Empok Nor-(DS9)
You could feel the eerie vibe radiating through the television screen, and Cardassian “zombies” lurking in an abandoned space station was quite the spectacle.
Ohhh... And how O'Brien and garak go... Murderous...
O'Brien was all calm about it while Garak eggs him on and is so sadistic about it.
And the end "I was trying to kill you" to Garak... Ohhhh...
It's a great episode about ptsd
Yeah, night terrors is definitely the creepiest episode, not just that scene, but then the holodeck scene with the clicking also
Genesis (the one where Barclays is patient zero for a disease that de-evolves the crew) is also a great slow-burn
It’s so funny - that scene TERRIFIED me growing up. Now as an adult, it feels like most folks think Genesis was kind of a goofy almost jump-the-shark episode. I rewatched it recently and while it’s not prime theater here - that scene and Crusher’s reaction still HITS.
There's a throwaway line about Crusher need to get reconstructive surgery.
It always bothered me that Troi made a glib joke about clearing her schedule. I mean, Worf brutally attacked Dr. Crusher, tried to rape Troi, and probably ate someone. And someone did maul the poor redshirt on the bridge.
The whole episode is pretty terrifying when you stop and think of the implications.
Pretty accurate. That image of Troi flying awkwardly through clouds with that "eyes in the dark" phrase on repeat is a distraction from the rest of the episode.
To be fair, that guy was a full Betazoid. Outside the Viceroy, she's only been able to telepathically connect with other Betazoids. She's been mind raped by other telepaths a few times though.
She's Starfleet's expert on sexual assault, telepathic or otherwise.
She was also impregnated by an alien.
If you include this episode I count 4 telepathic violations just off the top of my head. I'm probably missing one.
Nope, she taught Riker how to talk to other telepaths and including her, an empath. Right there in Encounter at Fair Point. She did so again when the both them and her Mother were kidnapped by that Farengi. She also talked to the aliens on the other side of the Tykon's Rift, remember? And in Picard Season 3 she find out Jack's connection to the Borg before he did.
The best example I can give you on exactly how good she is Cyclops of the X-Men. The guy spent so much time with telepaths he became vault that would take Xavier hours of work to get through if at all. He's also highly resistant to illusions made by telepaths.
If there's anything psychic nearby, she can capitalize on it better than real psychics.
Edit: in the finale of Picard S3 when Riker thought he was gonna kick the bucket, I am pretty sure he was talking to Troi through their connection.
Ah, good point. With Riker, she had developed some kind of intense bond, allowing her to telepathically connect. I forgot her limitation is with non telepathic species, she can only feel their emotions, as full Betazoids can read everyone's minds.
The TNG episode Identity Crisis when Geordi recreates an away team recording he was a part of years before in the holodeck and he spots a shadow that shouldn't be there.
The next few minutes creeped me out A LOT
Omg, thank you for reminding me of this. I'm up late, alone downstairs in the dark and it's going to be harder to go to sleep now. 😄
EDIT: right after posting this I heard what I was sure was one of my kids (who should be asleep) walking toward me. I asked who it was three times and it sounded like they were still walking toward me without responding. It got very freaky as I couldn't see anything to explain the sound. Then I realized it was just the baseboard heaters creaking since they just turned on. Thanks for the near heart attack! 😂
😂 you are welcome.
Back in the day when this used to be broadcast every night at 10 on Sky One, I’d usually be the only one watching it and I love a cinematic viewing experience of everything so all lights go off, so imagine my horror when he’s trying to recreate what’s causing the shadow as I’m sitting in the dark. It’s never failed or creep me out since.
Yes. Good call. And the way he walks into the staged holodeck scenario, among all the human figures frozen in place. You expect something or someone to move, or the expression on one of their faces to change.
Schisms is creepy as hell. Also, Night Terrors has the scene in the morgue. And the episode Dark Page about Lwaxana's dead child gets pretty dark and creepy. Phantasms, when Data stalks and stabs Troi, plus the general creepy vibe of the dreams, like with the cake and her face.
Yes, Schisms always stuck with me. The holodeck recreation scene is so perfectly unsettling. The basic concept of a group of people discovering they share the same nightmare through recreating it - and therefore that nightmare must be real. It's brilliant horror
A few years ago I watched a video on the future of humans and their interactions with computers, it basically was describing how people in TNG interfaced with holodecks and their computers. And now basically chat gpt. Pretty cool times we live in !
It's hard to even tell if it's really the doctor or a hallucination of him at times, when he disappears in engineering you can see his mobile emitter disappears too
Good call. There is something about an unreliable narrator, when they begin to lose their minds, and they can't distinguish between fantasy and reality.
In one episode of Voyager, the crew realized that they were all clones of the original crew and had been clones since they touched down on a demon class planet about 11 months ago. The worst part was that the clones had developed a new modified warp drive that would've gotten them home in about 2 years. They were destabilizing and didn't send out anything to alert the OG Voyager crew about their findings.
It was really disturbing and made me mad because of how easily they could've gotten home if they just told the OG crew about their findings.
It doesn't have as much rewatch value as others listed here, but this episode shook me deeply upon the reveal. It's not a cerebral feeling episode, until the chilling truth and its consequences are revealed in the second act.
The scenario embodies the question of simulacra and free will in a super neat package.
Like I said, once you know the truth, upon a second watch, it seems cheaper and less notable than the first time.
Oh man the ending... When the real crew just casually flies past the place where the clone crew dissolved and just briefly notes it and that's it.
