tv tropes star trek online

Star Trek Is About to Boldly Go Where It’s Never Gone Before: Netflix

For Trekkies old and new, the highly anticipated Prodigy Season 2 will be worth the wait.

Dan and Kevin Hageman seem relieved.

It makes sense. The brother duo behind the first Lego Movie and Trollhunters scored a big win back in 2021 when their Star Trek series Prodigy got picked up by Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. But despite signing a two-season deal, Star Trek: Prodigy was quietly canceled after Season 1 — until Netflix swooped in. Now, we’re just days away from the Season 2 premiere , so it’s no surprise that the look on the Hageman Brothers’ faces reads as a mix of glee and exhaustion.

“We’re very excited to be able to tell this story,” Kevin Hageman tells Inverse .

Over Zoom, the Hageman Brothers seem less like siblings and more like two friends who’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons with each other for decades. Kevin clearly wants to be the DM, while Dan is the guy who wants the quest to get bonkers. When it comes to crafting epic, animated projects, this geeky dynamic clearly gets he job done. But now, it’s up to the algorithmic streaming gods to decide Prodigy’s fate.

“I think it really all rests on the success of the Netflix platform,” Kevin says.

Star Trek: Prodigy began as a newcomer’s introduction to the massive canon of Star Trek, but Season 2 hits the ground at proto-warp speed with most of the main cast — Dal (Brett Gray), Jankom (Jason Mantzoukas), Rok (Rylee Alazraqui), Murf (Dee Bradley Baker), Zero (Angus Imrie), and Gwyn (Ella Purnell) — all, more or less, assigned to Starfleet duties. However, any cozy status quo is quickly up-ended by even more time-travel shenanigans than in the first season. It’s a big, surprising season-long arc, but the Hagemans were determined to sneak in some classic Star Trek standalone stories, too.

Dan Hageman hopes that’s enough to win over not just Netflix’s massive audience but the hardcore Trekkies. He says he’ll know Season 2 was a success “if it really sticks in the grill of the Star Trek fandom.”

So ahead of this historic drop — the first time that 20 new Star Trek episodes will be available all at once — Inverse caught up with the Hageman Brothers to talk about the flavor of Prodigy Season 2, balancing episodic adventures with an epic serialized arc, how the show fits into Star Trek canon, and their hopes for the future.

Star Trek’s Greatest Hits

Admiral Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) is back in Prodigy Season 2. But it’s not only Voyager references this season.

“Going into Season 2, we wanted to continue with that idea of what are the greatest hits [of Star Trek]?” Kevin says. “What are concepts and episode ideas that we can introduce to new fans that make up that Star Trek DNA? But we also we found ourselves it is a little more serialized, so the challenge was how to do that and also wrap up a lot of these bigger stories.”

In addition to introducing a new regular Vulcan character named Ma’jel (Michaela Dietz) — who is clearly inspired by Majel Barrett Roddenberry, the late “ First Lady of Star Trek” — Prodigy Season 2 has a slew of Trekkie greatest-hits moments. Without getting into any big-time spoilers, these include parallel universes, some classic aliens for The Original Series , a big shout-out to the 1986 film The Voyage Home , at least one doppelgänger dilemma, and a lot of time travel.

But in addition to creating a diversity of very different stories and completing a bigger arc, Prodigy Season 2 is also a kind of Rosetta Stone for a certain point in the Star Trek timeline. Because Season 2 takes place mostly in 2384, aspects of Lower Decks and Picard canon are fully addressed and integrated. ( Lower Decks occurs between 2380 and 2383, while the earliest Picard Season 1 flashbacks happen in 2385. But the way Starfleet feels in the early days of Picard’s 2380s has seemed a bit incongruous with Lower Decks and Prodigy. In Prodigy Season 2, there’s a very deliberate fix for that.)

“We always wanted Prodigy to embrace the whole canon of Star Trek.”

It’s also worth noting that while Admiral Janeway didn’t appear in Picard Season 3, Prodigy Season 2 elucidates her post- Voyager role a little more clearly. In fact, because Prodigy Season 2 includes recurring roles from Voyager regulars The Doctor (Robert Picardo) and Chakotay (Robert Beltran), it’s tempting to think of the series as a follow-up to that version of Trek, rather than a midquel between Lower Decks and Picard . But for the showrunners, Prodigy’s canonical scope is bigger than either of those options.

“Everyone would say, oh, it’s like a Voyager spinoff, and we were like, no, we’re not a Voyager spinoff,” Dan says. “We are Voyager- adjacent just because Janeway is one of our leads. But we always wanted Prodigy to embrace the whole canon of Star Trek. The things that pop up are things that happen in that timeline.”

Major Trek Twists

Kevin Hageman and Dan Hageman (center), with some of the Prodigy cast including Angus Imrie, Kate Mulgrew, Ella Purnell, and director Ben Hibon in 2022.

The specifics of these events from elsewhere in the Star Trek pantheon range from minor Easter eggs to major events. And some twists and details have been planned since 2021, well before Picard Season 2 or Season 3 aired. The Hagemans reveal that, three years ago, with multiple Trek projects in production, they were in contact with other Star Trek showrunners to make sure Prodigy not only lined up with the rest of canon but also expanded upon a few specific plot points.

“We were all talking and sharing what we were planning and making sure we were all in sync,” Kevin says. “So there was some collaboration.”

By the final episode of Prodigy Season 2, several aspects of Star Trek are fully connected, but there’s also an open-ended notion that the series could continue in some way, shape, or form. But will there be a Prodigy Season 3? The Hageman brothers offer a surprising response.

“Just a lot of dreaming on Season 3,” Kevin says. “Maybe it’s something that happens down the line. I could see something happening in 10 years. Maybe sooner.”

“Maybe there’s a live-action version of it,” Dan adds. “We’re hoping.”

Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2 hits Netflix on July 1.

• Science Fiction

Below are the 166 questions and answers for the Path to 2409 daily trivia, available at Starfleet Academy from Commander Viala for “History 102: Alpha Quadrant Midterm” and Klingon Academy from Loresinger Ch'toh for “Learning the Lore of the Empire” .

Commander Viala is the historian at Starfleet Academy

Ch'toh is the Loresinger of the Klingon Academy

Commander Viala outlines the objectives for Starfleet officers

Midterm can be taken at this computer console

last edit: -- Cyberchip ( talk ) 01:13, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

• 2 Temporal Agent Recruitment
• 3 Lohlunat Festival

10 Best Sci-Fi Tropes Star Trek Popularized

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10 Best Television Universes, Ranked

Star trek's 10 greatest one-off characters, star trek: 10 best captain pike quotes.

Star Trek changed the face of science fiction forever. Even before its popularity took off during the reruns and conventions of the 1970s, Star Trek: The Original Series endeavored to talk about more than just rocket ships and ray guns. It posited something extraordinary -- a viable vision of human utopia -- and slowly built it into a pop-culture bedrock.

In the process, it embraced a number of sci-fi tropes that other movies and TV shows came to emulate. Star Trek’s popularity elevated the profile of such notions, which had previously been limited to a few novels and short stories. Below is a list of ten classic sci-fi tropes that Star Trek helped make popular, presented in subjective order.

10 Controversial Star Trek: TOS Episodes That Wouldn't Fly Today

Star Trek: The Original Series has released several polarizing episodes that wouldn't work today, from "Omega Glory" to "Mudd's Women."

Ray guns were certainly nothing new when Star Trek came along, having served as a sci-fi staple since the days of H.G. Wells. The Original Series draws on the likes of Fantastic Planet and the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials for inspiration, which invariably made copious use of the weapons. It's only natural that Star Trek would deliver its own version, with the slightly more innovative title of phasers.

What really sets the weapon apart from other ray guns, however, is the stun setting, allowing targets to be neutralized without permanent harm. The phrase “set phasers to stun” has become one of Star Trek’s signature lines . More importantly, the weapon’s nonlethal qualities speaks to the franchise’s values: envisioning a future in which violence has been tempered.

9 The Alien Non-Interference Clause

Better known as The Prime Directive, the alien non-interference clause states that no member of Starfleet can interfere with a planet’s natural development. That includes anything from providing advanced technology to revealing the existence of off-world life. It makes for a strong moral dilemma, as figures like Jean Luc-Picard must stand by while terrible things happen to innocent people.

Not surprisingly, the Prime Directive is noted more in its breach than its keeping. James T. Kirk, in particular, is quite cavalier about it, but it remains an easy fulcrum for good storytelling. The Prime Directive is also a way to talk about more down-to-earth issues like colonialism and environmental devastation.

10 Star Trek Phasers, Ranked

The beam weapons have evolved beyond "ray gun" cliches to become an essential part of Star Trek. Here are the 10 best phaser designs in the series.

8 Human/Alien Hybrids

The existence of humanoid aliens precludes the ability to cross-breed, producing children with the genetics of both parents. With Star Trek , the notion goes all the way back to Mr. Spock: the product of a human mother and a Vulcan father. The other prominent canon examples include Star Trek: Voyager’s B’Elanna Torres, the child of a Klingon mother and a human father, and Worf’s son Alexander on Star Trek: The Next Generation , who also has human blood.

Such characters help science fiction explore the exchanges between different societies, as well as the unique challenges faced by the children of two or more cultures. That can lead to simplification or dismissal of complex issues. The trope is only as strong as the TV show using it, but it also gives creators a safe space to discuss those issues before a wider audience.

7 Fantastic Racism

Racism is a weighty issue and addressing it head-on won’t always fly on a series intended primarily as entertainment. Instead, Star Trek talks about racism in a more general way, using alien cultures as a stand-in for various kinds of prejudicial oppression. In the simplest terms, it helps point out the fundamental absurdity of racist beliefs, most notably in The Original Series Season 3, Episode 15, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” which features Frank Gorshin’s black-and-white alien at war with this white-and-black cohort.

Fantastic racism isn’t a perfect trope, and can often whitewash real problems by casting them in the realm of fiction. But it also allows shows like Star Trek to address those issues while still retaining a vision of a more mature humanity who has set such petty hatefulness aside. For good or ill, it certainly allowed other science fiction projects to follow its example.

6 Alien Empires

Humanoid aliens necessitate an essentially human political process, which Star Trek uses as one of its narrative bedrocks. Other entities such as the Klingons and the Romulans don’t necessarily embrace democracy, and have their own agendas that often conflict with the Federation’s. This leads to various schemes, conflicts and outright wars: generating easy storylines and culminating in epic clashes like Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War.

Alien empires predate science fiction movies, going back at least to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and the John Carter novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Original Series uses them as thinly veiled stand-ins for contemporary geopolitical foes like the Soviet Union or China under Chairman Mao. Star Trek: The Next Generation and subsequent series have developed their aliens more fully, while providing new narrative material in concepts like the Klingons’ Great Houses and The Romulans’ Qowat Milat.

The expansive franchise of Star Trek and the varying Law & Order series are some of the most successful shared universes of modern television.

5 Alternate History

Star Trek originally used the Stardate notion to get around the question of exactly when the story was taking place. It took 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to pinpoint its 23rd century setting. Even before then, however, it built its own future history without the slightest inkling of the franchise it was helping to create in the process.

Star Trek's alternate history comes complete with developments like the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s (swapped around to account for the passing of real time) and Zephram Cochrane breaking the warp barrier. The timeline allows new projects to develop their own stories at different points on the timeline. Subsequent franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have done much the same thing.

Star Trek was built to accomodate meaty roles for just a single episode. Here are 10 of the best, drawn from all corners of the franchise.

4 Parallel Realities

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has made the notion of a Multiverse widespread, and written works such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle form the foundation of the idea. But Star Trek brought parallel realities to popular attention long before more modern projects, most notably with Season 2, Episode 4, "Mirror, Mirror." That episode introduced the notion of the sinister Mirror Universe, which the franchise has used in other projects as well.

Star Trek continues to play with parallel realities, and indeed the concept has created some of its finest moments such as Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, Episode 15, "Yesterday's Enterprise." The Kelvinverse series of movies similarly exist in a parallel reality, allowing them to tell their own stories without risking undue continuity errors.

3 Rogue AI/Robots

Rogue AIs go back to the foundation of science fiction, as Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein creates a being he can’t control. Star Trek’s utopian setting makes fertile ground for stories of science to run amuck, with each new era adding its own distinctive touch. The Original Series has the berserk robot Nomad and the M-5 "ultimate computer." Star Trek: Discovery uses the AI Control as its primary antagonist during Season 2, while The Next Generation may have topped them all with the Borg Collective. Even Star Trek: Lower Decks has gotten into the act with the likes of Badgey and Peanut Hamper.

The trend certainly didn't begin with Star Trek , but it made the public increasingly familiar with the notion, while removing it from the more literal image of a Boris Karloff-style monster. As technology has advanced, it's allowed the franchise to continue using it: making pointed comments on contemporary issues behind the veneer of science fiction.

Christopher Pike has become known for his folksy wit and quiet authority on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Here are 10 of his best lines so far.

2 Cool Starships

Before The Original Series , sci-fi spaceships tended to come in two types: rockets and flying saucers. The original USS Enterprise manages to look like both at the same time, while giving Star Trek a singular visual image that sums up its entire zeitgeist. It becomes a character in and of itself during the first crew’s adventures, to the point where its destruction in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock initially elicited cries of grief among the faithful.

Subsequent series have made distinctive ship design a priority: giving them a brand identity distinctive from the rest of the franchise while still being resolutely Star Trek . Other creators took note, as 2001: A Space Odyssey's Discovery and Star Wars's Millennium Falcon emphasize visual distinctiveness to sell their worlds. The flying saucer is well and truly dead, and The Original Series' Enterprise may have killed it.

Star Trek’s best known piece of future technology arose out of a logistical necessity. Having created an iconic spaceship in the USS Enterprise , series creator Gene Roddenberry realized he had no way of landing it on the surface of the different planets the show was supposed to visit. Teleporting down via the ship’s transporters made an elegant solution, avoiding the clumsy logistics of a shuttle and providing a nifty effects shot to boot. It also allowed for easy drama, as Scotty invariably pulled the away team up from the planet's surface in the nick of time.

