Star Trek The Original Series / Tropes A to L

Star Trek: The Original Series contains the following tropes:

Tropes A-L | Tropes M-Z

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A–B

• Absurdly Dedicated Worker: In "The Return of the Archons" Landru guards his planet, long after its usefulness has ceased. Ditto the automated defense bot Losira in "That Which Survives".
• Act of True Love: "The Empath", McCoy sacrifices himself to save Kirk and Spock from death or insanity via Cold-Blooded Torture. Again, he lives, but he didn't know that.
• Adaptation Title Change: Two episodes' titles were changed when James Blish adapted them as short stories: "The Man Trap" became "The Unreal McCoy" (which may have been a working title from a draft script), and "Charlie X" became "Charlie's Law."
• Adaptational Alternate Ending: In the episode "Operation - Annihilate", Spock is temporarily blinded when they test a cure for a neural parasite on him before using it to free a planetary population. In the novelization of that episode, the planet is freed from the infection before Spock goes through the procedure, which does not blind him.
• Affectionate Parody: "A Piece of The Action" is an Affectionate Parody of gangster movies.
• Afrofuturism: Star Trek, while not afro-futurist in and of itself, did have an influence on the genre due to the presence of Uhura; the fact that a black person had a place on a futuristic space ship left a serious impact on young viewers. She was identified in the first episode as a Swahili (there are many Swahili peoples, James Blish described her as Bantu), had a few lines in Kiswahili in a couple of episodes, and the official Star Trek Writers' Guide established that she was from the United States of Africa.
• Aggressive Negotiations: This can happen quite easily. The Federation's Starfleet often flexes their muscle, and they almost never bluff. In fact, their official policy regarding diplomatic contacts with hostile forces extends to potentially killing everything on the planet^note As per Starfleet General Order 24, which is frighteningly easy to do because all large starship weapons are essentially weapons of mass destruction.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Star Trek is all about technology and how it can be used to further human civilization. However, the show also takes the stance that relying too much on automation is unhealthy, and the use of any technology without understanding the implications is actively dangerous.
  • In "The Return of the Archons", a computer has effectively stagnated a planet's entire culture into an ongoing, meaningless cycle of merely existing.
  • In "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky", a computer keeps the generational refugees under its watch ignorant of the fact that they're living in an asteroid, and punishes those who try to find the truth.
  • In "The Changeling", one of Earth's probes - programmed to seek out life - collided with and damaged an alien probe that was programmed to sterilize soil samples from other planets. The alien probe used parts of Earth's probe to repair itself, resulting in their programs merging to "seek out life and sterilize it".
  • In "The Ultimate Computer" the M-5 unit, designed by Dr. Daystrom, goes rogue after it mistakes a wargame for the real thing.
• Air-Vent Passageway
  • In "Dagger of the Mind", Dr. Helen Noel saves the day by using a passage to get to the power room and shut off the Tantalus Colony's force field.
  • In "Miri", the children use an air vent to infiltrate the lab where the Enterprise crew is working and steal their communicators.
  • In "The Trouble With Tribbles", Scotty speculates that the tribbles got into the food processors on the Enterprise via the actual air vents. Spock realizes that the grain the Enterprise is guarding on the nearby space station is in storage compartments with similar vents, prompting Kirk to beam over and leading to the episode's funniest moment.
• Alice Allusion: "Shore Leave": Both in the characters seen by the good doctor, and the fact that the planet turns out to be one big Wonderland.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: The Prime Directive, which forbids any interference with the internal development of pre-warp civilizations. Story-wise, it's used as a plot device to keep the main characters from just using the easy way out of a problem.
• All Planets Are Earthlike: Considering the technical and budgetary constraints, ridiculously so. The show hand waves it sometimes by making planets specifically based on Earth. Or making the episode actually take place on Earth.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The script for "The Omega Glory" has the main characters theorize right at the beginning that the Yangs and Kohms are lost colonists from Earth's early space race. Presumably it was removed to make the reveal at the end a surprise, but in doing so it just made the whole thing ridiculously contrived.
  • The final draft of the “Dagger In The Mind” script clarified that Kirk thought Helen Noel was a passenger at the party, not a member of the crew, and he flirted with her to his embarrassment.
• All Women Are Lustful: Contrary to his reputation, Kirk doesn't initiate a lot of his kisses, and when he does it's nearly always used as a means to an end.
• Always Chaotic Evil: This trope is continually subverted. The enemies of the Federation - including the Klingons - are definitely dangerous and hostile, but they are always shown to be individuals with varying opinions and rationales for their actions that exist outside of a simple "good/evil" dichotomy.
  • The Horta is initially presented and believed to be (as the episode title states) a "Devil in the Dark", but turns out to be a mother protecting her eggs.
  • Balance of Terror is the first episode to feature the Romulans, who are introduced by launching an unprovoked sneak attack. In the selfsame episode the two main Romulan characters are examples of My Country, Right or Wrong and What a Senseless Waste of Human Life, and it is made very clear that if it weren't for their being on opposite sides of battle, Kirk and the Romulan Commander could have easily been friends.
  • The episode Errand of Mercy marks the first appearance of the Klingons, and in that very episode the Organians - a more enlightened species than Humans or Klingons - predict that at some future date, the Klingons and the Federation will become allies, working together. There's also "Day of the Dove", when after learning that they are being manipulated by an Energy Being into a senseless, endless war with Kirk's crew, the Klingons team up in an Enemy Mine.
    Kang: I do not need any urging to kill humans. A Klingon kills for his own reasons! Only a fool fights in a burning house!
• Ambiguously Christian:
  • In the Pilot Episode, Captain Christopher Pike's character was subjected to an illusion of Hell when he refused to cooperate with his Talosian jailers. The illusion was stated to be made from information gotten from his own mind, implying that he was raised as a Christian.
  • Angela Martine, from the episode "Balance of Terror" genuflected before the altar during her marriage ceremony, implying that she is a member of either the Catholic or Episcopalian church.
  • At the end of "This Side of Paradise", when the Enterprise is leaving Omicron Ceti III, Dr. McCoy, reflecting on the euphoric effect the planet's spores had on the crew, states that "Well, that's the second time man's been thrown out of Paradise."
  • Captain Kirk's famous line to the alien impersonating the Greek god Apollo in "Who Mourns for Adonais?":
    Kirk: Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate.
  • In "The Ultimate Computer", both Dr. Richard Daystrom and, consequently, the sentient M-5 computer he built believe in God. Kirk makes the M-5 realize that in committing murder, it has sinned, and it shut itself down out of remorse.
  • In "Bread and Circuses", Kirk and Crew come upon a planet dominated by a Roman Empire but with 20th century technology, where a persecuted, pacifist new religion worships a sun god. At the end of the episode, Lieutenant Uhura discovers that this new religion does not worship the Sun but the Son, clearly referencing Jesus. Kirk even considers remaining at the planet for a number of years just so they can "watch it happen all over again."
  • Near the end of "The Way to Eden", Adam, one of Dr. Sevrin's followers, literally dies on the planet Eden after eating a poisoned apple; Spock sardonically points this out.
• Amnesia Danger: In "The Paradise Syndrome", the danger was that the amnesiac character (Kirk) had forgotten that there was a danger.
• And I Must Scream:
  • The unfortunate fate that Captain Pike is ultimately reduced to.
  • The fate of Lazarus and Anti-Lazarus in "The Alternative Factor".
  • Charlie's reaction to the ending of "Charlie X".
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: Villains often find that this trope is what forces Kirk to comply to them. Textbook case in "The Squire of Gothos", with Spock as the collateral.
• "Anger Is Healthy" Aesop:
  • The episode "The Enemy Within" involves a transporter accident separating Kirk from his aggressive side. While the unchecked aggressive side causes nothing but trouble, Kirk realizes he needs that side of him to be an effective leader. Kirk asks this aggressive side "Can half a man live?"
  • In "This Side of Paradise", anger frees Kirk and then Spock from the spores' influence. Later sonic frequencies irritate the rest of the crew and the colonists, freeeing them as well.
• Antagonistic Governor: Kodos the Executioner, who was governor of a human colony that was facing starvation because of an exotic fungus. He executed 4,000 citizens in order to see to it that the other 4,000 wouldn't starve. He later disappeared, presumed dead, but in reality, had changed his name and was living life as an actor.
• Antagonist Title:
  • "Charlie X": Charlie Evans turns out to be a Reality Warper and starts abusing his powers when the crew of the Enterprise doesn't bow down to his every whim.
  • "The Enemy Within": Kirk is split into a good and an evil version. Guess which one is the enemy.
  • "The Devil in the Dark": Subverted. The silicon-based Horta was killing the miners to protect its eggs. The Enterprise crew heal it and communicate with it.
  • "The Doomsday Machine": It is a planet-eating machine from another Galaxy.
  • "The Ultimate Computer": A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
  • "The Tholian Web": The energy web is being created by the Tholians to destroy the Enterprise.
• Apocalyptic Log: Losira's computer log in "That Which Survives", which explained how her colony died.
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Armor-Piercing Question: Surprisingly, one towards Kirk from the leader of the Organians in "Errand of Mercy" when they've stopped the Federation and the Klingon Empire from fighting.
  Kirk: Even if you have some power that we don't understand, you have no right to dictate to our Federation—
  Kor: Or our Empire!
  Kirk: —How to handle their interstellar relations! We have the right—
  Ayelborne: To wage war, Captain? To kill millions of innocent people? To destroy life on a planetary scale? Is that what you're defending?
• Arc Words: When Gene Coon was involved, soldier vs diplomat. A lot of the time it’s Kirk’s Conflicting Loyalty and Character Development, but other characters have the conflict too, and it’s a continuing theme for other Trek series.
• Artistic License – Physics: In "The Naked Time", the Enterprise is observing a planet in the process of breaking up. The only explanation given for why the planet is breaking up is that its star has gone dark, which would make no difference. It's as if it's just spontaneously exploding. What's more, they talk about its mass changing, which absolutely cannot happen under the laws of physics.^note The closest thing in real life would be, A.) Change the effect of gravity in some way (and most of the numbers related to gravity are called 'constants' for a reason), or B.) remove some of the planet's matter, which would change the total mass and either its density or volume (or both).
• Ascended Extra: Most of the main crew members (with the exception of Kirk and Spock) are not credited with starring roles in the opening credits, even McCoy (for the first season). Many of them don't appear in certain episodes, and don't even receive any real focus or characterization until late season 1 and throughout season 2. Only the movies credit them with starring roles.
• Aside Comment: At the end of "Journey to Babel", Doctor McCoy looks directly into the camera and happily states, "I finally got the last word."
• As You Know: In "Wolf in the Fold" Spock explains to Captain Kirk how ordering the computer to compute the value of pi to the last digit will drive the Redjack creature out of it.
• "Ass" in Ambassador: How many times has the presence of Federation diplomatic personnel actually helped matters? More often than not Kirk and company have to smooth over problems created by overbearing Federation officials. Alien ambassadors aren't much of an improvement.
• Asteroid Thicket: In "Mudd's Women", Harry Mudd's ship flies through one.
• Attack Reflector: Played With in the episode "The Corbomite Maneuver". Kirk threatens to use the eponymous strategy with a device embedded in the Enterprise. If any destructive energy hits it, the corbomite creates a reverse reaction of equal strength that destroys the attacker. He was bluffing: there was actually no such device and no such maneuver.
• Author Appeal: Gene Roddenberry admitted in the book “Where No Man” that a lot of episodes were his sexual fantasies. He’s at least equal opportunity about it, giving Kirk gratuitous shirtless scenes and apparently letting Shatner stick his ass out as much as he wanted, saying fans liked to watch him leave a room.
• Auto-Kitchen: The Enterprise has slots in the wall which can produce any food desired by inserting the correct computer tape. In The Next Generation, these are replaced by replicators.
