Star Trek The Original Series / Tropes M to Z

Star Trek: The Original Series contains the following tropes:

Tropes A-L | Tropes M-Z

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M–P

• Machine Empathy: Scotty could often sense when something was wrong with the Enterprise from subtle changes in her "feel". Possibly justified, because machines cause vibrations that engineers familiar with said machine can actually feel when touching it, such as through the hull of a starship—Scotty himself confirms this in the NextGen episode "Relics" when he compares the Enterprise-D to his Enterprise with Picard.
• Made a Slave: Season three has the dubious honour of trying to do this five times in one season, with Bones, Kirk, Spock, Chapel and Uhura used for entertainment in “Plato’s Stepchildren”, Bones again forced to stay in “For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky” and “The Empath”, Kirk kidnapped for breeding in “Wink Of An Eye” because he’s “pretty”, and captured in “Mark Of Gideon” to spread an STD and stem overpopulation.
• Mad Love: Nurse Chapel and Spock (well, on Chapel's side, at least), McGivers and Khan.
• The Mafia: "A Piece of the Action" is an entire episode revolving around a Mafia planet.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Kirk and his highest bridge officers often beam into danger despite the presence of specialists on board for that purpose.
• Male Gaze: In "Mudd's Women", the camera rather obviously pans to the women's derrieres as they walk along the corridors of the Enterprise after leaving the transporter room.
• The Man in Front of the Man: In "Patterns of Force", a society of Human Aliens has emulated the regime of Nazi Germany, complete with atrocities committed in for racial and cultural motives. The officers of the regime carry out the orders of their Fuhrer, who they only see via television broadcast. It turns out later that the Fuhrer was drugged and under the control of his Deputy. It was the Deputy Fuhrer who was really responsible for giving orders to the Nazi forces, while the true Fuhrer had good intentions all along.
• Mars Needs Women: "Mudd's Women"—Mudd is transporting the women to provide companionship to lonely colonists.
• Martyr Without a Cause: All three of the main trio have admitted at some point that peace and happiness are not regular emotions for them, and are just that little too willing to sacrifice themselves. The kicker is that Bones will complain when Kirk and Spock act like self-sacrificial idiots, but then do the exact same thing himself.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: Pike—>Kirk—>Sulu (although seen briefly in TOS, the Pike-Kirk relationship is only shown in any detail in the reboot and in the non-canon Expanded Universe). Chekov appears to be a mentee of Kirk as well, but ends up on a different career path (in Starfleet Intelligence as opposed to starship command) after the second movie.
• Mate or Die: The Vulcan pon-farr period provides a biological imperative that strong, as seen with Spock in "Amok Time". The Federation has no knowledge of it, as Vulcans do not speak of it even among themselves.
• Mechanistic Alien Culture:
  • The drone-like Lawgivers in "Return of the Archons." In that case, the drone-like humanoids were controlled by an intelligent supercomputer.
  • The original builders of the Androids on Exo III were also stated to have been a society of biological creatures who ruined their homeworld and retreated underground where they became a more mechanized, machine-like society.
  • The Kelvans from the Andromeda Galaxy are implied to have a culture like this; they are completely organic beings, but in their true form they experience none of the sensory distractions of humanoids, and consider themselves much more efficient. They go about trying to take over the Milky Way with very straightforward methods (transforming Kirk's crew into vulnerable dust-cubes that only their technology can restore to human form, for example) but without any of the typical Trek villains' hamminess. The Federation is saved from them by the fact that, when in artificial humanoid form, the Kelvans become Sense Freaks and can be incapacitated in a variety of ways, such as by the effects of alcohol or unfamiliar emotions like pleasure or jealousy.
  • The Eyemorg (humanoid female) society in the infamous episode "Spock's Brain" were totally reliant on a mechanized underground industrial complex run by advanced computers (for which purpose they tried to steal "Spock's Brain," because they lacked the knowledge to maintain this infrastructure themselves); this was in contrast to the primitive, Ice Age-like culture of males that lived on the surface.
  • The Fabrini who lived aboard a generational asteroid ship, which they all believed was actually a planet, were similarly run by an advanced, tyrannical computer called The Oracle. The Fabrini were less "rigidly mechanical" and more "rigidly traditional" though, the rigid traditions being enforced by The Oracle.
• Mechanical Abomination
  • The Doomsday Machine is a planet-eating, extragalactic superweapon hypothesized to have destroyed its creators, and is now moving through the Federation's part of the galaxy. It's practically indestructible, and has an anti-proton beam capable of easily obliterating most starships, and consumes entire planets. In the end, it isn't even destroyed, just shut down due to internal damage.
  • Nomad is a hybrid of human and alien probes which travels through space on a mission to "sterilize" planets, i.e. kill all organic life forms for no other reason than they are imperfect. It was first encountered after killing four billion people, is powerful enough to easily outgun the Enterprise despite only being about five feet long, and can bring the dead back to life. It was only beaten by showing it that it, too, was imperfect, motivating it to self-destruct.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Only three female personnel are killed in the whole series, whereas dozens of male Starfleet personnel are killed. In one of the three aversions, "By Any Other Name", the Black Dude Dies First trope is also averted, as the white female redshirt is killed by the Kelvans (sparing the black male redshirt in the party) when the Kelvan could have killed both of them just as easily.
• Military Science Fiction: The U.S.S. Enterprise is the focus of the show, and she is explicitly a military vessel in the service of The Federation Star Fleet. However, due the fact that the Enterprise operates entirely in deep space, her crew complement is not comprised entirely of soldiers. Instead, the crew consists of spacemen who are specifically qualified to operate the ship. This doesn't in any way reduce her status as a military craft: the Enterprise is designed to and fully expected to both facilitate and withstand combat, and is often diverted from her explorations - by order from Starfleet Command - to perform various missions of a purely military nature, such as stealing sensitive technology from the Romulan Empire, or preventing the Klingons from establishing a base in a tactically important area. This strongly contrasts some of the later installments, particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation, which takes on a much more relaxed tone in comparison.
  "Although the Enterprise is a military vessel, its organization is only semi-military. The "enlisted men" category does not exist. Star Trek goes on the assumption that every man and woman aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise is the equivalent of a qualified astronaut, and therefore an officer." - The Making of Star Trek, page 209.
  "I'm a soldier, not a diplomat." - James Kirk
• Mind Rape:
  • Used by the Platonians in "Plato's Stepchildren", with the most blatant example being Parmen forcing Spock to laugh and cry.
  • Mirror!Spock forcibly mind-melding with Dr. McCoy in "Mirror, Mirror".
  • The Neural Neutralizer in "Dagger of the Mind" was used for this. Upon learning that it works, Dr Noel inserts a one night stand into Kirk’s mind when it didn’t go that way originally, though she draws the line at Adams installing an obsessive love for her in him.
• Minored In Ass Kicking: The reserved, cerebral Spock and his skill at hand-to-hand fighting (Vulcan nerve pinch! Judo chop!).Helped by his Vulcan strength.
• Minovsky Physics: In contrast to later installments of the series, a lack of techno-babble was specifically enforced in Star Trek's original Writer's Guide(linked here). This extended to fictional materials introduced for the plot. Even now, Star Trek has grown to have a very long list of fictional substances and their properties: very rarely is any material given new abilities to fill a plot need: instead, the writers invent entirely new materials.
  • Dilithium crystals are a fundamental aspect of the Star Trek universe, as all Federation starships use them for their Faster Than Light engines. They have basically one important property: they are able to safely interact with antimatter to produce a controlled reaction. They cannot be replicated and can decay in quality, which adds to some tension in either repairing the imperfections in the existing crystal, or finding new sources of dilithium.
  • Star Trek's technical manuals all try to provide consistent explanations for the science and technology of the series.
• Mirror Universe: "Mirror, Mirror" features an alternate universe where the Federation is part of the tyrannical Terran empire.
• Monster Is a Mommy: "The Devil in the Dark" has the Horta, which is only protecting its eggs.
• Monster Munch: While Red Shirts die in great numbers on this show, they are sometimes killed by the Monster of the Week, often in the first scene.
  • "Obsession". A couple of red shirt security personnel are drained of blood and killed by the vampire cloud in the opening scene.
  • "The Devil in the Dark". Two miners and an Enterprise Security man are destroyed by the Horta's acid secretions, one in the first scene.
  • "Wolf in the Fold". Several women are slaughtered by the "Jack the Ripper" entity during the episode. One of them dies before the opening credits.
• Monster of the Week: In SF author David Gerrold's book about writing the episode "The Trouble With Tribbles", he recounts seeing the first episode broadcast, which featured a creature that sucked all of the salt out of people's bodies, thereby killing them. He hoped Star Trek wasn't going to turn out to be a Monster of the Week show, which ironically for him, it did. (Only if one considers political intrigue, human(oid) assassins, hostage situations, high tech pseudo wars, missing persons, (sometimes in other times or dimensions), and direct military conflict to (somehow) equal "monsters of the week").
• Mood Lighting: Whenever Kirk is putting the moves on a female (of any species), the lighting softens, playing up the female's sexiness.
• Morality Chain: Kirk keeps Bones and Spock from being at each other’s throats (lampshaded in his final orders in “The Tholian Web”, assuming now that he’s dead the two are locked in mortal combat), Kirk calls Spock the “noblest half of himself”, and Bones keeps the other two from too much self-sacrifice.
• More Hero than Thou:
  • In "The Empath", when aliens offer Kirk the choice of sacrificing McCoy or Spock, McCoy takes out Kirk with drugs. Spock is glad; since this leaves him in command, he can make the sacrifice himself. McCoy proceeds to drug him as well and sacrifice himself.
  • Ensign Garrovick attempts to do this in "Obsession", but Kirk isn't knocked out, and has no intention of sacrificing himself anyway. Just using himself as bait.
• Muggle in Mage Custody: Alexander is a dwarf who is not given the psychokinetic power that the other denizens of Platonius have. As a result, he is treated as a court jester and slave, and subjected to cruel treatment, particularly from Parmen.
• Multinational Team: Each of the bridge crew represents a part of the world (and an alien).
• Mundane Utility:
  • In multiple episodes, they use their phasers to create a heat source, by shooting a rock.
  • In one episode, Yeoman Rand uses a phaser to reheat Kirk's coffee!
• Mundanization: Episodes in which the crew visits Earth's past, or a planet that unusually mimics it, derive a lot of the humor from the Fish out of Water setting.