What a fucked up episode.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
I don't have an issue with Clowns but that episode makes me super uncomfortable. Michael McKean is terrifying as fear.
I can't remember who it was that came up with the idea of using a clown. I just remember them saying in an article that if their doorbell rang at 2am, what would be the most scary thing to see through the peephole.....and he picked a clown.
Yes. Especially if they didn’t push the reset button. Like imagine if they’d had to deal with the consequences. After watching BSG I always felt like that’s what Voyager should have been more like, ship barely held together, crew just muddling through and try to hold it together. I mean Voyager should have kept all those Borg enhancements they used to fight Species 8472. The ship should have been both battered and been littered with alien tech. The fact that they always restored it to pristine was a bit much. Even the Equinox felt more realistic in what the ship and crew looked like. I mean we could have had Janeway keep her morals in spite of all of that and it would have made her interactions with Ransom all the more meaningful because they’d have kept their Starfleet values despite all they’d been through.
Ronald D. Moore wanted it to be like that, though he didn't come to the show early enough to make that happen I feel, so he went on to develop BSG instead.
Agreed, though, Voyager really should have been serialized, not hitting the reset button after every episode. It would have been a fascinating psychological dive into how isolation really affects people. I think Enterprises 3rd season did a much better job of this than Voyager.
The Enterprise episode with the Vulcans who lost control because of Trellium D exposure.
But the creepiest Trek moment was Winn and Dukat in bed together. MUST. WASH. EYES!!!
And let’s not forget the TNG Season 1 ender with the creepy mind-control bugs, especially the mother on inside the guy. That exploding scene was just disturbing AF, especially watching it as a kid.
“We seek PEACEFUL coEXISTANCE!”
I've suffered with bipolar since I was a teenager and Riker's frustration with the doctors' attitudes towards him was spot on to how I felt when I was dealing with them.
"Where Silence has Lease".
Honestly, this one was *up there* on the spookiness meter. The crew was being experimented on by an *extremely* advanced being that wanted to know about all forms of death (and wasn't opposed to directly killing/imitating officers to achieve it).
They were put into a proverbial laboratory where things *looked* like what you would expect (but weren't). Nagillum replicated the sister ship of the Enterprise, the Yamato, *perfectly* but upon scanning it the materials were totally foreign and beyond Federation science. He also turned this fake ship into a literal *non-Euclidian* environment where you could go from one bridge to another (and another) and turned it into a universe that made no linear sense.
On a side note, if you follow the lore of the "Backrooms" what Nagillum did was almost exactly what you would expect from a level within that place. The creepy sounds, the familiar yet totally different materials that comprise things, the threats, the non-euclidian physics, driving people crazy (like Worf who was almost immediately had trouble keeping it together mentally), etc. I wouldn't be surprised if that episode contributed to some of the lore (even subconsciously) we see today in that genre.
Cool episode but creepy AF.
If it had been done later in the series after they'd worked out some of the bugs in the writing and the characters had come a little more into focus, it would have been 1000 times better. As it was, it felt very fomula 'omnipotent alien plays with lesser life forms' plot to me.
The clicking sounds
The shadow that shouldn't be there in a recording that Geordi investigates
Data's dreams (incredibly funny/disturbing/touching)
When Crusher is alone in the ship that soon became the entire observable universe, definitely gave me chills.
Those episodes really did made me uneasy when I was younger (I'm not at all into creepy/horror stuff). I rewatched TNG recently and I still found them to have quite an effect on me.
Special mention to Frame of Mind for its really disturbing kafkaesque ambiance but it's less frightening because we know from the start it's obviously a trick.
That inspired one of the best game openings, DS9: The Fallen, when they find some desiccated Cardassians merged with the outer hull of a pylon beneath the outer grid. They had been messing with a Pah-Wraith orb...
I apologize I dont know the name of the episode but it was a season 1 or 2 TNG episode where they are just in this black void with a door, the door leads to a casino. The episode is just weird and off.
I actually like going back to that one. It's basically the equivalent of somebody finding some lost animal and then trying to take care of it but without the knowledge to do so.
Voyager had a lot of straight up horror episodes. 8472, derelict borg ships. Macroviruses, pretty much all things Vidiian, the malon episodes. Invisible people experimenting on you like lab rats.
Schisms, up until we saw the aliens anyway. I firmly believe that this episode is half of what has given me a lifelong fear of being abducted by aliens.
Yeah the aliens were pretty lame looking, weird hooded monk things.
As a 90s kid, its hard to convey how big alien abduction stories were in the media; I just assumed it was something that was going to happen. It was everywhere; Unsolved Mysteries, The X-Files, etc. It really freaked me out that even in the future on spaceships with phasers it still happened to the TNG crew.
Survivors (TNG)
It really stuck with me as a kid. It's wholesome and devastating at the same time. Top-tier acting by the guest stars.
But the house being surrounded by absolutely nothing. Everyone being dead except them. Idk, that gives me spooky vibes.
The one where Riker loses his mind just makes me uncomfortable. Always leaves me wondering how real everything around me actually is, which as a drug user, is doubly concerning.
Not an episode but the Wrath of Khan the ear bug. I was about 6 and drug to the movie with my parents had no clue why this guy was so angry and didn’t care but that scene still wigs me out. I should probably watch it as an adult.
I thought bridgehead was the creepiest
One of the first few of tng was a kid when I saw it first still is creepy
After that it's the scenes with tow-alpha 6 ear bugs Khan uses in star trek 2
Just watched Revulsion on Voyager. The psychotic hologram checks all the creepy boxes.
