The 10 Most Common Tropes In The Star Trek Franchise

You know the familiar Star Trek lines. “He’s dead, Jim!” “Highly illogical.” “Make it so!” We even know “Beam me up, Scotty,” a line never actually uttered as such on the show but trademarked for merchandising anyway. What about the plot tropes? You may know them too, but you might not think you do. On the surface, many Star Trek shows across the franchise’s history seem very different, from the war footing of “Deep Space Nine” to the comedy-of-the-awkward stylings of the “Lower Decks” team.

Just as Star Wars needs its lightsabers, clones, and stormtroopers, though, so too does Star Trek need its familiar tropes. When it comes to the best of them, they’ve aged like fine wine from the time of James T. Kirk and Christopher Pike, to, well, the time of the newly recast James T. Kirk and Christopher Pike. In between, the likes of Jean-Luc Picard, Benjamin Sisko, Kathryn Janeway, Jonathan Archer, and whoever the hell was Captain of the Discovery on any given week often found themselves encountering situations that felt really familiar to fans, if not necessarily to the characters. (Only Brad Boimler on “Lower Decks” can be counted on to have memorized every previous canonical adventure.)

So, what are those situations? Let’s take a look and count up the 10 most common tropes across the entire Star Trek franchise.

Probably the best-known Star Trek trope of all time involves the frequent deaths of characters in red shirts on “The Original Series.” It generally happens like this: A team is sent to explore a new planet, consisting of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and one or two ensigns we’ve never seen before wearing the bright red uniform of engineering, security, or operations. By the end of the episode, but usually much sooner, whatever danger lurks on the planet has killed these newcomers. Obviously, the point is to establish a threat, and just as obviously, the show isn’t going to kill off its two main characters. Nonetheless, the degree to which the show fails to establish any of these “redshirts” as any kind of characters whatsoever before offing them makes their deaths feel hilariously inevitable rather than meaningful or threatening.

The uniforms changed color schemes drastically for the movies, so the trope didn’t hit the big screen until J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot, which knocked one off in a skydiving scene. Gene Roddenberry may have strictly been thinking of plot jeopardy, but to Abrams and others who grew up with “The Original Series,” the term “redshirt” has become bigger that Star Trek itself, and is used by sci-fi fans to refer to any characters seemingly marked for cannon fodder. In “Galaxy Quest,” Sam Rockwell’s Guy Fleegman reckons with the fact that plot-wise, he’s been put in that role.

Ironically, while larger numbers of redshirts die, a higher pure percentage of “goldshirts” do.

Star Trek loves to let actors play different versions of their main characters, and we can likely trace that back to William Shatner’s evident glee at playing over-the-top — whether his Captain Kirk was split into good and evil variants, possessed by an erratic woman, or given amnesia to think he was a Native American chief, he could be counted on to ham it up in ways the more straightlaced, regular Kirk had to hold back. It was more notable, then, when we got evil Spock on the episode “Mirror, Mirror,” which depicts a parallel reality where the Federation are tyrannical villains. To differentiate this version of Spock as a bad guy, he sports a goatee. So notable was this trope that shows like “Knight Rider” reused it, with David Hasselhoff playing double duty as Michael Knight’s crooked, goateed doppelganger, Garth.

The Mirror Universe would return multiple times on “Deep Space Nine,” reflecting very different changes in the timeline since the days of bearded Spock. “Star Trek: Discovery” relied on it even further, allowing Michelle Yeoh to return as a more devious, former Empress version of Philippa Georgiou after the Prime universe version died. “Lower Decks,” meanwhile, has taken the concept into a full multiverse, positing many mirror universes, including one where everything is pretty much the same except purple.

“Deep Space Nine” is especially guilty of this one, perhaps because for long stretches of the show’s run, they are stuck in the same location, so shuttlecraft adventures allowed them to change it up. Additionally, since not every major character is part of the Federation, there’s less of a guarantee they’d follow the same protocols in a crisis. So it went like this: Two characters go off on a mission (or vacation-slash-joy ride) in a shuttle, they break down or fall out of communication somehow, have to work together to solve the problem, come really close to one or both of them dying, and, by the end of the episode, understand a bit more about one another. 

The benefits of such an episode on the production side are obvious. It can use existing sets, fewer actors, and let the regulars explore their characters a bit more. Quark or Rom could be more than the comic relief, Odo could showcase more than mere exasperation, and writers never missed a chance to show Worf in a situation that forced him to show a sensitive side. A slightly bigger-budget version of the trope might strand two characters on an empty, hostile planet instead of a shuttle, but the arc would be the same.