• The Mutiny:
  • In "Turnabout Intruder", when a crazy ex-lover of Kirk switches bodies with him and the suspicious crew has no valid proof and she begins ordering the deaths of anyone who opposes her, Scotty suggests to McCoy that they mutiny, since they know that it would throw the captain into a fit and they would be able to stop him under regulations.
  • Spock's actions in transporting Captain Pike to Talos IV constitute a mutiny, for which he is put on trial—which is a ruse to buy him more time.
  • Kirk considers the crew's actions in "This Side of Paradise" to be a mutiny: they abandon the ship due to being Brainwashed and Crazy.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Dr Noel from “Dagger Of The Mind” puts a one night stand into Kirk’s mind (they originally just danced and he talked about the stars), but immediately regrets it once Adams tortures him and makes him think he’s dangerously in love with her. When Kirk says Adams died alone, without even a tormenter for company, she gets the message.
• My Grandma Can Do Better Than You: The exchange 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.
• My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That: in the episode "Mudd's Women", the computer tells the all-male hearing board the effect the women are having on them: elevated heart rate, sweating, rapid pulse. All except Spock.
• Neck Snap: The Vulcan tal-shaya technique performed by the Orion spy in "Journey to Babel".
• Negatives as a Positive: Spock often points out that humans are illogical and irrational. However, there are times he admits that those qualities are necessary.
  • "The Immunity Syndrome" has Spock states that the Vulcan crew of the U.S.S Intrepid would have been incapable of realizing that they were dying without a logical explanation.
  • "I, Mudd": Realizing that the androids were wholly logical, Spock prescribes a hefty dose of human illogic as just the thing to deal with them.
  • Also from "I, Mudd", Chekov discovers that the android girls were programmed by Harry Mudd...which he decides isn't necessarily a bad thing.
    Alice 118: We are programmed to function as human females, lord.
    Chekov: You are?
    Alices: Yes, my lord.
    Chekov: Harry Mudd programmed you?
    Alices: Yes, my lord.
    Chekov: That unprincipled, evil-minded, lecherous kulak Harry Mudd programmed you?
    Alices: Yes, my lord.
    Chekov: This place is even better than Leningrad.
  • "The Enemy Within", after a transporter accident splits Kirk into two people, one good and one evil, it's revealed that his good side isn't capable of command. Spock postulates that it is humanity's faults, tempered by their morals and ethics, that give them the ability to lead.
• Never My Fault: In "A Taste of Armageddon", Anan 7 describes the future he envisions if Kirk's crew does not submit to be executed because they were "killed" in a simulation: Eminiar and Vendikar will switch to real weapons and totally destroy each other. He lays the blame for this at Kirk's feet, taking no responsibility for his future actions escalating the war. He even says, "Escalation is automatic," as if the two sides have no agency to, you know, stop killing each other. He also says, before calling the Enterprise to threaten to kill the Federation people already on the planet if the remaining crew doesn't beam down, that Kirk is "forcing" him to do so. After the computer responsible for the simulated war is destroyed, Anan claims the whole thing is because they had admitted to themselves that they were killers and they just couldn't stop killing. As far as he was concerned, the fact that it was their instinct meant they were helpless to behave otherwise.
  • Sylvia in “Catspaw” gets angry at Kirk for trying to seduce her, and he calls her out on how she captured him, has him chained up for half the episode, and brainwashed his crew, so why shouldn’t he try?
• Niceness Denial: In "Amok Time", Spock hugs Kirk and gleefully shouts his name when he finds out he's not really dead. However, Spock claims that he did this not because he sees Kirk as a friend, but rather because he's relieved that a captain hasn't been lost.
• Noble Male, Roguish Male: Bought up by Nichelle Nichols in the difference between how Kirk and Spock are treated in-universe (and by female fans). Kirk gets Eating the Eye Candy, ripped shirts and women kidnapping him because he’s pretty. Spock on the other hand, is actually wanted as a romantic partner any time he has to cope with a Girl of the Week, Expanded universe novels will further this on, Kirk having an undeserved reputation as someone who sleeps with anyone and Spock only looking more aloof and repressed (so I Can Change My Beloved) in comparison.
• No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction: At the end of "This Side of Paradise", McCoy notes that this is the second time mankind has been thrown out of paradise. Kirk comments that, no, they left on their own, because maybe it's mankind's fate to only be happy when they have to struggle and fight for everything they get.
• No Immortal Inertia: In "Miri", children live for hundreds of years due to a virus, but when they reach puberty, they become ill and insane and die within a few weeks.
• No Name Given: Several prominent examples:
  • The character played by Majel Barrett in "The Cage" is referred to only as "Number One," the unofficial nickname attached to her position as Captain Pike's first officer.
  • Neither the male Romulan Commander played by Mark Lenard in "Balance of Terror" nor the female Commander played by Joanne Linville in "The Enterprise Incident" are ever referred to by name.
• Non-Standard Prescription: Doctor McCoy has Scotty visit a club with a belly dancer, saying it's a prescription. In the films, Bones drinks Romulan Ale for "medicinal purposes." The ship's doctor in the original pilot also gives Pike a glass of martini instead of medicine, stating that there are things that people will tell their bartender that they refuse to tell their doctor.
• No-Paper Future:
  • Although paper still exists, characters take notes on what are obviously tablet computers. Most characters find reading e-books off of screens to be more convenient than hauling wood pulp around. And this was over forty years ago.
  • The characters are reading what the series calls "microtapes." Yet another example of Zeerust, in that microfilm was predicted to replace paper books back in the 1960's.
  • Averted in the unaired pilot, where the ship's computer produces printouts.
• No Social Skills: Charlie Evans, due to being raised by Energy Beings.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: Discussed. When Khan is awoken in "Space Seed", he has a discussion with Kirk once they have determined his identity, lamenting the fact that the humans of the 2260s are practically indistinguishable from those of the 1990s. He was hoping to awaken in a world of genetically modified Ubermenschen like himself, at the very least.
• Not Rare Over There: In "Elaan of Troyius", the ship's dilithium crystals crack in the middle of a battle. Unfortunately, there are none left... until they realize that Elaan's necklace has a bunch of them. She surrenders it gladly, bemused that they would want what to her planet are Worthless Yellow Rocks.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • In the episode "Balance of Terror", the defeated Romulan Commander says that he and Kirk "are of a kind," just before blowing himself up.
    Romulan Commander: You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend. We are creatures of duty, captain. I have lived my life by it. Just... one more duty... to perform.
  • In the Gene Coon written “Errand Of Mercy”, the Organians don’t see much difference between Klingon rule and the Federation (and neither does Kor), no matter how much Kirk would like to think otherwise.
• Not So Stoic: "Amok Time" has Spock react in excitement when Kirk isn't dead.
• Novelization: between 1967 and his death in the late 1970s, James Blish adapted virtually every TOS episode in short-story format for a series of paperback books (Star Trek 1, Star Trek 2, etc.). A handful of leftover stories were subsequently adapted by his widow, J.A. Lawrence, as the final Star Trek 12 volume, plus the Harry Mudd stories were combined with an original novella to form the novel Mudd's Angels. Early Blish volumes exhibit Early-Installment Weirdness as they are based on early scripts of some episodes, resulting in noticeable differences in plot and characterization from the broadcast episodes.
• Numbered Homeworld: Rigel VII ... XII ... how many of those were there, anyway?
• Obstructionist Pacifist:
  • A famous example is Edith Keeler from "The City on the Edge of Forever". A time-traveling Dr. McCoy saves her, and because she lives, she leads a pacifist movement that prevents crucial war research during WWII, causing the Nazis to win the war. Kirk has to let her die to reset the timeline.
  • The Organians look like this for most of "Errand of Mercy". Spock describes the planet as a stagnant culture, and the planet seems to be populated by amiable old men who placidly allow the Klingons to conquer them, rebuking Kirk and Spock's efforts to inspire a resistance because they abhor violence so much they'd rather allow arbitrary executions than fight back. It's only at the end that we learn the Organians have simply pretended to be harmless (and executed, and humanoid) to make their visitors feel at ease. When tensions come to a head, they revert to their luminous true forms and make both sides sit in the corner.
• Obvious Stunt Double:
  • The most infamous example might be the fight in "Amok Time", which features a stunt double that looks nothing like William Shatner fighting an equally non-Leonard-Nimoyish stuntman.
  • Though you could also cite the fight between Ricardo Montalban's stuntman and whoever was doubling for Shatner in "Space Seed".
  • Or the fight in "Court Martial", where seemingly two random guys fought in place of actors William Shatner and Richard Webb.
  • In "Wolf in the Fold", Hengist, (played by the non imposing John Fiedler), is doubled by someone a few inches taller and more than a few pounds heavier.
• Of the People: In the episode "The Return of the Archons", outsiders are said to be not of the body.
• Oh, Crap!: In "Amok Time" Kirk is chosen to face Spock in battle. Kirk agrees, reasoning that, if things get bad, he'll quit and Spock will be declared the winner. Then, when the lirpa (the staffs with really big blades) are produced, T'Pau announces, "If both survive the lirpa, combat will continue with the ahn-woon." When Kirk asks about what she means, she tells him "This combat is to the death."
• Omnicidal Maniac: Matter!Lazarus from "The Alternative Factor". In order to kill his enemy, his Anti-Matter double, he has to cross the threshold into the other universe, but bumping into said enemy while in the same universe will destroy both universes. Despite knowing this, he's so far gone that he simply doesn't care.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: In "Court Martial", this turns out that Ben Finney, the man Kirk supposedly killed by accident and caused the titular court martial to happen and who actually faked his death to try to make Kirk go to jail and in the climax tries to crash the Enterprise on a planet with everybody on board believes that, because of "one little mistake" that Kirk reported while they served in another ship earlier in their careers, he was being constantly mocked by everybody else in their class, who made Captain before him. It's made pretty obvious as the episode goes that Finney has become completely freaking insane from his obsession over this, including constantly sending letters to his daughter Jame ranting about it (which make Jame accept that maybe her father is crazy enough to try to frame Kirk) and the wide-eyed glee he shows as he tries to kill Kirk with his bare hands at the climax.
• One-Hit Kill: The Romulan Plasma Torpedo is this, but only at close range.
• One-Winged Angel: Sylvia in "Catspaw" turns into a giant cat when Kirk refuses to obey her.
• Once a Season:
  • The Romulans appear in one episode per season: "Balance of Terror" in season 1, "The Deadly Years" in season 2^note though they are not seen onscreen and their ship is reused stock footage from "Balance of Terror", and "The Enterprise Incident" in season 3.