• Ax-Crazy: Captain, no, Lord Garth. Also most of his "court" of fellow asylum inmates, notably Green-Skinned Space Babe Marta, who is compelled to murder those she "loves."^note She is the only green space babe who kisses or is kissed by Kirk; and they certainly don't do it, as she reached for her dagger almost immediately.
• Badass Crew: The Original Series establishes a long and proud tradition of these in Starfleet.
• Batman Gambit: Kirk is very good at reading his opponents in battle, and thus can pull these off in ways that would make Batman himself proud. The Corbomite Maneuver is a distinct example, and the entirety of Balance of Terror has Kirk continuously doing this to the commander of a Romulan ship, estimating his every action and intention based on the maneuvers he makes:
  (Enterprise fires on the still cloaked Romulan ship, scoring a near-miss)
  Romulan Sub-Commander: "How, commander? HOW?!"
  Romulan Commander: "He is a sorcerer that one, he reads the thoughts in my brain!"
• Battle Chant:
  • In the episode "Miri", at one point, the Long-Lived children get together and start chanting the word "Bonk" repeatedly (as in "Bonk on the head") as an indication of what they plan to do to the Enterprise crew who have beamed down to their planet.
• Battle Theme Music:
  • The "Ancient Battle" theme from "Amok Time," an example of Orchestral Bombing which has been appropriated by so many homages and parodies. It's practically an Undead Horse Trope at this point.
  • Similarly, the space battle music from the episode "The Doomsday Machine" became a standard used over and over again in later episodes.
• Beard of Evil: "Mirror Mirror" provides the Trope Codifier of Evil Twins with beards, thanks to the Mirror-universe Spock's natty goatee.
• Beeping Computers: Computers in the original series beeped because it was a futuristic interpretation of the rather noisy computers of The '60s (which really did have blinking lights too).
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • In "Wolf in the Fold", it turns out that Jack the Ripper was just one of many creatures possessed by a Puppeteer Parasite over the centuries.
  • "Requiem for Methuselah" concerns an immortal being who takes credit for the deeds of many historical figures.
  • Inverted from perspective "Patterns of Force." We follow the crew of the Enterprise looking for John Gill, a Federation historian. It turns out he's created a replica of the Nazi movement on an alien world and made himself the Führer. Said aliens, and their planetary cousins, are shocked to learn of this.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't insult the Enterprise within earshot of Scotty, much less to his face. The Klingons find this out the hard way in "The Trouble With Tribbles". Then again, they are Klingons, so they may have been looking for that fight.
  • Don't imply to McCoy that logic is a good substitute for compassion in a crisis.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Very often, Kirk would be sweaty and his hair messed up in a fight, let alone be injured, but look perfect again the very next scene.
• Benevolent Dictator: Khan Noonien Singh held this reputation, despite his pro-eugenics beliefs and absolute power throughout his conquered empire, he was regarded as the best of the Eugenics wars Super men, with his ruling style being described as "firm but fair" and it being specifically stated that under his rule their was "no mass killings, no wars that weren't started by other parties". By the 23rd century his rule has even become somewhat romanticised, with him being compared to the likes of Leif Ericson, Richard the Lionheart and Napoleon Bonaparte. This reputation even leads to the crew of the Enterprise seriously underestimating just how ruthless and ambitious the still living Khan really was.
• Big Little Man:
  • In "The Corbomite Maneuver", the Enterprise encounters an alien vessel, and is able to get a video feed revealing the bridge, which shows the alien captain, Balok, to be a scowling monster that looks to be about 7 feet tall. However, later they manage to get onboard, revealing they had actually been watching an elaborate puppet show, and the real Balok is no larger than a child.
  • In "Plato's Stepchildren", Alexander is first seen as a massive shadow against a wall. Said shadow shrinks as he approaches Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, revealing he's actually rather short compared to them. The actor playing Alexander was 3 feet, 11 inches tall.
• Big "NO!":
  • Lazarus in "The Alternative Factor".
  • Charlie Evans does this in "Charlie X".
• Black-and-White Morality: Averted. The Federation may be a near-Utopia, but they only remain as one through military power. They get called out on this more than once.
• Black Comedy: "A Piece of the Action", and "The Trouble With Tribbles" both thrive on this trope. It can also be seen in dialogue moments in other episodes, such as this exchange in "This Side of Paradise" where Kirk and Spock (the only crew remaining on the Enterprise) are going to build a transmitter utilizing the communicators' emergency channel, but first Kirk has to fight Spock to free him of the spores:
  Spock: As you are probably aware, striking a fellow officer is a court-martial offence.
  Kirk: If we're both in the brig, who's going to build the transmitter?
  Spock: A logical point, Captain.
• Black Dude Dies First: Averted in "The Galileo Seven" and "By Any Other Name"; in both cases, the black male character survives to the end of the episode while one or more white characters die.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Eminiar and Vendikar, the two warring planets in "A Taste of Armageddon," have so sanitized their war with each other that they no longer send actual missiles—instead they just send computer signals signifying an attack and then have all civilians who happened to be within range of the theoretical attack disintegrate themselves in booths designed for that purpose. The leader of Eminiar considers Kirk a monster because he refuses to allow the same thing to happen to the crew of the Enterprise when the ship is calculated to have been "hit" by an "attack," and even more so when he destroys Eminiar's attack computers, immediately breaking the stalemate between the two planets.
• Bluffing the Authorities: The episode "City on the Edge of Forever". After Kirk and Spock go back in time to 1930's New York City, they're about to steal some clothing to replace their Enterprise uniforms but meet a police officer and have to explain Spock's pointed Vulcan ears. They come up with a story that Spock is Chinese and had a childhood accident involving a mechanical rice picker and plastic surgery, but the cop doesn't buy it.
• Bluff the Eavesdropper: In "The Deadly Years", due to having been rapidly aged by mysterious radiation and gone senile, Kirk has been forced to step down from command. His incompetent replacement has led the ship through the Romulan Neutral Zone, and the Romulans are about to destroy them. Suddenly a cure is found, a restored Kirk appears on the bridge and gives an order to relay a message to Starfleet—using a code previously established as having been broken by the Romulans, which briefly causes the crew to wonder if he's still senile. Nevertheless, they open the channels and Kirk sends a message that the Enterprise will self destruct via the Corbomite Device and destroy any ship in a huge radius. The Romulans intercept the message and leave in a hurry.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Thanks to his incredibly rationalist thinking, Spock has notable difficulty with understanding human euphemisms and metaphors.
• Boldly Coming: Kirk is the Trope Codifier. That said, Kirk's reputation for sleeping his way across the galaxy has been greatly exaggerated in the public mind; out of 79 aired episodes, he kisses another character in only 19 of them, and of those, thirteen are while he's under duress or doing it specifically to manipulate them. In fact, Kirk makes out with a woman purely for pleasure, with no other motive or emotional attachment, exactly once in the entire original series. Sex is likewise only implied in a few rare instances: once when he marries a native girl while amnesiac, and gets her pregnant; once when the show returns from commercial to find a woman brushing her hair in his room while he puts his boots back on; a Sexy Discretion Shot to an overhead lamp as Kirk kisses a Sex Slave girl who's been "ordered to please" him^note A line that was cut had Kirk drinking wine and saying "good," eating something and saying "excellent," and then — "And you?" and the woman says "Superb, I'm told."; and Kirk sitting up in bed taking a call from the bridge, the woman (France Nuyen as the Dolmen Elaan) lying next to him, she rolls over and sits up to lean on his shoulder.
• Book Ends:
  • Many episodes begin and end on a shot of the Enterprise flying through space as the dramatic fanfare plays her in (or out).
  • A more meta example: Sulu and Rand share a scene in the first episode aired, "The Man Trap". They don't share another scene until the sixth and final movie, with Rand as a Bridge Officer under Sulu's command.
• Borrowed Without Permission: Incorrigible larcenist Harry Mudd recounts how he managed to escape from a Federation penal colony to Captain Kirk and Mister Spock.
  Harry Mudd: I... borrowed transportation...
  Captain Kirk: He stole a starship!
• Bottled Heroic Resolve
• Brainwashed and Crazy: This happens in numerous episodes.
• Brandishment Bluff: "The Corbomite Maneuver"
  Kirk: This is the Captain of the Enterprise. Our respect for other life forms requires that we give you this... warning. One critical item of information that has never been incorporated into the memory banks of any Earth ship. Since the early years of space exploration, Earth vessels have had incorporated into them a substance known as... corbomite. It is a material and a device which prevents attack on us. If any destructive energy touches our vessel, a reverse reaction of equal strength is created, destroying—
  Balok: [over intercom] You now have two minutes.
  Kirk: —destroying the attacker. It may interest you to know that since the initial use of corbomite more than two of our centuries ago, no attacking vessel has survived the attempt. Death has... little meaning to us. If it has none to you then attack us now. We grow annoyed at your foolishness.
• Boulder Bludgeon:
  • Episode "Arena". Captain Kirk and the Gorn captain are forced to fight each other with improvised weapons. During their battle, the Gorn captain picks up a boulder and throws it at Kirk, pinning Kirk's leg to the ground.
  • "The Galileo Seven". While the crew of the shuttle craft is trapped on a primitive planet, they are attacked by giant cavemen-like humanoids.
    • One of the cavemen uses a boulder to pound on the shuttlecraft.
    • During a funeral ceremony, one of the cavemen throws a boulder at Spock, pinning him to the ground.
• Bread and Circuses: The aptly named episode "Bread and Circuses" explores a planet in which the Roman Empire never fell. Gladiator sports are broadcast on TV and interrupted by commercial breaks.
• Breakout Character: Spock became the fan favorite almost instantly, and the only way to keep the focus on the captain was for the writers to emphasize his close co-worker/friend relationship with Kirk ^note this was actually suggested by Isaac Asimov in this letter to Roddenberry; later, this dynamic evolved into the Power Trio of Spock, Kirk and McCoy.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Chekov does more screaming-in-pain than the rest of the crew combined. He even has a torture scene in the episode "Mirror, Mirror". This was explained as a convenient way to show there was mortal peril. In a nice inversion, he's the only one who doesn't get hit with the aging disease in "The Deadly Years". He still ends up getting subjected to a thousand and one medical checks, though.
    Chekov: Blood sample, Chekov! Marrow sample, Chekov! Skin sample, Chekov! If—if I live long enough, I'm going to run out of samples!
    Sulu: You'll live.
    Chekov: Oh yes, I'll live. But I won't enjoy it!
• Butterfly of Doom: In "The City on the Edge of Forever", Edith Keeler's death must occur or else it will cause an alternate timeline where Germany wins World War II and Starfleet does not exist.

C–D

• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": In "The Enemy Within", Evil Kirk insists that his subordinates bring him some "Saurian brandy." It's unlikely that whatever world the Saurians come from actually has grapes that can be fermented and distilled into real brandy. On Earth, brandy can be made from many different fruits; presumably, Saurian brandy is made from a fruit native to that world. Romulan ale is likewise presumably a drink made from a grain grown on Romulus; it's convenient but not implausible that they have analogues to Earth's grain grasses, malt, and yeast.
  • The Saurians were later established in Star Trek: The Motion Picture to be lizard people; there were a couple of them on the Enterprise.
• Calvin Ball: Fizzbin, the imaginary card game Kirk and Spock make up to confuse the gangsters in "A Piece of the Action", is an Ur-Example.
• Captain's Log: The Trope Maker; Kirk's famous voice-over logs were conceived as a way of quickly introducing or recapping plot points that may have otherwise been confusing. He seems to do them in his head even when he's nowhere near a recorder. In early episodes (e.g, "Mantrap"), he even adopts an "Ominiscient Narrator" stance when referring to future events. When he says "Captain's log, stardate.... unknown", it can be downright chilling.
• Cargo Concealment Caper: In the episode "Dagger of the Mind", a criminal from a penal colony sneaks aboard by hiding in a cargo container that's beamed up to the ship.
• Cartwright Curse: So frequent you could almost take bets on whether the Girl of the Week is going to buy the farm by the end of the episode (or if she doesn't, pull a High-Heel–Face Turn).
