The scariest ‘Star Trek’ episodes ever, ranked

Got an itch to explore strange ghoul worlds? To seek out new frights and new shiverlizations? To boldly go to the bathroom in your pants?

Then you’ve come to the right place, nerds. We’ve compiled here a list of some of the scariest episodes of Star Trek in the franchise’s nigh-on 60-year history. We even left out the TNG story where Doctor Crusher gets haunted by her horny grandma, and that’s terrifying in its own right – if that episode isn’t on this list, then where is it? It could be right behind you.

6: “Conspiracy” – Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1, episode 25

All on its own, there’s something bizarre and borderline horrific about Star Trek: The Next Generation’s debut season to begin with. The series hadn’t found its footing. Rewatching it, everything feels a little bit wrong, like when you go back and watch early The Simpsons episodes and remember that the characters used to look all squidgy. 

All of which adds to the already haunting story from “Conspiracy,” the first TNG episode to require a content warning and recuts for international broadcast. Like all great sci-fi, it challenges its audience with questions they might not have thought to ask on their own, like “what if giant sea monkeys climbed into a guy’s mouth and took over his brain, and then Captain Picard and Commander Riker used their phasers to peel back every layer of his flesh before exploding his head?”

5: “All Those Who Wander” — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1, episode 9

Strange New Worlds found an audience by boldly going back to basics, offering fans the optimistic, brightly-colored adventures that they’d so sorely missed during the franchise’s grunge period.

Then, sideswiping its viewers with a sudden tonal shift, it gave them “All Those Who Wander,” the season one episode that mixed the plot of Aliens, the character pathos of Firefly, and the monsters of Aliens again. The result was a previously unimaginable world where we, the devoted fans of Star Trek, were unexpectedly scared of the Gorn for the first time ever.

4: “Schisms” – Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 6, episode 5

“Schisms” might not be everyone’s favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it’s in the top five for anyone who’s ever thought “man, Riker doesn’t get his arm cut off in his sleep as much as he deserves.”

3: “The Thaw” – Star Trek: Voyager, Season 2, episode 23

Star Trek has long offered a safe place to break ground, but nobody could have called the revolutionary move pulled by the franchise when it aired “The Thaw,” back in 1996: introduce a scary clown, then make him the second freakiest thing on the screen.

Flying in the face of the relatively-boilerplate existential horror inherent in trapping crew members in a Matrix-esque nightmare ruled by a sadistic jester, “The Thaw” hooks you by playing with your expectations of a group of campy, original-series-looking bad guys. Then it ends by reintroducing you to, in hindsight, the most terrifying character of the series: Captain Janeway, a woman who will stare into your eyes, whisper calmly, and smirk while you die. Call it foreshadowing for the next episode on our agenda:

2: “Twovix” – Star Trek: Voyager, Season 4, episode 1

The Borg? The Phage? The slick new Gorn that can actually move around? None of them — not one — is as frightening as Janeway was the week that she met a fun, put-together dude, and decided that he’d be better off executed. No, that’s not true – what was scarier was watching said dude flail desperately across the bridge of Voyager, begging for help from a group of uncaring officers, whom the show cynically labeled “protagonists.” Just remember, kids: Even in a post-scarcity utopia, the people around you will wordlessly tear you in half if it means having a halfway-decent chef around to make them grilled cheese sandwiches.

1: The majority of Miles O’Brien’s life, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

There is no circle of hell, no Jigsaw torture basement, no Camp Crystal Lake weekend vacation package so horrifying, so devastating, as being Miles O’Brien. 

For interested parties, here’s the scoreboard: He’s been kidnapped and replaced by a malicious double, missed a family vacation while he was on trial for alien terrorism, been granted repeated visions of his violent death, had his wife possessed by a trans-dimensional demon, watched his daughter grow up to be a time-displaced feral woman, been chewed out by Captain Kirk, spent 20 years in a simulated brain prison, and been friends with Bashir.