  • Kirk faces a different Nefarious Klingon Commander once per season: Kor in season 1's "Errand of Mercy", Koloth in season 2's "The Trouble with Tribbles", and Kang in season 3's "Day of the Dove". (Both Koloth and Kang were intended to be a returning Kor, but the actor who played him was unavailable both times.)
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: if not the Trope Maker, then certainly the Trope Codifier with Captain Pike's portrayal in "The Menagerie".
• Orchestral Bombing: Like many dramatic series of its era, the show makes full and effective use of a brassy orchestral soundtrack. In fact all music used in this series was recorded especially, avoiding the use of common "library" music heard in many other series such as The Twilight Zone and The Fugitive.
• Our Vampires Are Different:
  • The alien Kirk hunts down in "Obsession" is a shapeless cloud that can travel through space at warp speed without a ship, that subsists off of human blood.
  • In the first episode aired, "The Man Trap", the monster can appear as someone the viewer finds attractive... but its true form is a shaggy creature with a lamprey-like mouth, that feeds through its fingers, on salt.
• Outlaw Town: "A Piece of the Action" has a planet whose culture has modeled itself after 1920s gangster culture.
• Out-of-Character Alert:
  • When his memories are about to be transferred over to an android double, Kirk quickly mutters, "Mind your own business, Mr. Spock. I'm sick of your half-breed interference, do you hear?" Later on, when the android meets up with Spock, it says those lines, alerting Spock that this isn't their captain and prompting him to quickly gather a team to beam down. ("What Are Little Girls Made of?")
  • Also occurs in "Day of the Dove," when Chekov is ranting about the Klingons having murdered his brother Piotr. Sulu immediately knows something is wrong because Chekov's an only child.
  • The rest of the crew is alerted to Janice Lester's hijacking of Kirk's body by her increasingly irrational and paranoid behavior in "Turnabout Intruder."
  • Used as part of a Batman Gambit in "Mirror, Mirror" when the crew convinces the Mirror Universe Spock to assist them in returning home and to set up the Heel–Face Turn that Mirror!Spock would perform later on, as referenced in subsequent episodes of DS9 and Voyager.
    Mirror Spock: You must return to your universe, and I must have my captain back.
• Out-of-Character Moment: "The Naked Time", "This Side of Paradise" and "Amok Time" are entire episodes about this trope.
• Papa Wolf: Kirk considers every man and woman under his command his responsibility, and if you harm them, he will not be happy.
• Parental Title Characterization: Spock, when not calling his parents by name, calls them "Mother" and "Father". This is because Vulcans (his father's species) tend to be quite formal in their language and don't tend to openly express affection.
• Parent ex Machina:
  • "The Squire of Gothos" has Trelane getting punished by his "parents" (who appear as blobs of energy)- just in time to stop him from finishing off Kirk.
  • In "Charlie X", the alien species that raised Charlie return to take him back before he can do any more damage, and they undo most of the damage that he has already done, though they are unable to bring back the crew of another ship which Charlie destroyed, probably because there wasn't enough left after the explosion.
• People Puppets: "Plato's Stepchildren", and a literal example in the ending of the original version of "Catspaw".
• Pilgrimage: Between the original series and the first movie Spock resigned from Starfleet and went to a monastery on Vulcan to eliminate his emotions. Everyone wears robes and meditates.
• Planet Spaceship: In "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky", a group of aliens have been sequestered inside a large interstellar asteroid for so long that they have forgotten that they are actually inside one.
• Pleasure Planet: "Shore Leave" takes place on a planet where aliens go for amusement and the Enterprise crew finds danger and weirdness.
• Plot Hole: "The City on the Edge of Forever" makes no attempt to explain how Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get back after fixing the time rift in Earth of 1930. They simply show up. The Guardian of Forever heavily implies it can pull them back if the timeline was reset.
• Pointy Ears: On Spock and other Vulcans; appropriate for Space Elves. Romulans, which are related to Vulcans, also have pointed ears, and Spock comes in for some Fantastic Racism when the visual similarity is noticed.
• Polarity Reversal: The Trope Maker.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: "Assignment: Earth" was intended to spin off a series of the same name. The existing script was reworked to include the Enterprise, but the focus is still clearly on Gary Seven and the other new characters; Kirk and his crew have almost no impact on the outcome.
• Powerful and Helpless: This trope is mentioned directly by McCoy in Whom Gods Destroy when the Elba II penal colony is overrun by the inmates and turned chaotic while their landing party is still on the now shielded and unapproachable planet. The Enterprise in orbit, though powerful enough to destroy a planet, can do nothing to get their men back - using the phasers to blow away the shield runs the risk of killing everyone they're trying to save.
  Scott: "We could blast our way through the (force) field, but only at the risk of destroying the Captain, Mister Spock and any other living thing on Elba Two."
  McCoy: "How can we be powerful enough to wipe out a planet and still be so helpless?"
• The Power of Legacy:
  • In his final log in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", Kirk merely notes that Mitchell "gave [his] life in performance of [his] duty", and omits the part where he first gained vast psionic powers and began to think of himself as a god who regarded humans as insects to be crushed. Justified in that not only is Mitchell not at fault for what was effectively an injury sustained in the course of duty (the galactic barrier which they had been ordered to explore) but he is also Kirk's friend from their academy days.
  • Likewise, in "The Doomsday Machine" Kirk states that his log will note that Commodore Decker died in the line of duty, omitting the part where the man pretty much went insane with survivor's guilt and almost got the crew of the Enterprise killed. It's heavily suggested that Kirk is attempting to imply by omission that Decker performed a Heroic Sacrifice by piloting the Constellation into the Doomsday Machine to destroy it, instead of the truth, that he went out in a futile suicidal gesture by crashing into the machine with a shuttlecraft. Note that Spock is the one who brings up Kirk logging Decker as having died in the line of duty, which he seems to endorse despite having been in a power struggle with Decker for most of the episode. Although he doesn't say it in so many words, he obviously felt for Decker in the same way that he felt for Gary Mitchell.
• Powering Villain Realization:
  • "Day of the Dove". An entity that feeds on hate and violence invades the Enterprise, setting Kirk and Klingon Captain Kang and their crews against each other. Realizing that they're being manipulated, Kirk and Kang refuse to fight each other, Kang even giving Kirk a good-natured (for a Klingon) slap on the back that almost has the Captain reeling, but they manage to drive out the entity by refusing to feed it with their hatred.
  • "The Menagerie": Pike realizes that the Talosians cannot read strong, violent thoughts, and also that they rely on him to supply the imaginations they use to fuel the illusions they attempt to trap him in. So he sits in his cell, stewing in hatred and anger until the Keeper gets careless and Pike seizes him. ^note Footage came from the unaired pilot episode "The Cage".
  • In the episode "And The Children Shall Lead", the evil entity called Gorgan gets its power from the fact that the children believe it has power. When that belief is taken away, Gorgan dies rather messily.
• Pretty in Mink: Lenore Karidian wears a short fur dress. Seen here, at 12:55: 14:47.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • There is only one curse in the entire series, occurring at the end of "The City on The Edge of Forever". It's notable for being one of the few curse words on American TV during the 1960s and showing just how hurt Kirk is as a result of the Bittersweet Ending.
    Kirk: Let's get the hell out of here.
  • Bones does say "Don't give me any damnable logic..." in one episode, and a gangster from the gangster episode does say "hell" in a non-religious context. Neither case is given the emphasis of Kirk's declaration.
• Pressure Point: Spock's Vulcan nerve/neck pinch. According to Word of Nimoy, this was originally going to be a traditional Tap on the Head, but Nimoy insisted that Vulcans had something more sophisticated and reliable instead.
• Prodigal Family: Spock got estranged from his father after joining the Starfleet instead of the Vulcan Science Academy and rejecting his betrothal to another Vulcan. The trope is ultimately subverted as Sarek dies before he can get properly re-introduced in his son's life.
• Proud Warrior Race: While the Klingons and Romulans are the expected examples, there are many species in this series that fit this trope.... including humanity to some extent.
• Proxy War: "A Private Little War" has the Klingons supplying increasingly advanced firearms to one tribe of a primitive planet, to install them as a puppet leader of that world. Another tribe, one that Kirk had met years before, begins to demand similar weapons by the end, and Kirk begins arranging a Federation-aligned alliance of tribes to oppose the Klingon-controlled ones. He even references the brush wars of the 20th century as he does so.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Janice Lester in "Turnabout Intruder" is an ex-lover of Kirk's. She uses a machine to steal Kirk's position by swapping their brainwave patterns.
• Psycho Serum: McCoy's adrenaline-like drug in "The City on the Edge of Forever" causes temporary insanity when injected at overly high doses. When the ship hits some turbulence, he accidentally injects himself with a very high dose.
• Psychopathic Manchild:
  • Charlie Evans from "Charlie X".
  • Trelane from "The Squire of Gothos." Made even better by the fact that while he looks like an adult human, by his species' standards Trelane is a child.
• Psychotic Smirk: Chekov gets a particularly nasty one in "Mirror, Mirror" when he threatens to kill Kirk for disobeying an order. Doubles as Slasher Smile.
• Public Secret Message:
  • In "Space Seed", Khan Noonien Singh was named for Kim Noonien Singh, one of Roddenberry's buddies from World War II. Roddenberry hoped that the name would attract the attention of the Real Life Singh in hopes that they would reconnect.
  • David Gerrold did a similar thing in writing "The Trouble With Tribbles"; the space station on which the episode takes place is in orbit around "Sherman's Planet". Gerrold's girlfriend at the time was one Holly Sherman.
• Pummeling the Corpse: In "A Private Little War", the previously violence-averse Tyree snaps when he sees his wife stabbed to death. In the ensuing climactic battle, Tyree rushes and quickly overpowers the man who stabbed his wife, and staves in his head with a large rock. Tyree's mind, clouded with berserk fury, does not register that his opponent is dead, so he spends the rest of the battle bashing the corpse's shattered head. Even after the battle ends, Tyree continues to bash the unresisting corpse until Kirk stops him.
• Punishment Box:
  • The appropriately-named Agony Booth in the episode "Mirror, Mirror."
  • The neural neutralizer in "Dagger of the Mind" is not intended as such, but ends up being used this way.
  • The Klingon Mind-Sifter in "Errand of Mercy."
• Puppeteer Parasite:
  • In "Operation: Annihilate!", parasitic creatures that resemble flying pancakes attack planetary colonists—and eventually Spock.