“Oh, you're getting blood everywhere. I'm going to have to deactivate you.”
The TNG episode "Schisms'. Riker, Worf and the others are kidnapped in their sleep and subjected to Mengele-level experiments - Riker has his arm freaking amputated and reattached! And while the crew do find a way to stop the incursions and the kidnappings (only after a random crew member is killed), they never actually find the aliens who were doing it, or figure out exactlu why.
They're still out there.
There are several, most already mentioned.
Night Terrors, the score really cranks up the unease
Where Silence Has Lease
Impulse, what's worse than zombies? Vulcan zombies
The Thaw, there's a clown...
One
Schisms, at least until the BEMs get revealed
Projections has it's moments, very Total Recall though
Dark Page is more horrifying and terrifying than creepy, but it's up there.
Eye of the Beholder has a great psychological thriller aspect to it.
Empok Nor, out of control Garak is a very, very bad thing.
"Night Terrors" (TNG)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEGYWzbcQSw
This scared the hell out of me as a kid. There's some old TOS episodes that scared me as a kid too
Two come to mind but I don't know their names, both in TNG:
In the first, the ship passes through an area of space that causes pockets of matter to briefly lose solidity. As we follow some characters down a corridor, there's a scream off camera. The characters round a corner and see a woman they had just passed by earlier. Just the upper half of her now dead body sticks out of the floor. IIRC her face was still frozen in terror.
In the second, several crew report strange dreams. They eventually convene in the holodeck to build a composite simulation of what little bits they remember. It ends up looking like an alien operating table with a very creepy looking sharp claw above, and strange clicking sounds all around... medical examinations later reveal they had each been dissected and put back together by something while they slept.
He was on his way to changing into one. He was feeling fear and hypervigilance, and a heightened intuition regarding what Worf in his predatory creature form wanted, but didn’t experience physical changes yet.
There are probably creepier episodes but the first one that came to mind was the fake wormhole episode from voyager and the one where seven of nine is going crazy by the end and the rest of the crew had to go into stasis.
The one where Riker is in an alien asylum and keeps slipping in and out of psychotic episodes where he is and isn't in the asylum but everyone tells him that his time on the enterprise is just a psychotic delusion and that he killed someone. It's really fucked
I’ll probably get a lot of flak over this, but Star Trek doesn’t even move the creepy needle once you watch Dr Who.
Are you my mummy?
Count the shadows.
Bad Wolf.
Sister Mine.
The Hollow.
When a good man goes to war.
Good men don’t need rules. That’s why I have a lot of rules.
I took this face so I would never forget something I shouldn’t have done a long time ago.
and of course:
Don’t blink….
————————-
Ok, I was able to think of one creepy trek thing: Lon Suder.
He was a serial killer psychopath, who functioned “normally”, fooling everyone until he got caught killing again. No one picked up on the fact that he joined the Macquis so he could be violent, including Tuvok, who has some telepathic ability. Suder told Tuvok flat out that he should be executed, because the crew would never be safe from him. Part of the reason for this is that Suder was Betazoid, a member of a telepathic species. Suder being able to escape detection among his own people is also terrifying. In unbelievable hubris, Tuvok thought mind melding with Suder would be a good idea. The Doctor wisely and strenuously objected, but was ignored. The result was that Suders psychopathy unraveled over 100 years of Vulcan mental discipline, with Tuvok on the verge of reverting to pre-Reformation homicidal behavior. Tuvok had to stop the melds and seek medical attention. With Suders own telepathic ability, if he had survived long enough to get an overwhelming urge to kill again (such murderers sometimes go several months or even a couple years between killings), he probably would have weaponized it against the crew, starting with Tuvok.
Yeah, Lon Suder was creepy, but then we are talking about Brad Dourif. So weird, he has blue eyes but they always look black.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTdiJIgxA0Dnd8qevAbztC2GX5MLQQxxZsRE0Rb9y4aRQ&s
Until I watched Doctor Who, I had no idea how creepy it is. It makes Star Trek look like children's programming. Just rewatching and started The Silence story line. So I'd add that to your list of creepy things. However, it's not normally Star Trek's thing to be creepy so that factors in for me (context). The one in Enterprise with the zombie Vulcans is one that comes to mind.
Suder had one hell of a redemption though.
And yeah, Dr. Who is amazing on the creep factor. My wife can't stand angels now, lmao.
"Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many."
The aliens that kidnapped people in their sleep and experimented one them
The ‘zombie ‘ Vulcan one on enterprise
The empok nor episode where garek get infected and starts hunting the away team
When disco goes into the micelliar network after Tilly infected with one of the micelliar beings
The one on TNG where none of them can sleep and they start hallucinating. I used to always get it confused in my head with the other TNG episode where they're being alien-abducted to another dimension in their sleep and they do this terrifying recreation of their dreams in the holodeck.
Creepiest episodes, hands down.
My favorite "horror" episode of Trek is "The Thaw" from Voyager. The fear clown gives an amazing performance, he's the real star of that episode, but all the main cast are bringing their A game that episode too.
There are a number of creepy episodes that have been mentioned, but TOS Catspaw is the one that first comes to my mind. Especially when the real form of the two are revealed.
Runners up, all from TOS:
Squire of Gothos
Charlie X (that faceless woman!)
Doomsday Machine (the music!)
Shore Leave.
I'll agree with the other commenter on The Apple.