• Cast Full of Pretty Boys: The show’s habit for putting the main men in obvious mascara and eyeshadow is well-documented and much appreciated. This observation began with the digitally remastered editions and wasn't noticed at the time. The relatively heavy television makeup was designed to create highlights and shadows since the cameras of that time saw flat. So to a 1960s viewer, even watching on a color set, the actors did not look heavily made up.
• Catchphrase: Dr. McCoy's "I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder" and "He's Dead, Jim." Spock's "Fascinating" and "Illogical."
• Catch the Conscience: "The Conscience of the King" plays with this trope; a man suspected of being the murderous tyrant Kodos the Executioner happens to be an actor currently starring in a production of Hamlet.
• The Cavalry:
  • Usually in the form of the Enterprise or a second landing party arriving to save the day.
  • Lampshaded in "Friday's Child" when Kirk wonders why "the cavalry doesn't come over the hill in the nick of time anymore." Then Scotty arrives with a Redshirt Army.
• Cerebus Retcon:
  • While Kirk has a lot of trauma and is a Broken Hero in the show, the writers obviously didn’t know they were going to have a movie series and give him a son that he knew about but had to stay away from. The Autobiography of James T. Kirk can do some fancy Arc Welding with how much Kirk likes running away from his problems; having the kid from “A Piece Of The Action” remind him of David, the traumas of season three pushing him to think he wants to be an Admiral, and reasoning that the more trio-based episodes after the first season is because of what happened with Edith and Sam.
  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan took Kirk’s penchant for Just Ignore It and applied it to the nature of the show, forcing him to actually deal with his consistent loss and pain, and certain villains of the weeks coming back to prove he can’t just run away from everything. “Generations” and his 10-Minute Retirement after all he’s gone through, does it as well.
• Characterisation Click Moment: Originally, Spock didn't have the impassive, scientific characterization he is famous for. Leonard Nimoy said the character first began to click for him in "The Corbomite Maneuver", when the director suggested he "be the scientist, stay detached", and react to Balok's threatening ship with "Fascinating."
• Cheated Angle: The Enterprise is almost exclusively seen from the starboard side, even straight on angles are slightly turned away. The reason was a combination of budget and limitations of model-making technology, the electronics for the lights were fed in through the port side of the secondary hull and thus the starboard side was the only one fully detailed with painting, windows and decals (including the inside of the port nacelle, which would face the camera). Whenever there was a need to show the port side they would mirror flip the decals and then mirror the footage. The Remastered version of the show, with a CGI model, was able to do this more often.
• Chewing the Scenery: The Klingon executive officer Korax in "The Trouble With Tribbles" insults the Enterprise For the Evulz, underlining the last two words of this speech loud and clear with a wide-eyed stare: "I didn't mean to say that the Enterprise should be hauling garbage. I meant to say that it should be hauled away as garbage!"^note Fans adore this line and loudly reciting the whole insult parade became a favorite gag at the conventions of the 1970s.
• City in a Bottle: "For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" featured this on a generation ship.
• Civilization Destroyer:
  • "That Which Survives". Thousands of years ago, a Human Alien civilization called the Kalandans made an artificial planet to live on. Unfortunately, the process created a microorganism that killed the personnel stationed on the planet. By the time they died, the disease had been transported back to the original civilization via supply ships, completely wiping it out.
  • ''Operation: Annihilate!" Going back to ancient times, a number of civilizations on different planets have been destroyed by outbreaks of mass insanity. The cause of the insanity is alien creatures that attack people and inject material into their bodies that takes control of their nervous systems. The aliens make the victims travel to other planets using starships, thus spreading the infection.
  • "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" The aliens who lived on the planet Exo 3 created android robots to serve them. When the androids developed Artificial Intelligence, the aliens became afraid of them and started to turn them off. In self defense, the androids Turned Against Their Masters and destroyed them.
  • "The Changeling". The interstellar probe Nomad uses its alien technology-enhanced weapons to completely wipe out the population of the Malurian system, killing more than 4 billion people.
  • "I, Mudd". The aliens who created the androids originally came from the Andromeda galaxy. Their home planet's star went nova and destroyed their civilization except for a few outposts, whose inhabitants died out over time.
  • "The Immunity Syndrome". The entire population of the Gamma Seven-A system, consisting of billions of inhabitants, is killed by having their Life Energy drained by a giant space amoeba.
  • "Return to Tomorrow". A half million years ago, a highly advanced Human Alien civilization fought an apocalyptic war that destroyed the surface of their planet, ripped away the atmosphere and killed all living creatures on it. Before the end, a few members stored their minds in advanced devices to wait rescue.
  • "The Empath". The star Minara is about to go nova, and all of its planets (several of which have populations) will be destroyed. The Humanoid Alien Vians can only save the population of one planet. They do so, but the other civilizations are doomed.
  • "Let That Be Your Last Battlefied". The Humanoid Aliens of the planet Cheron completely wipe themselves out in a genocidal war.
  • "The Lights of Zetar". Long ago, every living thing on the planet Zetar was killed. The minds and Life Energy of 100 of its Humanoid Aliens inhabitants traveled into space and search for new bodies to possess.
  • "For the World Is Hollow, And I Have Touched The Sky". Several thousand years ago, the Fabrini people's home sun went nova and destroyed their planets, but some of them were put on a ship resembling (or disguised as?) an asteroid and sent to another planet.
  • "Plato's Stepchildren". When the planet Sahndara is destroyed by its sun going nova, almost all of its civilization is annihilated. A small number escape to Earth, then later another planet.
  • "Wink Of An Eye". On the planet Scalos, radioactive water causes the entire race to live at hyper-accelerated speeds (which tremendously shortens their lifespans) and makes the male part of the population sterile. By the time the Enterprise arrives, there are only a few Scalosians left.
  • "All Our Yesterdays". When the star Beta Niobe goes nova, its only planet, Sarpeidon, will be destroyed. However, the entire population of the planet has used time travel to journey into the planet's past. They are mentally and physically conditioned to fit in, but their civilization in the future is effectively destroyed.
• Clear My Name:
  • Happens once in a while. In "Journey to Babel", Sarek is accused of murdering a Tellarite ambassador. The culprit is an Orion pretending to be a staff member of the Andorian ambassador. In "Court Martial", Kirk is accused of causing the death of one of his crew members. The crew member has faked his own death and is trying to sabotage Kirk's career, as he blames Kirk for ruining his.
  • Scotty has to do this in "Wolf in the Fold" after being set up for several murders by none other than Jack the Ripper himself—actually an alien entity who took possession over the centuries of (among others) Jack the Ripper and the city administrator investigating Scotty's alleged murders (conveniently stonewalling the investigation in the process).
  • Even Spock gets in on the fun in "The Menagerie", although the crime in Spock's case is mutiny, not murder, and the whole ordeal is arranged by an alien entity just like the other incidents, albeit out of compassion rather than any sinister motive. Then again, unlike in the other cases, Spock is actually guilty, and not mind controlled or framed - he just has a very justifiable motive.
• Clip Show: "The Menagerie" shows us most of the original pilot episode, "The Cage".
• Clothing Damage: Kirk must have a pretty steep uniform allowance to cover all of those shirts that get torn up (or completely torn off of him). An unintended case can be seen in "The Savage Curtain" when Kirk's pants split open in the back for a brief moment.
• Combat by Champion: "Arena" has Kirk vs. Gorn captain. "Amok Time" has Kirk vs. Spock. "The Gamesters of Triskelion" has Kirk, Chekov, and Uhura vs. an Amazing Technicolor Population.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: Gold Key Comics published its first Star Trek comic in 1967 and the series outlived the TV show by a full decade (ending only because Marvel Comics took over the rights so it could publish comics set post-Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Early issues are noted for their bizarre artwork and extreme breaks with TV continuity, due in part to the artist being a freelancer living in Europe who had never seen the series and only had publicity photographs to work with. As a result, one issue features a cut-away drawing that suggests that the Enterprise isn't much bigger than a large yacht, while another issue has the Enterprise landing on a planet, decades before Star Trek: Voyager does it. Later, Marvel, DC Comics, and IDW Publishing all took turns publishing comics set in the TOS era.
• Competence Porn:
  • This is the main draw of the franchise for many. Professional people from a variety of fields act professionally and work together to solve problems by the end of the episode.
  • Some newer Trek stuff is controversial with the old fans for the characters acting less professionally and competently and getting by more on luck and Indy Ploys.
• Constellations as Locations: Implied with the Orions (the original Green-Skinned Space Babes). Background information and later parts of the franchise established that the green-skinned aliens were from the planet Orion, which is located in the Orion Sector (which sector is presumably geocentrically named for the Earth constellation).
• Corrective Lecture: Attempted by Kirk in "Charlie X", when he attempts to explain to Charlie why slapping Yeoman Rand on the butt was not appropriate behavior, but also not trying to come down hard on Charlie, who had (as Kirk believed at the time) no supervision as a child, being the sole survivor of a crash when he was young. Kirk, trying to avoid having The Talk with Charlie, can only sum it up by saying, "There's no right way to hit a woman."
• Couldn't Find a Pen: In one episode, a Horta (essentially a lava monster) burns, "NO KILL I" on the ground. Spock wonders if this translates to "I don't kill" or "Don't kill me". Or both? She doesn't explain, so it's left up to the viewer, but she's in agony and more concerned about her kids.
• Court-martialed:
  • In "The Menagerie", Spock gets put on trial for commandeering the Enterprise and taking it to a forbidden planet.
  • "Court Martial": Kirk gets put on trial for (seemingly) causing the death of a crew member through negligence.
• Courtroom Episode: "Court Martial", "Wolf In The Fold"
• Cowboy Episode: "Spectre of the Gun", in which the main characters are forced to re-enact the gunfight at the O.K. Corral on an alien world.
• Creator Cameo: Gene Roddenberry himself voiced the ship's cook in "Charlie X".
• Credits Montage: Featuring not only stills from the episode in question, but random shots from various other episodes as well.
• Creepy Children Singing: The kids from "And the Children Shall Lead" use this song to summon Gorgon:
  Hail, hail, fire and snow
  Call the angel, we will go
  Far away, for to see
  Friendly angel come to me.
  • In "Miri" they just do the familiar "nyah nyah-nyah nyah nyah" chant but it's made very sinister.
• Cunning People Play Poker: The Corbomite Maneuver" when faced with Balok's incomprehensible mothership threatening to destroy the Enterprise, Spock contextualises their situation as a game of chess and concludes Balok has declared checkmate. Captain Kirk changes the game to poker, and then bluffs that Enterprise has a defense feature that will ensure that if it's destroyed, Balok's ship will also get blown up.
• Custom Uniform: Captain Kirk's deep green wraparound fatigue shirt, worn interchangeably with the usual uniform shirt in the first two seasons, is a good example of this trope in action. Kirk is the only person aboard who we see wearing this "casual" alternative uniform. At least, in the original series. Mirror universe Archer is seen wearing the one◊ that formerly belonged to the captain of the Defiant (which was captured by the Tholians in "The Tholian Web") in Star Trek: Enterprise episode "In A Mirror Darkly (Part II)".
• Cuteness Proximity:
  • Spock is totally unaffected by Tribbles. He is only petting it because it is logical... What's everybody looking at?
  • And cats. He has no particular fondness for the creatures.^note Vulcans were often compared with cats in fan essays of the time, and someone wrote a half-serious essay on how they could have evolved from felidae.
  • And dogs, too. See the space dog in "The Enemy Within".
  • Used as foreshadowing in “The Enemy Within”, as good Kirk (who thinks he’s the original at this point) is weepier than normal and gets distracted by the animal he’s holding being soft while trying to give orders. It turns out to be just a side of him that he needs, along with the toxic aggressive part of himself.