  • In "Wolf in the Fold", the Enterprise crew encounters "Redjac", a noncorporeal parasite responsible for numerous serial killings throughout the centuries. One of the humans it possessed was Jack the Ripper.
• Put on a Bus: Yeoman Rand during the first season. (Grace Lee Whitney later said that the producers wanted girl-of-the-week guest stars as love interests for Kirk.) The starship comes back for the movies and a time travel episode of Voyager.

Q–T

• Quitting to Get Married:
  • In the episode "Who Mourns for Adonais". Kirk and Dr. McCoy are discussing Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas.
    McCoy: One day she'll find the right man and off she'll go, out of the service.
  • Implied in the episode "Balance of Terror", when Kirk marries two officers, but is interrupted as a Red Alert goes off. The groom reminds the bride that for the moment he's still her superior officer.^note Though she could simply be transferring in some way - many militaries ban married couples from being in a direct chain of command.
• Race Against the Clock: This trope is deployed a lot to maintain tension after the main conflict of an episode is established. Kirk and crew will receive a deadline in which to solve their problem, after which dire consequences (often the explosion of the Enterprise or the death of a landing party) will occur. Sometimes the threat is directly related to the problem; in other instances, it's coincidental — the problem interferes with some bit of starship business that would otherwise be routine.
  • Taken up to eleven in "The Tholian Web" where there are three different time-sensitive crises (plus the non-time sensitive crisis of McCoy and Spock starting to lose their temper towards each other worse than usual due to everything else that's going on) going on at the same time: Kirk is lost in another dimension and running out of oxygen in his space suit, the Tholians are building the titular web around the Enterprise which will be unable to escape if it's completed before they fix their weapons and figure out a way out of it, and the part of the space they're in is also causing the crew to suffer Space Madness unless McCoy figures out a way to nullify its effect.
• Radio Silence: In "Balance of Terror", the Romulan ship heads home under cover of a cloaking device and comm silence. Unfortunately for them, one of the officers violates orders in order to call home base to report the success of their mission, and the transmission is detected.
• Ramming Always Works: How Kirk destroys the titular device in "The Doomsday Machine", using a derelict starship to which Scotty manages to restore some engine power.
• Rape by Proxy: Downplayed in “Plato’s Stepchildren”, as Spock and Kirk are forced to kiss Chapel and Uhura to the sadistic joy of the Platonians, and all four are traumatised and disgusted; Chapel not wanting her crush on Spock to be used like this, and Uhura feeling safe around Kirk, until now.
• Ray Gun Gothic: The Original Series was the last of the classic examples. Soon afterwards, 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Real Life moon landings introduced more realism into the genre.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Said by everyone: Spock, Chekov, Uhura...
• Real Award, Fictional Character: In "The Ultimate Computer", Dr. Richard Daystrom is cited as a 2243 Nobel Prize winner for the invention of duotronic computers.
• Reality-Changing Miniature: In "Catspaw", Silvia's little silver Enterprise causes the real ship to overheat when the model is exposed to a flame, and the old girl to be surrounded by a force field when the model is encased in hard plastic.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • In "Miri", the kids on a planet identical to Earth are hundreds of years old.
  • In "Requiem for Methuselah", Flint is thousands of years old and posed as various historical figures.
• Reckless Gun Usage: Two instances, both involving Time Travel and the not-gun-shaped Phaser. In "The City On The Edge of Forever", a 1930s bum gets hold of one and vaporizes himself playing with it. In "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", Kirk is captured by Air Police in 1969, and cringes (with priceless facial expressions) as they fiddle with his weapon, toss it around, and several times almost press the trigger, conflicted between justifiable fear and the need to not let them know who he is or what they have.
• Red Shirt: Actually an Unbuilt Trope: By and large, most of the people who die in a given episode tend not to be very plot-important, but only 24 red-shirted crewmembers died across all 80 episodes, in a series fraught with evil computer programs, shape-shifting salt vampires, planet destroying superweapons, and explosive rocks. Considering their job, and the fact that the ship has 430 crewmembers, that's not bad for a five-year mission.
• Redemption Equals Death: Dr. Elizabeth Dehner in the 2nd pilot episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and Captain Merik in "Bread and Circuses".
• Religion of Evil: The cult of Landru in "The Return of the Archons".
• Repressive, but Efficient: "Patterns of Force", in which a lawless planet adopts Nazism as its hat with the justification that it was "the most efficient state the Earth ever knew." Their version of Nazism is treated in-universe as just as flawlessly efficient.
• Resort to Pouting: "Tomorrow is Yesterday" introduces a rather inconvenient modification to the Enterprise's main computer, the installation of a feminine personality. After it refers to Kirk as "dear" one too many times when he specifically ordered it not to, he makes a notation in the log that he considers it a fault. If it cannot be repaired, his recommendation is that the whole thing be scrapped. There is an entirely audible pout as the computer replies with a sulking "Computed."
• Rewatch Bonus: While the thinking he can just assimilate other cultures would be called out later on by the Gene Coon era, “The Enemy Within” shows most of the flaws and positive qualities that would last Kirk the rest of his life, from even his good side wanting to pretend something bad never happened, to his bad side only showing intelligence when it’s time to act weak but charming, and his compassion both helping and harming him.
• Right-Hand Cat: Isis (to Gary Seven) in "Assignment: Earth" and Sylvia (to Korob) in "Catspaw".
• Rude Hero, Nice Sidekick: Inverted; Captain Kirk is a charming Officer and a Gentleman. By contrast, his first officer, Spock, is more tactless and ruthlessly pragmatic. The fact that he's also The Stoic when he does these things probably doesn't do his image any favors.
• Running Gag:
  • Trying to explain Spock's Pointy Ears to native people. The cake-taker has to be this gem, from "The City on the Edge of Forever":
    Spock: You were saying you'd have no trouble explaining [the ears].
    Kirk: [to a cop] My friend... is obviously Chinese. I see you've noticed the ears... well, they're... actually easy to explain...
    Spock: Perhaps the unfortunate accident I had as a child...?
    Kirk: ...the unfortunate accident he had as a child. He caught his head in a mechanical... rice picker... but, fortunately, there was an American, uh, missionary living close by who was a, uh, skilled, uh, plastic surgeon in civilian life who...
    Cop: All right, all right. Drop those bundles and put your hands on the wall.
  • Chekov claiming everything was "inwented in Russia."
    Chekov: It makes me homesick... just like Russia.
    McCoy: More like the Garden of Eden, Ensign.
    Chekov: Of course, Doctor. The Garden of Eden was just outside Moscow. Very nice place.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Infamously, the Klingons (though they didn't even have the budget for that until the movies). Vulcans are Rubber Pointy Ear Aliens.
• Sacred Scripture:
  • In "The Omega Glory", the Yangs have a sacred text which turns out to be identical to the US Constitution.
  • In "A Piece of the Action" our heroes discover a planet has been using a book about gangs in 1920s Chicago (left by a previous Federation vessel) as their holy book.
• Sadist: The Platonians enjoy humiliating Kirk and company in “Plato’s Stepchildren”, the wife especially looking like she’s finding it all sexually appealing.
• Sadistic Choice: Everyone is forced to make these every so often.
• Sailor Fuku: In the episode "Court Martial", Jame Finney wears a futuristic version of this.
• Sarcastic Devotee: Both Spock and Bones are devoted to the captain, but are also quite willing to question/make sarcastic comments about his orders when the situation warrants it.
  Spock: Captain, you are an excellent starship commander, but as a taxi driver, you leave something to be desired!
• Science Is Good: The show portrays a fairly utopian, post-scarcity, post-racism future for humankind, with Cool Starships and Faster-Than-Light Travel. Unlike many science-focused works, the original series is fairly idealistic and romantic, showing respect for both nature/tradition and new science and medicine.
• Scientifically Understandable Sorcery: While there are plenty of incidents where the Enterprise crew seems to encounter the supernatural, said supernatural thing is always shown to have a scientific basis when sufficiently analyzed by the characters. That said, sometimes the thing is too advanced to analyze with the Enterprise's technology, and thus remains indecipherable (though not actually thought of as "magic"; they just acknowledge that what they've encountered is so far above/beyond them that they can't realistically understand the principles it works on).
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Whenever Kirk violates given orders, it's specifically to avoid the loss of his ship and crew, or to avoid making a situation worse by not seeing it through to the end.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Supernatural Powers!:
  • Trelane, the Squire of Gothos... at least until Kirk breaks whatever it is he has behind that mirror. In the episode "Catspaw", Sylvia and Korob... until Kirk shatters the power transmuter wand tied to the illusions to themselves and the planet. You may notice a theme.
  • Justified/Played with in "Charlie X", because he really doesn't understand the rules.
  • Gary Mitchell from "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
• Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: In "A Taste of Armageddon", Jim Kirk and his crew discover that the Planet of the Week, Eminiar VII, is conducting a Forever War with a neighboring planet, Vendikar, entirely by computer simulation, with the "simulated" casualties ordered to report to the government for euthanasia. They're horrified but aren't allowed to do anything about it under the Prime Directive... until the computer erroneously marks the Enterprise as a valid target and designates it "destroyed". Kirk refuses to abide by the Eminian-Vendikari rules, and instead starts blowing up the euthanasia booths and ultimately the computer. The Eminian head of state complains that with the computer gone, their underlying civilizations will be destroyed by war instead of merely people's lives. Kirk counters that the simulated war has taken all the horror out of the conflict, and with it any incentive to make peace, and how about they try that instead.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • Khan Noonien Singh and his cryogenically frozen followers, in the episode "Space Seed".
  • In "The Alternative Factor", if Lazarus and his insane counterpart from the antimatter dimension were ever to meet in the same universe, that universe would be destroyed. Both of them are sent into an intermediate dimension so that this can never happen, and where the two of them will be locked in combat for all eternity.
• Sealed Orders: In "The Enterprise Incident", Captain Kirk receives secret orders to steal a Romulan cloaking device. As part of The Plan, he acts like a Jerkass as a form of Obfuscating Insanity.
• Second Episode Introduction: McCoy doesn't appear in either of the pilots, but does appear in the first proper episode.
• Secret Test: Balok in "The Corbomite Maneuver", the Ekosian Resistance in "Patterns of Force", and Korob in "Catspaw".