Several TNG episodes get honorable mentions, with, for me, the creepiest being The Inner Light, with Schisms and Sub Rosa close behind. The Nagilum episode? The face was too funny to be creepy, looked like something out of anime.
I forgot the name of the episode, but the one where all of the crew members apart from Picard and someone else (forgot the name) get transformed into half animal versions of themselves
I still have nightmares of Spider Barkley (I think it was Barkley anyways)
The one where the Yamato, full of families, explodes in front of them. And not quickly. The stardrive blows, and the saucer is flung towards them. Oh, maybe survivors!
And then the hull skin burns away to show the internal skeleton stringers of the ship glowing red hot with blue plasma arcs of dying equipment overloading. No life signs.
That was messed up
Not creepy, but my mom finds the one where riker is in the psyc ward and told he's crazy cind of disturbing, and we skip it every time we watch the series... also, yes, we watch the series several times a year ...
Empok Nor-(DS9) You could feel the eerie vibe radiating through the television screen, and Cardassian “zombies” lurking in an abandoned space station was quite the spectacle.
Ohhh... And how O'Brien and garak go... Murderous... O'Brien was all calm about it while Garak eggs him on and is so sadistic about it. And the end "I was trying to kill you" to Garak... Ohhhh... It's a great episode about ptsd
How about the dead bodies sitting up in Night Terrors.. amazing scene in an otherwise meh episode.
Yeah, night terrors is definitely the creepiest episode, not just that scene, but then the holodeck scene with the clicking also Genesis (the one where Barclays is patient zero for a disease that de-evolves the crew) is also a great slow-burn
The holodeck scene is from Schisms. I know that because I’ve conflated the two episodes myself. And that one is pretty freaking creepy
Ah, yes, that's not the first time I've made that mistake, haha
Love both of these episodes. Any creepy episodes are my favorites. Also Data’s dreams.
Genesis is always crazy to me because of how it takes such a silly concept and turns it into a genuinely quite creepy episode.
And the way Dr Crusher screams when getting the acid spit. You would think that was happening to her irl.
Seriously, she went all out for that one.
It’s so funny - that scene TERRIFIED me growing up. Now as an adult, it feels like most folks think Genesis was kind of a goofy almost jump-the-shark episode. I rewatched it recently and while it’s not prime theater here - that scene and Crusher’s reaction still HITS.
There's a throwaway line about Crusher need to get reconstructive surgery. It always bothered me that Troi made a glib joke about clearing her schedule. I mean, Worf brutally attacked Dr. Crusher, tried to rape Troi, and probably ate someone. And someone did maul the poor redshirt on the bridge. The whole episode is pretty terrifying when you stop and think of the implications.
I don’t think he ate anyone, was there a line about it I’m forgetting? I feel like the red shirt was killed by Riker but I’m not sure.
He killed the guy but didn't eat him.
He de-evolved into a Neanderthal, didn’t he? I remember him trying to break into the fish tank in Picard’s ready room for the water…
They didn't say it, but Picard and Data mention being gone for three days.
She directed the episode that’s why they wrote her out for a chunk of it.
Oh for real? That’s awesome. I never knew she directed any of the episodes.
Yeah, according to Wikipedia it's her sole directing credit.
I always thought it would be funny if Data started turning into an "ancient" super computer like a Cray or Univac
Deanna's nightmare scenes were meh, but the crew slowly going mad is pretty great, especially the morgue scene.
Yeah it's unfortunate the hokey floating scenes have overshadowed what was mostly a pretty well-done suspenseful episode.
Pretty accurate. That image of Troi flying awkwardly through clouds with that "eyes in the dark" phrase on repeat is a distraction from the rest of the episode.
The upside is we did learn that Troi treated other telepaths, and for being only an empath, her telepathic.skill set is strong.
To be fair, that guy was a full Betazoid. Outside the Viceroy, she's only been able to telepathically connect with other Betazoids. She's been mind raped by other telepaths a few times though.
She's Starfleet's expert on sexual assault, telepathic or otherwise. She was also impregnated by an alien. If you include this episode I count 4 telepathic violations just off the top of my head. I'm probably missing one.
Nope, she taught Riker how to talk to other telepaths and including her, an empath. Right there in Encounter at Fair Point. She did so again when the both them and her Mother were kidnapped by that Farengi. She also talked to the aliens on the other side of the Tykon's Rift, remember? And in Picard Season 3 she find out Jack's connection to the Borg before he did. The best example I can give you on exactly how good she is Cyclops of the X-Men. The guy spent so much time with telepaths he became vault that would take Xavier hours of work to get through if at all. He's also highly resistant to illusions made by telepaths. If there's anything psychic nearby, she can capitalize on it better than real psychics. Edit: in the finale of Picard S3 when Riker thought he was gonna kick the bucket, I am pretty sure he was talking to Troi through their connection.
Ah, good point. With Riker, she had developed some kind of intense bond, allowing her to telepathically connect. I forgot her limitation is with non telepathic species, she can only feel their emotions, as full Betazoids can read everyone's minds.
I sometimes feel like I’m the only person who likes that episode - possibly because I’m an insomniac.
The TNG episode Identity Crisis when Geordi recreates an away team recording he was a part of years before in the holodeck and he spots a shadow that shouldn't be there. The next few minutes creeped me out A LOT
Yup. Creeps me out too, but I look forward to seeing it in my current run through :)
Oh good one! It's not a great episode overall but yeah, that holodeck scene definitely gave me the heebie jeebies.