• Cyberpunk: Star Trek often leans into both this and Post Cyber Punk quite often, with mentions of technology steadily replacing men, the implications of using technology to enhance men or even replace humanity entirely, and the ramifications of technology being misused by those who don't understand it. Some of the clearer examples of this trope at play are listed below:
  • The Cloud Minders, which features the oppressive sky-city of Stratos and its subordinate, ground-dwelling Troglytes, some of whom have formed the rebellious Disrupters in an attempt to overthrow the city.
  • Return Of The Archons in which a whole society is run by a mind-controlling computer, and an underground resistance has formed to overthrow it.
• Daddy's Little Villain: "The Conscience of the King" (a tragic Double Subversion). The daughter of a former villain in hiding uses their cover as a performing theater troupe to kill off the remaining witnesses to her father's previous crimes as a way of "protecting" him from recrimination. Her father is extremely displeased with her when he finds out, having hoped to start a legitimate new life in their cover identities, and appalled that the blood on his hands had irreversibly stained her, as well.
• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: "A Piece of the Action". The inhabitants of Sigma Iotia II are so enamored of 1920s Chicago gang culture that they decided to base their entire civilization on it.
• Damsel out of Distress: Double subverted in “A Taste Of Armageddon”, as Kirk is held hostage and Spock comes in just as he’s got himself out of it. Kirk replies to “we thought you needed help” with admitting he still does.
• Dangerously Garish Environment: "The Way to Eden" shows a group of space hippies taking over the Enterprise to fly to a "paradise planet." The planet is beautiful enough, but everything on it is lethal, and the hippie leader dies when he refuses to believe it.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky" is this for McCoy.
  • "A Wolf in the Fold" and "The Lights of Zetar" for Scotty.
• Days of Future Past: Primarily a Space Western, with Kirk frequently acting as the Army Scout who helps the struggling colonists. But there was also plenty of "Age Of Sail" IN SPACE and the American Cold War IN SPACE.
• Dead Man Writing: "That Which Survives". Losira's computer message to her fellow Kalandans about the death of the colony. Also the last surviving crewman of the USS Exeter recording a log warning anyone who finds it of the plague (while logging, the crewman succumbs).
• Deadpan Snarker: The epic snarkfests between McCoy and Spock are legendary for a reason.
  • Averted in "Spectre of the Gun" when Spock surprises McCoy by giving him a genuine compliment.
    McCoy: "I doubt that this combination of things was ever used for any purpose quite like this."
    Spock: (Sincerely) "Perhaps they would've been if [these people] had your ingenuity, Doctor."
    McCoy: (Looks up and blinks in surprise)
• Death Ray: Phasers, at their highest setting, become Disintegrator Rays.
• Decadent Court: The Romulan government at several points is implied to be one. The Platonians in "Plato's Stepchildren" started out with a good idea—create a society based upon Plato's Republic—but ended up as this after centuries of isolation. In "The Gamesters of Triskelion," the three brains running the planet have resorted to pitting random aliens against each other in gladiatorial combat after losing their purpose in life.
• Deconstructed Trope: Kirk uses his sexuality a lot like a male version of a Heroic Seductress, but not only does he see it as Necessarily Evil, gets him a rep in-universe and he’s called out if he gets too cold, but Janice Lester is able to get away with Never My Fault (claiming he left her when it got serious when clearly she was the abusive one) and he’s drugged or coerced in some way no less than four times.
• Depending on the Writer: The actors themselves have admitted that the characters’ levels of feminism range from early women’s lib with messages like right to choose at best, slightly patronising or just outright sexist insults at worst, depending on who was writing the episode. The main show creators to be sincere feminists were Gene L. Coon and D.C. Fontana.
• Destructive Teleportation: The Trope Codifier. Transporters work by disassembling an object (or person) into energy, shooting (or "beaming") it some distance away, and reassembling that object at the new location. It consists of the following parts:
  • A de-materializer, which breaks down the object in a controlled fashion.
  • A buffer, which holds the disintegrated object until transmission.
  • A transmitter, which transmits the disintegrated object as a beam of energy.
  • A re-materializer, which reintegrates the object in a controlled fashion.
  • invoked Contrary to popular opinion, the transported object is indeed the original object from the start, and the device does not kill living things that are being transported; it's the same matter, just transmuted into energy, beamed to a new location, and then transmuted back to matter. ^note People transported are in fact conscious during transport. If there's unbroken continuity of consciousness, then there cannot have been a death. However, as you can probably imagine, transporters can be rather scarily dangerous if some part of the process were to be interrupted.
• Deus est Machina: Several episodes, notably "The Apple".
• Deus ex Machina: "Charlie X" (the Thasians), "Shore Leave" (the Keeper), "The Squire of Gothos" (Trelane's parents), "Errand of Mercy" (the Organians).
• Deus ex Nukina: In "The Doomsday Machine," Commodore Decker takes a shuttle and steers it down the throat of the planet killer—without an onboard nuke. But this gives Captain Kirk the idea to try Decker's plan with the already nearly-destroyed USS Constellation rigged to self-destruct in a big explosion. Kirk manually pilots the Constellation into the maw.
  • In "Obsession," the vampire cloud, which has been freely munching on the crew, finally heads home to reproduce. Kirk beams down to the planet Where It All Began to deliver a chunk of antimatter. When it blows, it rips half the planet's atmosphere away.
  • In "The Immunity Syndrome", the Enterprise must deliver an anti-matter bomb to the nucleus of the giant space amoeba. In a twist, Mr. Spock volunteers for a separate suicide mission, to deliver the probe that enables Kirk to target the nucleus.
• Death World:
  • The planet Gamma Trianguli VI in "The Apple" includes plants that throw poisonous thorns, rocks that act like anti-personnel mines, and directed lightning strikes. The novelization explains that this is because the planet's 'god' identifies the Starfleet people as a danger and want to eliminate them before they can interfere.
  • The planet Eden in the episode "The Way To Eden". Looks beautiful, but beware of differing chemistry; the fruit is poisonous and the even the grass is highly acidic.
• Death of the Old Gods: "Who Mourns For Adonais" has the Enterprise meeting Apollo, the last of the Greek gods (who were actually Sufficiently Advanced Aliens). Kirk pretty much tells him to stuff it, and then gets schizophrenic about whether humanity has Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions as religion in general, or just moved on to Christianity.
• Depraved Bisexual: Dr Coleman from “Turnabout Intruder” is Janice’s lover, but is also fine with her spirit being in the body of Kirk, and responds to Janice-in-Kirk’s seduction.
• Devil's Advocate: Spock would occasionally perform the duty of the Devil's Advocate, typically countering McCoy's or Kirk's spontaneous, Gut Feeling-inspired actions.
• Discontinuity Nod:
  • Various extra-series material (novels, for example), often refer in a disparaging way to the more "out there" episodes from The Original Series, usually in the form of Starfleet Officials claiming Kirk made up a large number of his reports, with his motive being contempt for his superiors. Invariably mentioned is the universally disbelieved incident in which aliens "stole the brain of Kirk's Science Officer," a reference to the episode in which Spock's brain is, indeed, stolen by alien babes, and which is considered to be the worst episode of the original series, if not of Star Trek as a whole.
  • The foreword to the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture essentially says that the original series is a overwrought dramatization of actual events which should be regarded as unreliable. Fans debate its canonicity, since, while Trek literature is officially considered non-canonical, it's the only novel written by Gene Roddenberry himself.
• Disintegration Chamber: In "A Taste of Armageddon" the (virtually) warring planets Eminiar and Vendikar use "disintegration machines" to dispose of persons who have been deemed casualties.
• Disney Dog Fight: At the end of "Requiem for Methuselah", Robot Girl Rayna Kapec must choose between Flint and Captain Kirk. The strain causes her to overload and die.
• Distress Call: 14 different episodes (including both pilots) start with the Enterprise receiving or already responding to a distress signal.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The platonians in “Plato’s Stepchildren” are played like domestic abusers. Parmen’s speech after he makes Kirk slap himself for speaking up to him is making excuses for himself and plying the three with gifts. When they force Kirk to act like a horse and Spock to laugh then cry, they blame Bones for what’s happening, and all three men are traumatised by it afterwards.
• Door Jam: Several episodes (notably "Arena" and "The Tholian Web") contrive ways for Kirk to end up alone facing the Monster of the Week without back-up, whether becaue of alien meddling, transporter malfunctions, or interdiminesional anomalies.
• Doomsday Device: "The Doomsday Machine" features a planet-eating device.
• Doppelmerger: In one episode, a Teleporter Accident results in both Captain Kirk and a doglike alien getting turned into two individuals, one of whom has all of their negative traits. They eventually get fused back together in the transporter, and while the alien dies (ostensibly from too much fear), Kirk survives.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Lampshaded in “Turnabout Intruder” when Lester in Kirk acts like it’s ludicrous to imagine a small woman like Lester overpowering a muscled man like Kirk. Ends up being an example anyway, as she’s Easily Forgiven to the point where even Shatner complained nothing was resolved, and Nimoy was disgusted she’s just treated as a stupidly Hysterical Woman, by design. His rant on this subject for the book Shatner: Where No Man is well known and often quoted online.
• Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi:
  • Even discounting the times he uses his prettiness and charm to get himself or his crew out of trouble, Kirk has a pretty bad track record on the whole being able to consent, whether it’s the one Green-Skinned Space Babe of the series forcing a kiss on him in “Whom Gods Destroy”, the Bed Trick in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Deela enjoying kissing him when he’s not aware of her in “Wink Of An Eye”, mind raped in “Dagger Of The Mind” to believe he had sex and was in love, or having sex with Elaan after her tears drug him. He’s not exactly happy about all of it, but it seems to be something he feels like he just has to deal with.
  • Spock gets his own turn in “This Side Of Paradise”, Leila deciding that she wants him to stay, and giving him no choice in the matter by subjecting him to spores that affect his mind.
• Doves Mean Peace: The Elba II and Tantalus Penal Colonies (which are both colonies that dealt with trying to treat the insane and cure them of their insanity) use insignias with a dove in it.
• Downer Ending: "Who Mourns For Adonais", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", "The City On The Edge Of Forever", "Requiem for Methuselah", "Charlie X" and "A Private Little War".
• Dramatic Chase Opening: "The Return of the Archons" starts with Sulu and another crewman running from some pursuers in a city street. They're both caught.
• Dramatic Downstage Turn: Several instances, especially during dramatic scenes featuring female cast members. One simple example appears in a conversation between Leila and Spock near the end of the episode "This Side of Paradise".
• Dress-Up Episode: a lot. "A Piece of the Action", "Return of the Archons", "Assignment: Earth", "The City on the Edge of Forever", that one where they ended up dressed as Nazis ("Patterns of Force")... This trope was popular because it allowed them to use standard, pre-existing costumes, props and sets, rather than having to make expensive new ones. There had been very few science fiction television shows (as opposed to movies) up to that time, outside of children's series like Captain Video and Tom Corbett Space Cadet. Series like One Step Beyond (1959) and The Twilight Zone (1959) often had people in normal clothing facing unusual situations. There were very few props hanging around to be re-used, unlike today, when science fiction has been popular for a long time.
• Dropped After the Pilot:
  • Perhaps the most famous example, Captain Pike from the first pilot. More accurately, everyone but Spock was replaced.
  • The 2nd pilot episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", has Ship's Doctor Mark Piper, Communications Officer Alden, and Yeoman Smith. They were replaced by Leonard McCoy, Lieutenant Uhura, and Janice Rand, respectively, in the series.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Bones and Kirk have a tendency to drink together, especially when Bones thinks Kirk isn’t handling shit well.
• Dude, She's Like in a Coma: Deela from “Wink Of An Eye” is upfront about liking to kiss Kirk when he’s not aware of her, teasing that he’s probably used to that happening to him, and coos over him being pretty while he’s unconscious.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Averted. Among Kirk's various honors and awards: the Grankite Order of Tactics, the Kargite Order of Heroism, the Palm Leaf of the Axanar Peace Mission, the Prentares ribbon of Commendation, the Starfleet Award of Valor, the Starfleet Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry, the Starfleet Silver Palm with Cluster, and the Starfleet Medal of Honor. The list goes on for so long that it has to be stopped early so that the episode can continue.