• Seduction-Proof Marriage: In "Elaan of Troyius", Kirk is infected by alien tears that cause men to be madly in love with the woman who shed them. Doctor McCoy looks for a cure, but in the end notes that the Captain had his own cure; he was in essence already married to the Enterprise. Fans tend to point out that the 'cure' occured shortly after a conversation/confrontation with Commander Spock, implying that the marriage may not be a Cargo Ship after all.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: The Enterprise has one on board. It requires simultaneous voice input from three senior officers to activate.
• Serious Work, Comedic Scene: The show does this practically Once per Episode, breaking the tension of an episode's conflict with a joke. For example, the episode Spock's Brain features this exchange after Spock starts describing the culture of Sigma Draconis VI:
  McCoy: I should never have reconnected his mouth.
  Kirk: Well, we took the risk, Doctor.
• Send in the Search Team: Whenever the Enterprise loses track of important personnel on a planet, they send in the Redshirt Army to find them. This occurs in several episodes, with varying degrees of success.
• Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: Almost everyone in the mirror universe dresses skimpier than they do in the main universe. Though you'd be hard-pressed to take the basic female Starfleet uniform and make it skimpier without violating broadcast codes, they found a way.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Kirk and Gary’s friendship. Gary’s the one who is more a playboy (a girl he was with went “nova” whatever that means) and Kirk was the “stack of books with legs”, with most of his relationships dying because he's Married to the Job.
  '''Cadet Kirk: [Gary Mitchell] was everything I wasn’t: charming, gregarious, rough and a little reckless.
  • While both hammy, Kirk vs Mudd. In both episodes, Mudd complains that Kirk is uptight and needs to take orders (from him, specifically), while Kirk always fires back that Mudd is a criminal sleazeball.
• Settling the Frontier: A couple of examples:
  • "This Side of Paradise" has the Enterprise on a rescue mission to settlers on a Federation colony, supposedly endangered by deadly radiation.
  • In "The Way to Eden", the crew of the Enterprise meets a group of space hippies who hope to settle a new colony on a planet they call Eden.
  • In "The Trouble with Tribbles" the Federation and the Klingons are competing to develop a colony world. The Enterprise is tasked with delivering a special grain hybrid to kickstart the colony's agriculture. A Klingon agent subsequently poisons the grain.
• Sexier Alter Ego:
  • In the episode "Mudd's Women", Mudd has pills that he claims makes a woman more attractive.
  • Mirror Universe Spock is this for many viewers.
• Shapeshifting Seducer: The pilot episode and the season 2 episode "Catspaw" feature women who change shape to find a form that pleases the captain.
• Shirtless Scene: Kirk has a lot of these.
• Shout-Out: To the show's precursor Forbidden Planet, which included the early line, "We'll reach D.C. point at 1701."
• Showing Off the New Body: In “Return To Tomorrow”, Sargon puppets Kirk’s body, saying it’s excellent and complimenting Bones on “maintaining” it, while Janice Lester in “Turnabout Intruder” takes the opportunity to grope his abs when she steals it.
• Show Some Leg: Lampshaded in “Is There In Truth No Beauty” when Spock needs a diversion to mind meld with Kolos, Kirk knows just the thing: flirting with Miranda Jones to distract her. For once it doesn’t work, and she’s only annoyed by the deception.
• Shown Their Work: In "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", the Enterprise travels back in time to 1968. It's mentioned that three astronauts are taking part in a manned moon shot on Wednesday. Two years after the episode aired, Apollo 11 blasted off on July 16, 1969 (a Wednesday) carrying three astronauts (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins). Given that the Apollo program was already getting started around the time of this episode, however, it was already known that there would be three astronauts per spacecraft, and odds were good that at least one of the craft bound for the moon would launch on a Wednesday.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: In "A Taste of Armageddon", the Eminian leader insists that peace is impossible and that their 500-year-old simulated war with declared casualties reporting in to be neatly and cleanly killed is the lesser of two evils. Kirk insists that they can make peace if they just try harder, and helpfully provides them with motivation to do so by shutting down the war computer and forcing them to choose between real-world messy warfare and swallowing enough pride to find a peaceful solution.
• Silly Reason for War:
  • "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is a commentary on race relations; two aliens who have mirrored skin tones (right side of the face black, left side white and vice versa) fight over this difference. When they reach their homeworld, they discover that they are the Last of Their Kind; everyone else killed each other in the race war. They keep fighting anyway.
  • In "A Taste of Armageddon", the two warring powers have forgotten why they were fighting in the first place!
• Sliding Scale of Continuity: The series adhered to the level 2 of continuity (Status Quo Is God) well enough that with a scant few exceptions and Character Development for the main three (Bones and Spock are less at each other's throats, Kirk tries to be less of a soldier) you can watch the series in any order and it generally makes perfect sense.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: The show was mostly on the idealism end of the spectrum, showing that in the future, humanity managed to finally stop fighting with each other and form a world government free of racism and other evils. It’s particularly notable seeing as how it was made during a time when America’s biggest issues were racism and the threat of nuclear war.
• Slut-Shaming: Both played straight and ultimately avoided with Kirk, as in episodes like “Dagger Of The Mind”, he’s gently teased by Bones and Spock for accidentally flirting with Dr Noel, but when things go badly wrong and she shoves a false one night stand in his brain, they’re both sympathetically hovering around him at the end of the episode, and it’s not treated as something he deserved. Played straight as an arrow with both in-universe and out “Kirk Drift” though.
• Smart People Play Chess: Spock, logically, as well as Kirk, who was stated to be quite bookish at the academy, play 3-D chess. They are often seen playing while having a conversation relevant to the plot.
• The Smurfette Principle: Uhura was a Token Twofer who was also relegated to the position of space phone operator. For the time, she was rather progressive^note and a black woman seated at back center stage, right behind the captain's chair, highly and constantly visible, was extremely radical, but... This was due to Executive Meddling. The original pilot had a female second-in-command. The network couldn't fire her fast enough (even if she managed to sneak back on set anyway in a blonde wig as a nurse). The network might also have resented the fact that she was Gene Roddenberry's girlfriend. According to William Shatner at least, women in the test audiences found the female second-in-command "pushy" and "annoying." Maybe The World Was Not Ready... (It's also possible that Number One was simply perceived as being too abrasive toward her subordinates, though her being a woman with subordinates would probably contribute to this perception. On the other hand, it's noteworthy that Kirk was also frequently abrasive in the early episodes until the character was refined and solidified.) It's also been said that NBC gave Roddenberry a somewhat Sadistic Choice: either keep the female second-in-command or keep Spock, but not both. Years later, Majel Barrett would quip that he "kept the Vulcan and married the woman, 'cause he didn't think Leonard would have it the other way around."
  • Many individual episodes also employ this trope: when a landing party beams down to a planet, there is usually exactly one woman on the team, whose narrative function is to have a romance arc with either another member of the landing party, or the episode's villain.
• Space Amish:
  • "The Way to Eden" features a group seeking a world where they can set up such a society. In the end, it doesn't work out (both because the planet they've chosen is uninhabitable, and because their leader is a nut), but it's interesting that, out of the whole crew, the one who is most sympathetic to their goal is Spock.
    Spock: Miss Galliulin... It is my sincere hope that you do not give up your search for Eden. I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves.
  • "Errand of Mercy" features an alien society that thrived for eons without technological advancement. Although, they really don't need to use technology. They are, after all Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
• Space Is Noisy: Star Trek's writers are very well aware that there is no sound in space - in fact, the show was originally planned to not feature sound during the space scenes at all. This idea was dropped because without sound, the scenes felt unreal.
  • In "Balance of Terror", both the Romulan and the Enterprise crews cut their ship's power to avoid detection. During this, the crews whisper so they will not alert the enemy. This is actually justified by the fact that starship sensors are established to be able to detect even very faint vibrations - such as heartbeats - from very long distances: the impact of voices hitting the hull could give them away.
• Space Is an Ocean: The Enterprise is a "ship," equipped with "torpedoes," and the crew is arranged along naval lines. Several touches are intended to put the audience specifically in mind of the age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men: the in-ship intercom's attention chime is a bosun's whistle, and the standard bit of incidental music played when the Enterprise is in flight is in a style often used for incidental music accompanying a sailing ship under way.
• Space Mines: In the episode "Balance of Terror", the Romulan ship uses one of its self-destruct devices as an impromptu mine in an attempt to destroy the Enterprise. It's also noted in the Writer's Guide that the Enterprise's photon torpedoes can be used as mines, but this is never actually done in any episode.
• Space Western: Gene Roddenberry famously pitched the series as "Wagon Train to the stars". The first season in particular gives the impression of the Enterprise'' crew as frontiersmen exploring and expanding into a vast and untamed wilderness.
• Spot the Imposter:
  • In "Whom Gods Destroy", Spock sees Kirk standing right next to an insane shapeshifter who is posing as Kirk. Spock identifies the imposter getting into a fight and noticing that one Kirk orders them both shot to prevent the imposter from escaping. Knowing that the imposter would never give that kind of command, Spock stuns the other one. This may be the origin of the "shoot us both" gambit, which itself is so well-known that today it's more likely that the evil one will use it, expecting the decider to shoot the other one.
    • Spock knew that the shapeshifter in question couldn't hold another identity for more than a few minutes. He says so, and explains that all he has to do is wait. That's when the "Shoot him! No, shoot us both" dialogue occurs.
    • Leonard Nimoy hated this episode, noting that as The Smart Guy Spock should have been able to easily and quickly create the kind of highly personal trick questions only his best friend, Kirk, should be able to answer properly to identify himself. According to Spock, he did not make his choice based on the order to shoot them both, but rather based on which one was winning: Kirk was recovering from serious injuries and thus was at a disadvantage against the healthier duplicate.
  • "The Man Trap" features a shapeshifting creature that drains the salt from people. It shapeshifts several times before settling on shifting into McCoy's form. It can be spotted by its tendency to curve its index finger and nibble slightly on the arc of the finger.
  • In "The Enemy Within", Kirk is split by a transporter accident into his "good" and "evil" halves. In what might be considered a subversion, it turns out Kirk's "evil" half is not so much evil, as driven by passion and base instinct, and Kirk's "good" half, the logic and intellect side, is incapable of acting competently without it.
  • In "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", Spock is able to spot the android Kirk because the genuine article focused on a particular out of character thought, embedding it in the android's programming.