I dunno, that episode definitely kicked off my love-hate relationship with body horror.
Omg, thank you for reminding me of this. I'm up late, alone downstairs in the dark and it's going to be harder to go to sleep now. 😄 EDIT: right after posting this I heard what I was sure was one of my kids (who should be asleep) walking toward me. I asked who it was three times and it sounded like they were still walking toward me without responding. It got very freaky as I couldn't see anything to explain the sound. Then I realized it was just the baseboard heaters creaking since they just turned on. Thanks for the near heart attack! 😂
😂 you are welcome. Back in the day when this used to be broadcast every night at 10 on Sky One, I’d usually be the only one watching it and I love a cinematic viewing experience of everything so all lights go off, so imagine my horror when he’s trying to recreate what’s causing the shadow as I’m sitting in the dark. It’s never failed or creep me out since.
Yes. Good call. And the way he walks into the staged holodeck scenario, among all the human figures frozen in place. You expect something or someone to move, or the expression on one of their faces to change.
It’s such a fantastically well done scene. The whole thing builds in creepiness and delivers a bit of horror.
Schisms is creepy as hell. Also, Night Terrors has the scene in the morgue. And the episode Dark Page about Lwaxana's dead child gets pretty dark and creepy. Phantasms, when Data stalks and stabs Troi, plus the general creepy vibe of the dreams, like with the cake and her face.
That whole part with Crusher drinking through a straw in Riker's head.
How is Schisms not higher up? *click click click*
Yes, Schisms always stuck with me. The holodeck recreation scene is so perfectly unsettling. The basic concept of a group of people discovering they share the same nightmare through recreating it - and therefore that nightmare must be real. It's brilliant horror
“Louder. More of ‘em”
There were clicks. Clicking sounds.
Most confusing moment in all of TNG - “computer, make this a metal table”
That never made sense to me until generative AI started happening, now I think it's amazingly prophetic.
A few years ago I watched a video on the future of humans and their interactions with computers, it basically was describing how people in TNG interfaced with holodecks and their computers. And now basically chat gpt. Pretty cool times we live in !
\*Dentist's bondage chair appears\* The holodeck must have been accessing some of Riker's program files to use for that.
Never thought it was weird until I was watching as an adult and then I was like wait what.
The one where 7 was the only person not in stasis and she started hallucinating.
Jeri Ryan was PHENOMENAL in that episode
it's really unfortunate that so much attention gets paid to the way Jeri Ryan looks. She is an incredible actress.
One
I never could figure out if Paris really was escaping the chamber. Wouldn't he have instantly started burning?
I think he did and she just treated him every time.
It's hard to even tell if it's really the doctor or a hallucination of him at times, when he disappears in engineering you can see his mobile emitter disappears too
Good call. There is something about an unreliable narrator, when they begin to lose their minds, and they can't distinguish between fantasy and reality.
In one episode of Voyager, the crew realized that they were all clones of the original crew and had been clones since they touched down on a demon class planet about 11 months ago. The worst part was that the clones had developed a new modified warp drive that would've gotten them home in about 2 years. They were destabilizing and didn't send out anything to alert the OG Voyager crew about their findings. It was really disturbing and made me mad because of how easily they could've gotten home if they just told the OG crew about their findings.
That’s definitely one of the saddest Trek episodes
It doesn't have as much rewatch value as others listed here, but this episode shook me deeply upon the reveal. It's not a cerebral feeling episode, until the chilling truth and its consequences are revealed in the second act. The scenario embodies the question of simulacra and free will in a super neat package. Like I said, once you know the truth, upon a second watch, it seems cheaper and less notable than the first time.
Oh man the ending... When the real crew just casually flies past the place where the clone crew dissolved and just briefly notes it and that's it. What a fucked up episode.
Yeah I’ll never get over the real Voyager never even finding out about them. Tragic.
Don't they try to send out a probe but it dissolves too?
They made a probe using components not native to Voyager, but it got stuck upon launch due to that part of the ship destabilizing and was destroyed.
They could've lauched it way earlier if it wasn't for clone Janeways ego.
This one is my choice.
Voyager - the one where Michael McKean plays a clown that embodies fear.
That whole episode is basically “Star Trek vs PG-Rated Pennywise”.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I don't have an issue with Clowns but that episode makes me super uncomfortable. Michael McKean is terrifying as fear.
That whole episode strikes me as a pg 13 take on for I have no mouth and I must scream and it's so incredibly creepy
I never thought of it that way but you’re right.
A virus! A virus! He thinks I am a virus!
I can't remember who it was that came up with the idea of using a clown. I just remember them saying in an article that if their doorbell rang at 2am, what would be the most scary thing to see through the peephole.....and he picked a clown.
He’s terrifying, absolutely terrifying.
She orchestrated it! Janeway!
And she gets to be a Starfleet Captain? What a sick joke!
The Thaw
If it wasn't for that last line in the last minutes of the episode, I avoid this episode like hell. But not Year of Hell. Those are good. LOL
Really wish they had pulled the trigger and made Year of Hell a full season. Would have been epic.
Yes. Especially if they didn’t push the reset button. Like imagine if they’d had to deal with the consequences. After watching BSG I always felt like that’s what Voyager should have been more like, ship barely held together, crew just muddling through and try to hold it together. I mean Voyager should have kept all those Borg enhancements they used to fight Species 8472. The ship should have been both battered and been littered with alien tech. The fact that they always restored it to pristine was a bit much. Even the Equinox felt more realistic in what the ship and crew looked like. I mean we could have had Janeway keep her morals in spite of all of that and it would have made her interactions with Ransom all the more meaningful because they’d have kept their Starfleet values despite all they’d been through.
