Series Continuity Error / Star Trek

aka: Series Continuity Error

• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics", Scotty is released from a transporter buffer where he was trapped for 75 years and initially believes that Geordi and Riker were sent by Kirk. However, Star Trek: Generations reveals that Scotty was present when Kirk was sucked into the Nexus from Enterprise-B (this was due to Scotty being placed in the movie at the last minute since Leonard Nimoy wasn't available). The Expanded Universe attempted to Retcon this by saying that Scotty never really believed Kirk was dead.
• In their first appearance, the Ferengi were aggressive, militaristic imperialists. In later appearances, they are portrayed as craven, greedy people with few cultural arts outside peddling and trading. This was an Author's Saving Throw; they'd planned to make the Ferengi the new Big Bad Aliens of the franchise, and they didn't realize until the episode was already wrapped and aired that they'd utterly failed at it. So they cut their losses, rewrote the Ferengi (and changed their uniforms to something less silly), and brought back the Romulans. (The Expanded Universe has a cute explanation for this: the Human Popsicle stock broker from the 20th century who also appeared in the episode where Romulans first reappeared was eventually made the Federation ambassador to the Ferengi homeworld. This lead to the revelation that the hostilities were due to the two species not being able to understand each other, and the unfrozen stock broker was able to bridge the divide.) The timeline on this is also sketchy. In 2364, it's stated that the Federation (specifically, humans) and the Ferengi have never even seen each other and know nothing about each other. However, in the Deep Space Nine episode "Necessary Evil", flashbacks show Quark in his bar on what was then Terok Nor (and it seemed like he'd been there a while) by the time Odo arrived in 2365. In order for this to track, it would have to be the case that they had made contact and developed some level of rapport with one major power (Cardassia), while knowing nothing about another (the Federation) beyond vague rumors and speculation. If nothing else, why wouldn't they at least get the (albeit biased) basics about the Federation from the Cardassians?
• The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Space Seed" was made during a time when a specific year wasn't yet assigned to the canon, so it references things in blocks of time... but misses the mark by a hundred years when Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out. Whoops.
• The Borg story has a sketchy chronology. Q set Picard's Enterprise thousands of light-years to find the Borg for the first time, and eighteen months later they came looking for Earth. Guinan identified the Borg in their introductory episode and it was later revealed that Guinan and her people migrated during Kirk's time. Voyager introduces Federation scientists (Seven of Nine's parents) studying the Borg long before Picard's first contact. It messed up what was inferred in the original episode, but it does make some sense that Guinan's people could have reported it to the Federation and it just didn't become common knowledge until the official first contact.
• In the Borg's first appearance in "Q Who" they're only interested in "consuming" technology, and ignore other lifeforms unless they see them as a threat. When they take Picard in "Best of Both Worlds", he's chosen to be a spokesman, not a drone. It's only after this that we're told assimilating other lifeforms is their standard MO, and always was.
• "The Neutral Zone":
  • The vanished outposts were meant to be foreshadowing of the Borg (in "Q Who?", they encounter an identical pattern of destruction after Q displaces them), implying that the Borg were probing the edge of Federation space even before Q made formal introductions. This is never mentioned again, and Guinan would later claim that, thanks to Q's intervention, the Borg discovered humanity centuries sooner than they ought to have done.^note This is primarily due to a scrapped plan for TNG's second season that would have included a season-long arc of the Enterprise gathering allies to fight the Borg. The plan was thrown out due to the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, which resulted in a shortened second season largely thrown together at the last minute to get into production.
  • "The Neutral Zone" established that the Romulans had been in a self-imposed isolation for a good fifty years, choosing now to come out of it because of the attack on their outposts. Later episodes bring up encounters with the Romulans, from Garak having worked at the embassy to Romulus from Cardassia, at the same time as the deaths of several high level Romulan officials (which was pure coincidence), and a handful of major battles with the Klingons, one at Khitomer (which is on the Federation border, the attack being how Worf was adopted by a human couple), another at Narendra III, the battle that claimed the Enterprise-C, and a previous episode mentioning that there was a Romulan incursion at the Neutral Zone that required the Enterprise to show up and wave the flag to spook them off.
• Data's cat was repeatedly referred to as male since it was introduced, then suddenly became female in the last season and even had kittens. Spot was also a different breed in his/her first appearance.
• In "The Naked Now", Tasha tells Data she was "abandoned" at the age of five, suggesting that her parents just up and left her. In "Legacy", Ishara says that their parents were killed (and since Ishara was a baby at the time, anything she knows about what happened to them would have had to come from Tasha, so it doesn't make sense in-universe for them to have different stories).