While it never caught on with other science fiction projects, that kept it a singular part of the franchise itself: never duplicated lest the presented be accused of imitating Star Trek . The rest of the public need not act with such care, of course, and "beam me up" has become a short-hand term for the desire to escape any unpleasant situation.

‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.’ Review: Eddie Murphy Works Hard to Act Game in a Sequel Made to Tickle Your Nostalgia

It's better than "B.H. Cop II" or "III," but its clichés bring the series full circle: the product/schlock of the '80s meets the product/schlock of Netflix.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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What the movie is really out to tap into is that old 1980s “high-powered” life-is-a-blockbuster feeling. The ’80s, at least in popular culture, were the definition of a carefree decade (in terms of movies, it could have been called: How we learned to stop worrying and love the popcorn schlock on steroids). And “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.” is engineered to make us feel, for a couple of hours, as carefree now as we did then. That’s why the whole cash-grab tackiness of the movie isn’t necessarily a liability. It’s actually part of the package.

I’ve always thought the story of how the original “Beverly Hills Cop” came to be was significant — that it was conceived as a straight-up police thriller starring Sylvester Stallone, and then, once Eddie Murphy came aboard, it was turned into a comedy. The motormouth effrontery of Murphy’s early-’80s screen personality, back when he still radiated joy in what he was doing, held the movie together, but “Beverly Hills Cop” was always a patchy, catch-as-catch-can hybrid. And now, with “Axel F.,” a parade of watchable clichés (not just retro-cop-thriller clichés but Eddie Murphy clichés) staged by director Mark Molloy in a slovenly utilitarian style, the series comes full circle: the product/schlock of the ’80s meets the product/schlock of Netflix. Welcome to nostalgia minus the soul!

Full disclosure (though it’s one I’ve made before): I’ve never liked the “action comedy” genre. I’m perfectly capable of enjoying a movie like “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” (or, years ago, “The Last Boy Scout,” or “48 HRS.,” which I still think is the “Citizen Kane” of action comedies, and an infinitely better movie than “Beverly Hills Cop”). But I’m sorry, the genre rarely thrills me, because in most cases there’s an annoying contradiction at its center. Watching the “straight” action-crime-movie parts, we’re supposed to feel invested; watching the comedy parts, we’re the opposite of invested — someone like Eddie Murphy mouthing off may crack us up, but he’s also telling us that the whole thing doesn’t matter. So the audience lurches back and forth between “investment” and not giving a damn. When the comedy happens, the plot stops dead (and if the comedy falls flat, that means the whole movie stops dead).

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die” demonstrates how much speed and flair and even surprise can still be applied to action-comedy trash. It’s a far better ride than “Axel F.” But, of course, what we’re here to see is Eddie Murphy, as the sixtysomething but still street-smart Axel, and Murphy, who seemed like a replicant in the last two “B.H. Cop” movies, bestirs himself this time. He’s really trying — to be not just testy but angry, to inject a touch of renegade conviction into the old Axel brashness. But he’s still got a tinge of that eerie late-period Eddie detachment.

The movie is built around Axel trying to salvage his relationship with Jane, played by the gifted Taylour Paige with so much standoffish lawyerly efficiency that she really never seems like Axel’s daughter. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in a beard that makes him look like an Oberlin philosophy professor, is Bobby, the homicide detective who used to be involved with Jane, and is therefore Axel’s Oedipal rival; this is what sets up the pair’s buddy-cop hostility. Jane is defending an innocent kid who got framed as a cop killer, and the movie is about unearthing the conspiracy, which involves a drug cartel and Kevin Bacon as an officer too natty and smooth to be on the level.

There are a few funny moments, like when Axel is razzing the difference between his last name and Jane’s, or the scene where he tries to convince a Black parking attendant that they’re both brothers , so can’t he just borrow a car? The scene in a cartel homie bar, with Luis Guzmán as a drug runner singing karaoke, isn’t bad; if you squint, for two minutes you can almost pretend you’re in “48 HRS.” A helicopter escape sequence, with Bobby piloting the chopper along the ground, finds the right fusion of action and yucks. All of this might tickle your nostalgia bone — but, of course, the difference between then and now is that in the 40 years since “Beverly Hills Cop,” there have been 400 action comedies spun out of these same tropes. “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.” is just one more of them.

Reviewed online, July 1, 2024. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 115 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Eddie Murphy Productions production. Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Eddie Murphy, Chad Oman. Executive producers: Ray Angelic, Charisse Hewitt-Webster, Melissa Reid, Lorenzi Di Bonaventura.
• Crew: Director: Mark Molloy. Screenplay: Will Beall, Tom Gormican, Kevin Etten. Camera: Eduard Grau. Editor: Dan Lebental. Music: Lorne Balfe.
• With: Eddie Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Paul Reiser, Bronson Pinchot, Kevin Bacon, Luis Guzmán.

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• How Technology Changed TV Tropes Forever

Those of us who love TV often take the standard plot devices known as TV tropes for granted, especially tropes that have been around for a while.

Yet, some TV tropes can disappear or nearly disappear, and new ones can emerge with the changing times.

Technological changes are often to blame for changes in the TV trope landscape.

Entire Shows Can Become Obsolete Due to Technological Advancements

Growing up in the 1980s, I developed an affinity for watching reruns on Nick at Nite, a programming block devoted to older television programs.

After Nickelodeon launched Nick at Nite, an entire generation of us grew up loving shows with first runs that ended well before we were born.

Related: The Best Shows for Kids That Had No Disney or Nickelodeon Ties

Among those programs were series like Gilligan's Island and Lassie, the former about getting stranded on an island and the latter about the daily adventures of a boy and his dog.

Given current technology, many such shows would be pretty different programs if they were produced today.

In some instances, it might even be impossible to duplicate them realistically.

For example, technically, people can still get on a boat, get stranded on an island, and be impossible to locate, as occurred on Gilligan's Island.

It's possible. However, it's not nearly as likely because technologies like cellular phones and tracking devices exist to prevent such things today.

As for Lassie , it's difficult to know where to begin talking about the outdated tropes used on that show.

Almost daily, Lassie had to run through seemingly half a county to find help for someone in some predicament.

That wouldn't happen today because cellular phones are so standard that most people can call for help alone.

Another problem creators of such a show would have today is that characters with outdoor skills are few and far between.

Not only is getting lost or stuck more difficult due to technology, but just getting outside is less common.

Related: 13 Classic Shows to Watch if You Love Elsbeth & Where to Find Them

Children today are likelier to hang out inside in this age of computers, tablets, and video game systems.

Today's societal norms make it far less likely that Timmy Martin (Jon Provost) and Lassie would tromp through the woods, stumble on abandoned mines, and so on daily.

Technology Has Nearly Eliminated Multiple Telephone-Related TV Tropes

Cellular phones have also killed some tropes regarding telephone eavesdropping and privacy.

Years ago, as in real life, homes depicted on TV often featured single phones in central locations like kitchens or living rooms so everyone present could hear at least one side of each conversation.

Classic television shows often used the trope of eavesdropping on phone calls to create romantic and other conflicts.

Of course, some homes had extensions, which made it easy for parents, siblings, or others to eavesdrop and overhear information they had no business hearing.

Other information was also easier to convey on TV through overhead phone conversations back in the day, such as characters receiving news about medical conditions or family emergencies.

Landline phone use by TV characters with crushes and others also created other communication issues.

Before answering machines were standard, people often missed essential calls, a plot point that has been a standard in TV shows for years.

Once answering machines did come on the scene, TV tropes adjusted for them, often including plot devices where machines didn't record correctly or the wrong person got to a machine and heard a message before the intended recipient.

Related: TV Shows Should M ake Stars, Not Depend On Them

Cellular phone usage has eliminated most of those issues.

Today, we are all so attached to our phones that we often never even let calls go to voicemail, and if they do, we get the messages quickly. The same is true of most modern TV characters.

Technology is Rapidly Eliminating Payphone Tropes

Those of us who are old enough to remember a world before cell phones also remember a world peppered with payphones.

According to the FCC, the United States had approximately two million payphones in 1999, but in 2023, the numbers indicated only about 100,000 left.

The reduction in payphones in real life has also reduced their depictions on TV because most characters use cellular phones.

The days of characters being cornered in creepy phone booths making urgent middle-of-the-night calls like they are in a true crime documentary are nearly gone.

Depending on the setting, it's also not as easy to have a character realistically make an anonymous call from a payphone to deliver critical information as it once was.

Then there's the Superman problem to consider.

The Man of Steel was known for years for changing outfits in phone booths.

Related: Superman (Formerly Superman Legacy): Everything We Know So Far About the Upcoming Man of Steel Flick

Granted, he didn't always do so consistently, but many people think of payphones the second they hear anyone mention Superman because the image is cemented in our brains.

As phone booths have become less common, writers of various Superman movies and shows have had to give Superman more creative costume change methods.

In recent years, many Superman shows have used quick cuts, off-screen changes, or CGI methods instead of phone booth sequences.

The Impact of Technology on Crime Show TV Tropes

Another primary TV genre with tropes eliminated or heavily impacted by technological advancements is the crime show.

Crime shows like Miami Vice (1984-1989) often used currently outdated technologies like pagers to allow characters to communicate with each other.

Digging through the records was also a much more common trope years ago.

Today, our favorite TV police officers wouldn't be caught dead using tropes like sending faxes, searching through files manually, or typing up reports on typewriters.

It's all about the latest and greatest in state-of-the-art technology.

The suspect sketch is another TV trope commonly used on crime shows like Law & Order: SVU .

We often saw victims sit in rooms with sketch artists while the artists drew faces on sketchpads.

The trope is still alive and well on modern crime shows, but the methods are often different now.

Related: 23 Dreamiest Male Detectives

Most TV forensic artists have traded in their sketchpads and easels for computer software on popular shows.

The software is exciting but makes the process so quick that modern shows must fill time with other plot points.

It also tends to minimize the use of emotional connectivity between victims and sketch artists as plot points.

The Takeover of Computerized TV Tropes

Hacking is a prime example of a computerized TV trope that didn't exist years ago and is portrayed on TV in multiple ways.

Sometimes, inaccessible data or secure areas require hackers to infiltrate, either for nefarious reasons or to stop criminals already trying to hack systems.

Then there's hacking done purely to distract by setting off alarms, sprinkler systems, or other systems to draw attention away from a character or situation.

An excellent early example was on MacGyver Season 1 Episode 18: Ugly Duckling (1986), when young prodigy Kate Laffery (Darcy Marta) hacked Defense Department systems to cause equipment to go haywire in the building while she escaped custody.

A more modern example of the hacking trope is the frequent hacking done by and to police or government agencies, such as on NCIS (2003-Present).

Computers are also responsible for many other modern tropes besides generating images of crime suspects and being used for hacking.

A major one that pops up frequently is the introduction of a computer virus, with entire episodes usually devoted to stopping the virus before it compromises computer systems.

Since the 1990s, the computer virus trope has been gaining popularity.

Related: 13 Child Stars of the '90s

It has often been utilized on science fiction shows like Eureka (2006-2012) and crime procedurals like CSI: Cyber (2015-2016).

The good guys beat the bad guys trope often used in Westerns and other classic shows is alive and well within the computer virus trope of today because the good guys always tend to stop the virus in the nick of time.

Modern Cellphone Calling and Texting Tropes Are Also Everywhere

Another family of modern tropes created by today's technology is the family of cellphone calling and texting tropes.

These days, we almost all send text messages daily.

Doing so can cause many unexpected and sometimes unwelcome issues, both in reality and on TV shows.

An often-used trope relating to that is the drunk message, such as when Rachel (Jennifer Aniston ) left a drunk answering machine message professing her love to Ross (David Schwimmer) on Friends .

The modern twist is that thanks to technology, people can now not just leave phone messages while drunk but also send emails, text messages, or social media messages in seconds.

Shows and films often use text messaging or just plain calling to add tension between characters.

For instance, one character may get upset if another doesn't answer a text or call immediately because, in this era of instant communication, most people always keep their phones on them.

Texting or calling the wrong person can also help build up drama or, depending on the series, get a comedic laugh.

Related: 17 Great Dramas That Focus on Family First

The most iconic instance of this in recent TV history was probably during Succession Season 3 Episode 8: Chiantshire when Roman (Kieran Culkin) accidentally sent an infamous image of his lower regions to his father, Roy (Brian Cox).

The HBO series Succession often made viewers cringe, and that moment was one of the most cringe-worthy.

Those and many other technological advancements have changed the TV landscape forever .

However, those of us who are into nostalgia can still enjoy classic shows to get our old technology fixes.

Certain recent and current shows, such as The Goldbergs , also highlight our old technological ways.

Which do you prefer, old technology on TV for nostalgia or the latest and most significant technological advancements?

Comment below and tell us all about it.

Jessica Kosinski is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. You can follow her on X .

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Season 2 On Netflix, Where The Ragtag Group Of Teen Starfleet Trainees Join Janeway On A Dangerous Mission

Where to stream:.

• Star Trek: Prodigy

‘Star Trek III’ at 40: The Story of How (and Why) Leonard Nimoy Brought Spock Back After Being Killed Off In ‘The Wrath of Khan’

‘star trek: strange new worlds’ renewed for season 4 at paramount+, bill maher applauds william shatner for controversial ‘star trek’ interracial kiss, patrick stewart was asked to wear a wig at his ‘star trek’ audition — a wig that flew by itself from heathrow to lax.

Star Trek: Prodigy has had a bit of a strange history. It debuted on Paramount+ two-and-a-half years ago, and got good reviews. But Paramount cancelled the show before streaming its second season. Who rides to the rescue? Only the big red N of Netflix, that’s who. They picked up not only the show’s first season but its already-produced second season.

STAR TREK: PRODIGY SEASON 2 : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A group of Starfleet warrant officers are in a training exercise. Then the tiny blobby warrant officer Murf (Dee Bradley Baker) gets a notification from Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew).