  • Spock's no slouch either. He's in the Vulcan Scientific Legion of Honor, and received two decorations for valor from Starfleet Command.
• Duel to the Death: "Arena", "Amok Time", "The Gamesters of Triskelion".
• Dutch Angle: Used in "Wink of an Eye" to denote the scenes taking place in hyper-accelerated time.
• Dysfunction Junction: Despite the Status Quo Is God (series-only, not the films), everyone except Chekov is a mess; Kirk bases his identity on serving the Enterprise and thinks he doesn’t deserve to be happy, Spock is subject to Half-Breed Discrimination from everyone and has an estranged family, Bones has Chronic Hero Syndrome and killed his dying father only for there to be a cure months later, Chapel’s fiance goes insane and kills himself, and All There in the Manual has Uhura be a lonely Stepford Smiler, Scotty start drinking after his nephew dies at his post, and Sulu’s home be victim of a terrorist attack when he was young.
• Dying Race: The Talosians in "The Menagerie," the Calandans in "That Which Survives," and the Scalosians in "Wink of an Eye."

E–H

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The initially unaired original pilot, "The Cage" features a completely different crew, gooseneck viewers. In addition, the pilot uses "hyperdrive" instead of "warp" for the Faster-Than-Light Travel. The make-up used on Leonard Nimoy for Spock is substantially different in the two pilots; this is very obvious in the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", which for Executive Meddling reasons aired as the third episode.
  • And speaking of warp, the original Enterprise uses warp all the time, even for combat maneuvers, unless circumstances force them to rely on her impulse drive. Later series have ships use warp drive when they need to get from one place to another very quickly while sticking to impulse for combat and in-system maneuvers.
  • Though it's more subtle and less jarring than the transition from pilots to series, the first half of the first season (produced by Roddenberry) has a much stronger Wagon Train to the Stars emphasis, with the Enterprise functioning as a deep space exploration vessel whose missions often involved surveying uncharted space and re-supplying isolated frontier posts. When Gene Coon took over as showrunner, he introduced the United Federation of Planets, the Prime Directive, and the Klingon Empire, and the Enterprise took on many more diplomatic and strategic missions more consistent with a Cold War setting than The Wild West.
  • In this series, the Klingons are generally duplicitous schemers while Romulans are honor-bound warriors. This is the exact inverse of how these two races would be portrayed in later series. The more primitive make-up also means both races lack their forehead ridges; the Klingons are just copper-skinned humans while the Romulans are more explicitly identical to Vulcans.
  • The Prime Directive functions quite differently in this series compared to any other — here it's effectively "don't make contact with primitive civilizations unless you absolutely have to, and never give advanced technology to primitives". The Prime Directive is waived in cases where said civilizations would be in danger from external forces (usually the Klingons) if the crew didn't act. By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Prime Directive has been redefined as "don't get involved in the affairs of any other civilization, regardless of their technology level, even if they ask you directly for help".
  • Speeds of Warp 10 and higher are mentioned a few times. Later series would establish Warp 10 as infinite speed and the absolute maximum way that speed can be quantified.
  • Most viewers are familiar with the red, blue, and green/gold uniforms used throughout most of the show, but in the first few episodes produced - including the pilot and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" - members of the Services department wear bronze uniforms. Notably, Spock, Gary Mitchell, and Lt. Kelso in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" all wear bronze uniforms that are quite distinct from Kirk's gold uniform.
  • Kirk takes point on almost every landing party. Later series (especially Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager) have The Captain stay on the ship more often while the Number Two leads the away teams. In addition, the later series give the captain an office next to The Bridge for filling out paperwork and meeting with people one-on-one, something Kirk didn't have.
• Easily Forgiven: The Kelvans in "By Any Other Name". They hijack the ship, threaten the entire crew, and kill a female yeoman as a demonstration of their power (she wasn't acting as a danger to them in any way). And yet, at the end, Kirk forgives and agrees to help them.Then again, this could be sheer pragmatism given the Kelvan's power level and the fact that he has barely managed to convince them not to kill the rest of his crew (which they could do very easily).
• Eat Dirt, Cheap: The Horta. It's a silicon lifeform that eats rocks.
• Eating the Eye Candy:
  • Aside from the “you’ll be taught how to use your tongue” line, Kor in "Errand Of Mercy" circles Kirk and very obviously looks at his ass.
  • In “Spock’s Brain”, a woman comes onto the Enterprise, makes everyone collapse and because Kirk fell in a way that shows off his ass, she checks it out.
• The Echoer: Played with. The episode "Assignment: Earth" has the mysterious Gary Seven conduct a covert operation on Earth during a 1968 orbital platform launch. While at his workstation, a secretary named Roberta walks in. Gary Seven needs to know what happened to two other agents on the same assignment, so he has Roberta sit at a dictation machine: an electric typewriter with a microphone and speech recognition software. When the machine starts typing every word Roberta says, she gets increasingly flustered, and Gary Seven is compelled to switch it off.
• Eldritch Starship: The ethereal Thasians' ship, an odd lighting effect; the Planet Killer, a conical machine miles long that eats planets; and Balok's enormous, odd spaceship, the Fesarius.
• Empathic Healer: Gem of "The Empath" heals injuries by taking the patient's pain into herself.
• Empire with a Dark Secret: In "The Mark of Gideon", there is a germ-free "paradise" of a planet which is willing to join the Federation. However, the reason why they invite only Kirk to their planet is so they can decrease the planet's overpopulation by using Kirk, who had a rare disease in his blood, to infect people.
• Enemy Mine:
  • The Klingons team up with the Enterprise crew in "Day of the Dove" to escape the emotion-eating entity that wants them to fight to death for its amusement.
  • In "Errand of Mercy", ironically, Kirk and Kor seem to be united in their mutual loathing of the Organians, somewhat to Kirk's surprise and Kor's amusement.
• End-of-Series Awareness: According to Nichelle Nichols, they knew season three would be the last (saved from cancellation after season 2 by a vociferous fan campaign led (albeit sub rosa) by Roddenberry himself) and never really cared about by the network to begin with), and almost every episode has mention of ghosts, consent forcibly taken, or some sort of "off" feeling. Josh Marsfelder's blog Vaka Rangi verifies this and points out several third-season episodes, notably "Spectre of the Gun", as being really about Star Trek itself being "a dead show walking", "shackled and sentenced to death".
• Enforced Cold War: Examples abound, since the show was written during the Cold War. Examples of this include the plots of "Balance of Terror", "Errand of Mercy", "The Trouble with Tribbles", "Friday's Child", and "Elaan of Troyius".
• Enlightened Self-Interest: In "Whom Gods Destroy", the insane Garth tries to convince Kirk and Spock that they should be friends (with the implication that the other option would be "or I kill you").
  Spock: On what, precisely, is our friendship to be based?
  Garth: Upon the firmest of foundations, Mister Spock. Enlightened self-interest.
• Escort Distraction: In "Mirror, Mirror", Lieutenant Uhura gets slinky-minky with Mirror!Sulu on the bridge so that Mirror!Sulu won't notice a warning light on his com panel. Engineer Scott is disabling the ship's phasers and bypassing transporter protocols in an effort to return the landing party to their correct universe. Once the tampering alert stops flashing, Uhura curtails the snugglies.
• Everyone Can See It: A growing trend in the series and movies would be for Kirk and Spock to be off in their own little world, and background characters look either curious or annoyed. Original Series fans often viewed this (and wrote fan fiction accordingly) as close comrades thinking alike or even incipient telepathy rather than sexual interest, especially after Kirk was shown in a few episodes picking up on things intuitively.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Well, everybody but Spock. "Shore Leave", "The Trouble With Tribbles", "The Galileo Seven", "Spock's Brain". An actual plot point in "Day of the Dove", when the laughter drives the Energy Being away.
• Every Episode Ending: The Enterprise flies off into parts unknown, as the dramatic fanfare plays her out. Very rarely averted. But when it is. . .
• Evil Is Hammy: "The Enemy Within" has Evil!Kirk Chewing the Scenery.
• Evil Twin: "The Enemy Within", which featured Kirk's evil self separated from his good self via transporter malfunction, and "Mirror, Mirror", which featured an entire universe of evil twins.
• Explosive Breeder: The Tribbles are hermaphroditic and born pregnant.
  McCoy: The nearest thing I can figure out is they're born pregnant... which seems to be quite a time saver!
• Explosive Overclocking: Thanks to Kirk's tendency to be an overachiever, the Enterprise's antimatter-powered warp engines - which are tied to all of the ship's main power - were frequently overclocked to get the job done, with varying results. ^note (This is probably the source of all the "she cannae hauld no muir!" parodies of Scotty) Additionally, hand phasers have an "overload" setting which allows them to be used as time bombs.
• Expositron 9000: The ship's computer.
• Exposition of Immortality: Several of the alien beings that the TOS crew encounter have vastly expanded lifespans and/or have dabbled in Earth's history in some way. In "Return to Tomorrow" the Arretians speculate they might have messed with Earth, but Dr. Mulhall says earth life evolved independently, and Spock notes some elements of Vulcan prehistory could be explained by their presence.
  • A key example can be found in the episode "Requiem for Methuselah". In Flint's home, Mr. Spock finds a waltz by Johannes Brahms written in original manuscript in Brahms' own hand, but which is unknown. Likewise, Flint has a collection of Leonardo da Vinci masterpieces that have been recently painted on contemporary canvas with contemporary materials. Flint later admits that he was Brahms and da Vinci, among others.
  • "Who Mourns for Adonais?" reveals that the Greek gods were actually nearly-immortal aliens who helped inspire and build classical Greek culture in exchange for being worshipped.
• The Face: Uhura is the Communications Officer, though Kirk handles important parleys, negotiations, and First Contacts himself.
• Fade Around the Eyes: In the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before", in one scene with Gary Mitchell after he has undergone his transformation, the rest of the screen fades out, leaving only his silver eyes visible.
• Failed Future Forecast: The fact that it was a show set in the future but made while the Soviet Union was still around means that a lot of things said by the Russian Chekov got outdated. There's his My Grandma Can Do Better Than You exchange with Scotty where Scotty tells Chekov that Scotch whisky is a man's drink, and Chekov replies that it was invented by a little old lady from "Leningrad". Chekov also attributes one of the "Russian inwentions" to somebody in Minsk, which was part of the Soviet Union but is now in modern-day Belarus.
• Fallen Hero: Gary Mitchell, John Gill, Garth of Izar.
• Familial Chiding: The Power Trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were forever chiding one another, though usually in a respectful and supportive way.
  • In "The Immunity Syndrome" Spock is in a shuttlecraft, adrift, and losing power. Kirk gives the order to bring the shuttle aboard, but Spock, fearing such a delay would endanger the ship, tries to warn them off. McCoy is having none of it.
    McCoy: Shut up, Spock! We're rescuing you! (nods at Jim, who nods back)
    Spock: (Fascinating Eyebrow) Why thank you, Captain McCoy.
• Fan of the Past: Sulu and his Fleeting Passionate Hobbies, which the rest of the crew regard as unusual for the time period.
• Fanservice: Everywhere, and actually pretty equal-opportunity.
  • Almost any outfit worn by the girl-of-the-week, and those famous Starfleet miniskirts. Most were designed by William Ware Theiss, Trope Codifier and Trope Namer for the Theiss Titillation Theory. You could show an AMAZING amount of skin as long as it did not include belly buttons or the underside of the wearer's breasts. Legend has it that when Sherry Jackson walked into the NBC commissary wearing her Andrea costume from "What Little Girls Are Made Of"—bell-bottoms and two straps crossed over her chest—forks stopped halfway between plate and mouth. And dear god, "Mirror, Mirror" shows that Uhura has nice abs (actress Nichelle Nichols was, after all, a trained dancer).