• There were continual goofs in whether Lieutenant Commanders are referred to as "Lieutenant" or "Commander" formally. They could probably have gotten away with either regardless of real-world behaviors if they had just chosen one and stuck with it.
• When the Trill were first introduced in a TNG episode they were very different than when they became regular DS9 characters. To start with, they had facial ridges and no spots unlike their DS9 appearance.^note The change was made because they hired model Terry Farrell to play Dax, and didn't want her to lose any of her Fanservice appeal The symbiotic nature of the Trill was also different, implied this is the natural state of the entire species, rather than only certain Trill being selected as hosts, and it's implied that the host contributes little or nothing with the symbiont being the "true" Trill, whereas Jadzia Dax made it clear each host creates a completely different individual when joined, and that joined Trill are a small minority, with the vast majority of Trill never getting a symbiont. Lastly, the Trill are stated by Picard to be a relatively unknown species, to the point that their symbiotic nature was a total shock. DS9 established that at least one joined Trill — the previous Dax host — was a famous Federation ambassador and Starfleet officer who had been Sisko's mentor for most of his career. Even if he was the only Trill ever to serve in Starfleet at that point, they should have had at least some basic awareness of the species. In addition, it's a major plot point in Season 7 of DS9 that Ezri had to become the permanent Dax host, even though she never wanted/intended to be Joined, because she was the only Trill onboard, and that was supposedly the only option when Dax could no longer survive outside a host. But TNG had already established that a non-Trill can act as a temporary host (which Trills can't do, because their bodies will fully integrate with the symbiont within a day or so) with no long-term ill effects. Why not just put Dax in a willing non-Trill volunteer (or even a series of them, if necessary) until they got to the Trill homeworld? Also, in season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery, the Trill treat a human acting as a host to a Trill symbiont as an impossibility. Have they forgotten that Riker has already done that? In addition, DS9 established that nearly half of the humanoid Trill population is capable of serving as hosts to symbionts, but the government has been keeping that a secret. But in DIS they mention how their population of viable hosts has been severely depleted by the Burn. One would think that the government would remove the secrecy at this point in order to allow most Trill to join.
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Alternate", Sisko strongly implies that his father is dead. This contradicts later episodes where his father is very much alive and running a restaurant in New Orleans.
• O'Brien's exact rank is inconsistent in his first few appearances in TNG; he's an ensign in one episode, a lieutenant in another, and his position on the ship changes. Season 2 established him as a Chief Petty Officer, right around the time his character was also named for the first time.
• In one of Ezri Dax's early episodes Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where she's having trouble dealing with the responsibilities of being Dax's host, Sisko teases her by suggesting she can return to Trill and become one of the caretakers of the immature symbionts. He then goes on to describe that her duties would entail stirring the mud in the vats which contain the immature symbionts. The trouble is that we've already seen the subterranean caverns he's talking about, and the immature symbionts swim around in immense subterranean rivers, not mud.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Omega Glory", costumer William Theiss gave crew members of the USS Exeter their own uniform patch instead of the chevron worn by the Enterprise crew, under the mistaken impression that every starship had its own insignia. He was corrected on this point by Robert Justman, who explained that the chevron didn't denote the Enterprise but rather was branch insignia for personnel assigned to starships. Theiss didn't make the mistake again, but the error spawned a fan theory that in the 2260s, each of the twelve Constitution-class starships had their own insignia, and that the Enterprise chevron was adopted throughout Starfleet as a result of the ship's fame. This became so endemic that the costumers of Star Trek: Enterprise gave dead USS Defiant crew members their own unit patch in "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part I", despite them having worn an Enterprise-style chevron when they disappeared from the prime universe in "The Tholian Web".
• The TOS episode "Arena" treats the Gorn as though the Federation have never run into them before, under any circumstances, ever. However, in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Memento Mori", the Enterprise (under Pike's command) has to fight Gorn ships, with La'an recalling her own childhood experience as a prisoner of the Gorn. The show takes place nearly ten years before TOS, so either Kirk was misinformed or it's a minor Retcon that claims that while the Gorn have been known by Starfleet, they've never been seen in person (except by La'an).
• In "Dagger of the Mind," Spock, when about to perform the first Mind Meld in the franchise, mentions he's never done one with a human before. In the same SNW episode, which, again place about a decade before that one, he mind-melds with La'an, a human.
• In "Amok Time", Nurse Chapel is shocked at the existence of Spock's fiancée T'Pring. Except she has already met her in "Spock Amok" and even gave Spock relationship advice a decade prior.

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