The Worst Things The Crew Of The Starship Enterprise Have Ever Done

While there have been other ships and space stations featured in the franchise's nearly sixty-year history, the starship Enterprise has always been at the center of Star Trek. It's the flagship of the Federation, seeking out new life on the frontiers of the galaxy, and as a result, its crew — not just the captains — has always been composed of the best of the best that Starfleet had to offer. 

Or, well, that's the idea, anyway. In practice, the crew of the Enterprise naturally tends to make the kind of terrible decisions that lead to dramatic, exciting television, and sometimes, those plot points and story beats come down to just plain being terrible. From hijacking the ship on multiple occasions to being a weird Holodeck sex creep to getting caught up in a 400-year-old murder mystery, here are the worst things that the people serving on the Enterprise have ever done.

"Wolf in the Fold" is one of the strangest episodes of the original Star Trek, and in retrospect feels a lot more like an episode of Doctor Who with the way it mixes history with a sci-fi take on the supernatural. It starts off interestingly enough, with a trip to the sexy planet of Argelius that goes bad with a dead belly dancer and Scotty accused of murder. 

It turns out the whole reason the Enterprise came to Argelius in the first place was Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy figured a trip to a "hedonistic society" full of people who "think very highly of their pleasure" — a very TV-in-1967 way of saying they were down to boldly go to the Bone Zone at Warp 6.9 — because of Scotty's "total resentment toward women." Eventually, things start to get really weird when it turns out the murders were actually perpetrated by "Redjac," an intangible space ghost known on Earth as the infamous 19th-century serial killer, Jack the Ripper. Redjac, you see, is a parasitic organism that feeds on fear, and drives its hosts to murder women, "because women are more easily and more deeply terrified" than men. Not a very enlightened opinion there, Mr. Spock.

Since Scotty didn't actually kill the dancer, and the rest of the crew wound up putting an end to a 400-year-old murder ghost, you might be wondering how this ends up on a list of the worst things the crew's ever done. That comes immediately after, when there are still dead bodies cooling in the conference room and everyone's high on drugs that make them happy instead of terrified, when they decide to celebrate by beaming back down and getting laid like it's the end of Caddyshack. Everyone's reaction to dealing with a series of horrific serial killings is different, but we can all agree this probably isn't a good one.

Wesley Crusher, the teenage starship prodigy Captain Picard allowed to fly the Enterprise despite the fact that he was too young to have a driver's license, was a notoriously unpopular character among die-hard Star Trek fans. Really, though, most of the complaints leveled at Wesley were the same gripes that a lot of characters meant to give younger viewers someone to identify with get: in addition to being annoyingly precocious, he was too smart, too skilled, and too good at everything, criticisms that were never really given to, you know, the sentient robot or the only Klingon in the Federation that were also hanging out on the bridge during Wesley's tenure.

If fans really wanted to complain about Wesley, they should've just waited until TNG Season 5 and "The First Duty," when he got one of his classmates at Starfleet Academy killed and then tried to cover it up as part of a conspiracy. To be fair, it wasn't entirely Wesley's fault. The classmate was killed while attempting a dangerous maneuver with his flight squadron — a maneuver which had been banned by the Academy because, you know, people kept dying from trying it — after he was pressured into it by the rest of the squadron. 

Eventually, Wes did come forward with the truth (hashtag stop snitching), but only after he was directly called a liar and thoroughly chewed out by Captain Picard with the most devastating example of Space Dad Disappointment ever put to film. If Picard had trusted Wesley just a little bit more and not looked into the incident for himself, Wesley never would've revealed the real story and allowed his fellow cadet to be blamed for his own death. 

Jean-Luc Picard has a very good reason for hating the Borg. Not only are they some of Starfleet's deadliest enemies, with a staggering cosmic body count racked up on their mission to assimilate the galaxy, they also transformed Picard himself into their spokesman, Locutus. Picard was forced to watch, a prisoner in his own body, as he was controlled by the Borg and made to order the deaths of over 11,000 of his fellow officers — the crews of 39 ships — in the massacre at Wolf 359. 

It's pretty understandable, then, that he'd want some revenge. That desire is often presented as one of his few major character flaws, and even gives Patrick Stewart one of his most memorable moments of scenery-chewing in the famous "the line must be drawn here!" scene in Star Trek: First Contact. His reaction to finding a single, stranded Borg Drone in Season 5's "I Borg," though, is much more understated, and a lot more sinister.

While he eventually grows to understand that the drone, who takes the name Hugh, could evolve beyond the Collective and introduce the concept of individuality to the hive mind of the Borg, the road to get there is marked by suspicion, fury, and one stone cold moment where Picard suggests that they infect him with an "invasive programming sequence" meant to function as a disease — "a terminal one." The crew winds up debating it, and Riker winds up arguing in favor of it. JLP's desire for revenge is one thing, and putting a stop to a galactic menace is another, Will Riker advocating for full-on cybernetic genocide is a bit far for the utopian morality of the 24th century. 

By and large, the utopian future of Star Trek is one where humanity has finally moved past its history of racism, something that the show frequently illustrates by having the crew encounter cultures that are so wrongheaded and backwards that their people still hate each other because of the color of their skin. In the famous "Balance of Terror," however, it turns out that this just applies to humanity. Racism against aliens is still totally fine.

That's the case with Lieutenant Stiles, though, who inherited a hatred of Romulans from his family, some of whom died serving the Federation in a war against the Romulans 100 years earlier. The thing is, the technology for video communication didn't exist back then, so none of the humans actually knew what Romulans looked like. 

If you're familiar with the show at all, you can see where this is going. It turns out that Romulans look exactly like Vulcans, which leads Stiles to suspect that Spock has been a no-good dirty spy this entire time. Admittedly, this episode is in Trek's first season, but Spock had been around long enough to prove his loyalty to the Federation and the Enterprise time and time again. Even if he hadn't been, judging someone by the pointiness of their ears is never a good thing. 

For the most part, the bad stuff about Star Trek: Enterprise has more to do with being boring than being actively terrible. The episode "A Night In Sickbay," however, feature what might just be the single worst thing that a member of the Enterprise crew has ever done ... for certain interpretations of "crew."

In order to give himself some company on his trek through the stars, Captain Jonathan Archer brings his pet beagle, Porthos, along for the ride. This seems like a good idea — everyone loved it when Data had a cat, right? — but it had some unforeseen consequences that, really, everyone should've seen coming. When Archer decides, for some reason, to bring Porthos down to a new planet with him, the dog, well, does what dogs do and starts marking its territory. The problem is that this isn't his territory. Or the Federation's. It's a holy site for the Kreetassans, who were already obsessed with politeness before a dog showed up to literally urinate on their sacred tree. 

In his own worst moment, Archer spends the entire episode griping about how it's all their fault that he took his dog down to their planet and destroyed one of their cultural treasures, but eventually, he makes amends with the Kreetassans by doing some shirtless chainsawing. This is never explained, but there's one thing we know for sure: as bad as the rest of the crew aboard the various Starships Enterprise might've been, none of them have ever peed on a religious artifact. That we know of.