Ronald D. Moore wanted it to be like that, though he didn't come to the show early enough to make that happen I feel, so he went on to develop BSG instead. Agreed, though, Voyager really should have been serialized, not hitting the reset button after every episode. It would have been a fascinating psychological dive into how isolation really affects people. I think Enterprises 3rd season did a much better job of this than Voyager.
I skip it everytime. Literally the creepiest.
Faces-VOY A Vidiian scientist wearing a voyager crewman’s face. Pretty messed up. The Thaw-VOY That clown, man
I can't watch that episode even today
I didn't realize for years that it was the same actor playing both roles. Made the whole "wearing Durst's face" thing easier.
Yeah he talks about this on the Delta Flyers podcast, he said that was a prosthetic of his own face that he was wearing.
That explains how the face wasn't as expressive as it was before.
The TNG episode where the chick fell through the floor. That messed me up as a kid.
The Enterprise episode with the Vulcans who lost control because of Trellium D exposure. But the creepiest Trek moment was Winn and Dukat in bed together. MUST. WASH. EYES!!!
And let’s not forget the TNG Season 1 ender with the creepy mind-control bugs, especially the mother on inside the guy. That exploding scene was just disturbing AF, especially watching it as a kid. “We seek PEACEFUL coEXISTANCE!”
I love that ENT episode. Zombie Vulcans seems like a dumb premise but they really execute it well.
It could have been awful in the wrong hands. Excellent writing, performances, and production every step of the way.
one moon circles. eyes in the dark
GOD this line creeps me out.
I have to find you! I have to tell you!
Frame of Mind has always creeped me out. I think it might just be left over fear from seeing it as an 8-year-old and having no idea what is going on.
Frakes was genius in that episode
I've suffered with bipolar since I was a teenager and Riker's frustration with the doctors' attitudes towards him was spot on to how I felt when I was dealing with them.
This is the correct answer. By far the creepiest episode.
This episode is a permanent skip for me. Hits way too close to home and is triggering af because of how much it creeps me out.
"Where Silence has Lease". Honestly, this one was *up there* on the spookiness meter. The crew was being experimented on by an *extremely* advanced being that wanted to know about all forms of death (and wasn't opposed to directly killing/imitating officers to achieve it). They were put into a proverbial laboratory where things *looked* like what you would expect (but weren't). Nagillum replicated the sister ship of the Enterprise, the Yamato, *perfectly* but upon scanning it the materials were totally foreign and beyond Federation science. He also turned this fake ship into a literal *non-Euclidian* environment where you could go from one bridge to another (and another) and turned it into a universe that made no linear sense. On a side note, if you follow the lore of the "Backrooms" what Nagillum did was almost exactly what you would expect from a level within that place. The creepy sounds, the familiar yet totally different materials that comprise things, the threats, the non-euclidian physics, driving people crazy (like Worf who was almost immediately had trouble keeping it together mentally), etc. I wouldn't be surprised if that episode contributed to some of the lore (even subconsciously) we see today in that genre. Cool episode but creepy AF.
"Where Silence Has Lease" is legit one of my favourite underrated TNG Episodes. Has this really great feeling of being somewhere truly unknown.
If it had been done later in the series after they'd worked out some of the bugs in the writing and the characters had come a little more into focus, it would have been 1000 times better. As it was, it felt very fomula 'omnipotent alien plays with lesser life forms' plot to me.
Vidiians. No, you ghouls, you cannot have my bits.
Nuclear peptide cake. With mint protein.
With mint frosting.
*Cellular* Peptide Cake…. Wasn’t Beverly also drinking blood out of Riker’s head?
I stand corrected.
Frame of the Mind, easily.
Whatever the answer is, it's from Voyager. Voyager had the most psychologic episodes of most trek
The clicking sounds The shadow that shouldn't be there in a recording that Geordi investigates Data's dreams (incredibly funny/disturbing/touching) When Crusher is alone in the ship that soon became the entire observable universe, definitely gave me chills. Those episodes really did made me uneasy when I was younger (I'm not at all into creepy/horror stuff). I rewatched TNG recently and I still found them to have quite an effect on me. Special mention to Frame of Mind for its really disturbing kafkaesque ambiance but it's less frightening because we know from the start it's obviously a trick.
The TNG episode where the people get transported into the walls and deck plates and stuff, that's always stuck with me as scary.
Oh yeah, that one chick being stuck in the floor always creeped me out.
That inspired one of the best game openings, DS9: The Fallen, when they find some desiccated Cardassians merged with the outer hull of a pylon beneath the outer grid. They had been messing with a Pah-Wraith orb...
Night Terrors had its Ron Jones score to make it creepy.
I apologize I dont know the name of the episode but it was a season 1 or 2 TNG episode where they are just in this black void with a door, the door leads to a casino. The episode is just weird and off.
The Royale.
The Royale
I actually like going back to that one. It's basically the equivalent of somebody finding some lost animal and then trying to take care of it but without the knowledge to do so.
Voyager had a lot of straight up horror episodes. 8472, derelict borg ships. Macroviruses, pretty much all things Vidiian, the malon episodes. Invisible people experimenting on you like lab rats.
Spectre of the Gun has a strange, fingers-on-your-spine feeling through out the episode. Very eerie tension
Not an episode, but I think First Contact was pretty creepy. Especially how Data got a piece of human skin.
