rarely says more than one line (granted that line is a chillingly subdued "I will burn your heart in a fire") is more disturbing than when he's fully expressive and psychotic.
- In The Stinger, back in the Kalla system from "No Small Parts", we cut to a ship scavenging the wreckage of the Pakled Clumpship. Rutherford's old implant is still among the debris, where it suddenly activates to reveal a very much alive Badgey.
Season 4
"Twovix"
- On Voyager we get several callbacks as Disaster Dominoes bring back several of Voyagers enemies all at once starting with some Macroviruses that stowed away on the ship triggering some Borg Nanoprobes which go haywire Assimilating several of the exibits and messing up the holodeck leading to Dr. Chaotica, The Clown and the bartender from Fairhaven rampaging across the now holo emitter equipped ship.
- Billups and Dr. T'ana get transporter merged into Tillups, that's not the nightmare fuel, what is however is when Tillups, Freeman and everyone else are sure Janeway found an ethical solution to the situation back when Tuvok and Neelix went through the same thing, then they find out what her solution actually was and Tillups freaks out and decides to merge crew members at random both to make a point about having a right to live and to have extra muscle on her side in case the unmerged crew try to separate them anyway starting with making Freeman/Migleemo and Shax's/Barnes fusions and culminating in a horrifying Blob Monster made of several crew members.
- Ma'ah and his crew encounter a mysterious ship which they choose to ignore as it would be dishonourable to destroy it. The ship responds by draining the Klingon ship's systems before obliterating it in a single blinding flash of light.
"I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee"
- The Moopsy may look cute but he will drink your bones.Mariner: How does something drink bones?
[The Moopsy leaps on a swamp gobbler, bites its back, and slurps its skeleton up in two seconds flat, reducing it to a floppy pile of flesh]
Mariner: ...HOLY F**K!- Narj, despite looking like a Plant Person, reveals that he is actually made of ossified matter. Seconds later, the Moopsy pounces on him and drinks him entirely, as he is completely made of bones.
- Once again, the nonthreatening looking ship from episode 1, that seems to be the season’s primary antagonist, takes out a fully armed and armored Romulan vessel without giving them so much as a chance to cloak.
"In The Cradle Of Vexilon"
- Boimler actually dies during the mission, and then we see him in the afterlife. He wakes up in a room that looks like it belongs in Twin Peaks and sees the Black Mountain that Shaxs described to Rutherford. Then he finds the Cosmic Koala sitting in the chair and it utters something before Boimler comes back to life. The Koala is actually speaking backwards, and what it says is chilling: "It is not your time, Bradward Boimler."
"Something Borrowed, Something Green
- The Orion Captain lets out a horrifying scream as the mysterious ship vaporises her and her crew.
"Parth Ferengi's Heart Place"
- The fact that the Ferengi freighter has a friggin' Genesis Device in its hold, meaning they could terraform any planet, inhabited or not, for enough latinum.
- The Ferengi have always been treated as harmless comic relief, but it's still unsettling that in this hyper-capitalist society, people can be sent to a lifetime working in the mines for simply lying about their relationship status to get a discount. They don't even get a trial.
"A Few Badgeys More"
- The episode begins with Badgey tempting a Drookmani captain with Starfleet secrets, telling him to raise Rutherford's headpiece to his head before violently assimilating him.
- Badgey actually succeeds at hacking every Starfleet ship and installation. It looks like the Federation is finished...until he has his Heel–Face Turn (but it's a close call).
- There's The Reveal that the mystery ship is actually capturing its targets and faking their destruction. While their crews are presumably still alive, this raises the question: what is that ship doing to them?
- What's more, many viewers suspected that Badgey, AGIMUS, or Peanut Hamper (or some combination of any or all of them) was the culprit behind the mysterious destruction, but turns out they weren't involved at all. So who is it?
"The Inner Fight"
- We finally learn what happened to the people on the stolen ships. They were left on a Death World near a Starfleet Weather Satellite. There are constant electrical storms and it rains glass (something made all the more horrifying by the fact that raining glass is a very real thing on exoplanets).
- It's played with the show's usual Black Comedy attitude towards grisly injuries, but it's still shocking to see Ma'ah with his face dripping blood from having killed his former first officer with his teeth.
- So how does a mysterious alien ship know about a random Starfleet satellite? Why, a former member of Starfleet. Specifically, Nick Locarno, the former trainee of Nova Squadron who got one of his classmates killed doing a Dangerous Forbidden Technique of a flight maneuver. And he has Mariner and wants her help.
"Old Friends, New Planets"
- Robert Duncan McNeill and the other Powers That Be described Nick Locarno as "irredeemable". They weren't kidding. His refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of the Kolvoord Starburst debacle and unresolved resentment towards Starfleet have left him utterly fucked up. By the time he confronts Mariner for the final time, any trace of human decency is gone.
- Locarno's main talent is manipulation. He even tries this on Mariner (though thankfully she knows better). He tries to act like it's all for "the team", but the instant something goes wrong, Locarno makes it all about himself and tries to throw anyone else under the bus. It's the pattern he fell into with the Kolvoord Starburst mess, and it's the pattern he falls into when Mariner calls out his bullshit, derails his New Era Speech, and flees with the Genesis Device.
- The opening flashback at Starfleet Academy is a tad sickening. You can see Locarno manipulate Nova Squadron into performing the maneuver that gets Joshua killed, in what would otherwise look like a casual conversation. Josh and Wes try to object to it, but he just comes up with reasons why their concerns don't matter that basically boil down to "we're Nova Squadron, we're number one" and tries to tempt Wes by saying Picard will be impressed. Sito realizes that he's just self-aggrandizing, but he promises the rest of the squad will be legends too. Mariner herself didn't think twice about it at the time.
- While Locarno was always a manipulative bastard, way back in "The First Duty" there was still a shred of honor in him — when Wesley spilled the beans on what happened to Josh, Locarno took full responsibility as team leader and convinced Starfleet to expel him alone, protecting the rest of Nova Squadron just as he'd promised. By this episode, however, after more than a decade of festering resentment over the whole thing, he's barely recognizable as the same man, having disavowed any responsibility for what happened and seeking to build a criminal empire purely out of spite.
- Locarno has a Genesis Device, and is all too willing to use it on anyone who tries to stop him. The only thing that stops this from being a threat is Mariner stealing it when she flees Nova One, and she spends most of the episode on the run from Nova Fleet. She tries to set it off on an uninhabitable planet but ends up having to settle for the ion storm Locarno just cornered her in because she knows it's not safe for anyone to have it, especially not a man who got expelled from the Academy for getting a squadmate killed and has only got worse since then.
- Also Genesis itself. The technology has escaped Federation control and is apparently easily available in the black market. David Marcus was right — Nick Locarno did pervert it into a dreadful weapon. It also means that the Klingons were right to be worried all those decades ago because now all you need to murder a planet is enough money...
- It gets worse: Despite Starfleet's attempts to keep it a secret a century ago, someone not only replicated the technology but refined it to make it "portable". The Genesis Device is no longer the size of a torpedo that requires a starship to fire or beam it for use. Anyone can simply carry it by hand to set it off.
- The episode and the season ends with Tendi watching the Cerritos disappear as her ship goes into warp... only for her to turn around and sport a devious grin on her face. Does our sweet and innocent Tendi have a darker side she was hiding the entire time? What does this mean for season 5?