“Lower Decks,” which doesn’t have to budget for sets because it’s animated, tends to use more than just two characters when it utilizes the trope.

A virtual reality room that can convincingly duplicate any reality for your enjoyment feels like a dream, although we know full well that on a five-year mission, a decent percentage of the crew would probably use it to have sex with cartoon characters. However, in execution within the Star Trek universe, it becomes an increasingly irresponsible device to have. There’s literally no reason anybody should be able to take “safeguards off” so that the holograms in it can gain the ability to murder you … yet, once that cat’s out of the bag, it’s not much of a stretch to have convenient malfunctions flip that switch. (Thank the late writer Tracy Torme for many of the stories that ensued.) On “The Next Generation,” Captain Picard is especially fond of playing 1940s detective in scenarios where the bullets can become real; meanwhile, both Geordi LaForge and “Lower Decks” Ensign Sam Rutherford have used the device to accidentally create supervillains whose powers transcend the VR room.

Holo-technology seems to be the one area of Star Trek where capitalism works better. Quark’s holosuites, available for a fee, are less prone to malfunctioning, as he wants return customers, and “Deep Space Nine” story editor Rene Echevarria felt the rogue holodeck trope had been overdone. They’re not immune, as the episode “Our Man Bashir” proves, but that involved external transporter issues; on the whole, Ferengi holosuites are more likely to create an empathetic nightclub singer than a homicidal, sentient communication badge.

This trope extends beyond Star Trek to many sci-fi shows, simply because it maximizes the use of props and sets already on hand. It’s a planet of Nazis! A wild west planet! A gladiator planet! A planet that’s exactly like Earth during the particular time and place that we happen to have convenient sets already made for!

“The Next Generation” tended to use the holodeck or the interference of Q for these purposes, so while they didn’t technically have a Sherlock Holmes planet or a Robin Hood planet, they were effectively and narratively the same thing. Kirk and Spock, meanwhile, found themselves on worlds of gangsters, cowboys, Indians, and anything else that allowed “The Original Series” to piggyback on to a more popular genre than sci-fi. Considering Gene Roddenberry had initially pitched the show as “Wagon Train” to the stars, that kind of hybridization was baked into the formula anyway.

Shows as high-profile as “Battlestar Galactica” and as little-known as “Otherworld” would follow suit; viewers don’t seem to mind, and it’s easier than creating something entirely new. Indeed, for a while, there was talk that Quentin Tarantino wanted to write an entire Star Trek movie set on the gangster planet from the “Original Series” episode “A Piece of the Action.” Would audiences have gone for it on the big screen? Possibly more so than yet another take on “The Wrath of Khan” that annoyed the original director.

Time travel is so common in Star Trek that it’s the key plot point of two of the movies — three if you count the Nexus in “Generations” existing outside of time. Those other two — “The Voyage Home” and “First Contact” are top-tier, so it makes sense that TV episodes might aspire to the same heights. It’s been there since “The Original Series,” however, when the Enterprise ends up in the 1960s on the aptly named “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.”

It helps, from a canon perspective, that time travel in the Star Trek universe is almost comically easy, so much so that a mere Klingon fighter ship can simply fly around the sun really fast to pull it off. Thus, it made sense that by the time of “Deep Space Nine,” a Department of Temporal Investigations had been established to ensure that consequences ensue when anyone attempts to visit the past. None of that stopped Benjamin Sisko and crew from going back in time to integrate into the “Original Series” episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” encountering Kirk’s crew and amusingly explaining away the newer show’s evolution in Klingon makeup (“We do not discuss it with outsiders.”)

Even “Voyager,” stuck on the other side of the universe, somehow sent its crew to ’90s Los Angeles. “Enterprise” never fully explained its Temporal Cold War and mystery future antagonist. Yet, the biggest time jump has been forward, when the crew of “Discovery” traveled from the 23rd century to the 32nd … permanently.

A regular character on the series wakes up in an unfamiliar place. How did they get there? It’s unclear, except that they are not recognized as the person we know they are, but someone else entirely. Their memories of serving on a starship are either absent and forgotten or written off as delusions. Either way, they (and we) are told that this is actually reality, and everything we thought we knew is a lie.