  • For people more into the men, the original uniforms, even untouched, were particularly flattering. The tendency forKirk to get his shirt off or torn certainly counts, too. "Charlie X" features Kirk shirtless and in tights. It's very distracting. Also, Sulu goes topless in "The Naked Time".
  • And then for the fetish crowd, there's "Patterns of Force" with its whips, chains, and shirtlessness.
• Fantastically Challenging Patient:
  • "The Devil in the Dark" has a mining colony be terrorized by an unknown creature. Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock explore the mine, and find the creature - a Horta. When it advances, they fire their phasers at it, creating a wound and causing it to retreat. However, once Spock conducts a psychic rapport with the creature, he and Kirk realize it's a brood mother defending her egg clutch. Doctor McCoy is brought in to heal the creature, which he does with silicon-based spackling compound. This ad hoc bandage works well, to the doctor's surprise.
  • In "Journey To Babel", Bones performs surgery on Spock's father Sarek. As a Vulcan, Sarek's organs are arranged a bit differently than a human (his heart is where a human's liver is, for example), and Spock is the only crew member who can donate blood to him.
  • The episode "Spock's Brain" has a humanoid alien incapacitate the crew of the Enterprise. Upon recovery, they discover that she has absconded Spock's brain, leaving his body alive but mindless. It becomes the episode's mission to track down the brain thief and recover Spock's brain before his body fails from lack of purpose. Bones is ultimately able to operate on Spock and get his brain back in.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Dr. McCoy seems full of it, insulting Spock's "green blood," "computer" mind, and other Vulcan traits. Kirk and Spock often comment on the differences between Vulcans and Humans, but in a Gentleman Snarker way without any malice.
  • Spock gives back as good as he gets with his snarking about "human emotion." However, the context makes it clear that this is nothing more than banter amongst good friends and colleagues. Anyone but Kirk, Spock, McCoy, or (occasionally) Scotty trying to invoke this trope gets smacked down hard (usually—and appropriately—by Kirk, but Scotty does it to a junior officer in at least one episode).
  • Several episodes also revolve around two alien species' hatred of each other for no good reason.
• Fascinating Eyebrow: When Spock raises his eyebrow, he says "fascinating" very nearly every time.
• Feigning Healthiness: Whilst transporting numerous dignitaries in "Journey To Babel", Captain Kirk is hospitalised by an assassin and Spock takes over command of the Enterprise. Meanwhile, Spock's father Sarek (one of the diplomats) needs a blood transfusion, with Spock as the only viable donor. However, as the quantity needed would also put him out of action for several days, Spock's sense of duty won't allow him to relinquish command whilst the ship is still in danger. To avoid him being responsible for his father's death, Kirk fakes an early recovery to retake command. He initially plans to simply hand over control to Scotty and return to his own treatment once the operation has started, but at that moment the Enterprise is attacked, forcing Kirk to stay on the bridge during the battle in spite of his wounds.
• Female Gaze: The show had a loving relationship with Kirk’s ass, including a lingering shot of it as he walks out of his quarters in “The Corbomite Maneuver”. Nichelle Nichols in “Where No Man…” discussed the trope, summing up why female fans responded so well with both Kirk and Spock; Spock was emotionally unavailable, leaving women to want to get through to him, and Kirk was emotionally open as a man, when not many male characters were like that.
• The Final Temptation: In "This Side of Paradise", the spores caused the target to be content with living a simple comfortable life, abandoning any greater ambitions.
• Food and Animal Attraction: In "The Cage", during one of the illusions the Talosians create for Captain Pike, a horse starts nuzzling his jacket pocket in search of the sugar therein.
• Forbidden Fruit: In "Requiem for Methuselah", the only part of Flint's mansion that Rayna Kapec is forbidden to enter is one specific room. Guess where she wants to go more than anywhere else? Flint doesn't want her to go in there for a good reason. It's the laboratory where she was created: she's a humanoid robot. The clue is when she tells Kirk that the area just outside that is the place she goes when she's troubled and wants to think things over.
• Forceful Kiss: Deela plants one twice on Kirk in “Wink Of An Eye”, who struggles against her both times and is more concerned that all of his crew are in slow motion. Any other kisses between them are him trying to get her guard down. He gets a few of these in general, as well as can aggressively kiss women himself if he’s desperate or doing a particularly cold con.
• Force-Field Door: The ship's brig has one of these.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In “Court Martial”, much is made of how Kirk has devoted his life to the service, and he could finally have had a breakdown, causing a lapse in judgement. Later episodes will have him genuinely messing up, and more on how his Married to the Job life is unhealthy, getting taunted in “Shore Leave” about how he can sleep forever if he wants to.
  • “Miri” is Close to Home for Kirk, Bones and Spock. For Spock it’s being between two worlds (a carrier, but still can’t go back to the ship), for Kirk we’ll see in “Conscience Of The King” why he assumes kids would just want comfort after a massacre, and for Bones, who had to let his father die, he has to race to find a cure before the last one of them goes mad and kills himself.
  • In “What Little Girls Are Made Of”, Kirk and his robot clone have a discussion about food, which ends by Robot Kirk (who knows Kirk’s backstory) smugly telling the real one he’ll never starve. A few episodes later, we find out that as a child, Kirk was a survivor of a famine-induced massacre.
• Forgets to Eat: Spock, occasionally.
  • In "Amok Time", McCoy uses the fact that Spock hasn't eaten for three days in an attempt to convince Kirk that something is wrong, and Kirk dismisses it as simply being Spock in one of his contemplative phases.
  • Another example is "The Paradise Syndrome", where Spock hardly eats for weeks while studying the obelisk.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Everyone who got killed on the show. Deconstructed in the movies, movie novels and the All There in the Manual bios, as Kirk intentionally tries to forget about losses, because otherwise he can't deal. There's a tinch of evidence for this in the show too, as some characters like Dr. Korby or Sam Kirk are alluded to in episodes before they get axed, but never after.
• Forgot the Call: In "The Paradise Syndrome", Kirk loses his memory and becomes a simple farmer, living on a planet with a bunch of displaced Native Americans.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Trelane ("The Squire of Gothos"), the Organians ("Errand of Mercy"), the Thasians ("Charlie X"), the Metrons ("Arena"), and the Kelvans (who get stuck in that form in "By Any Other Name.")
• Frequently-Broken Unbreakable Vow: Captain Kirk's willingness to break the Prime Directive whenever he needs to save the Enterprise and/or a "stagnant" culture is well known. He's also a hypocrite on the issue, condemning Captain Tracy in "The Omega Glory" for doing something he has done before and will do again.
• Freudian Trio: Kirk (Ego), Spock (Superego) and McCoy (Id) form the page image for this trope.
• A Friend in Need: How the Enterprise crew sticks by each other, through thick and thin.
  • Spock risks his career, and possibly his life, for his former captain (Pike) in "The Menagerie". Kirk does the same for Spock in "Amok Time", and again in the third movie.
• Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't: Spock has a very good relationship with his crewmates (particularly Kirk and McCoy) considering he's culturally required to be The Stoic, but he has severe issues with his father, to the point where they didn't speak to one another as family for almost two decades. Stories involving his family show a different and troubled side to Spock.
• FTL Test Blunder: "The Naked Time" has Spock and Scotty performing a Dangerous Forbidden Technique to restart the Enterprise's warp engines after they'd been shut down. It was an untried technique, with the possible consequence of blowing up the ship, but not doing it would guarantee crashing on a collapsing planet. Fortunately, the only consequence of the forced restart was that the Enterprise was flung three days back in time, introducing the idea of using the warp drive for time travel to the series, which would feature in other episodes and the franchise as a whole.
• The Gadfly: Chekov and his constant, deliberately erroneous references to Glorious Mother Russia. It's made very clear that he only does it to mess with people's heads.
• Garden of Eden: The Enterprise bumps into enough Eden-like planets for there to be at least one about to be centered around Paradise per season.
  • The paradise planet in "That Side of Paradise" is a lush world where no one can die and fills everyone with an innocent joy, even Spock. Spock outright calls it "a true Eden" and the episode ends with Kirk and McCoy concluding that the trouble they had on the planet means man was meant to leave the Garden of Eden.
  • The name "Eden" pops up in the episode "The Way to Eden", which is about a group of space hippies searching for the mythical paradise Eden. It turns out to be a False Utopia. Although Spock strongly encourages the hippies to continue to look for the real Eden, or make it themselves.
  • The Garden is also referenced in the episode "The Apple", where a race of innocent humanoids serve a "god", Vaal, a computer shaped like a serpent head. According to Chekov, the original Garden was located just outside Moscow. After Kirk and company save the day and destroy the false god, the knowledge of good and evil is then known by the inhabitants. Spock makes a reference and Kirk asks if there is anyone onboard who remotely resembles Satan.
    Spock: No-one to my knowledge.
• Genocide Survivor: In "The Conscience of the King", Kirk is stated to be a survivor of a genocide on the planet Tarsus IV, where the Governor ordered thousands of citizens killed to ensure the rest could survive, using eugenics to decide who lived and died. Oddly, Kirk's status as a survivor of a genocide is rarely touched on elsewhere in the series.
• George Lucas Altered Version: The late 2000's saw the series get a high-definition transfer for the series, but created special edition versions to show in syndication with remaking the existing visual effects shot for shot, some enhanced visuals to expand the environment and some newly created shots to help flesh out the story (largely establishing shots to help capture the look of other planets and cultures, including one of Starfleet Command). By and large the effort was made to capture the look and feel of the original FX with updated CGI renders rather than trying to play catch up on later parts of the franchise, though established Trek production legend Mike Okuda was the one to oversee it.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man
  • In the episode "The Naked Time", Kirk does this to Spock. After several slaps, Spock finally retaliates and sends Kirk flying across the room. It does seem to work though.
  • Kirk attempts it on McCoy, who is under the influence of the Lotus-Eater Machine in "The Return of the Archons". This one isn't so successful.
• Get Back to the Future: "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", "All Our Yesterdays".
• Get It Over With: Dr. McCoy has a version of this when he is attacked by Khan in Sickbay in "Space Seed":
  Dr. McCoy: Well, either choke me or cut my throat. Make up your mind!
  Khan: English... I thought I'd dreamed hearing it. Where am I?
  Dr. McCoy: You're in bed, holding a knife at your doctor's throat.
  Khan: Answer my question.
  Dr. McCoy: It would be most effective if you would cut the carotid artery, just under the left ear.

• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Gary Mitchell gains these when he gains godlike powers.
• God Guise: A recurring theme:
  • In "The Paradise Syndrome", an amnesiac Kirk is mistaken for a deity by transplanted American Indians on a distant planet.
  • "Who Mourns for Adonais?" has an actual surviving Greek God who reveals he's just a powerful alien who had become too used to being worshiped by mortals.
  • In "The Omega Glory", Spock is mistaken for the devil. (This was actually a real-life objection the producers had to his appearance.)
• Godwin's Law of Time Travel: "The City on the Edge of Forever" has a plot where McCoy saving the life of Kirk's Girl of the Week causes a peace movement that leads to the US losing WWII and the Federation never existing. The episode ends with Kirk letting her die to preserve history.
• Godzilla Threshold: In "A Taste of Armageddon" where Kirk and the landing party are being held captive by a civilization whose leaders' simply will not listen to reason and Kirk see that things are going to go from bad to worse to apocalyptic, he interrupts their leader speaking to Scotty through a communicator. Speaking quickly before he's restrained, he gives Scotty an encrypted order the aliens don't understand (General Order 24). Scotty calls them back to inform them that if they don't play ball, he'll use the Enterprise's weapons to destroy the entire surface area of their planet. His quiet, grim tone when he's telling them this leaves no doubt that he'll go through with it.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: The captains wear gold uniforms. Anyone wearing a Red Shirt is not so lucky. This all changes starting with Star Trek: The Next Generation, however. The command uniforms were originally a greenish shade close to chartreuse, but the color came out on many people's TV sets as yellowish, so eventually the producers threw in the towel and changed them to gold.