• Starfish Alien:
  • Despite the franchise's well-earned reputation for Rubber-Forehead Aliens, the original series did introduce some nonhumanoid aliens in some of the series' most highly-regarded episodes: the Horta in "Devil in the Dark," the tribbles in "The Trouble with Tribbles"; the true forms of Sylvia and Korob as seen at the end of "Catspaw"; and several non-corporeal aliens. Within the limits of the special effects technology available at the time, the original series actually did fairly well in this regard. Additionally, the Kelvans are stated to have had a truly bizarre physiology before taking on human form to steal the Enterprise.
  • TOS also introduced the Tholians, an extremely xenophobic race that had the general appearance of a virus. Despite only appearing in one episode, they became a fan favorite and the subject of wild speculation. Eventually, throughout the remainder of the franchise, a few canonical facts were given about the species: They have six legs, no evidence of a circulatory system, require temperatures above 400 degrees Kelvin to survive (lower temperatures would cause their carapace to rupture and eventually explode), have two sexes despite being hermaphroditic, and can emit radiation as a means of communication.
• Stealth in Space: The Romulans' cloaking device technology shields them from both visible light and sensor readings, but also blinds the ship itself, and draws so much power that it must be dropped in order to fire, allowing for "Balance of Terror" to be a submarine episode (specifically, the 1957 film The Enemy Below) Recycled IN SPACE!
• Stealth Pun: The name of the librarian in "All Our Yesterdays" is "Atoz". Which is what you get if you take the phrase "A to Z" and compress it.
• Stinky Flower: Discussed. When Kirk and his crew are spouting Non Sequiturs to get some robots to shut down, Spock says that "Logic is a wreath of beautiful flowers that smell bad".
• Straw Vulcan: Among other examples, in "The Galileo Seven", we're shown Spock's first command, as the shuttle he is in charge of crashes on a desolate planet filled with savage aliens. Spock determines that a display of superior force will logically frighten away these aliens while the crew make repairs to the shuttle. Instead, as Dr. McCoy points out, the aliens have an emotional reaction and become angry and attack, something Spock did not anticipate. In the end, Spock's desperate act of igniting the fuel from the shuttle to create a beacon proves to be the correct action since it gets the attention of the Enterprise and allows for a rescue. When called on this "emotional" act, Spock replies that the only logical course of action in that instance was one of desperation. Also, much of the conflict in the episode comes from Spock steadfastly refusing to take the emotional reactions of the men under his command into account, or to even acknowledge that they have them, expecting them all to act like cool, logical Vulcans. Spock's been around humans long enough he should know this attitude is illogical.
• The Strength of Ten Men: In "Space Seed," Khan's "I have five times your strength!" Spock, as well, being half-Vulcan - he's thrice as strong as a human. This is not always apparent since he tends either to avoid physical confrontation or end them instantly with a nerve-pinch to shut down the opponent, but on the few occasions he ended up in a fight, this trope is clearly in play.
• Stumbling Upon the Lost Wizard: The show used this a couple of times:
  • "Metamorphosis": Lost scientist Zefram Cochrane, inventor of the warp drive, is discovered by the Enterprise. He has an otherworldly companion that allowed him to live for centuries, not unlike the fey servant of the Ur-Example of this trope, Prospero.
  • "Requiem For Methuselah": Mr. Flint owns a planet in the Omega system. He has a number of robots as servants and a beautiful female ward named Rayna Kapec. He has tremendous technological power, enough to destroy the Enterprise. He has two dark secrets. The first is that he is an immortal man from Earth and is thousands of years old. The second is that his ward is not human, but actually an android robot in female form, and he needs to have her emotions wakened so she will love him. Her name may be a reference to Karel Čapek, who coined the word "robot".
• Styrofoam Rocks: In "Return of the Archons", a melon-sized "rock" bounces off a stuntman's head and he keeps running. Apparently it wasn't supposed to hit him at all, and was left in under time pressure.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: "The Corbomite Maneuver", "The Squire of Gothos" and more.
• Super Cell Reception: Naturally, the communicators came before cell phones, but they look much like them (having arguably inspired their modern look), and are often subject to both ends of this trope.
• Take a Third Option: Kirk is famous for these. When faced with two undesirable options in "Operation: Annihilate!", he outright tells his crew to go and find him a third one.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Usually with Kirk delivering a Logic Bomb to a psychotic computer.
• Talking Is a Free Action, by way of the Captain's Log used to bring viewers up to speed on current events. In "By Any Other Name", as the Enterprise approaches the Energy Barrier, Kirk records a log detailing a plan to defeat the Kelvans—while the Kelvans are on the bridge with him.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Spock definitely fits into this trope.
• Tap on the Head: Often played completely straight with the human characters, especially Kirk, but Spock uses his famous Vulcan nerve pinch instead.
• Take That!:
  • Chekov was supposedly introduced after an article in the Soviet state newspaper Pravda allegedly mocked the show for not having a Russian, when the Russians had been the first into space.
  • Chekov was then used as a delivery vessel for a number of minor Take Thats to the Russians for the remainder of the series, turning In the Original Klingon into an art form:
    Chekov: It makes me homesick. It's just like Russia.
    Bones: More like the Garden of Eden, Ensign.
    Chekov: Of course, Doctor. The Garden of Eden was just outside Moscow—a very nice place, must have made Adam and Eve very sad to leave.
  • The insult "Herbert" that the space hippies use in "The Way to Eden" was definitely a Take That at a real-life Herbert. However, no-one is exactly sure who it was supposed to be: depending on who you ask, it was either Herbert Hoover or Herbert Solow, who was the show's production executive for the first two seasons.
  • In "Charlie X", Uhura sings seductively to Spock (no, the 2009 movie didn't make up her having the hots for him) and jokingly describes him as being "in Satan's guise" (to which Spock struggles to suppress a smile)—a Take That! to meddling executives who had feared that Spock's "devilish" appearance would offend conservative viewers (and doctored publicity photos to remove Spock's pointed ears and slanted eyebrows).
  • Uhura's normal place on the bridge was directly behind the captain's seat, the center of attention and focus. Many, many shots of Kirk included her. "There's a black lady on TV", indeed.
• Team Kids: Uhura, Checkov, and Sulu are the Team Kids to the Kirk/Spock Team Mom and Dad, with Bones and Scotty as uncles. This is made apparent in "Who Mourns For Adonis", when Checkov suggests he comfort Lt. Palamas. Kirk asks him how old he is and when Checkov tells him, Kirk says he's too young.
• Technicolor Death: Anyone killed by a phaser weapon set to "disrupt" will experience this.
• Techno Babble: Interestingly for a Star Trek show, outside of a few rare occurrences, this trope is almost never used. Instead, any technological devices are merely referred to by their explicit functions whenever they are used by the plot. (So, a Photon Torpedo is a torpedo that releases photons, as opposed to a "10 isoton thermolytic warhead encased in a rectified multiphasic matrix") It wouldn't be until Star Trek: The Next Generation that Techno-babble became a major trope in Star Trek. As it turns out, a lack of techno-babble was specifically enforced in the Writer's Guide. (linked here):
  "The writer must know what he means when he uses science or projected science terminology. A scattergun confusion of meaningless phrases only detracts from believability." - Gene Roddenberry
• Teenage Wasteland: "Miri" features a planet where a virus has killed off all the adults, leaving the children to look after themselves.
• Teens Are Monsters: Charlie in "Charlie X." Being a juvenile Reality Warper with boundary issues doesn't help, though he does turn out to have a serious Freudian Excuse for his actions.
• Teleporter Accident:
  • Many (usually the transporter being out of order and unable to beam the heroes aboard), but notably in "The Enemy Within", which creates an Evil Knockoff and a wimpy knockoff of Kirk.
  • The lack of safety features of the transporter is highlighted in Season 3's "And the Children Shall Lead", when Kirk and Spock accidentally transport two crewmen into open space because the transporter system doesn't have any mechanism to warn that they are not locked on to a habitable location.
• Teleport Interdiction: Federation correctional facilities, such as the Tantalus penal colony in "Dagger of the Mind" and the Elba II asylum in "Whom Gods Destroy", include security fields that prevent beaming in or out while in operation.
• Temporary Substitute:
  • Sulu doesn't appear in "Space Seed". He was replaced by Makee K. Blaisdell as Lt. Spinelli.
  • Scotty and Sulu are absent from "The Alternative Factor". For unknown reasons they were substituted in the roles of engineer and helmsman by Charlene Masters and Leslie, respectively.
  • During filming of the episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion," George Takei was busy filming The Green Berets. Chekov took his place in the script, with a barroom brawling style in the episode's fight scenes taking the place of the martial arts scenes planned for Sulu.
  • Ditto "The Trouble with Tribbles"; Chekov's instant recognition of quadro-triticale makes more sense knowing that the script was originally written for Sulu, as Sulu had an established background in botany.
  • Uhura doesn't appear in "The Doomsday Machine", her duties assumed by Lt. Palmer, played by Elizabeth Rogers.
  • For "Turnabout Intruder", the final episode, Uhura takes the day off and is replaced by a Lieutenant Lisa. (Nichelle Nichols had a singing engagement that conflicted with the shooting schedule.)
• Tempting Fate: In "The Menagerie", a few episodes before several traumatic missions and causes for my greatest failures, Kirk calls having to be part of Spock’s mutiny trial hearing the worst moment of his service. The Talosians tell him at the end that Pike has illusion and he has reality, and he can’t quite keep up the smile.
• Terminally Dependent Society: The Enterprise encounters several of these during the series.
  • In The Cage, Talosian society is revealed to be so addicted to their own natural ability to create realistic psychic illusions that they allowed their entire civilization to crumble around them while they endlessly enjoyed the fake realities they constructed.
  • In The Apple, the Enterprise encounters a society that has been kept in primitive cultural stagnation by an advanced computer that carefully controls the entire planet they live on.
• That Reminds Me of a Song: The show would have one of these on occasion because Nichelle Nichols was a professional singer. Every now and then she would serenade the crew.
• That's an Order!: Occurred in 13 different episodes.
• This Is No Time for Knitting: In "Court Martial", McCoy is aghast to find Spock playing chess against the computer while Kirk is losing a court martial for criminal negligence. However, Spock reveals that he has been using the chess games to confirm that the ship's computer's memory banks have been tampered with to frame Kirk: since he's the one who made the chess program to begin with and thus the computer has to be at least as good as he is, he should only be able to force a stalemate at best, but he's won several games in a row by that point, proving that something is wrong with the computer.
• This Was His True Form: The shapeshifting creature in "The Man Trap"; the two telepathic aliens in "Catspaw".