The Gist: All of the old ragtag group of teens that saved the Federation while flying the Protostar get the same notification: Murf, Dal (Brett Gray), Zero (Angus Imrie), Jankom Pog (Jason Mantzoukas) and Rok-Tahk (Rylee Alazraqui). Gwyn (Ella Purnell) has gone back to Solum, the home planet she never knew, to see if she can change the First Contact that will lead to the civil war 52 years later, the one that abandoned Captain Chakotay (Robert Beltran) on the future version of the planet.

The quintet is met not by Janeway, but by The Doctor (Robert Picardo), one of Janeway’s closest confidants on the original Voyager . Janeway has invited them to join her on a new mission, this time on a new Voyager , working as interns in their area of interest. The mission is to observe the wormhole created when the Protostar was destroyed.

Dal is suspicious of the group’s interaction with Janeway when they get on board, as if the admiral was distracted by something. He’s also bored of the study he has to do for command training, so he’s intrigued when Zero tells him that the Doctor mentioned a third shuttle bay, even though the ship is only supposed to have two.

A quick trip down the Jefferies tubes, over Rok-Tahk’s objections, lands Dal, Zero, Murf and Jankom Pog in what looks like an empty shuttle bay. But they soon learn that it’s not empty; it contains a cloaked shuttle, which is against Starfleet regulations. Then Janeway, The Doctor, Commander Tysess (Daveed Diggs) and Counselor Noum (Jason Alexander) walk in; the four interns overhear what the cloaked ship, called the Infinity , is really for.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As we said before Season 1, Star Trek: Prodigy gives off the same vibes as Star Wars: The Bad Batch , but now the group a more fully canonical part of the Trek universe, so we might as well link this up with the original Voyager series.

Our Take: What we appreciate about Star Trek: Prodigy , which Netflix saved from the scrap heap after Paramount+ cancelled it, is that showrunners Kevin Hageman and Dan Hageman put together a pretty complex adventure despite the fact that the show is intended for kids.

In the second episode, Janeway ends up telling Dal and the others exactly what the Infinity is for: She wants to go through the wormhole and rescue Chakotay from the future version of Solum. That’s some pretty heavy stuff, and a dangerous mission to boot. And the mission Gwyn is on is pretty complex, as well, as she seeks to meet the younger version of her father, The Diviner (John Noble). All the while Aseincia (Jameela Jamil) is out to sabotage her efforts.

The show’s writers don’t shy away from the dangers of either of these missions, and there are red-shirt-type deaths that happen, at least in the abstract. And they’re not trying to dumb anything down, knowing that the kids who watch the show are smart, and their Trekker parents are going to pick apart any inconsistencies or dumbed down moments.

Given that the season plays out over 20 episodes, there should be plenty of time for this mission to unfold without having to skip details, and there will be time for Gwyn to rejoin the rest of the old Protostar gang. This is one of the cases where more episodes are helpful, as it gives the writers room to keep exploring relationships between the teen interns, other groups on the ship, as well as Janeway’s relationship with Chakotay. Will it all be canonical? Probably not. But there will be more than enough linkage to the rest of the Trek universe to keep fans happy.

What Age Group Is This For?: Besides the red-shirt-style deaths, there’s some hand-to-hand fighting and “pew-pew” phaser fights, so despite the show’s TV-Y7 rating, we think this is more for kids 10 and up.

Parting Shot: After overhearing Janeway and her executive officers, Dal says, “And this just got interesting!”

Sleeper Star: It’s always fun hearing Robert Picardo playing the Doctor again, but…

Most Pilot-y Line: We don’t remember the Doctor speaking with some sort of haughty upper-class voice in the original Voyager . Who directed Picardo to use a haughtier voice this time around?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Star Trek: Prodigy gives Trekkers a real adventure with canonical implications to wrap their minds around while providing action and characters kids can relate to. It’s a combination that we rarely see in kids’ extensions to existing franchises.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

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10 best classic star trek tropes in strange new worlds.

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Star Trek Actor Compares Working With William Shatner & Patrick Stewart

Every star trek ship with an illegal cloaking device, star trek found a vulcan way to honor majel barrett roddenberry.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds   was met with a bit of trepidation when it was announced. After all, did audiences really need to be put back on the Enterprise  again ? Weren't there more stories to tell in the  Star Trek   universe? Did  Trek  fans want another show like  Discovery   and  Picard , which featured season-long story arcs and (in the minds of some) played fast and loose with established canon?

Instead,  Strange New Worlds has been a breath of fresh air for Trekkies. Fans and critics alike are raving about how effective and entertaining  SNW  is. The show leans heavily into nostalgia, using classic  Star Trek tropes and themes to bring it a more familiar feel.

Captain Falls In Love With An Alien

Episode Six, titled "Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach," re-introduces Captain Pike to Alora, a Majalan woman he met years prior as a young officer. Pike and Alora rekindle their romance, but it comes to a sudden end when Pike uncovers disturbing details about Majalan society.

Related: 10 Unpopular Opinions About Strange New Worlds, According To Reddit

Pike's successor, Captain Kirk was notorious for drawing the attention of ladies, whether they be 23rd-century aliens or human women from centuries past. Captain Picard was less of a lothario, but even he couldn't escape the affections of the roguish Vash. Sisko, Archer, and Janeway all dabbled to some degree with galactic romance, proving once again that it's good to be the captain.

Obsession With Spock's Love Life

One of the recurring guest roles on  SNW is T'Pring, Spock's fiance. The show goes to great lengths to explore the couple's relationship, using several episodes to fill in details about one of Spock's best romances.  The subject of Spock's love life is one  Trek just can't seem to get away from.

Original Series episodes like "Amok Time," "All Our Yesterdays," and more dealt with Spock's love life to some degree. A deleted scene from  Star Trek: The Voyage Home would have established that Saavik was pregnant with Spock's child. The character who is supposed to feel the fewest emotions is constantly being thrust into situations fraught with emotion, a dichotomy  Trek writers are apparently still fascinated with.

Body Swapping

In one of the show's latest attempts to explore Spock's romantic side,  SNW decided to fall back on another classic  Star Trek gag: the swapping of bodies between characters. In this case, Spock switches bodies with T'Pring, which brings both of them a greater understanding of each other's professional roles.

Thankfully in this episode, the body-switching is a light-hearted mistake. In many episodes of  TOS  and  Voyager , it took on a more sinister tone, with aliens attempting to use the bodies of Starfleet crewmembers for their own dark purposes. The most famous instance comes from  Star Trek   III, which famously used body-swapping to bring Spock back from the dead.

Conflicts With The Prime Directive

This one is such a classic that it ends up in the first episode of  SNW.  The episode follows the Enterprise crew as they debate whether or not to intervene in a conflict that could tear apart a developing civilization.

One of the most well-known rules in the  Trek  universe is that Starfleet officers are forbidden from interfering with the internal developments of non-warp-capable species, a rule known as General Order 1 (later the Prime Directive). The reason it's so well-known is that it's almost exclusively brought up when it's about to be broken, and it happens repeatedly in every  Trek  series. Mostly it works out, but  some violations of the Prime Directive end pretty messily.

Landing Parties With Multiple Bridge Officers

One of the best small details about  SNW is that Starfleet vernacular is a bit different than on shows set later in the timeline. "Away teams" are referred to as "landing parties" to pay homage to  TOS , but no matter the name they share one characteristic across every era: they're always full of extremely important bridge officers.

Obviously, from a production point of view, this is necessary to ensure that the audience cares about the characters being beamed into a dangerous or thrilling situation. Still, from an in-universe perspective, it's rather impractical to risk the lives of so many high-ranking officers ( and some of  SNW' s most likable characters)  by sending them into an unknown environment. It is, nevertheless, perfectly in keeping with some of the oldest  Trek traditions.

Aliens With A New Form Of Communication

Ever since she was confirmed to appear on  SNW , it was fair to assume Uhura and her talent for communication would play a big role in the show. Episode 2, "The Children of the Comet," thrusts the cadet into the spotlight, forcing her to use her skills to communicate with a living comet that's on course to collide with an inhabited planet.

Alien species that use music, mathematics, or flamboyant gestures have all been used on  Trek in the past, and usually to impart a similar lesson. Such interactions serve to teach the characters (and the audience) that it doesn't take much to open their mind to possibilities they'd never considered, and doing so can build rewarding bridges.

Situations That Require Outlandish Costumes

In "The Elysian Kingdom," the crew of the Enterprise is unwittingly forced to play out a children's story by a powerful alien living inside a nebula they came to study. All of them inhabit characters from the book, and each gets a full medieval costume to complete the transformation.

Since  SNW  is set in a time without holodecks, the writers had to get a bit more creative, but previous  Trek shows loved putting their cast into wacky situations that required elaborate costumes. Such hijinks have their roots in the original  Trek , and the willingness to fall back on  TOS is one of the things Trek fans love most about  Strange New Worlds.

Mystery Illness Incapacitates The Crew

In "The Ghosts of Illyria," the crew investigates an alien colony that has seemingly been annihilated, only to contract whatever illness afflicted the colonists. They must race against time to discover a cure before they too are wiped out.

Related: 10 Reasons Why Even Non-Star Trek Fans Will Love Strange New Worlds

That description could be used to summarize about a dozen  Trek  episodes from years past, and it's a trope the writers return to for good reason. It underlines that space exploration is dangerous and that the crew hasn't seen all the dangers the galaxy has to offer. Because the characters on the show are highly skilled, they have to be confronted with challenges they've never seen to keep the show believable and entertaining.

Social/Political References To Its Time

The conflict with the Prime Directive that drives the plot of episode 1 culminates in Captain Pike showing the aliens of a non-warp-capable species scenes from Earth's violent past in order to convince them to change. The footage includes real scenes from recent political turmoil in the United States and other places around the globe.

Though it was an unpopular move with some fans, the inclusion of commentary on real-life political and social issues is one of  Star Trek's  oldest traditions. Several  TOS  episodes dealt with themes of race and fascism,  TNG explored LGBT issues, and  DS9 's  two-part episode "Past Tense" was a stark commentary on issues of poverty and class.

Planet Of The Week

One of the most striking features of  SNW  is its return to a less serialized storytelling format. The Enterprise finds itself on a new adventure every week, which allows more room for the creative storytelling that  Trek is well-known for.

One of the biggest criticisms of  Discovery  and  Picard was a departure from what every  Trek show up until then had featured: storytelling that included some longer story/character arcs but was largely episodic. Instead of becoming bogged down in one large plot,  SNW can introduce fans to more characters and new aliens, as well as bring back familiar ones. In short, this format is the ideal one for showing audiences more and more strange, new worlds.

Next: The 10 Best Star Trek References And Easter Eggs In Strange New Worlds

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022)

Weird Star Trek Novels That Are Enjoyable To Read

I n February 1970, Bantam Books published the first original Star Trek novel. James Blish's Spock Must Die! received mixed reviews from critics, but it laid the foundation for many hundreds of further novels . Perhaps the golden era of Star Trek prose was under Pocket Books, who produced an ambitious continuation of TNG and DS9 long before Star Trek: Picard .

Some of the tie-in novels are good, some are bad, and some are just plain strange. From vanity projects to starship-sized plot holes, Star Trek's authors went where no one had gone before (and sometimes where they shouldn't have gone). Though they may be on the stranger side, here are a few books that fans of the franchise will doubtless enjoy.

The Enterprise War - John Jackson Miller

John Jackson Miller's 2019 novel answers a pertinent question: where was the Enterprise during Star Trek: Discovery 's Federation–Klingon War? Miller shows Pike's Enterprise caught in a different war between the Boundless and the Rengru, aliens who hope to use the starship to tip the scales in their favor.

RELATED: Most Charismatic Star Trek: The Next Generation Characters, Ranked

The Enterprise War has an exciting plot, but stumbles slightly when it comes to reconciling the Pike era with the rest of contemporary Trek. Spock's references to Michael Burnham seem out of place alongside obscure characters from Star Trek 's failed pilot, while the Enterprise 's saucer separation recalls TNG rather than TOS or Discovery . Miller's novel walks a fine line between anachronisms and tropes. The result is a weird blend of eras, but one that readers are sure to enjoy.

The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin

Few fans were impressed when Star Trek: Enterprise ended by killing off one of its crew. In terms of both scriptwriting and direction, the noble sacrifice of engineer Trip Tucker is an anticlimax. This shortcoming inspired authors Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin to consider an alternative: what if Tucker's death was a hoax?

RELATED: Star Trek: The Relationship Between Vulcans & Romulans, Explained

The Good That Men Do (2007) claims that Tucker never died; instead, he left the Enterprise to work for Section 31 . This coverup allowed him to investigate a new threat posed by the Romulans. The book holds a strange place in Star Trek canon: it is as much an apology as it is a novel, although the Romulans' machinations make for an entertaining read.

Disavowed - David Mack

While the Star Trek Relaunch series provided fans with some franchise highpoints, it had started to stumble by the time of David Mack's Disavowed (2014). Six years earlier, Mack had torn up the status quo with his Destiny trilogy, focusing on a massive Borg invasion . The trilogy is excellent—but its fallout left subsequent novels unsure of where to take the series.

Mack's story, centered on Julian Bashir, reinvents the Star Trek novel as a tense espionage thriller as the Starfleet doctor and Section 31 operative travels to the Mirror Universe to halt a scheme by the evil Breen. Mack's prose is propulsive, but Disavowed represents the Star Trek world at a crossroads. The book's weirdness lays not in its writing, but in its attempt to reinvigorate the series with a focus on espionage rather than exploration.

Broken Bow - Diane Carey

Star Trek 's writing has been the subject of parodies aplenty, from shows like The Orville to movies like Galaxy Quest . In 2020, the franchise itself got in on the fun, with cartoon series Lower Decks spoofing on Star Trek 's tropes. Yet Lower Decks was not the first time that Star Trek' s own writers took a swipe at the franchise. The 2001 novelization of "Broken Bow" derided the Star Trek: Enterprise episode it was meant to retell.

RELATED: Star Trek: Enterprise Actor Slams How Her Character Was Written

Author Diane Carey wrote extensively for Star Trek 's novels (the hero of her 2000 novel Challenger was written to resemble Enterprise 's Scott Bakula, though the book predated his casting). Yet when it came to novelizing Bakula's first real adventure, Carey was so unimpressed with the script that she used the characters' internal monologues to criticize the story's plot. The author was allegedly blacklisted for her mischief, but she turned an otherwise by-the-numbers novelization into a sneaky practical joke.