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • In "The Alternative Factor", Matter!Lazarus goes stark raving mad upon learning of the existence of his Anti-Matter double and becomes bent on destroying him, even if it means the destruction of both universes.
  • "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" revolves around Kollos, an ambassador of the Medusan race, whose physical appearance is so hideous: or maybe so beautiful: that any humanoid who looks at them directly goes insane. This is a subversion, as Kollos, in contrast with Shoggoths and Eldritch horrors, is clearly a good guy.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • In "Patterns of Force," John Gill, a Human historian, broke the Prime Directive and encouraged the inhabitants of Ekos to institute fascism in order to combat its disorganized anarchy. It worked.
  • In "That Which Survives," a people rendered extinct by disease tried to prevent others from their planet from joining them by setting up a self-defense mechanism. It worked.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • The adults in "Miri" tried to prolong their lives through bioengineering. They ended up creating a disease that did preserve life, but only in children. Adults are killed within a week.
  • "The Ultimate Computer" is meant to replace starship captains, but ends up killing Red Shirts because it is the most efficient way of doing things.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: In "The Savage Curtain", Surak, Spock, and President Lincoln have a hard time understanding the motives and actions of the opposing "evil" side. Only Kirk seems to have a grasp of their potential for deceptiveness and duplicity.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Kirk's usual response to problems when the Kirk Summation just isn't getting the job done. All of the core cast are capable of throwing down when necessary, but Spock especially stands out as a Badass Bookworm with his Vulcan nerve pinch.
  • In "Return of the Archons" Spock decks somebody with an ordinary punch and Kirk says "Isn't that a little old-fashioned?"
• Good Republic, Evil Empire: Why the Federation is unlike the Klingons, according to Kirk.
• Got the Whole World in My Hand: The Terran Empire's sigil from "Mirror, Mirror" shows a dagger stabbed through the Earth.
• Grand Theft Me: In "Turnabout Intruder", the Girl of the Week and Mad Scientist Dr. Janice Lester uses an alien device to swap her mind into Kirk's body (poor, desperate girl) in order to fulfill her dream of being a starship Captain, because, y'know, chicks can't do that stuff in The Future (although it's made fairly clear that her mental instablity and not her gender is what prevented her from achieving success, for which she irrationally blames Kirk)... Anyhoo, Hilarity Ensues, and we get to watch William Shatner act like an Large Ham with a side of girl, instead of the usual Large Ham.
• Grand Theft Prototype: In "The Enterprise Incident", the Starfleet Command sent the Enterprise on a mission to steal a cloaking device so they could learn how to neutralize it.
• The Great Repair: In "The Galileo Seven", an Enterprise shuttlecraft is pulled off course and crashes on an unknown planet. The crew is repeatedly attacked by primitive humanoids, and there's dissent over Commander Spock's decisions while Scotty attempts to repair the shuttle.
• Grudging "Thank You":
  • In the episode "Bread and Circuses" Bones gives Spock a Grudging "Thank You" and receives a Think Nothing of It in return.
    McCoy: Spock, er, I know we've, er, had our disagreements. Er, maybe they're jokes, I don't know. As Jim says, we're not often sure ourselves sometimes. But, er... what I'm trying to say is...
    Spock: Doctor, I am seeking a means of escape. Will you please be brief?
    McCoy: What I'm trying to say is, you saved my life in the arena.
    Spock: Yes, that's quite true.
    McCoy: [indignant] I'm trying to thank you, you pointed-eared hobgoblin!
    Spock: Oh yes, you humans have that emotional need to express gratitude. "You're welcome," I believe is the correct response.
  • There's another one in "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield". One of the aliens of the week is set up as someone who's hotheaded and difficult, but ultimately at least somewhat sympathetic. Viewers get a hint of that second half coming when in his first exchange with Kirk and McCoy, after reacting very angrily to their (perfectly accurate) accusation that he had stolen a Federation ship, the alien visibly pulls himself together enough to thank them quite sincerely for rescuing him.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: In "A Taste of Armageddon", "Space Seed", "All Our Yesterdays", "A Piece of the Action" and "Whom Gods Destroy".
• Gunboat Diplomacy: The Federation brings peace, justice, and brotherhood... and if you don't like it, Captain Kirk brings a phaser.
  • "A Piece of the Action" is the funniest example. Captain Kirk positively revels in giving all the mob chiefs offers they can't refuse.
  • The series was partially inspired by the Horatio Hornblower books.
  • Parodied in a line given to Kirk in one of the classic fan songs, "Star Trekkin'" — "We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill," which was in turn inspired by a scene in one episode where Kirk declares, "We come in peace!" while pointing his phaser at the alien. He never actually said those words.
• Guy on Guy Is Hot: Practically a fandom nod in “Wink Of An Eye”, as Deela notes Kirk “feels great affection for the Vulcan”, and wonders if she can make him demonstrate that, the actress’s tone of voice knowing full well what she’s insinuating.
• Halloween Episode: "Catspaw", which was first broadcast on October 27, 1967.
• Hands-On Approach: In “Requiem For Methuselah”, and as he still has no clue how to play from “Piece Of The Action”, Reyna teaches Kirk to play pool.
• Hate Plague: In "Day of the Dove", an Energy Being that feeds on hate brings the Federation and the Klingons, who are trying to abide by the peace treaty, into conflict. It goes as far as implanting False Memories so that the manipulated will have an extra source of conflict. Those who are killed are somehow brought back to life with their fatal wounds healed to fight again. Once they all figure it out, the creature is repelled from the ship by laughter. Lots and lots of laughter.
• He Who Fights Monsters: This trope is why Alexander, the court jester of the Platonians in "Plato's Stepchildren", refuses to take McCoy's concoction that will give him psychic powers. As much as he loathes Parmen for his abuse, the idea that he could turn out as cruel and manipulative as his master, along with even greater psychic abilities to boot, sickens him even more.
• Helping Another Save Face:
  • "This Side of Paradise" After Kirk deliberately provokes Spock to anger to kill alien spores manipulating him. Spock says that striking a fellow officer is a court martial offense. It's clear Spock is embarrassed by his emotional behavior, no matter how involuntary. Kirk reasons, logically as Spock notes, that if they're both in the brig no one can build the device needed to free the rest of the crew.
  • "Amok Time" has Spock in the grip of blood fever during a bout of pon farr. Spock explains the situation to Kirk and McCoy, who both tell him that they'll never tell another soul about the private information he's divulged to them. This is especially poingnant for the Doctor, as he and Spock are Vitriolic Best Buds, and it would be easy for him to mock Spock over it, but he never does.
• The Hero: Captain Kirk
• Heroic BSoD: Decker in "The Doomsday Machine"... that is until he faces the planet-killer one-on-one.
  • And Spock in Amok Time when he believes he has killed Kirk.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Kirk and Spock (though considering how often the series dips into Ho Yay territory it could possibly be described as Bisexual Life-Partners).
• High-Heel–Face Turn: Frequently with women Kirk seduced.
• Historical Domain Superperson: In the episode "Requiem for Methuselah" the Enterprise crew meets an old human named Flint who is both immortal and possessed of superhuman strength. Flint was originally born around 3800 BC and lived as many notable historical figures during his long lifetime including King Solomon, Alexander the Great, Johannes Brahms, Leonardo da Vinci, and Lazarus. He kept his immortality secret by letting each persona eventually "die" and establishing a new identity elsewhere.
• Historical Rap Sheet: In "Wolf in the Fold" it is discovered that Redjac is a noncorporeal lifeform which has been a serial killer on several planets, including Earth where it was Jack the Ripper as well as a few other unnamed killers (in China in 1952 and Kiev in 1974).
• Hollow World: "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched The Sky" has a variation, a shell covering an artificial planetoid to hold the atmosphere in.
• Hollywood Torches: In "Errand of Mercy" and "Catspaw".
• Holodeck Malfunction: Subverted in the episode "Shore Leave". The planet's safety protocols are working just fine, but the landing party doesn't know that and thinks they are actually in danger. The protocols do break down when the Enterprise returns to the planet in the animated series because the guy in charge died in the meantime and the AI chose to go rogue through sheer boredom.
• Honor Before Reason: In "Spectre of the Gun", Kirk refuses to ambush the Earps, in spite of the severe danger they present. Even after one of them kills Chekhov, he doesn't kill the defeated party.
• Hotter and Sexier: Look at “The Corbomite Maneuver” in comparison to “The Cage”. The women’s uniforms go from turtlenecks and pants to mini-dresses, and stern Chaste Hero Pike gets replaced with Captain “tits out in the hallway” Kirk.
• Human Aliens: Most alien races encountered are indistinguishable from humans, even the Klingons; they weren't given rubber foreheads until the films. This is mostly due to budget reasons, though it's odd that only Spock requires a disguise whenever the crew infiltrates an alien world.
• Humans Are Interesting: Or fascinating, even.
• Humans Need Aliens: The Aegis (Gary Seven's alien overlords) routinely protect civilizations from destroying themselves. Fridge Logic issues arises, as they are only ever seen in one episode, in which they operate in the past (20th century).

I–L

• I Can Still Fight!: Justified, when Kirk is injured but insists on being on the bridge because Spock is needed to give a vital transplant to his father. However, the end of the episode suggests Kirk hates being cooped up in Sickbay.
  • Spock as well, in "Operation Annihilate" where he is in unbearable pain as a result of being infected by an alien parasite and nearly driven insane. He still insists on returning to duty, claiming (truthfully) that he can control the pain with Vulcan techniques.
• I, Noun: "I, Mudd".
• I Have Your Wife: Plenty of villains seem to know that threatening Spock will get Kirk to cooperate (at least for a while), and vice versa. Sometimes it’s “I have your crew”/”I have your captain” but mostly it’s just those two.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Kirk and Spock in "This Side of Paradise"; Kirk has to get Spock angry enough so he can overcome the influence of the mind-altering spores. It worked a bit better than Kirk was counting on.
• Idiosyncratic Cultural Gesture: "Journey to Babel" reveals that Vulcan couples extend their pointer and middle fingers from their hand and touch the tips as a sign of being in a relationship.
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: Trope Maker; Dr. McCoy's Catchphrase whenever called upon to perform a task or give advice outside of his expertise.
• Imperiled in Pregnancy: In "Friday's Child", a usurper named Ma'ab kills Aka'ar, the Teer (tribal king), in an attempted coup. He then demands Aka'ar's pregnant wife Eleen and her unborn son killed, as the unborn son is the true heir of succession. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy have to go on the run with Eleen to keep her safe.
• Implacable Man:
  • The Gorn in Arena shrugs off injuries that would kill a human and is very strong, but isn't very agile. Kirk finally manages to stop it using an improvised cannon.
  • The two aliens in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" are the last members of their respective races and still continue to fight it out.
• Impostor-Exposing Test: In "The Trouble with Tribbles", the Tribble dislike for Klingons is used to identify the Klingon spy disguised as a human.
• Improvised Bandage: A mysterious alien creature has been menacing some Federation miners, and Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock investigate. When they encounter the creature, it ignores warnings to stay back, so they fire phasers at it. The creature is wounded, and retreats. Later, the pair discover the creature is intelligent, and menaced the miners to protect its eggs. A silicone-based spackling compound is used to patch the creature's wound, and its hatchlings start digging tunnels faster than the miners ever could.
• Improvised Weapon: The rough-and-tumble fights often involve these. Kirk in particular is a master: ropes, pillows, and that stick thing resembling a reactor control rod he uses to beat Khan.
• In-Camera Effects: The series would achieve the shaking of the bridge when under attack by simply shaking the camera and getting the crew to wobble about. Later SF productions with a bigger budget, such as the Trek films, replaced the cheesy effect with Practical Effects: sets would be placed on top of a large platform and the camera would be still while the entire set was shaken. That would be counted as Practical Effects.