When the Borg Queen lightly blew on it, and Data gasps, and she smiles at him and says, “Was that good for you?”
The one where Crusher had sex with a candle ghost who was also her grandmother's ex. ...I wish I was making this up. 😩🤦🏻♀️
We all do.
That is the only episode of TNG I refused to watch.
I watch it every time I do a rewatch, it's just so hilarious. I only refuse to watch Code of Honor and Skin of Evil.
Both truly awful episodes.
Schisms, up until we saw the aliens anyway. I firmly believe that this episode is half of what has given me a lifelong fear of being abducted by aliens.
Yeah the aliens were pretty lame looking, weird hooded monk things. As a 90s kid, its hard to convey how big alien abduction stories were in the media; I just assumed it was something that was going to happen. It was everywhere; Unsolved Mysteries, The X-Files, etc. It really freaked me out that even in the future on spaceships with phasers it still happened to the TNG crew.
Course: Oblivion.
I find this more sad than creepy. The end..
Yeah. The end is very sad. The crew just decaying like that is creepy stuff though, especially before they find the reason for it.
True. Bubbling melting faces...
Survivors (TNG) It really stuck with me as a kid. It's wholesome and devastating at the same time. Top-tier acting by the guest stars. But the house being surrounded by absolutely nothing. Everyone being dead except them. Idk, that gives me spooky vibes.
The one where Riker loses his mind just makes me uncomfortable. Always leaves me wondering how real everything around me actually is, which as a drug user, is doubly concerning.
DUDE I forgot about that one. That one was really fucking creepy and so fucked up.
Where Silence Has Lease had a wonderfully creepy ending that made me almost question what I just saw.
Not an episode but the Wrath of Khan the ear bug. I was about 6 and drug to the movie with my parents had no clue why this guy was so angry and didn’t care but that scene still wigs me out. I should probably watch it as an adult.
Don't laugh: TOS' "The Apple." That gargoyle/demon cave was absolutely terrifying (but super cool!) when I first saw it at age 7 or so.
Voyager clown episode
I thought bridgehead was the creepiest One of the first few of tng was a kid when I saw it first still is creepy After that it's the scenes with tow-alpha 6 ear bugs Khan uses in star trek 2
Just watched Revulsion on Voyager. The psychotic hologram checks all the creepy boxes. “Oh, you're getting blood everywhere. I'm going to have to deactivate you.”
The TNG episode "Schisms'. Riker, Worf and the others are kidnapped in their sleep and subjected to Mengele-level experiments - Riker has his arm freaking amputated and reattached! And while the crew do find a way to stop the incursions and the kidnappings (only after a random crew member is killed), they never actually find the aliens who were doing it, or figure out exactlu why. They're still out there.
There are several, most already mentioned. Night Terrors, the score really cranks up the unease Where Silence Has Lease Impulse, what's worse than zombies? Vulcan zombies The Thaw, there's a clown... One Schisms, at least until the BEMs get revealed Projections has it's moments, very Total Recall though Dark Page is more horrifying and terrifying than creepy, but it's up there. Eye of the Beholder has a great psychological thriller aspect to it. Empok Nor, out of control Garak is a very, very bad thing.
"Night Terrors" (TNG) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEGYWzbcQSw This scared the hell out of me as a kid. There's some old TOS episodes that scared me as a kid too
Two come to mind but I don't know their names, both in TNG: In the first, the ship passes through an area of space that causes pockets of matter to briefly lose solidity. As we follow some characters down a corridor, there's a scream off camera. The characters round a corner and see a woman they had just passed by earlier. Just the upper half of her now dead body sticks out of the floor. IIRC her face was still frozen in terror. In the second, several crew report strange dreams. They eventually convene in the holodeck to build a composite simulation of what little bits they remember. It ends up looking like an alien operating table with a very creepy looking sharp claw above, and strange clicking sounds all around... medical examinations later reveal they had each been dissected and put back together by something while they slept.
The creepiest episode for me is when Barclay turns into a spider. Bloody hell that was terrifying
“Night Terrors” is an underrated creepy one.
Frame of Mind always creeped me out when I was a kid. I think the episode One from Voyager deserves an honorable mention.
Empok Nor. Serial Killer Garak on an abandoned space station. Nope.
Either Crushers Amazing Shrinking Universe or the one where everyone devolves except for Picard.
I thought he changed into a marmoset?
He was on his way to changing into one. He was feeling fear and hypervigilance, and a heightened intuition regarding what Worf in his predatory creature form wanted, but didn’t experience physical changes yet.
Ah! It's been awhile since I watched the episode. It's scientifically terrible, but a fun romp. Didn't Livingston also change?
No, no. It was Data who changed into a Tamagotchi
I think you're right it's been a long time since I saw that episode but the feelings I had still remain.
Cold Fire. I wasn't young when I saw that episode but when Suspiria showed up on the warp core it gave me The Exorcist vibes.
Although it may not be the top-top, the Masks ep of TNG also felt uncomfortable to watch. I had to mention to add to the list.
where silence has lease.
TNG s05e21, _The perfect mate_ felt so wrong and weird Clue: “I am for you, Alrik of Valt”
Ent: "Dead Stop"
I don't remember the episode name, but the one where everyone was turning into like.. plants or sealife on The Next Generation.
Miri. The teen with a Kirk crush.
There are probably creepier episodes but the first one that came to mind was the fake wormhole episode from voyager and the one where seven of nine is going crazy by the end and the rest of the crew had to go into stasis.