A Singular Destiny - Keith R.A. DeCandido

Readers might expect a sequel to TNG and DS9 to feature a hero like Captain Picard, or a fan favorite like Kira Nerys. Yet although Keith R.A. DeCandido's 2009 novel does feature DS9 's Ezri Dax, its star is diplomat Sonek Pran, a wholly original character. This stylistic deviation allows A Singular Destiny to interrogate the state of the Relaunch universe . The Borg may be gone, but a new threat is rising in the form of the Typhon Pact, an alliance of several hostile states including the Breen and the Gorn.

Despite the scope of its universe, Star Trek can become bogged down by revisiting the same characters and tropes. DeCandido's novel bucks this trend, making this immersive political thriller an essential chapter in the Relaunch saga.

Fearful Symmetry - Olivia Woods

Viewers of DS9 may recall the episode "Second Skin," in which Bajoran Kira Nerys was disguised as a Cardassian. Fearful Symmetry claims that the woman that Kira impersonated, Iliana Ghemor, was also altered to look like Kira, but fell into the clutches of Gul Dukat , who imprisoned and abused her. Driven mad, the impostor plots her revenge in Olivia Woods' 2008 novel.

While it's odd that Dukat never mentioned his prisoner, the novel's true weirdness is its two-in-one physical format. Fearful Symmetry is made up of two narratives: the front cover depicts Kira, while the rear is an alternate cover showing Ghemor. Starting the book in one direction shows Kira's investigation into her duplicate, while starting in the opposite direction provides the troubled life of Ghemor. This parallel structuring allows the novel's form to mirror its content, a clever gimmick.

Killing Time - Della Van Hise

The possibility of a deeper, potentially romantic bond between Kirk and Spock has intrigued fans for decades (the term "slash fiction" is attributed to stories about the pair), but Star Trek 's writers were unwilling to offer any confirmation. Father of the franchise Gene Roddenberry was particularly opposed to the idea. He was displeased, to say the least, when author Della Van Hise snuck suggestive material into her 1985 novel.

RELATED: Captain Kirk's Redemption Of Spock In The Mirror Universe

First editions of Killing Time (which involves the Romulans altering history to try and defeat the Federation) were recalled and destroyed, although some were purchased by fans. A revised edition removed the offending content. Rumors circulated that an even more explicit version existed, although Van Hise denied these claims. If nothing else, Killing Time demonstrates the importance of checking a book before it's sent to the printers.

The Return - Garfield Reeves-Steven & William Shatner

Actor Leonard Nimoy was so impressed by Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , in which his character died, that he asked for Spock to return from the dead . William Shatner, on the other hand, was so unimpressed by Kirk's death in Star Trek: Generations that he decided to take matters into his own hands, co-writing a series of novels in which a resurrected Kirk continues the fight against evil.

The resulting Shatnerverse (comprising ten novels by Shatner and Judith and Garfield Reeves-Steven) is generally considered non-canon even by novel fans, with some regarding it as an ego trip for Shatner. Kirk's transition into a quasi-Messianic figure certainly has all the hallmarks of a vanity project, as does his role in the total defeat of the Borg in 1996's The Return . The Shatnerverse novels may not fit into any version of canon aside from their own, but they represent an interesting diversion for those who like their books heavy on fan-service and light on common sense.

MORE: Best Starfleet Ships Of The 23rd Century

Star Trek: 10 Most Overused Plot Tropes

Let's take a look at some recurring plots that've come to define Star Trek!

Star Trek has been around for so long that it's forgivable for it to slightly reuse plots from time to time, such as the Voyager episode Author, Author that plays out very similar to the Next Generation episode The Measure Of A Man, both episodes featuring an artificial lifeform (Data and The Doctor) fighting for their freedom as sentient beings, not the property of Starfleet. In Star Trek: Picard we see the continuation of this story with other synthetic lifeforms.

However, there are certain plot ideas that have been reused so much that they have become tropes. Moments that define Star Trek, and can be found across nearly all shows of the franchise.

From things that prevent their technology from easily saving the day, to rehashed ideas for conflicts, to repeated filler moments, this list will be counting down ten of the most egregious examples of Star Trek plot tropes throughout the franchise's history.

10. Characters Meeting Alternate Versions Of Themselves

Most fans are familiar with the mirror universe. This alternate reality where humanity rules the galaxy with an iron fist and subjugates all alien life has appeared on Star Trek: Enterprise, The Original Series, Deep Space Nine, and Discovery, and shows audiences a darker, more sinister reality devoid of Starfleet's morals.

There are also many other alternate versions of characters that pop up throughout the franchise. In the Next Generation episode, Second Chances, we learn that Riker was inadvertently duplicated through a transporter glitch. His duplicate was left alone on the planet as the ship warped away carrying the other Riker and was forced to survive on his own for eight years. Another example is the clone of Picard, Shinzon, created by the Romulans, who assassinated the Romulan senate and made a plan to annihilate Starfleet.

Other notable copies include Admiral Janeway from the alternate future in the last episode of Voyager, all of the characters from the reboot movie timeline, and many more. This trope appears constantly in Trek and gives us insight into how the characters we know and love would've been different if they'd had different lives.

Marcia Fry is a writer for WhatCulture and an amateur filmmaker.

The True Tropes Wiki

• Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
• Military Science Fiction

Star Trek Online

An MMO developed by Cryptic, makers of City of Heroes and Champions Online , set in the original Star Trek universe in the year 2409, thirty years after the last appearance of the Next Generation crew in film, and 22 after Romulus was destroyed in the prime timeline as per Star Trek XI . The game was originally being developed by Perpetual, but was auctioned off as the studio was facing severe financial troubles at the time , and actually had to lay off nearly half of the development staff.

The Borg are back, deadlier than ever before, and the galaxy is once more on the edge of war. The Federation and The Klingon Empire are at each other's throats again, and the tattered remains of the Romulan empire post "Countdown" may be scattered, but they remain a credible military threat to both. That's only compounded with a newly democratic Cardassia facing a civil war against True Way rebels helped by Dominion renegades, and the Undine (formerly Species 8472) infiltrating everyone.

In other words, the 25th century Star Trek universe has become a Crapsack World (relatively speaking), and it's up to the player(s) to find a way make it right.

The game combines space travel with on-foot segments and a healthy dose of combat in both. A proprietary engine was created to randomize missions, star systems, and planetary surfaces, in order to provide new and different experiences every time a player engages in a mission or quest.

And, of course, being a Cryptic game, Character Customization is suitably bonkers and may in fact eclipse every other thing they've done. You have an absolutely astounding number of ways to customize your captain; not only has every facial feature from the TV series been included, but Cryptic has included all kinds of inventions of their own. And then they allow you to apply the same level of customization to your entire bridge crew . And then you get to customize the hull of your ship, and then you get to customize your bridge and more interior customization is coming and... well, you get the idea. Oh, and you can create a new custom species for your captain.

The consensus so far is that the game is essentially a mix of World of Warcraft IN SPACE! combined with Star Trek Starfleet Command ... and that this isn't necessarily that bad a thing at all. Especially with the new weekly "Featured Episodes", small content updates centered around a fairly lengthy and involved mission, and the advent of a pretty good branching dialogue tree on top of the combat, the game is finding a fairly solid set of legs and and a strong following after a admittedly rocky start. Additions like the "Foundry" content generation tools may allow the game to carve out an even larger niche for itself, as well.

Right now the only two playable factions are the Federation and Klingons. Shortly after the game first started, there were rumors of other factions like the Cardassians and Romulans to be added later on, allowing for more playable races such as the Hirogen and Jem'Hadar, though it looks like that rumor might remain as such.

As of January 17th, 2012 the game has gone Free-To-Play with the standard Subscription option containing boosts such as more wallet space, the ability to create content in the Foundry, a stipend of their Store Points, and so on, so lifetimers don't have to feel gypped at the game going free.

This Game Provides Examples Of: [ ]