• There Are No Therapists: Bones is apparently an expert on space psychology, and tries to Team Dad everyone, but he tells Edith he’s no psychiatrist.The crew could really use one.
• Those Wacky Nazis: "Patterns of Force" features a planet of Nazis!
• The Three Faces of Adam: Kirk is The Hunter (brash, impulsive and adventurous), Spock is The Lord (wise, rational and logical) and Bones is The Prophet (cynical, outspoken and compassionate).
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: During one of the illusions that Captain Pike is subjected to in the original pilot episode, he winds up using this on a giant warrior threatening the Love Interest, causing it to fall and get impaled.
• Time Bomb: "Obsession", "The Immunity Syndrome", "The Doomsday Machine".
• Time Stands Still:
  • "Wink of an Eye" features aliens who move so fast that they're invisible to the naked eye and everyone else appears frozen to them. (Interestingly enough, so long as none of the aliens or the people they abducted into their 'timeframe' by means of a drug are actually around to watch, both they and the crew seem to function in parallel and on the same timescale just fine. This point is never addressed.)
  • Kirk receives the drug when it's slipped into his coffee, inadvertently making it look like he's on a rush.
• Time Travel: "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" has a time disturbance send the crew back to Earth of the 1960s. "The City on the Edge of Forever" has a weird time portal on a strange planet send the Power Trio back to the 1960s. "Assignment: Earth" has them do it deliberately for "historical research."
• Time Travel Episode: In "The City on the Edge of Forever", Bones accidentally steps through a time portal that takes him back to the 1930s, where he inadvertently changes the timeline so humans never went into space. It's up to Kirk and Spock to follow him and repair the damage.
• Time-Travel Romance: Kirk falls for Edith Keeler in the 1930s in "The City on the Edge of Forever." Unfortunately, You Can't Fight Fate.
• Time-Travelers Are Spies: "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "Assignment: Earth".
• Title Drop:
  • Doubling as a Wham Line, from the episode "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky".
    Old Man: You are... not of Yonada?
    Kirk: No, we're from... outside your world.
    Elder Yonadan: Where... is outside?
    Kirk: [solemnly] Up there. Outside, up there, everywhere.
    Elder Yonadan: So they also... [seizes in pain, whispers] Many years ago, I climbed the mountains, even though it is forbidden. [winces in pain]
    Kirk: Why is it forbidden?
    Elder Yonadan: [winces in pain] I am not sure. [winces again] But things are not as they... teach us, for the world... is hollow, and I... have touched the sky! [screams in pain, falling over dead]
  • Most of the episodes get a Title Drop, including "Obsession", "The Changeling"' and yes, "Spock's Brain".
• That's What I Would Do: In "Balance of Terror", this is Kirk's comment after the nameless Romulan commander dodges one of the Enterprise's attacks: "He did exactly what I would have done. I won't underestimate him again."
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Kirk has one in “Is There In Truth No Beauty”, telling Bones “we’re all vulnerable in one way or another” before staring off briefly with a haunted expression. He’s had a lot of brandy.
• Token Minority: Played with. On the one hand, Star Trek was perhaps the first mainstream show to actively do this, as part of its utopian themes. However, people from all sorts of minorities were shown almost every episode, which means they were hardly tokens, but also most of these characters were minor or one-shot. Among the main cast, it could be said that Sulu and Uhura fit this trope.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • One Girl of the Week has a guy obviously in love with her who is Too Dumb to Live. Given that said girl had to spend four years on Vulcan to retain her sanity, I'm sure trying to make her feel strong emotions is a wonderful idea! Oh, and what better way to get a girl to like you than by ruining her career by murdering the ambassador she's accompanying? The ambassador is an Eldritch Abomination the mere sight of which can make humans go mad. Just walk up, look it straight in the whatever-seeing-organs-it-possesses, and kill it. What could possibly go wrong?
  • Almost every Red Shirt seems Too Dumb to Live in a way. (Except in the cases where their deaths are the direct result of the orders or actions of a superior officer.) To expand on the example, let's examine just how well Starfleet Landing Parties are designed to kill the men and women assigned to them: They carry no protective gear of any kind (helmet, armour, gas mask etc), no emergency food or drink, no miscellaneous survival equipment such as a knife or stove, no emergency shelter, no storage capability beyond a small belt, refuse to change out of their thin brightly coloured uniforms into anything resembling camouflaged and/or practical gear, and they never ever carry a back-up communicator/combadge despite it constantly being broken or lost.
    • Special mention to Joe Tormolen in "The Naked Time" for taking off the glove of his hazmat suit to fucking scratch his nose. He then just leaves the glove off for no apparent reason, touching things with his bare hands. Then when Spock stresses the importance of not touching anything and they have to be decontaminated, Tormolen says nothing, doesn't even seem nervous like he's thinking "Hey, maybe I shouldn't have done that." His stupidity gets him killed and the entire crew infected.
• Touched By The Monster: Interestingly it’s Kirk that gets grabbed a lot by Ruk in all the stereotypical damsel ways in “What Are Little Girls Made Of”, including one bit where he’s held by the waist and forced in close.
• Tragic Bromance: Kirk and Spock, both ways. Kirk is completely broken when Spock dies, and doesn’t expect that he’ll actually come back, and in The Autobiography of Spock, Spock wonders if he could have saved Kirk one last time, and can’t bring himself to visit the man’s grave.
• Trespassing to Talk: During the first season episode "A Taste of Armageddon", Kirk escapes captivity and waits in his captor's office to have a calm, albeit at gunpoint, conversation about the reasons for Kirk's imprisonment.
• Truce Trickery:
  • The Federation has a peace treaty with the Romulan Star Empire that established a demilitarized zone along their mutual border, the Romulan Neutral Zone. "Balance of Terror" revolves around a string of Romulan raids on Federation listening posts along the Neutral Zone, meant to test the Federation's willingness to retaliate for breaches in the treaty.
  • "The Savage Curtain": Kirk points out to Colonel Green that he was notorious for striking his enemies while in the midst of negotiating with them.
• True Companions: Kirk, Spock and McCoy.
• Trial by Combat:
  • Kirk must face the Gorn captain in "Arena" in a Duel to the Death to determine which of them has trespassed into the other's territory.
  • Kirk vs. Spock in "Amok Time" is the other classic example. Spock is badass enough when he's in his right mind. Spock driven beyond the point of insanity by his mating instinct is horrifying for Kirk and McCoy!
• Turns Red: The Companion, when Kirk and crew attack it with something like an EMP; it takes Cochrane to stop it from killing our gallant crew.
• Turn the Other Fist: The episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" features this kind of punch by good ol' Scotty when a Klingon is insulting the Enterprise.
• Two Girls to a Team: For most of the show, there are two women in the core cast: Lt. Uhura and Nurse Chapel. Initially, Yeoman Rand was part of the cast as well, but the actress was let go in the middle of the first season. Only one episode ("The Naked Time") features all three women; Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand never interact with each other, but Uhura seems to be on fairly good terms with the both of them.
• Two of Your Earth Minutes: Occurs in multiple episodes.

U–Z

• Unexplained Recovery: Two rather famous Redshirts. Lieutenant Leslie gets killed by the Dikironium Cloud Creature in "Obsession" and reappears unharmed later in the episode.^note According to the actor, a "recovery" scene was scripted but never filmed. Lieutenant Galloway gets disintegrated by a phaser in "The Omega Glory", but he shows up alive and well in "Turnabout Intruder."
  • In the episode "The Galileo Seven," Spock's legs get pinned between a large rock and a cliff. After he is freed, he is visibly limping; however, later in the episode, he is shown walking around the bridge with no indication that the injury had ever occured. Justified in that Spock may heal faster than humans and that McCoy may have had a chance to treat his injuries in the meantime.
• Underestimating Badassery: In "Errand of Mercy", the Klingons conquer Organia, not knowing that the Perfect Pacifist People living there are actually ludicrously powerful Energy Beings. They didn't need the Federation's help to rescue their planet.
• Unknown Relative: In the episode "Journey to Babel" Kirk is surprised to meet Spock's parents. It's a little unrealistic that a Starfleet captain tasked with transporting a distinguished delegation to a vital conference would have no idea that Vulcan's ambassador to the Federation is his first officer's father.
• Unlimited Wardrobe: Guest star Barbara Anderson (Lenore Karidian, "Conscience of a King") shares the record with Ricardo Montalban and Joan Collins for the most costumes worn in an episode (six).
• Unique Pilot Title Sequence: The broadcast version of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" didn't have William Shatner's "Space, the final frontier" Opening Narration. This was "corrected" for the HD remastered version of the episode. The actual pilot version (first publically available on the Blu-Ray release of the series) had an even more unique title sequence. Alexander Courage's famous theme song was conspicuously absent (despite having been in the earlier pilot, "The Cage") and in its place was different music composed by Courage. The title itself was in a completely different font. Of the cast only Shatner as Kirk was credited with the title, as opposed to season one which credited both Shatner and Nimoy as Spock. Nimoy was instead credited later in the episode before the guest cast. This itself was also done in a way different format than seen in the series, though it does match the style used by other shows of the period (even adding a "Tonight's Episode:" banner above the episode title). Finally, the end titles credited the rest of the cast with their characters' professions (for example, "Ship's Doctor" or "Engineering Chief") rather then their characters' names. These differences (and a few others) can be viewed here.
  • "The Cage" has an even more unique title sequence. It lacks a cold open, doesn't have the narration, and doesn't even have the "Created by Gene Roddenberry" credit. Jeffrey Hunter is the only main cast listed in the opening, followed by a guest star credit for Susan Oliver. There are a few high-speed passes of the Enterprise, none of which are reused in later credits. The sequence ends with a zoom in over the starboard side of the ship, passing over the saucer until the bridge dome crudely transitions to the bridge set. This shot of the ship (without the bridge transition) would be used as Stock Footage for several later episodes. The remastered episode recreated the sequence, adding a nebulous background behind the title while improving the quality of the transition from the CGI model to the bridge set.
• Unsuccessful Pet Adoption: Zigzagged. In "The Trouble with Tribbles", Uhura adopts a Tribble (a little fuzzy alien), but has to give it away because all Tribbles multiply like crazy and are "born pregnant". However, it's a bit ambiguous on whether Tribbles are usually kept as pets. They are sold, but Kirk and other such characters frequently comment on how bad they are as pets.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Doctor McCoy (and Edith Keeler) in "The City on the Edge of Forever".
• Updated Re-release: The remastered episodes, with redone special effects, HD film transfers, and rerecorded stereo soundtracks.