Star Trek isn’t “The Twilight Zone,” even though its original episodes share similarities. We know full well that Will Riker is really Will Riker — he has to be, or the show’s over. We just don’t know how, or why, he (or whomever else might be the central character that week) got there.

Two of the undisputed greatest Star Trek episodes ever made use of this formula. In “The Inner Light,” Captain Picard experiences a 40-year lifespan in just 25 minutes, as part of an implanted memory from a dead planet’s final space probe. In the “Deep Space Nine” episode “Far Beyond the Stars,” Captain Sisko finds himself in 1953 America as Benny Russell, a science fiction writer who has trouble getting his work published because of racism. In an especially meta joke, Armin Shimerman’s 1953 persona Herbert Rossoff is an obvious parody of Harlan Ellison, author of the classic “City on the Edge of Forever” episode in which Dr. McCoy has amnesia in the Depression era.

Most Star Trek episodes, of any series, have a moral to them. In many cases, it’s also a larger social allegory. Sometimes, though, they get a little too on the nose. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” from 1969, is notably in this category. In order to show that racism is bad, regular “Batman” foe Frank Gorshin shows up as an alien who’s literally half black and half white, evenly split down the middle of his body. Naturally, he’s racist — against half-white, half-black aliens who have the colors on the opposite sides of their body. When he and the enemy he pursues turn out to be the last of their kind, after race wars killed all the rest, they continue to hate and pursue each other to the (expected) death.

On 1992’s “The Outcast,” Riker starts worrying out loud about personal pronouns long before they became a major societal topic, as he falls for a non-binary alien from a heterophobic planet. That’s a far cry from “Discovery” character Adira Tal, in 2020, flat-out requesting they-them pronouns in a speech that might just as well be directed at the audience as at the other characters. When the Trill character Jadzia Dax kissed another woman on “Deep Space Nine,” or re-met old friends who once knew her as the male Curzon, it was clear Trills could be metaphors for trans and non-binary people; making non-binary human Adira briefly part-Trill merely belabored that message ham-handedly.

Captain Kirk is often mistakenly thought of as a player and philanderer, yet on “The City on the Edge of Forever,” he lets the woman he has fallen in love with die in order to ensure the correct timeline occurs. Contrast that with Michael Burnham on “Discovery,” who is constantly told that her lover Book has gone rogue and she needs to apprehend him, a task she refuses or ignores every time. She’s right instinctively that Book is competent and probably not screwing up, but she probably should have been demoted by now for it.

Kirk and Spock, despite being the characters who inspired the whole concept of same-sex “slash” fiction, share a strictly platonic love, yet Kirk got stripped of his Admiral rank for stealing the Enterprise to save a reincarnated Spock. Then again, he just so happened to save Earth, and the whales, on his way to trial, which helped. Spock set a similar precedent, by breaking the rules to try and get a disabled Captain Pike back to a planet that would at least provide him the illusion of healing.

Though Captain Sisko was initially by the book when his lover and later wife Kasidy Yates engaged in suspicious activity, he eventually tried to bend the rules to get her freighter out of harm’s way during the Dominion War; she correctly took him to task for it.

Then again, nobody wants to be Picard, suppressing his love for Dr. Crusher for seven whole seasons.

Cave episodes are such a trope that “Lower Decks” literally did an entire episode about how cave episodes are a trope. It’s essentially a combination of the shuttlecraft bottle episode and historical planet scenario, allowing for fewer cast members and a simple re-dressing (or even just re-lighting) of existing sets. Typically, major characters — but not all of them — go on an underground mission, find that simple rocks or extreme weather block their communications to the starship above, and must deal with the threat of cave-ins, new life forms, or perhaps guerillas on a similar mission who oppose them. “Enterprise” had the added bonus of transporters not being a commonplace technology-slash-plot device at that point in the timeline; “Voyager,” in its isolated setting, ensured there were no pre-existing allies who could come to the rescue.

“Deep Space Nine,” though, may take the cake, as caves would often house adversarial Dominion strongholds, Maquis terrorist hideouts, mystical Bajoran artifacts, and for the grand finale, demonic Pah-wraiths. On that last episode, “What You Leave Behind,” Sisko’s final showdown with arch-villain Dukat ends with the good Captain finally pushing his enemy into the wraiths’ Fire Caves to defeat him once and for all. Dukat was arguably the most hissable recurring villain in Star Trek history, and no cave episode can ever do better than taking out the show’s top heel.