• The only problem is that the ships are limited in how much they can pitch up or down, to about 75 degrees relative to the plane of the ecliptic. This is likely to prevent players from getting horribly confused and turned around, but it also does make "vertical" attacks difficult to pull off; this unfortunately makes escorts, with their narrower firing arcs, a bit harder to use than they probably should be.
• Abusive Precursors : Remember how Picard thought that the Iconians had a bad rap due to their frightening teleportation technology? He was wrong. Very. Very. Wrong.
• I have to spend twenty credits to get a drink out of the replicator? What, did my crew bring a bag lunch and never use them? For that matter, I have to pay Starfleet to have better guns mounted on my ship?
• Trade goods vary in price at different locations, but always sell for a price slightly lower than the cheapest price you can buy them for, so you can't make trade runs across the galaxy with a full load of them, only buy them for missions and research.
• Also averted in two ways. 1: You don't have to pay a penny to get the stock weapons, shields, etc that come standard on your ship (like the phasers and photon torpedoes that the Enterprise always had; we never saw them trade up for better weapons!). 2: You will get so many loot drops throughout the game that you can sell, so that you will eventually be rolling in Energy Credits (the ingame currency) anyway and can afford the awesome upgrades.
• Reinforced by the Mk XII M.A.C.O. and Omega Force gear, which is only availible by getting Prototype Borg Technologies in Elite Special Task Force mission (Borg raids essentially) but they drop so rarely there people who have been playing since launch and not recieved a single one. Did I mention that there are two sets (Ground and Space) of each?
• Blurs earlier than that. The cruiser, with its high hull rating can be a tank, but with engineering crew can also heal itself and a friendly's shields, making it a buffer too. The science vessel, with its strong shields can be a magic tank, and debuffer with good science personel. The tactical vessel is a good combo of the blade-master and backstabber with good tactical officers. The real difference though isn't their base stats, but the number of bridge crew slots for a particular field and their abilities, which like almost everything else, can be infinitely customized.
• Air Guitar : One of the emotes.
• All Your Powers Combined : The Federation and Klingons' ultimate ships, the Advanced Odyssey and Bortasqu', actually come in three varieties, each tailored to a different career type, and each with a unique console appropriate to that career. There's nothing stopping you from loading all three consoles on one ship if you have them, though, and you even get a handy set bonus for it (not to mention some useful synergies, like using the Subspace Snare on your Bortasqu' to teleport some poor sap in front of your Disruptor Autocannon ).
• Played with even further in "The Needs of The Many," where a former Temporal Investigations agent remembers events from the game, the Star Trek Novel Verse , and the J.J. Abrams movie , suggesting that any and all continuities can intersect whenever the heck they feel like it.
• Note, however, that the game is still non-canon. Paramount's official policy is that only the movies and TV series (including TAS) count.
• Always a Bigger Fish : The Iconians are fond of this one. The second time they show up, they're wiping out the two Borg Cubes coming after you. The third time, just as you're in a fight for your life with Empress Sela , an Iconian ship shows up, snags her ship and sucks her through a Gateway.
• The Player Characters can become this as well, thanks to a Diplomacy XP system capped by gaining the official status and title of Ambassador, complete with spiffy Dress Uniform .
• Ancient Astronauts : At the end of the Breen arc, a planet is found with thousands of living Preservers in stasis, with many choosing to awaken and explore the Galaxy created by the various species in the Trek verse whose worlds they seeded billions of years ago.
• Hakeev , meanwhile, is a quite intentional example - his undignified, anticlimactic death is the absolute worst nightmare for an arrogant, theatrical Smug Snake like him. To add insult to injury, it's not even the end of the mission - you then get treated to a spectacular boss battle against Empress Sela , his employer and Unwitting Pawn , who had nothing whatsoever to do with the story-arc that he was the Big Bad of.
• Molor goes down like a putz, too. Maybe it's just something about Klingons? On the plus side, you then get to battle Fek'lhr himself , and he is definitely not an Anticlimax Boss .
• Apocalyptic Log : Several of the random exploration missions on dead worlds or empty stations. Examples include mind control experiments Gone Horribly Wrong , teleportation experiments Gone Horribly Wrong , and other such things Gone Horribly Wrong.
• Arbitrary Maximum Range : 10 kilometers. Some ships can cross that distance in a handful of seconds.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions :
• If a custom title is used, that replaces the Rank when people speak to you. This can lead to some strange results, however.
• Artificial Stupidity : The Borg seem to ignore any mini-ships you send at them, like the Scorpion Fighters. All you have to do is run outside of combat range while they slowly but surely deal hull damage and eventually destroy them.
• Asteroid Miners : Players can now strap on their EVA suit and mine for in-game currency on, yep, an asteroid.
• Asteroid Thicket : Usually as a planet's rings or a debris field. At least in the early missions, though, it's just a bunch of rocks floating in the middle of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever. Worse, the thickets tend to exist just around the mission area. Meaning that if you're not surrounded by asteroids you're likely far from where you should be. Less of a problem with more recent missions.
• A-Team Firing : Dual pistols and assault rifles have a spray-and-pray special ability which, fittingly, has a chance to cause Expose. The primary fire is actually very accurate.
• ~Author's Saving Throw~: Several missions put you in contact with NPCs interested in the Hobus supernova (the one that destroyed Romulus), all of which say things that boil down to "yeah, this doesn't make one damn bit of sense", which it didn't. An arc in the Lieutenant Commander levels reveals the supernova and its FTL blast wave were the result of a weapon deployed by Romulan Admiral (then Praetor) Taris at the behest of alien "dark masters", AKA the Iconians. This is a take-off from the new movie's prequel-comic Countdown, and the game also acknowledges that Data is alive and commanded the Enterprise-E after Picard finally retired. Much to the chagrin of players who haven't read Countdown, this information is only displayed in tooltips, and they do not elaborate on how Data survived.
• This is actually a problem for any cannon-toting ship that has a wide turning circle, like the larger Klingon cruisers. The Bortasqu' has an elegantly simple solution, though - its Subspace Snare console teleports the enemy in front of its main guns .
• "Boarding Party" a lower level Bridge officer space ability sends, you guessed it, a boarding party onto the target ship. However they don't do much and tend to get killed quite easily (even though your ship sends three shuttles at once) and beyond that the logic makes it even worse. What if you lose all three shuttle craft? About 30 crew members are "dead" yet you can do the whole thing again in about 90 seconds...
• It might seem insane to bring a bat'leth or lirpa to a gun-fight, but 50% of their damage can go right through personal shields, and a lunge attack can knock several enemies down if they're close enough together, leaving them exposed. Especially useful against Hirogen, who like to beam into the midst of your group.
• Badass Crew : After the first story arc of the game, the player and their Bridge Bunnies more than qualify for this status. And if you fill your Duty Officer ranks with Uncommon to Very Rare DOFFs, your ship's crew readily quailfies as well.
• Badass Longcoat : By the time you reach Level 51 (the level cap currently), you are very badass indeed. And what is your reward for all this badassery? A knee-length Vice Admiral's overcoat.
• Badass Long Robe : The content update "Common Ground" added off duty outfits for the players to wear, including a selection of Robes.
• Bait and Switch Boss : Inverted in one of the endgame missions, when Q tosses you into battle against three Borg Cubes ... and then when they're just outside your weapons range he decides to go easy on you and handwaves two of the Cubes out of existence.
• Bare Your Midriff : One of the premium uniforms is the TOS Mirror Universe Terran uniform.
• Not a beam, but Heavy Plasma Torpedoes can be shot down or repelled by a tractor beam. Bonus points if you destroy one with another heavy plasma torpedo.
• Beam Spam : Beam: Fire at Will is the most literal interpretation given that it ends up with your phasers blasting away at anything in sight, but really, any broadside from a beam-laden high-level cruiser qualifies. If we count cannons, Cannon: Scatter Volley is about as spammy as they come.
• The Engineer gets one automatically around Lieutenant Commander 5 (level 15), bonus points because this uses the same graphic as the Power Armor Block ability in Champions Online .
• Betting Minigame : With the release of Season 2, Dabo is now been introduced in which you can earn Gold Pressed Latiumn.
• BFG : Many of them . Your away team will likely be decked out with these after about three or four hours of gameplay.
• BFS : The Klingon Bat'leth sword, which can be used by both playable factions. They are also carried by Klingon Swordmasters , and it would be wise to take them down before they can get close enough to use it.
• Beware the Nice Ones : The Federation has gone to war. Enough said. Also might apply for the peaceful hunter-gatherer Aelasians - see the Superweapon Surprise entry below.
• Among the Tactical, Operations, and Science variety Odyssey Class ships, the Operations can do a saucer separation, and Tactical can launch an escort from the back. Sadly, while you can use both consoles on one ship, you can't use both abilities at the same time (splitting into three sections).
• In the late Lieutenant and for most of the Lt. Commander levels, "Ambassador"/General B'vat, who will do just about anything to keep the Fed/Klink war going so that Klingons don't turn on one another.
• While Romulan space lacks one specific Big Bad, Praetor Taris ultimately ends up being the source of quite a few of the problems you have to face in that section of the game - not to mention the fact that she's responsible for the deaths of billions in more than one continuity .
• The Admiral Upper Half Undine missions and the latest feature episodes basically confirms the Iconians are the true Big Bads in the galaxy, and have manipulated EVERYONE, including the Undine into total war so the Iconians have a softer target for conquest. Shame that now EVERYONE knows now, and are mighty pissed. Ooops.
• You as a player get a whole bunch of these moments. This is also the entire purpose of the Fleet Support ability, which lets you call in another Federation ship once your hull integrity drops below 50%.
• You're also on the receiving end of one of these in an early mission: You find out that the ambassador you've been escorting really is an Undine/8472 infiltrator, and he's beamed back to his ship... a Tethys-class dreadnought that you cannot possibly hope to fight under any circumstances. You can only hope to survive by shooting down the plasma torpedos it spews at you... and then help arrives in the form of the USS Kirk , leading a flotilla of warships which open up an incredible can of whoopass on the dreadnought.
• He's so far gone that when you meet his past self during a Time Travel mission, he asks you to give his future self an honorable death.
• Amusingly enough, this character (almost to a T) duplicates one from ANOTHER videogame franchise - these are exactly the motivation AND the actions of Admiral Tolwyn from the Wing Commander franchise, as shown in Wing Commander IV .
• Bond Villain Stupidity : Played perfectly straight by Hakeev - right down to the Evil Gloating - after cornering you in a cutscene in the Cloaked Intentions feature episode series.
• Brainwashed and Crazy : Praetor Taris seems to be this. She's pretty much unflinchingly loyal to her "dread masters", and for a Romulan that is weird .
• Of course, you can earn all the Dilithium Ore you want, but it must be refined before you can spend it, and you can only refine 8,000 per day . At current rates [1] , that translates to 35 CP per day. Most items cost 400 CP or up. Cryptic Studios know what they're doing.
• The Bridge : Players can choose from several different bridge layouts for their ships.
• Illustrated quite well in this El Goonish Shive strip.
• Break Out the Museum Piece : The TOS Constitution Class starships, complete with blue phasers. The Miranda class are also still going, while a refit Excelsior class can be bought. The NX class would seem to be this, being over 250 years old at this point, but is actually a replica with modern systems.
• Breather Episode : "Cold Comfort" in the Breen series. The episode features no combat whatsoever, and only several dialog puzzles.
• Janeway did it a few times.
• The Cavalry : In the ultimate battle for Deep Space 9 in "Boldly They Rode", despite preparing for the battle, the forces to recover Deep Space 9 still find themselves being pushed back. That is until Captain Shon of the U.S.S. Enterprise-F {Odyssey Class } arrives to help turn the tide of the battle.
• Captain Ersatz : If you look around, you will find a lot of custom species characters of non-Trek alien species, recreated to varying degrees of accuracy.
• Casual Interstellar Travel : More so than the rest of Star Trek , necessarily due to it being an MMO played in real-time.
• The Chains of Commanding : The Duty Officer System. Nearly every assignment has a risk to your crew. This means that yes , they can come back on death's door, and yes , they can actually die. With this knowledge, do you send your crewmates on a risky recon mission? Do you send your medical staff to fight an outbreak of a deadly plague?
• Character Customization : Just in case we haven't hammered it home yet: Mother. Of. God.
• Chekhov's Gun : In one story mission, an Andorian scientist you've just rescued makes an offhand comment about making progress on a cure for irumodic syndrome. Anyone who has seen The Next Generation's series finale knows the possible [2] implications of this.
• The Wolf 359 System. Especially with the Federation memorial in the middle (when you get close you start to hear the comm traffic from the battle).
• Naomi Wildman is the commander of Deep Space K-7. Icheb appears as a mission giver, too.
• Miral Paris is a plot-centric character whose storyline first introduces you to the Guardian of Forever and the Mirror Universe .
• Akira Sulu is the Great-Grandson of Mr. Sulu.
• Admiral Janeway.
• Among the ships you will hear about will be USS Kirk, USS McCoy, USS Montgomery Scott, USS Archer and USS Tucker, among others.
• Sela is the Romulan Empress. Not too many people mind any of this, and it's all quite well-explained.
• The Galaxy-Class bridge set alone has plenty. The side consoles from Generations , the modified tactical console from the future Enterprise-D in "All Good Things", and a large transparent console panel behind the tactical station very similar to the one seen in the TNG seventh season episode "Parallels".
• One of the engineers over at Memory Alpha is Kirayoshi O'Brien.
• One of the Starfleet contacts at K-7 is Mackenzie Calhoun .
• Deep in Cardassian space, you will encounter Joshua Riker, the son of a transporter-created clone of old Will Riker.
• And then, who should show up from the mirror universe? Captain James O'Brien . Aboard the ISS Molly.
• Expect to encounter any and all types of food that are ever shown or mentioned throughout any of the series, including Chateau Picard wine. They even have Prune Juice, repeatedly mentioned and referenced as Worf's drink of choice.
• The entrance to the Preserver archive resembles the Asteroid Deflector from the TOS episode "The Paradise Syndrome"
• "The 2800" story arc is not only a continuity nod but also a continuation of a story arc from one of the series. A Dominion fleet suddenly emerges from the wormhole, attacking (and taking over) Deep Space 9, and still thinking the Dominion war is still going on despite checking a calendar since then . Starfleet is baffled by where they came from. It's the same fleet that the Prophets had willed out of existence when Captain Sisko and the Defiant single-handedly headed into the wormhole to confront.
• Convection, Schmonvection : An early mission in the Romulan story arc places you on a planet that has active volcanic activity on the surface (along with local plant life that thrives in the lava). You can walk all over it and it won't hurt you.
• Cool Starship : Many ships from across Trek canon have made their way into the game (Including an old-fashioned Constitution-Class and Miranda Class as starting vessels), and a few have been made especially for it, such as the mighty Odyssey and Bortas end-game ships.
• The Aehallh worms found in the Colliseum aren't exactly tentacles, but they're pretty close.
• Changelings like to choke your character by the throat and toss you around like a ragdoll by this method.
• Competitive Balance : The idea between the three classes and ship types. Players can customize themselves to extend beyond the original class they chose through skill point distribution.
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable / Worst Aid : This was the original way to revive a downed character. It has since been replaced with a quick tricorder scan. This is slightly justified, though. Things such as revive spells and whatnot, that one would encounter in other MMOs, would be out of place in the Star Trek universe.
• It's also only "crapsack" in relative terms - Earth isn't a smoking ruin or anything, for example. But it's definitely not as peaceful and idealistic as the franchise was during the early TNG days. The game has a feeling closest to the latter seasons of Deep Space Nine and the more action-oriented movies.
• Critical Existence Failure : Ships suffer damage and systems can be affected, but until you suffer a warp-core breach (read: death), there's no downward spiral of failing systems, like the shows.
• Crystal Spires and Togas : The Deferi come pretty close.
• Also, in defense of the Voth getting stomped in space, the Vaadwaur were using ship technology given to them by the Iconians, one of the only races older and more advanced than the Voth.
• Custom Uniform : The developers were able to Hand Wave the glaring flaw about Star Fleet's uniform code by stating in one of the Loading Screen notes that Star Fleet relaxed their uniform codes to help it's officers feel a little more comfortable, just as long as they still wore their primary color associated with their position.
• Death From Above : Engineers get the Orbital Strike skill, capable of wiping out a large group of enemies in one hit. It also works indoors for some reason. And then you get to "Cutting the Cord" and its optional objective of calling in orbital strikes, and all of a sudden your ship is a veritable Kill Sat , wiping out Romulans and fighters left and right.
• The top-level escorts explicitly have holographic crews. That would pretty much explain everything, except it's noted as unusual.
• Defeat Means Playable : The special reward for defeating the Breen during the Deferi story arc? A Breen bridge officer. Repeated with the Romulan/Reman missions, though technically it's the Romulans you're defeating and a Reman bridge officer joining you.
• Design It Yourself Equipment : The player's ship.