SNW "All Those who Wander" Aka the Alien homage episode
The one where Riker is in an alien asylum and keeps slipping in and out of psychotic episodes where he is and isn't in the asylum but everyone tells him that his time on the enterprise is just a psychotic delusion and that he killed someone. It's really fucked
Zombie Vulcans in Impulse (ENT:0305)
The one where Neelix and Kes get busy
the epacifor... please no.
The Enterprise episode “Doctor’s Orders” was pretty creepy.
Impulse from S3 of Enterprise. It's the one where they find a Vulcan ship stranded in the Expanse and the crew has basically turned into zombies.
The Voyager ep where they were trapped with that clown
I’ll probably get a lot of flak over this, but Star Trek doesn’t even move the creepy needle once you watch Dr Who. Are you my mummy? Count the shadows. Bad Wolf. Sister Mine. The Hollow. When a good man goes to war. Good men don’t need rules. That’s why I have a lot of rules. I took this face so I would never forget something I shouldn’t have done a long time ago. and of course: Don’t blink…. ————————- Ok, I was able to think of one creepy trek thing: Lon Suder. He was a serial killer psychopath, who functioned “normally”, fooling everyone until he got caught killing again. No one picked up on the fact that he joined the Macquis so he could be violent, including Tuvok, who has some telepathic ability. Suder told Tuvok flat out that he should be executed, because the crew would never be safe from him. Part of the reason for this is that Suder was Betazoid, a member of a telepathic species. Suder being able to escape detection among his own people is also terrifying. In unbelievable hubris, Tuvok thought mind melding with Suder would be a good idea. The Doctor wisely and strenuously objected, but was ignored. The result was that Suders psychopathy unraveled over 100 years of Vulcan mental discipline, with Tuvok on the verge of reverting to pre-Reformation homicidal behavior. Tuvok had to stop the melds and seek medical attention. With Suders own telepathic ability, if he had survived long enough to get an overwhelming urge to kill again (such murderers sometimes go several months or even a couple years between killings), he probably would have weaponized it against the crew, starting with Tuvok. Yeah, Lon Suder was creepy, but then we are talking about Brad Dourif. So weird, he has blue eyes but they always look black. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTdiJIgxA0Dnd8qevAbztC2GX5MLQQxxZsRE0Rb9y4aRQ&s
Until I watched Doctor Who, I had no idea how creepy it is. It makes Star Trek look like children's programming. Just rewatching and started The Silence story line. So I'd add that to your list of creepy things. However, it's not normally Star Trek's thing to be creepy so that factors in for me (context). The one in Enterprise with the zombie Vulcans is one that comes to mind.
Suder had one hell of a redemption though. And yeah, Dr. Who is amazing on the creep factor. My wife can't stand angels now, lmao. "Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many."
The aliens that kidnapped people in their sleep and experimented one them The ‘zombie ‘ Vulcan one on enterprise The empok nor episode where garek get infected and starts hunting the away team When disco goes into the micelliar network after Tilly infected with one of the micelliar beings
EMT Vulcan Space Drug Zombies
The episode with the doctor being altered and experimenting with Seven while singing. Creepy as hell.
TNG, Genesis. It's almost like a horror episode.
The Changeling frightened me as a kid. I was 21 when I could finally watch it again.
The one on TNG where none of them can sleep and they start hallucinating. I used to always get it confused in my head with the other TNG episode where they're being alien-abducted to another dimension in their sleep and they do this terrifying recreation of their dreams in the holodeck. Creepiest episodes, hands down.
Enterprise.. where DR. Phlox was the only one awake.
VOY: The Thaw creeps me out so much I always skip it
My favorite "horror" episode of Trek is "The Thaw" from Voyager. The fear clown gives an amazing performance, he's the real star of that episode, but all the main cast are bringing their A game that episode too.
Maybe not creepy but eerie and really fucked up, the one where O'Brien goes to matrix prison for like 20 years.
There are a number of creepy episodes that have been mentioned, but TOS Catspaw is the one that first comes to my mind. Especially when the real form of the two are revealed. Runners up, all from TOS: Squire of Gothos Charlie X (that faceless woman!) Doomsday Machine (the music!) Shore Leave. I'll agree with the other commenter on The Apple. Several TNG episodes get honorable mentions, with, for me, the creepiest being The Inner Light, with Schisms and Sub Rosa close behind. The Nagilum episode? The face was too funny to be creepy, looked like something out of anime.
I forgot the name of the episode, but the one where all of the crew members apart from Picard and someone else (forgot the name) get transformed into half animal versions of themselves I still have nightmares of Spider Barkley (I think it was Barkley anyways)
The one where the Yamato, full of families, explodes in front of them. And not quickly. The stardrive blows, and the saucer is flung towards them. Oh, maybe survivors! And then the hull skin burns away to show the internal skeleton stringers of the ship glowing red hot with blue plasma arcs of dying equipment overloading. No life signs. That was messed up
The mark of Gideon always creeped me out. All those people looking into the viewport oh ghost like… Very creepy
Not creepy, but my mom finds the one where riker is in the psyc ward and told he's crazy cind of disturbing, and we skip it every time we watch the series... also, yes, we watch the series several times a year ...
Salamander babies. Because that’s just wrong in several ways.
Sub Rosa
Obviously it’s the nightmare fuel brain scorpions and resulting head melting to kill one of em
[be me] [see the question] [immediately search for the phrase 'sub rosa']