• Industrialized Evil: In "A Taste of Armageddon", the Enterprise discovers two planets are involved in a bizarre war in which computers simulate the conflict, and civilians deemed "killed" in the simulation are required to report to disintegration chambers. The people willingly go to their deaths, believing that in doing so, they are preventing an actual war from breaking out.
• Inertial Impalement: In "The Menagerie", during the illusionary battle between Captain Pike and a Rigelian warrior, Pike is kneeling in a courtyard holding up a broken spearhead braced against the ground. The warrior jumps down on him and impales himself on the spearhead.
• Inexplicable Cultural Ties: A key element of Roddenberry's goal for the series, to tell stories applicable to Earth in The '60s. The alien-culture-of-the-week will therefore be similar enough to one from Earth to get the point across. "Bread and Circuses" acknowledges the prevalence of these and implies that the phenomenon is understood by Federation scientists, providing an alternate Trope Namer, the Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planet Development.
• Innocuously Important Episode: “Shore Leave”, character-wise, as Finnegan calling Kirk old leads to Kirk actually getting an edge in their fighting, and upgrades his wish to just rest for a few days to a deeper need to “sleep forever”. “The Deadly Years" is similar, showing Kirk’s denial over his getting older and less competent, taking it the worst out of all of them, and learning the lesson that he needs to be young in order to be a good Captain. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan even does a Continuity Nod to it.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: Kirk and Spock’s fight in “Amok Time” gets… grindy. Spock choking Kirk out cures him of Pon Farr, and while said choking is happening, Kirk starts to put his legs around Spock’s back.
• Involuntary Group Split: Happens to Kirk and Spock in "Devil in the Dark".
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Why Sarek married Amanda Grayson: "At the time, it seemed the logical thing to do."
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: invoked Used by Spock as a Logic Bomb in "I, Mudd":
  Spock: [to Alice 27] I love you. [to Alice 210] However, I hate you.
  Alice 210: But I'm identical in every way with Alice 27.
  Spock: Yes, of course. That is exactly why I hate you; because you are identical.
  [both Alices succumb to the logic bomb]
  Spock: Fascinating.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Garth uses this on Dr. Cory and Kirk in "Whom Gods Destroy" in an attempt to learn the transporter code word. Naturally, it doesn't work.
• Jack the Ripoff: Subverted: the killer actually is Jack the Ripper, who was really a noncorporeal alien possessing human bodies.
• Jekyll & Hyde: In "The Enemy Within", a Teleporter Accident splits Kirk into Good and Evil halves. They both have to be convinced that they need each other before the split can be undone.
• Jerkass Has a Point: In “The Trouble With Tribbles”, with the exception of Chekov, nobody in the bar objects when the Klingon calls Kirk a swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood, which gets the betrayed Puppy-Dog Eyes look from Kirk later on.
• Jerk Jock: Though not a jock, Kirk was tormented endlessly by upperclassman Finnegan when he was younger. One of his fantasies is finally getting to punch him out.
• Job-Stealing Robot:
  • The titular device in "The Ultimate Computer" is designed to run a starship with a minimal crew; the Enterprise is chosen for its test run.
  • In "A Taste of Armageddon" entire governments have been replaced this way.
• Judicial Wig: When Trelane puts Kirk on trial for defying him in "The Squire of Gothos", he wears a white and long curly wig along with his judges' robes.
• Just Testing You: Kirk and Scotty set up a challenge/response password before Kirk beamed down to a planet in order to prevent imposters from getting beamed up. Naturally a shapeshifter takes Kirk's form and tries to get Scotty to beam him up. When he doesn't know the password, he tries to cover it up by saying that he was just testing Scotty. Scotty catches on immediately and concludes that Kirk must be in trouble, since the real Kirk would never "test" him like that.
• Kill the Cutie: Edith Keeler in "The City on the Edge of Forever". After all, You Can't Fight Fate.
• Kill the Poor: In the episode "The Cloud Minders", on the planet Ardana, rather than being killed, the poor are enslaved and forced to live out their entire lives underground.
• Kirk Summation: The Trope Namer and Trope Maker. Kirk (or occasionally another character) would often either try to reason with the episode's antagonist or put them in their place before ending things.
• Knockout Gas: In the episode "Space Seed". After Khan takes over the Enterprise, Kirk orders that all decks be flooded with Neural Gas, which would render everyone aboard unconscious. That attempt fails, but later the attempt succeeds.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • Watching in production order, Spock is understating it when he says the crew has had a few rough months in "Shore Leave", with two court martials, Kirk being revealed to have survived a genocide and suffering Mind Rape helped on by the ship psychologist, Spock getting a load of racism, everyone going insane on a planet where all the adults die, and Chapel losing her fiance.
  • Gene Coon in “A Piece Of The Action” did a gentle poke of how much a Lust Object Kirk was in the show, with Krako putting his hand on Kirk’s shoulder guiding him away, and both Shatner and Nimoy’s faces have Here We Go Again! expressions.
  • The “alternate earth” of “Miri” has Kirk saying in voiceover, just on the edge of sighing, “it seems impossible, but there it is”.
• Large Ham: William Shatner's Kirk is legendary... for the... oddly placed... pauses... and emphasis... in his sentences. Although like most things, this has been heavily exaggerated by people trying to make fun of him. This style is actually most notable when he is being possessed and/or imitated by another person. For the most part he gave Kirk a subtle, sly, devil-may-care attitude that made the character famous in the first place.
  • WEEEEE...THE PEEE-PLE!
  • IIIIII'M CAPTAIN KIIIIIIIRK!
  • The actual reason was revealed recently: Control freak Roddenberry often rewrote, and re-rewrote, and re-re-wrote the scripts up to the last nanosecond, such that it became very difficult to memorize lines. Instead of asking "Line?" and ruining the take, Shatner would laboriously strive to remember what he was supposed to say, creating the effect.
• Last of His Kind: "Who Mourns for Adonais?", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". "Devil in the Dark" plays with this one; the Horta is merely the last of her generation, trying to guard over a massive hoard of eggs until they hatch.
• Last-Second Term of Respect:
  • "The Trouble With Tribbles": Kirk asks Scotty what it was that the Klingons said that made him disobey orders and start a fist fight with them. Scotty passionately replies, "They called the Enterprise a garbage scow! Sir."
  • "Friday's Child": Upon learning that the new baby destined to one day rule a tribe is named Leonard James Akaar, Spock cannot help but be flabbergasted by the smugness of Kirk and McCoy.

    Spock: [genuinely exasperated] I think you're both going to be insufferably pleased with yourselves for at least a month. Sir.

• Later-Installment Weirdness: Star Trek began as a semi-hard science fiction series^note Hard enough for people to make much of the technology real about a Human run elite paramilitary organization that sent out their best Starship to explore outer space. Many plots revolved around how the humans handled encountering the strangeness of the universe, while occasionally segueing into Space Opera. Since then, newer writers have incorporated many elements of contemporary and post-contemporary science-fiction, with the following installments sometimes resembling Star Wars outings.
• Leitmotif:
  • Mr. Spock was first given his distinctive theme music in the episode "Amok Time". The wistful, romantic melody is usually provided by a bass guitar: a deliberate choice by composer Gerald Fried, as he felt it would be a terrible match for such a utilitarian instrument^note tell that to Jaco Pastorius or Sting!, a juxtaposition that suits the dichotomy of Spock's character.
  • Scotty also has his own leitmotif, typically used in lighter moments. It is prominently heard in both "The Trouble with Tribbles" and "By Any Other Name".
• Let's You and Him Fight: In "Amok Time" Spock's "fiancée" has chosen another, and elects to invoke a ritual in which the two fight for her hand. He's perfectly willing to fight Spock for her, but she elects Kirk as her champion instead - for reasons that Spock later describes as "logical." Unfortunately, since Vulcans have a really bad case of mating fever, Spock is not in his right mind at the time and fully capable of killing his much weaker captain and Kirk (who agreed to be the champion because he thought he could simply throw the fight and walk away) doesn't know it's a Duel to the Death till it's too late to back out.
• Liberty Over Prosperity: In "Space Seed", after Khan's attempt to take over the Enterprise fails, Kirk says that he and his followers can either be punished under Starfleet regulations (which would presumably involve a long prison sentence) or accept exile on an uninhabited planet.
  Khan: Have you ever read Milton, Captain?
  Kirk: I understand.
  [later]
  Scott: It's a shame for a good Scotsman to admit it, but I'm not up on Milton.
  Kirk: The statement Lucifer made when he fell into the pit. "It is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven."
• Licensed Pinball Tables: There were technically two:
  • Bally's Star Trek, originally featured the crew in their television designs. Soon after production, however, it was redecorated to bring it closer to Star Trek: The Motion Picture instead.
  • Data East's Star Trek was released as part of the 25th Anniversary of the television series. Features oodles of character cameos on the playfield and a great transporter effect on the backglass.
• Lima Syndrome: Deela kidnaps Kirk to be a Sex Slave in “Wink Of An Eye”, and demands the right to like him. Of course she wants him to be docile, and then decides she likes him better as a Defiant Captive, so her assertions to the trope are nebulous.
• Literal Maneater: The salt vampire from the episode "The Man Trap" mostly operates this way, though there is one exception where it takes on a hunky male form to attract Lt. Uhura.
• Literal Split Personality: In "The Enemy Within", Kirk gets split into his good half and his evil half.
• Literary Allusion Title: Rather famous for the grandiloquent episode titles. There's "The Conscience of the King", "Bread and Circuses", and "Is There In Truth No Beauty" among others.
• Lobotomy: The episode "Spock's Brain", in which aliens, to put it simply, steal Spock's brain, and the episode revolves around the Enterprise crew getting it back and reattaching it.
• Logic Bomb: One of Kirk's favorite tactics for dealing with rogue computers; it invariably causes a shutdown, and occasionally a self-destruct. Examples include "The Changeling", "I, Mudd", "Return of the Archons", "The Ultimate Computer", and "Wolf In The Fold".
• Long-Lived: The children in "Miri" (hundreds of years) and Mr. Flint in "Requiem for Methuselah" (six thousand years). The tie-in novel Cry of the Onlies has Flint coming to the children's planet to be a mentor for them, especially those who chose to have treatments so they would age at a normal rate.
• Loss of Inhibitions: In "The Naked Time," the crew experiences strange feelings and behaviors after a landing party investigating a mysterious disaster beams back to the ship, gradually infecting almost everyone. Dr. McCoy ultimately realizes the water on the planet had mutated, causing it to affect the brain like alcohol. While some effects more resemble delusions (e.g., Sulu calling Kirk "Richelieu", unless he's playacting), a lot of them (Sulu leaving his station early to fence at the gym, Christine Chapel making an Anguished Declaration of Love to Spock, Spock breaking down in tears over his inability to accept either part of his heritage completely and Kirk confessing how stressed he feels because of his position) fall under the lack of inhibitions that alcohol typically causes.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: This was the plot of the original pilot, "The Cage," though Pike sees through the ruse easily. However, another character trapped there doesn't want to leave the setup—and knows that it's all an illusion—as after having been horrifically mangled in a crash the aliens were able to restore the illusion of her original beautiful appearance. They give her a illusory Captain Pike to live with until the real Pike returns to the planet in a later episode made up of the original pilot.
• Low Culture, High Tech:
  • In "A Private Little War", Kirk and McCoy discover that the Klingons gave flintlock weapons to village-dwelling native people who didn't have guns before. Instead of their tradition of peaceful trade with the nearby hunter-gatherer people, the Klingons encourage the villagers to attack them. To restore the balance of power, Kirk provides the hunter-gatherers with similar weapons. McCoy compares their situation to the "Brush Wars" of the mid-20th Century.
  • "Bread and Circuses" features a world with 1960s-level tech (television, firearms) but a society that mirrors the Roman Empire, complete with the slow rise of Christianity (albeit 2000 years late).
• Ludicrous Precision: Spock's figures, constantly. Discussed in "Errand of Mercy".

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