• Detachment Combat : Several ships can turn parts of themselves into separate, independent craft, increasing their firepower and distracting the enemy. The Galaxy-class can detach its saucer, the Bortasqu' can deploy a heavily-armed escort ship, and the Advanced Odyssey can either detach its saucer or deploy a heavily-armed escort ship . The Prometheus-class escort takes the prize, though - true to the series , it can split itself into three equally-powerful ships, and you can choose which one you want to command the formation from.
• Development Gag : During one patch, the space station K-7 was accidentally removed. The in-game Game Masters claimed it was "Cloaked by Klingons" and that "Federation scientists were working to rescue it". Once it was re-added, a group of Security officers could be found interrogating a Klingon about how and why she helped to cloak the station. Similarly, due to all the confused newbies asking "Where's Sulu?", numerous NPCs were changed to be discussing his location, all across Sol Station. This didn't seem to help anyone at all, however, and now you don't need to physically find Sulu anymore. Still, the immortal question lives on in the NPC conversations.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu? : The Fek'lhri arc basically involves carving your way through The Legions of Hell , confronting Klingon Satan, and sticking a bat'leth through his face.
• Dramatic Space Drifting
• Driven to Suicide : K'Valk in the Doomsday Machine due to his part in helping the machine being activated. See Heroic Sacrifice below.
• Dude, Where's My Respect? : Beautifully averted. Once you reach the rank of Rear Admiral, just walk into the general vicinity of the auditorium at Earth's starbase, and EVERYONE in the room immediately turns and salutes you, holding that pose until you walk away.
• Eject! Eject! Eject! : An ability all captains get late in the game, your crew evacuates and the ship blows itself up. May or may not be used when said ship is moments away from destruction.
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You : Lampshaded. Upon encountering some hostile ice spiders in a cave during the Reman Uprising arc (not too long after fighting off hostile jackals), one of your officers loudly questions why every new species you encounter always wants to kill you.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold : The Breen, complete with Human Popsicle grenades and lasers.
• Evil Sounds Deep : The voice of the Collective in Borg space missions, coupled with a bit of Voice of the Legion (naturally).
• Also, Empress Sela and Praetor Taris. The former has a few less atrocities to her name, but they're both still pretty unpleasant.
• The Excelsior is in a different tier than the Vesper . There's a Tier 3 version (the Advanced Heavy Cruiser) and the Tier 5 Retrofit, just like the Galaxy Retro). So it fills a different niche.
• Frankly, most of the ship variants count. Each Tier contains: 1) a ship from the TV series, and 2) two more ships that look different but are basically cosmetic redesigns. This allows the mix-and-match customization, since the warp nacelles, engineering hull, etc are all in the same position, but the cosmetic redesigns themselves are of variable aesthetic quality.
• Executive Meddling : Popular discussion among the official forums by both the players and developers is that there some things that the developers want to add into the game that they can't do unless they have CBS's permission to do so, because they own the intellectual property rights to the entire Star Trek series. For example, adding Tier 5 refits of lower level ship designs. They kinda need CBS's approval before they can touch any ship class that was shown in the series, like the Constitution or Akira class ships.
• Explosive Instrumentation : This is Star Trek. How else do you duty officers get hurt realigning a sensor array or some of the other tasks that have the possibility of injury?
• Face Heel Turn : Expository text in the loading screens reveal that Worf had severed all ties to the Federation after they declined assisting the Klingons in fighting the Undine/Species 8472. Of course, given that he was worried about Starfleet Command and the Federal Parliament being shot through with Undine infiltrators and was rebuffed after being told it couldn't happen, exactly who ended up the face and who ended up the heel is a matter of perspective .
• Face Palm : One of the emotes you can do is a Picard face palm.
• Falling Into The Captain's Chair : This is more or less how the Fed side of the game starts out. You're beamed to a damaged ship to help out, and while you are away, the senior staff of the ship you started on gets blown to smithereens, and you, a lowly ensign, now have to take command of an entire starship... against the Borg. The fact you actually win is why command makes your command position permanent.
• Fake Defector : In the mission "Under the Cover of Night", Frankin Drake is actually a member of Section 31, and recapturing him is just part of a ruse to feed the Romulans false information.
• Fan Disservice : The scantily-clad, hideously ugly Fek'lhri Ravagers.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel : Par for the course. Thankfully, there is no such thing as a Warp Queue .
• Four-Star Badass : The current maximum rank a player can achieve is Rear Admiral 5 Vice Admiral. Rather quickly in universe, one would imagine.
• Fragile Speedster / Glass Cannon : On paper, the Escort class ships are supposed to be this: Quick and deadly, but light on defense. Player customization and skill determines if that is true or not.
• Future Me Scares Me : Past-B'Vat, complete with TOS Klingon style smooth forehead, is terrified at what he will become in the future, and helps the player in taking down his future self
• Game Gourmet : You can boost your HP with such delicacies as Romulan Osol Twists, Glazed Ham, Bajoran Larish Pie, Saurian Brandy, Klingon Targ Milk, Ferengi Snail Steaks, Dosi Rotgut, Bolian Souffles, Klingon Raktajino, Cardassian Kanar, Klingon Gagh, and Cardassian Yamok Sauce.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation : Of a sort. The Duty Officer system represents your junior officers, and every ship is supposed to have their crew number's worth of Doffs. However, you start at 100 for free, up to a max of 400. However... some ships crew numbers don't fit with this, like the Galaxy with a crew of 1,000 , or the Defiant with a crew of 50 , or the Runabout class shuttle, which has a maximum crew compliment of 5 . Very few ships have Doff numbers close to their crew numbers, while others are either hopelessly understaffed, or unrealistically packed.
• Gatling Good / More Dakka : One of the options for either yourself or your crew while on foot is essentially the energy-weapon version of a Squad Automatic Weapon. Having one of these around is rather handy. Not the first time we've seen 'em, either.
• Genre Savvy : During one mission that involved time travel you wind up saving the orignal U.S.S. Enterprise from a ambush that normally they would have survived but was destroyed due to interference. After you do so you immediatly jump out of system to avoid contaiminating the time line. Then at the end while fighting more Klingons the Enterprise jumps in system to help you fight them off. Then Commander Spock sends you a message saying that he's had experience with the Guardian of Forver and recognizes the portal. He then pretty much tells you he understands why you're not talking back and urges you to go back to your time before you cause any damage to the time line.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar : One of the Duty Officer assignments is 'Retrieve DNA Sample from Romulan Senator', which is easier to accomplish if the officers you assign to it have the 'Seductive' and 'Unscrupulous' traits. Oh my .
• Gladiator Games : Prominently featured in the Cloaked Intentions episode series.
• Glass Cannon : The Escort.
• Guile Hero : You get the chance to be this on occasion, especially during the Drozana Station missions.
• Guns Akimbo : Klingon Swordmasters and other types of enemies often use twin disruptor pistols, but the Player Character and their Bridge Bunnies can too. Somewhat justified, in that these are energy weapons, and thus would have nonexistent kickback.
• Good Old Fisticuffs : Just because you have a Phaser , doesn't mean you always have to use it . Far from being an Emergency Weapon , some enemies just go down faster if the player simply holsters their weapon and hands them their ass . Having the Leg Sweep ability for crowd control makes this even more useful. See also BFS .
• Green-Skinned Space Babe : The Orion Vixens, complete with confuse-inducing Seduce skill. They're also a popular choice amongst the RP community.
• Heel Face Turn : The Remans, and particularly Obisek, who starts off stealing thalaron weapons and siccing fighters on you.
• Heroic Sacrifice : K'Valk does a suicide run into the core of the Doomsday Machine to at least try to disable it. And he does it while singing the Klingon War Song.
• Humiliation Conga : Hakeev gets put through one once his plans start falling apart. As the Anticlimax Boss entry notes, it doesn't even end with his death .
• The KDF has a lot of this. One of the Klingon Player Versus Environment missions is called "Sulfur My Wrath." Players collectively groaned upon seeing it.
• Hyperactive Metabolism : we will have this trope in the future.
• Even worse is that the Guardian of Forever confirms the fact that she is the Kuvah'magh.
• Orbital Strike for Engineer captains. It doesn't matter where you are--on the surface, underground, on another Federation starship, even back in time.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence : There is one very prominent example on the Starfleet Academy map. Your character is not able to access the waterfront, even though there's only a literal waist-heigth fence in your way - one that you could jump over under normal circumstances. Many other maps (including player-created Foundry stories) use noticable Invisible Walls . Those are most prominent around the edges of maps, where your character suddenly can't go any further for no apparent reason, although in some maps (e.g. some of the Borg ones), there are energy fields acting as these.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Key : "Lock Boxes" need to be unlocked using a "Master Key," which costs 100 CP. (Even better, the lock boxes themselves drop frequently enough that, unless you use real money, you're likely to have way more of them than keys. Fortunately they're a limited-time promotion. First started with Cardassian lock boxes that gave the possibility of a Galor class ship, and currently there are Ferengi lock boxes that can reward a D'Kora Marauder vessel.)
• Interface Screw : Some missions will require you to hide your ship inside a nebula. Inside these nebulae, static interference will obstruct your entire view of everything on the screen save for the UI itself. Your map will also be obstructed by static as well.
• Interface Spoiler : In a mission where you've secretly been in a Holo-Deck the entire time, your away mission's map shows a yellow grid pattern.
• You also get to design the exterior of your ship from several options for each major ship section, natch. It took them a while to add Klingon options, however.
• Craftable Delta Flyers have now been removed and are only available through the C-Store.
• Killed Mid-Sentence : During the Breen arc.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better : Played with. Torpedoes are far and away the most damaging weapons in your starship's arsenal, but they kind of suck against shields. That's where phasers and disruptors come in. On the ground, meanwhile, melee weapons have the advantage of ignoring shields and Borg adaptation, guaranteeing a steady damage output if you're willing to risk your skin up close.
• Then again, their Carriers have similar capabilities to Science Vessels (less weapons, increased shields, extra Science stations, Auxiliary Power bonus...).
• Exaggerated further with the Fek'lhri, who range from the wast-high Hordelings to the Slave Masters, who are twice your height... and the Horde's senior leadership are even bigger than that.
• The Legions of Hell : The Fek'lhri are a space-faring version of this. They are malicious souls of the damned. Spirits sent to Gre'thor, the Klingon version of Hell. The Klingons have a story arc where you and your crew are sent down to Gre'thor itself, where you must find why and how the Fek'Ihr reappeared. Along your travels you will fight, among other demons, the physical personifications of Treachery, Cowardice, and Dishonor.
• Level Editor : The "Foundry" content creation toolset. Even in its initial "beta"-ish release state (as Cryptic calls it), it's quite robust and will only get moreso, and will likely allow STO to carve out a very solid niche for itself.
• Level Scaling : In order to maintain some of the challenge, all instances that the player enters into will feature enemies that scale up to your level. This also helps please the fanbase by maintaining that the Klingons, the Orion Syndicate, the Gorn, and all the other races you engage in the low level story arcs are still a viable threat against you at level 50 [3] . Public areas like space conflicts still scale the enemies to their appropriate levels, making it very easy to destroy entire Klingon armadas with only a few phaser shots to drop the shields and a torpedo to finish off the ship.
• Lightning Bruiser : The Escort class ships. Once you learn and train your tactical officers with the Cannon Rapid Fire ability, you will tear almost any ship's shields to shreds faster than they have time to turn around and start fighting back. Add torpedoes into that mix and they'll be dead in seconds. Defense can be easily enhanced through shielding and skill distribution into science or engineering skills.
• Loads and Loads of Loading : One of the few nearly-universal complaints about the game is that due to the way sector space, solar systems and human-scale stuff is divided, you have to transition between loading screens a lot . Admittedly, because of the way they go from environment to environment in the shows so quickly, there wasn't all that much of a way of escaping scene changes, but on older machines or lower-quality connections the load times can hurt.
• Lower Deck Episode : played with. You are, of course, The Captain , so it wouldn't make sense for you to be deeply involved in one of these. However, the game does offer " Duty Officers ," who are semi-randomly generate and whom you can send on Lower Deck Missions, bringing back small amounts of EXP, EC, dilithium and "Commendation Experience," a second set of levels which give you some new abilities. What's interesting is that Doffs themselves are Serious Business . The cheapest Bridge Officers, the NPCs that form your away team , start at like 100 EC at the exchange. The cheapest Duty Officers start at 10K .
• Machinima : The "The Veil Of Space" trailers.
• The Borg command ship from the sector invasion events love to use Torpedo Spread on the players. For a ship of it's size, from the player's perspective, it looks like you're getting hit point blank with buckshot from a shotgun. Say goodbye to your shields and 90% of your hull from the initial impact.
• On a smaller scale, this trope applies to the Romulan Empire. While Empress Sela does in her own right hold a great deal of authority and power, The Tal Shiar have always had their own agenda and goals of operation. They work under their own masters, and don't recognize Sela as the true ruler of the empire.
• Manipulative Bastard : Looking increasingly like this is the Undine/8472's hat.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane : During the invasion of Klingon space by the Fek'lhri , nobody is quite sure whether they're up against demons or artificial constructs. It may be a bit of both.
• Medium Awareness : During "The State of Q", Q himself will speak through the yellow text message pop up on screen that says "Intense, isn't it?" These yellow messages are typically reserved for system noticer such as when you receive a reward for completing quests, goals, duty officer assignments, and such.
• Megaton Punch / Touch of Death : It's possible (though very rare) to disintegrate enemy NPCs or other players with hand-to-hand criticals.
• Melee a Trois : Upon arrival at the Preserver outpost world, the player finds several Breen and Jem'Hadar ships fighting for control of whatever's on the surface. The player's crewmates encourage them to attack while both are distracted.
• Memetic Badass : In universe. The player fully achieves this status, complete with random Starfleet NPCs fawning over the player's character... as early as the first moment you arrive at Earth spacedock. Justified , in that...oh hell, just read this page from top to bottom . Don't even bother looking behind the spoilers.
• Mildly Military : As ever for Starfleet. In fact, you can customize the uniform on your captain and on each bridge officer - while they'll still be Starfleet uniforms, they don't even have to match . With TOS, TNG, Deep Space Nine , the various films, and even mirror universe uniforms available, they don't even have to have the "new" look.
• At least two missions ( "Diplomatic Orders" and "Divide et Impera" ) have you escorting someone who turns out to be an Undine imposter.
• Mook Maker : Klingon Targ Handlers wil spawn an endless legion of creatures to attack you until you take them down. On the other side of the neutral zone, Tactical Player Captains can summon a two man team of NPC redshirts from their ship to fight for them every two minutes. But if you combine that with the Tactical Initiative skill , which instantly recharges all of your abilities...
• More Dakka : Whereas Cruisers are more into Beam Spam , Escorts' ability to equip considerable numbers of rapid-firing cannons puts them into this trope instead. Especially since most cannon-related abilities involve increasing their rate of fire even further .
• This is made even worse in that you have no option to question the "Admiral" or your orders the way Picard and Riker did in the TNG episode "The Pegasus" and you are literally forced by the mission design to carry the Idiot Ball when many players could easily tell something's not quite right about the situation (as pointed out by your officers repeatedly through it). The only way to avoid being forced into said stupidity is to choose never to do the mission (or drop it partway through) and miss out on the reward. How easy it would have been for you to expose the Undine plot by refusing to kill any more Romulans after gathering enough evidence, and watching the thwarted Undine still sabotage the Romulans' research and escape. Thanks Cryptic, your script writers are morons.
• No Sidepaths No Exploration No Freedom : Many ground missions that take place on a ship or space station will give you very little freedom in the way of completing the mission. You'll have to travel through the area to the designated path, completing various tasks along the way. In "Boldly They Rode", The Founder tells you that you're the best candidate to infiltrate Deep Space 9 to reclaim it from the inside by saying that the Jem'Hadar are designed for assault and not infiltration, while Starfleet training covers space walks and such. Your character lampshades this by saying "Why do I feel like I've just been railroaded ?"
• Old School Dogfighting : Not only do you have massive ships flying around like it's 1941 again, but NPCs often have fighter ships accompanying them. Tiny one or two shots to kill but annoying little fighters.
• One-Gender Race : While it is implied that there are female members of the Gorn, Nausicaan, and Lethean races, the fact that one has never shown up in any canonical source (or even described in any of the Extended Universe books) prevents the developers from allowing the female gender of these races to be playable. Strangely averted with a few federation races though. For example, there's never been any confirmed depiction of a female Tellarite anywhere in the series, and the same for a few other races, yet they all have both genders available to play as.