• Villainous Breakdown: Quite a few instances.
  • Khan suffers a brief one when no one from the bridge is willing to join him, even with Kirk's life at stake.
  • In "Turnabout Intruder", Dr Janice Lester grows increasingly unhinged as the rest of the suspicious crew begin to mutiny and rebel against her orders while she's in Kirk's body.
  • "The Conscience of the King" deals with trying to discover if actor Anton Karidian really was a murderous tyrant named Kodos the Executioner. By the end of the episode, this has happened to two villainous characters. Karidian, who is Kodos and becomes spooked when he overhears an argument between Riley and Kirk about his past during a performance of Hamlet, breaks down backstage during the intermission, believing the voices to be ghosts from his past. At the same time, his daughter Lenore reveals she has murdered seven of the nine witnesses who could still identify him, and plans to kill Kirk and Riley, even swearing she would destroy a planet to save him. Kodos breaks down further as he realizes his actions in the past have corrupted his own child as well. In true Shakespearian fashion, this causes a chain reaction that ends in the death of Kodos, who dies trying to stop Lenore from shooting Kirk and instead takes the lethal blast meant for Kirk. Lenore is pronounced completely insane in the epilogue, as she believes her father to be alive and well.
  • Evil Kirk in "Mirror, Mirror". "I. ORDER. YOU!!!!"
  • And Evil Kirk in "The Enemy Within". "IIIIIII'MMMMMMMM CAPTAIIIIIN KIIIIIIIRK!"
• Virus and Cure Names: Rigellian Fever, cured by Ryetalyn.
• The Wall Around the World: The barrier around the galaxy in "Where No Man Has Gone Before". Appears again in "Is There in Truth No Beauty?", when a jealous (and then insane) engineer gets them lost on the wrong side of it and Spock must mind-meld with Kollos to get them back, and mentioned in "By Any Other Name" as the reason for the Kelvan expedition being stranded in our galaxy.
  • In "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky," the inhabitants of Yonada believe themselves to live on a "world" but are actually living in a hollowed-out asteroid that has been turned into a starship, as one elderly Yonadan discovers by comitting the titular act, before being killed for his "heresy" by the Oracle that controls their ship.
• Wanting Is Better Than Having: Spock in "Amok Time", almost word for word.
  Spock: After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical... but it is often true.
• War Hero: Captain Kirk is openly stated to have been decorated many times for valor. Kirk doesn't talk about his awards or display them, preferring to keep them locked away in his quarters. His record is so impressive that in the episode "Court Martial" where Kirk was framed for the death of a crewman and put on trial, the prosecutor tried to have his decorations entered into the record without being read aloud to the court. Fortunately, Kirk's defense attorney saw right through this ploy and insisted that more of Kirk's list of medals be read into the record.
  Cogley: I wouldn't want to slow the wheels of progress. But then on the other hand, I wouldn't want those wheels to run over my client in their unbridled haste.
  Stone: Continue.
  Computer: Awards of Valor, Medal of Honor, Silver Palm with Cluster, Starfleet Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry, Karagite Order of Heroism...
  Cogley: Stop. I think that's enough. I wouldn't want to slow things up too much.
• Weakened by the Light: In "Operation: Annihilate!", the parasites that infected the colonists on the planet Deneva are destroyed by bright light.
• Weapon Running Time: In "Balance of Terror", the Romulans' plasma bolt travels at sublight speed and has a limited range. This allows the fleeing Enterprise to travel far enough before the bolt hits that it survives the weakened bolt's impact. A full-power hit would have destroyed the ship.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Vians in "The Empath" use a beautiful, mute empath in combination with our Power Trio to determine whether her race is worthy of survival before their sun goes nova. Their methods consist of torture and mutilation, resulting in gross physical and psychological damage. Turns out that the empath's race is worthy of preservation, and the Vians, logical and possessed of their own morals and ethics regarding life, needed only "good old-fashioned human emotion" to help them see that.
• We Need a Distraction: Both “By Any Other Name” and “Is There In Truth No Beauty” have the woman notice that Kirk is trying to seduce them as a blatant distraction.
• What a Senseless Waste of Human Life:
  • Kirk is often upset whenever one of his crew members (usually a Red Shirt) dies. He is also clearly upset when the Romulans decide to self-destruct rather than surrender in "Balance of Terror".
  • What's more, the Romulan Commander himself sees his own mission the same way: he's testing new weapons (a cloaking device and extremely powerful plasma torpedo) to see if the Romulans have a sufficient technological edge to win another war against the Federation, and to see if the Federation has grown soft in the intervening years. He is haunted by the fact that if his mission goes well, a new war will be the result, with senseless wastes of Human and Romulan lives on both sides. Nevertheless, he fights to the best of his ability, as his duty demands. This all serves to highlight the fact that he and Kirk aren't so different.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The Horta (rock monster) in "The Devil in the Dark".
• Where's the Fun in That?: "The Squire of Gothos". Kirk asks his captor, "Where's the sport?" in simply hanging him, as he had planned. Instead, Kirk talks his captor into staging a "royal hunt". This buys Kirk enough time for a Deus ex Machina rescue.
• Who Even Needs a Brain?: In "Spock's Brain", Spock's brain is stolen by aliens who use it as a computer to run their planet's infrastructure. For some reason, his autonomic functions still work, but he is completely unconscious. Kirk has to get the brain back quickly, because Spock's Vulcan physiology is especially dependent on that tremendous brain. (While a brain-dead human could be kept "alive" easily for quite some time.) So that they can restore the brain quickly when they find it, McCoy rigs up a device that fits on Spock's head and allows his lifeless body to walk around, manipulated by a remote control. With three buttons. S.P.O.C.K has made a song called "Mr. Spock's Brain", based on the above episode.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Edith Keeler in "The City on the Edge of Forever", a passionate advocate of peace—in the face of Nazi Germany.
  Spock: She had the right idea ... but at the wrong time.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", and to a lesser extent (or at least power level), "Whom Gods Destroy".
• World of Ham: A galaxy of ham, in this case. With most of the principal cast being classically-trained stage actors and having earned their early TV credentials in Westerns,^note and, in Shatner's case, as a television lawyer in a Canadian Perry Mason copycat it comes with the territory.
• Worthy Opponent: Several examples, with the Romulan commander in "Balance of Terror" being a particular standout.
• Would Hit a Girl:
  • Usually it's to show how evil the villains can get, as the main characters would rarely ever do it (unless their body is taken over or if they are under the influence of something). In one episode alone, one minion slaps Uhura and would do it on two more occasions if others hadn't stepped in.
  • Another instance is when an ex-lover of Kirk's, while in Kirk's body, hits Kirk, who is in her body. This shocks the rest of the crew, who at this point haven't learned about the change and grow suspicious, as Kirk would never hit a girl like that.
  • Kirk chins Shahna, his "drill thrall" in "The Gamesters of Triskelion", into unconsciousness, but it doesn't get him very far.
  • However, Kirk has a weird tendency to lay his hands on female characters as part of "normal" conversation, including grabbing them by the arms or shoulders and shaking them, even women he hasn't been sleeping with. This tendency towards physical conversation also extends to male crew members.
  • This tendency doesn't extend to when the girls hit first. Both Kirk and McCoy have slapped women right back in a few episodes.
  • In the very first episode, when the salt vampire disguises itself as Nancy, the woman archaeologist who's supposedly been living on the planet, it's Spock who convinces McCoy by beating the living shit out of "Nancy", who isn't affected at all, finally pretty casually backhanding Spock clear across the room.
• Xanatos Gambit: "Amok Time". T'Pring benefits no matter who wins the duel. Turns out Vulcans love these, since they are, as Spock comments, "Logical. Flawlessly logical." They're always looking to turn some kind of benefit from plans and events.
• Yellow Peril: "The Omega Glory" attempts to subvert this by portraying the white Yangs as barbaric and savage while the Kohms are more advanced and civilized. However, casting the Kohms as descended from Communists and the Yangs as fallen Americans turns it into a straight play of "Red China takes over the world." More here.
• Ye Olde Butchered English: T'Pau in "Amok Time" consistently messes up "Thee" and "Thou," using "Thee" as second person singular subject.
• You Are in Command Now: In "Catspaw", a landing party that includes Scott and Sulu is taken prisoner. Kirk assigns himself and Spock to the rescue party, which also gets captured. This leaves Assistant Chief Engineer Lt. DeSalle, an obscure character that most viewers have never heard of, in command of the Enterprise. (DeSalle appeared in a grand total of 3 episodes.) Robert Bloch's original script had everyone senior to Uhura off the ship, and left her in command, but Executive Meddling wouldn't allow for a black woman being put in command of the Enterprise. In fact, it wouldn't allow for a woman, period. Gene's extremely nasty divorce from his first wife was in progress, and he was reacting with extreme misogynism, declaring in staff meetings that "all women are cunts" and telling Nichols to her face "You can't have females taking over a man's ship."
• You Can't Fight Fate: In "The City on the Edge of Forever", Edith Keeler must die so that Germany doesn't win World War II and wipe the Federation from existence. (Had she lived, she would have founded a peace movement that would have delayed the United States' entry into the European front of WWII, allowing Nazi Germany sufficient time to develop the atomic bomb and thus win the war.)
• Zeerust: Not as bad as often claimed. Though much of the show's technology is highly outdated in its presentation (Apparently 23rd-century starships are still controlled by analog switchboards...), Star Trek inspired a lot of modern technology and strongly parallels future developments in technology in various important ways.
  • Averted, at least for a decade or two, with the "microtape" data cartridges, which look very much like 3.5" diskettes and can store a fantastically large amount of information compared to modern technology.^note as in, one of them can store the entire Internet as of 2017. At the very least recording tapes still exist as a means of long term bulk data storage, with higher capacity tapes and better formatting being made to fill this niche need.
  • Maybe the in-universe designers of the Enterprise wanted the crew to remember they were talking to a machine, but 21st century GPS units sound much more human and less mechanized than the ship's computer voice.
  • There is now a remastered version of Star Trek with modern, CGI special effects. In contrast to the changes done on Star Wars, the remastering is generally (though far from universally) well-received (it helps that the Blu Ray release utilizes seamless branching to allow the viewer the choice of watching the episodes as they were originally broadcast, or with the updated special effects). It should also be noted they only remastered the original special effects and didn't take the opportunity to tweak any plot points. The CGI also embraces a degree of Stylistic Suck, so that the improved effects aren't jarring against original footage.

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