• One Product Planet : Certain stellar bodies are often noted for being useful for one type of industry. For example, asteroids are usually only inhabited because of their mining qualities. Some planets will describe how it's native races became known due to their huge advancements in agriculture or what-have-you.
• Our Dwarves Are Different : Tellarites, plain and simple. They're short (an average height of 4 feet tall,) usually have epic beards , aesthetically ugly (pig-like facial features and wrinkles,) and LOVE to argue with others just because they can. Add a love of alcohol in there, and you'd have a dwarf by any other name in a more traditional fantasy setting.
• Majel Barret was ready, willing, and able to provide the voice for various combat notifications and alerts, but she has since passed on, and a replacement had to be brought in for the announcements at Prison Facility 4028 during "The 2800" episode. Her replacement manages to sound almost exactly like her though.
• Percussive Maintenance : The "basic engineer" at Starbase 39's starship area, on the console linked to the Federation bank, is continually hitting the console with fists, repeatedly.
• It should be noted that the above mentioned Q is not the rogueish Q we are most accustomed to, nor is it his lover, Q . Nor is it his close friend Q . The Q in question is actually his son, Q , who seems to have grown up much like his father, despite his aunt Kathy's influence.
• Another example is the Aquarius Escort, a tiny bundle of cannons and torpedoes that serves as a very nasty surprise for anyone stupid enough to take on an Odyssey Tactical Cruiser .
• Pleasure Planet : There's really nothing to do in Risa but hang out and/or party.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality : In several missions you're sent to keep Borg technology out of the hands of your enemies. After all, it's simply too dangerous to meddle with, right? And then you get the Special Task Force rewards. That's right, a full set of Borg technology for your ship.
• Given the mind-blowing freedom the character creation tool gives the player in creating their own alien species , we can expect quite a few running around out there.
• The Breen are this, according to the first set of Featured Episodes. The Undine consider themselves this as well. The Romulans also have shades of this, with elements of Rihannsu being incorporated into STO's story. And then there's the Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Terran Empire , Remans, Hirogen...
• Recursive Ammo : Cluster torpedoes. Each one produces more than a dozen homing mines.
• The "death penalty" (as it was supposed to be implemented) for being defeated in space is a loss of part of your Redshirt crew; lose too many and ship functions are impaired and you must return to a starbase for repairs. There is no death penalty for normal difficulty, and you can go from a ship full of corpses to being fully manned by alive crewmen within minutes. On higher difficulty settings, you will accumulate injuries and ship damage that reduce stats and need an item or returning to a starbase to remove.
• This trope is taken Up to Eleven when you get the Fleet Support ability. You summon a nameless starship to help you in space combat. The ship can be destroyed just like any other. Nobody's gonna care that the nameless science vessel got destroyed. Just a whole crew of redshirts who gave their lives because you ordered them to. On the other hand, you do need to be in moderately serious trouble before you can request a whole other ship to bail you out, so there's that.
• Averted with the Saurians, a Federation playable race. Player-created races can go either way, naturally.
• The Remnant : The Romulan Star Empire, after Romulus gets destroyed (as seen in the 2009 Star Trek ). The Backstory of how they break up and unite repeatedly, strikingly resembles what happened to a certain other franchise's Empire .
• La Résistance : The Remans, to the Tal Shiar and their "Dark Masters".
• Reverse Polarity : The skill "Reverse Shield Polarity" which causes energy weapons to increase rather than damage the shields.
• Sehlat cubs have been added to the C-Store. Basically huge kittens .
• The above is not only justified, it's outright stated in-game by the Admiral you get your orders from
• Also, you did take out a Borg Sphere in the tutorial. It just gets better.
• Space is really pretty.
• The Awesome Anachronistic Apparel (see above), in which characters can choose to mix-and-match pieces of uniforms, going all the way back to the TOS or even Enterprise era. When was the last time the US Army let its soldiers come to work in Civil War or Revolutionary Army uniforms just because the soldiers thought they looked cooler than modern fatigues?
• Starship armaments and components can be scavenged from the wreckage of enemy spaceships--and Federation ships can field phasers, disruptors, plasma cannons, or whatever the heck their player feels like slapping into them. Likewise, individual officers strip weapons and armor off of corpses and carry whatever armament they feel like, up to and including the equivalent of heavy machine guns. The 25th-century Starfleet seems to be made up of 17th-century buccaneers.
• well, You did blow up a Borg Sphere as your very first act of command . If Starfleet has enough resources to not only pump out countless ships but tailor them to the CO's whims, then its likely a case of having a surplus of captain's chairs to fill and a need of skilled Captains more than anything.
• What makes it worse is that there's every indication that they're right , but going about it in completely the wrong way.
• Serial Escalation : "Avatar" customization, as noted above. It isn't just your captain, everything involved with your "Gestalt Avatar" in the game (ship, officers, etc) is customizable. This is a massive step up from Cryptic's previous efforts, which already set the bar for character customization in an MMO. And they keep adding more options.
• In one of the Breen Featured Episodes, the player must interrogate several Breen prisoners to find a way to remove a Breen neural implant that is driving one of the Deferi mad. One of them happens to be a Breen Combat Medic named Tran .
• Not to mention that nearly all the place- and ship-names in the Romulan storyline are references to Diane Duane's noncanon-but-popular Rihannsu novels.
• The "Frozen" featured mission is a one big shout out to The Empire Strikes Back , as it features a rebel base inside an Ice cave, and...
• The final boss of the Borg sector defense missions looks almost exactly like V'Ger . Popular fanon theory says that V'Ger was enhanced by the Borg and sent back to Earth.
• The 2800 storyline happens to reflect upon another story involving people vanishing and reappearing decades later.
• Shown Their Work : during one of the Franklin Drake missions, you have to help calibrate a "cortical stimulator" based on tricorder readings of affected brain cells. The neuron factoids are basically spot-on.
• Hilariously, though, one of the reasons for so many complaints about the game is that it isn't simulation enough for some, who had envisioned a kind of "player bridge crew" game and a constant bridge-view of combat, ala Bridge Commander (even though that game also had a view outside the hull). Once Cryptic established that everyone would be a captain and that full player crews were not even on the drawing board, the rage from some corners was... palpable .
• A lot of hardcore fans were/are also hoping and expecting the game to be a lot less Rule of Cool and a lot more serious and canon, and complain about hundred-year-old ships being able to go toe-to-toe with more recent ones, etc. (Of course, good luck getting any group of more than a half-dozen Trek fans to agree on what counts as "canon"...)
• Sixth Ranger : Players who have preordered their copy get an additional rescued Borg crewmate .
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World : Q's Winter Wonderland, complete with a foot race on an ice track. You can even buy boots that reduce your traction and leave you sliding around ridiculously.
• The Hirogen basically have this as their hat . They're an overconfident, cowardly bunch who prefer to pick on crippled, defenceless prey and go on and on about how they're the greatest hunters ever until you send them running off to their Romulan daddies. At one point, they even pull a Wounded Gazelle Gambit to get sympathy from a passing Romulan patrol after their ambush goes horribly wrong.
• So Long and Thanks For All the Gear : This can only be invoked by the players themselves, but the game warns you whenever you want to get rid of one of your officers or ships that any gear that's currently equipped on them will be lost as well.
• Space Clothes : Fully customizable ones, including the uniforms from Star Trek the Next Generation , from Star Trek Deep Space Nine and the latter TNG films, and the tunics from Star Trek the Original Series and the more naval oriented red uniforms worn in Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan and onward. The game also provides an array of late 24th/Early 25th century uniforms for the players and crew to wear. It's a space clothes jamboree.
• Space Elves : Vulcans, Romulans, and Remans all fit the bill. As far as Star Trek goes, they all fit the Elvish archetypes. Vulcans are a straight Type 2 example. Romulans border between type 2 and type 3 due to their mistrust of others (especially after what happened to their homeworld), and Remans are unfairly categorized as a type 3 due to their physical appearance and how their whole race has been treated as 2nd class citizens by the Romulans. There are a few other races who have at least pointed ears including the Preservers , who definitely qualify as a type 2 .
• Space Is an Ocean : Oh so very much, it's Trek afterall.
• Space Marine : Starfleet/KDF Tactical Officers are essentially this, focusing on weapons buffs and squad command/support tactics. Starfleet Security also, naturally, as they've been like this since Star Trek Deep Space Nine at the very least.
• A few others might describe the overall experience (with the mix of ship and ground action and whatnot) as the old Spectrum Holobyte games, but with the proper level of technology behind it now to pull it off and design gone terribly, wonderfully right , especially in the recent weekly missions which give you lots of plot and dialogue options on top of the fighting.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil : Every enemy faction you encounter has a hierarchy of Mooks of varying degrees of "ability to kick the players ass". For instance, the Klingon's mook hierarchy seems to be:
• Stealth Pun : the most recent (as of may 2012) addition to the Federation Fleet is the Atrox Carrier , a Vice Admiral level starship designed by the Caitians, a race of humanoid felines . its a Cat Carrier .
• Mighty Glacier : Another way to play the cruiser allows significant toughness (though less than the all-out defense build) while maintaining a pretty dangerous offense. You're still slow and won't turn for anything, but when you shoot (especially broadside) - the enemy WILL feel it.
• There is also the Galaxy-X; which can cloak.
• Superweapon Surprise : The reason everyone treads lightly around the Aelasians , a one-shot race in the Romulan arc, who used to be the mightiest empire in the galaxy before they forsook their warlike ways. Nobody's quite sure if they have any 'just in case' stuff left over from their glory days, and nobody wants to find out firsthand.
• The harness-like designs and special combat functions of many of the away team "kits" (not to mention the big screwoff disruptor-miniguns and the like) suggest that Star Trek Elite Force may well be continuity with STO as well.
• The mention of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers and of the U.S.S. DaVinci in a couple of non-story mission suggest that some elements of the S.C.E. novels may be canon now, as well.
• That whole business about Andorians having four genders is almost completely taken from the books.
• The Rihannsu novels, which fleshed out the Romulan culture, seem to have been incorporated completely, as well, with Romulan missions making multiple references to what was depicted therein.
• Some of the Star Trek Deep Space Nine relaunch novels are canon, too; certainly the book about Garak (written by Andrew J Robinson no less), as the past religion of Cardassia is in the game. However, it seems the entire series hasn't been incorporated whole-cloth, as The Sisko doesn't seem to have returned yet, among other things. They may be saving that one for an in-game event.
• Admiral Leonard James Akaar shows up in one mission during the Romulan arc.
• Techno Babble : Naturally. Science-type vessels and officers literally specialize in technobabble-based powers, to buff you or your friends or debuff your enemies.
• Technology Porn : Your very own customizable starship. The graphics are optimized to make her look as sexy as possible.
• Ten-Minute Retirement : Executive Producer Dan Stahl, who left in late 2011 to work for Zynga , and later returned to Cryptic to work with the Foundry, before finally resuming his post as Executive Producer in mid February 2012.
• Meaningful Rename : Sort of. While they didn't "choose" to rename themselves, the proper name for the Undine makes sense given that they come from "fluidic" space , and nearly all references to "8472" in-game are replaced with the new name.
• To Hell and Back : One of the PVE Klingon missions involves your captain storming the gates of Gre'thor and killing Molor and his Legions of Hell .
• Tron Lines : Not too long after Tron: Legacy came out, a new equipment set included these for ships. Especially the Maelstrom class fleet escort. With a dark hull, it looks like it could have come right from the movie.
• Two Keyed Lock : Make that Three Keyed Lock in Infected . And there are five of them .
• The Turret Master : The Engineer 'Away Team Kit', including NPC Bridge Officers.
• Vaporware : People thought for a long time that this would happen to the version of the game being developed by Perpetual, who never seemed to make any headway (and who are rumored to have taken on the project for less than savory purposes ), and then the project was transferred to Cryptic. It was six years between announcement and release.
• And then you have some players preferred method of getting rid of Tribbles dominating their inventory: feeding them into the replicator .
• Weapons Ranges is possibly justified by everyone having also improved their Electronic Countermeasures, allowing them to spoof sensors at anything beyond close range.
• Subverted in that one of the NPCs you talk to makes it clear there is something wrong with the drones, and the cube is nearly-dead. You can take on full-strength Borg ships very early on though in the Sector Defense Scenes, and it will become clear very quickly that your Miranda, limited to Lieutenant grade equipment, is no match whatsoever for even a Borg Sphere at that point. Even if by some miracle you and the other ships manage to beat four cubes in the time allowed... the Borg call in a Unimatrix , which is basically an expy of V'Ger from the first movie.
• Species 8472 is also getting this treatment in a big way after one of the episodes of Voyager similarly de-fanged them (after, ironically enough, introducing them). They're one of the BigBads of early Fed content, and are once again committed to their campaign of subterfuge and genocide in the name of paranoid self-preservation, with several tangles with their Tethys dreadnoughts in the early stages of the game... just to drive home the point that you can't hope to beat anything larger than their scoutships without a ton of help.
• On the other hand, you kill more Klingons yourself in that mission than Kirk did in his entire career. That can't be good for their Badass reputation.
• That said, the fairly linear nature of the missions can result in a few instances where it seems like you don't act like too much of a Starfleet officer; see the Unwitting Pawn and ~You Can't Thwart Stage One~ examples below.
• Of course, it's also possible to see this as part of the larger point; this era of Trek started out very idealistic in TNG, but after all the Borg invasions, the Dominion War, the trouble with Romulus, and the constant issues with the Klingons, the higher-ups of the Federation have become inured to, and too used to, answering problems with violence ... just like what began to happen in DS9's 4th season.
• Of course, it could well be taken as a homage to The Original Series . Intentional or not.
• The roll wasn't originally in the game, but enough players requested that the "Kirk Roll" be included.
• Unwitting Pawn : A savvy player might expect to go up against some clever schemes when going into Romulan territory... but you probably wouldn't guess just how often your own people are the ones pulling the gambits on you. First, you are tricked by an Undine posing as an admiral into wrecking the Romulan effort to out Undine infiltrators, and you end up inadvertently enabling the Undine to infiltrate the Romulans and cripple their chances of ever discovering infiltrators; then, immediately afterward, you get sent to intercept a diplomat who seems to be selling secrets to the Romulans. You intercept the dude, manage to catch him, but the Romulans get away with the info... and then you find out that the "diplomat" is a Section 31 agent who fed the Romulans false information, and you were the sucker sent to make the agent look genuine. By the time you find this out, even your normally somewhat passive bridge officers are complaining about how everyone you meet seems to have several agendas at once.
• Player ships can of course use the Beam Overload, Torpedo: High Yield and Cannon: Rapid Fire skills, which do Exactly What It Says on the Tin .
• Weaponized Exhaust : the Eject Warp Plasma ability.
• What You Are in the Dark : One for the player in "Operation Gamma" A Ferengi agrees to help you contact the Dominion, but when you do, she angers the local Cosmozoan life forms, and warps out, leaving you to fight for your life in a little shuttle. When you catch up to her, she ran into the Dominion, who disabled her, and are about to destroy her ship for illegal activities in their space. In exchange for the Dominion's help, they ask you to carry out the sentence against the Ferengi. You can either destroy her, or let her go back through the wormhole. The only people who will know are your loyal crew on your little shuttle, and the Dominion, who will see it as simply a legal matter being settled as it should be. You have to make a choice...
• Whole-Plot Reference : The last two Breen Featured Episodes to The Next Generation episode "The Chase".
• This one is especially grating for some people, as one of TNG's best episodes had the message of "the first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth"; yeah, that's great, so could the game please let us pursue the truth before we have to slaughter dozens (more like hundreds, considering that those warbirds you scrap in orbit don't launch any escape craft) of innocent Romulans?
• Zerg Rush : Very much the case for some of the Borg-based Special Task Forces. Yes, there are a lot of Borg. Yes, they are in every room. Yes, they will all jump you unless you manage your aggro very carefully. And yes, they do spawn more and they do adapt to energy weapon attacks.
• Zettai Ryouiki : The TOS uniforms for the ladies are rocking some serious grade B goodness if you go with the skirt and thigh-high boots. Grades C and D are also represented.
• ↑ 223 dilithium to 1 CP; Feb 14 2012
• ↑ and potentially awesome
• ↑ and that while an assault cruiser (e.g. Sovereign class) is still clearly significantly more powerful than a light cruiser (e.g. Centaur class), it is not by several orders of magnitude as happens when comparing two players with a 40-level difference
• ↑ The Klingons took over their homeworld and keep it under martial law
• ↑ such as the highest levels of power of the Federation, according to Starfleet Intelligence
• 1 Metamorphosis (manga)
• 2 Gushing Over Magical Girls
• 3 Complete Monster

Star Trek /Characters

• Film Series
• E00 The Cage
• E01 The Man Trap
• E02 Charlie X
• E04 The Naked Time
• E14 Balance of Terror
• E20 Court Martial
• E21 The Return of the Archons
• E22 Space Seed
• E23 A Taste of Armageddon
• E26 Errand of Mercy
• E28 The City on the Edge of Forever
• E29 Operation: Annihilate!
• E01 Amok Time
• E02 Who Mourns for Adonais
• E02 Who Mourns for Adonais?
• E03 The Changeling
• E04 Mirror Mirror
• E04 Mirror, Mirror
• E05 The Apple
• E06 The Doomsday Machine
• E07 Catspaw
• E09 Metamorphosis
• E11 Friday's Child
• E12 The Deadly Years
• E14 Wolf in the Fold
• E15 The Trouble With Tribbles
• E16 The Gamesters of Triskelion
• E21 Patterns of Force
• E01 Spock's Brain
• E08 For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
• E24 Turnabout Intruder
• Fanfic Recs
• Headscratchers
• Heartwarming
• Nightmare Fuel
• Tear Jerker

This characters page is for the species that populate the Star Trek 'verse .

• Star Trek the Original Series
• Star Trek the Next Generation
• Star Trek Deep Space Nine
• Star Trek Voyager
• Star Trek Enterprise
• Beware the Nice Ones
• Boldly Coming
• Humans Are Diplomats
• Humans Are Special
• Most Writers Are Human : Which is why all Star Trek series to date have centered around a human captain.
• Several characters have commented on how relatively fast humanity expanded compared to other species and how quickly humans tend to pick up a skill or job. Humanity's hat seems to be taking everything Up to Eleven .
• We All Live in America : Or at least European; all other cultures seem to have died out. All the names are surname-last, alien cultures that borrow elements from other Earth cultures are seen as mind-blowing, and the French all sound like grumpy Englishmen.
• And Romulans are Vulcans who did not follow Surak. Nuff said.
• Emotions vs. Stoicism
• Feel No Pain
• Insufferable Genius
• Mate or Die
• Memetic Hand Gesture : Their salute.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist
• Our Elves Are Better : The original Space Elves.
• The Paralyzer : Vulcan Nerve Pinch.
• Pointy Ears
• Proud Scholar Race Guy
• Psychic Link : Mind Meld.
• Strange Salute : The Vulcan salute.
• The Spock : Trope Namers , makers , and codifiers .
• Spock Speak
• Straw Vulcan
• Actually, they are usually portrayed as Worthy Opponents and Noble Demons in both, especially in the latter when in at least one episode Archer gets a Klingon lawyer who serves as a Deconstruction of this (helpfully played by Deep Space Nine' s General Martok, Worf's buddy), saying that neither of his parents were warriors and lamenting the way his people are becoming less civilised, as well as less honourable than they claim, but denying that every Klingon is a savage barbarian.
• Asskicking Equals Authority
• The Drunken Sailor : And even the greatest of Klingon heroes are not allowed to receive their honors until they have proven that they can hold extreme amounts of Blood Wine.
• Flanderization : Originally depicted in The Original Series as calculating Warrior Poets akin to Samurai. Later became Vikings In Space .
• Glory Seeker
• Klingon Promotion : Trope Namer .
• Martyrdom Culture
• Memetic Badass : So much that some people now have Klingon weddings!
• National Weapon / BFS : The Bat'leth.
• Not So Different : Most of the races are of course not so different from humans. But Quark goes to especial trouble to say that Klingons and Humans are Not So Different .
• Proud Warrior Race Guy
• Rated "M" for Manly : Their idea of a bachelor party is four days of Macho Masochism . Their idea of a honeymoon is going on a hike through the nastiest terrain in the galaxy. Their idea of a joyous wedding night is for the happy couple to gleefully beat each other to a pulp. And their idea of a wedding ceremony is to tell how two mythical Klingons showed their love for each other by teaming up to sack and destroy the heavens. Isn't that romantic ?
• Rubber Forehead Aliens
• Arch Enemy : On TNG . Not as powerful as the Borg, not as ruthless as the Cardassians, but more recurring than either and are behind half the evil schemes in that series. Arguably this again in Enterprise .
• Alternate Character Interpretation : In the novels, they often come across as dignified and traditionalist aristocrats rather then simply as bad guys, though the Romulan characters that appear on TV sometimes do have that aspect to them.
• Evil Counterpart Race / Shadow Archetype : To Vulcans.
• Man Behind the Man : If some villain is implied to have a secret benefactor, the benefactor will probably be the Romulans. Especially if the villain is a Vulcan or a Klingon, just to show how traitorous or gullble they are as both species regard the Romulans as long-standing enemies.
• Officer and a Gentleman : The more admirable of Romulans tend to be this way.
• Secret Police : Known as the Tal Shiar.
• Space Romans
• Though overall, they are still very composed and disciplined. Ironically despite their imperialistic empire, they seem to contradict the idea that Vulcans who don't control their emotions are a dangerous menace, since on a personal level they rarely if ever violently lose their temper or hint at uncontrollable emotions. In-universe this is attributed to their lack of suppression; there is no emotional build-up to blow off when they lose their cool.
• Worthy Opponent : Several of the most memorable Romulan characters in the original series, as well as a number of times in the novelizations.

Cardassians

• Affably Evil
• Dirty Communists
• Lizard Folk
• Magnificent Bastards : Or, at least, they seem to produce Magnificent Bastards at an unusually high rate.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent
• Secret Police : Known as the Obsidian Order.
• Always Lawful Evil
• Assimilation Plot
• Catch Phrase : "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
• Deflector Shields : The built-in, personal variety. Made even nastier in that they can adapt to threats just like the rest of their technology.
• Implacable Man : Subverted; you may be able to pick a few off, but they'll eventually adapt and keep relentlessly coming until they overwhelm you.
• Memetic Mutation : "I am X of Borg. Memetic Mutation is irrelevant. You will be assimilated."
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens
• You Will Be Assimilated
• Occupiers Off of Our Planet : They were this to the Cardassians during the occupation.
• Adorkable : Heck, even Ferengi arms dealers are adorkable.
• Affably Evil : Not all of them are evil, though sometimes even the good ones try to convince themselves that they really are evil. But they do tend to be weirdly likable.
• Honest John's Dealership : ...and the less.
• Subverted by the Rules themselves turning out to be another scam -- at least in Quark's dream.
• Variations are used across Asia, ultimately all distortions of the word Frank , i.e. somebody from France, mistakenly interpreted to mean all Europeans.
• Space Pirate : Their original characterization when they were planed to be serious villains. Implicitly Retconned to be just a few who couldn't make it in "legitimate" business.
• Straw Capitalists
• Turned on it's head a little though, if Quark can be trusted, in that while Ferengi are greedy as a virtue and sexist/xenophobic as a culture, they've also never taken it to the same extreme that humans have, citing that the Ferengi never had concentration camps, slavery or massive-scale warfare. In particular, Quark states that the Ferengi would have negotiated a mutually beneficial deal with the Dominion, as opposed to the Federation's "Independence at any cost" stance.
• Fantastic Caste System : The joined have more prestige then the unjoined.
• Humanoid Aliens : The only outside difference is the leopard-like spots on the neck.
• Living Memory
• Mental Fusion
• Puppeteer Parasite : An odd benevolent version.
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo : Joined Trill are forbidden to marry someone they were married to in a previous life.
• Henchmen Race
• Just Following Orders
• Manipulative Bastard
• Sissy Villain
• Exclusively Evil : Deconstructed.
• Badass Army
• Fantastic Drug : The White.
• Meaningful Name : Related to the ranking system in Kiplings Finest .
• Proud Warrior Race
• Slave Mooks
• Spikes of Villainy
• Super Soldier
• Villainous Valour : They take pride in their discipline and prowess and are generally treated tragically rather then as faceless mooks. If they were more chivalrous they would be considered Worthy Opponent s. As it is, even Klingons fear them.

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Star Trek » Does This Remind You Of Anything

• " Metamorphosis " features Zefram Cochrane being looked after by a powerful energy being. When he realizes that the energy being wants a physical relationship with him, he's repulsed, but Kirk, Spock and McCoy don't see what the problem is. Given Cochrane's actual words, the episode can be read as a metaphor against homophobia, or, given the time period and a strange handwave about it being a female energy being, possibly against opposition to interracial relationships . Cochrane: Is this what the future holds? Men who have no notion of decency or morality? Maybe I'm a hundred and fifty years out of style, but I'm not going to be fodder for any inhuman monster. (He leaves in disgust.) Spock: Fascinating. A totally parochial attitude.
• In " The Conscience of the King ", Kodos culled people based on his eugenics theories, and has lived under an assumed name to escape the punishment for his crimes decades later. The comparisons to the Nazis here (especially in the '60s when knowledge of the many fugitives living underground became prominent after the capture of Adolf Eichmann) are probably intended.
• In " Up the Long Ladder " Pulaski and Riker destroy the clones made of them without their consent, and reject that being consdered 'murder'. An interviewed writer indicated that the similarity of the issues implied to those related to abortion was completely intentional.
• The Cardassian occupation of Bajor, complete with labor camps and racially-charged rhetoric, is reminiscent of the Nazi regime , while its mention of comfort women is reminiscent of Imperial Japan's occupation of various countries.
• Like the Nazis, the Changeling Founders consider themselves racially superior to "solids" and have no moral qualms about genocide.
• Linking , dear God. The linking scenes between Odo and the Female Changeling have the feel of love scenes .
• On the subject of changelings, " Chimera " has a lot of parallels to the struggles of gay men and others on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Laas's being an unabashed shapeshifter in comparison to Odo keeping his changeling nature private is not unlike two gay men, one who is out and another who is closeted. The comparisons become stronger with the station residents' discomfort with Laas's shapeshifting mimicking the discomfort of the average person with an outwardly gay man's mannerisms, as well as Odo and Laas linking on a few occasions (see previous point). Quark hammers the point in further when he cautions Odo against holding a "changeling pride parade" on the station.
• A more humorous version occurs when a baby Changeling is discovered. Odo convinces Sisko to pull some strings to put him in charge of its development, but when he hits a brick wall, the scientist who first experimented on him, Dr Mora, comes to the station to help out. Their interactions come across like a mother and daughter arguing about how to raise the grandchild.
• Star Trek: Discovery : The Klingon House of T'Kuvma is an faction that seeks to reunite the fragmented Klingon Empire under his banner and strike back at the Federation, and they are noted for being particularly fundamentalist in nature and employing martyrdom to advance their goals. This mirrors the goals of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria , a real-life terrorist group that rose to prominence in the 2010s that uses similar methods and seeks revive the old days of the Umayyad Caliphate.
• In " Maps and Legends ", the circumstances of the failed Romulan evacuation are fleshed out, including the fact that several species threatened to leave the Federation if they helped them. This episode was released on the day that the UK left the EU, one of the reasons being xenophobia . Some of that xenophobia was the result of an inability to separate modern Germany from the Nazi regime , which is paralleled in the Romulan Star Empire being the Federation's oldest enemy and those species being unable to see beyond that.
• The harvesting of Icheb's Borg parts is analogous to an Organ Theft .
• "Freecloud keeps your secrets" sounds a lot like "Whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."
• Picard describing how the Borg "entered" and "defiled" Seven of Nine as a child continues to drive home the "assimilation as rape" metaphor.
• In "Broken Pieces", the Zhat Vash gathering around the Admonition brings to mind a witches coven, or a cult initiation ritual.
• On Star Trek: Voyager , Seven of Nine made a point in insisting upon being addressed as "Seven" instead of her birth name, Annika Hansen . Throughout Picard , many villainous characters address Seven as "Annika" or "Hansen", not unlike how homophobic or transphobic people will spitefully address transgender or nonbinary people by their "dead name".
• Star Trek: Voyager : The episode " Lineage " can easily be read as a metaphor for colorism. B'Elanna, who has been insecure about her Klingon heritage her whole life, is distressed when she learns that her and Tom's daughter will inherit her features, particularly forehead ridges, as she had assumed that she would look human. With a few minor rewrites it would be a story about a biracial woman being upset that her 1/4 Black child has dark skin, particularly when B'Elanna considers genetically modifying her unborn baby to remove her Klingon DNA, which would not only remove her ridges but also change her hair from brunette to blonde, i.e. skin bleaching.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?
• The Boys (2019)

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