The Original Series Has Done

The main crew of the original “Star Trek” are not, by most stretches of the imagination, anti-heroes. They’re the good guys, traveling through space in the service of exploration and peace. They’re a diverse bunch who all get along…usually. If Starfleet were real, James Tiberius Kirk and his crew would be in its heroes hall of fame. Nobody, however, is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, and when those mistakes are made at the helm of a starship with energy weapons and torpedoes, things can go really bad.

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All the main characters of “Star Trek” have made terrible mistakes. Often, it was the result of possession or madness. Other times, it was a severe lapse in judgment, or a miscalculation about where exactly the needs of the many and the needs of the one fall on the scale of probabilities. Hikaru Sulu, Pavel Chekov, Nyota Uhura, Montgomery Scott, Leonard McCoy, Spock son of Sarek, and James Kirk have all done things to merit a guilty conscience, no matter how much control they had in the moment. Many can claim extenuating circumstances, and in at least one case, the effects were completely reversible. All took an emotional toll.

Let’s take a look at the worst thing each main character from the original series has ever done. Note: for expediency, we are only counting the characters as played by their original actors. The Kelvin universe and “Strange New Worlds” iterations still have time to do worse.

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Despite George Takei’s real-life issues with William Shatner, Sulu was always arguably the most dependable of Captain Kirk’s Enterprise bridge crew. Rare is the occasion when he isn’t textbook-efficient, so for him to do something significantly wrong is a clear sign that he’s out of his mind. His “The Naked Time” shirtless fencing moment is the most flamboyant example, but that didn’t ultimately harm anyone.

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In “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,”  the Enterprise-A is taken over by Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), Mr. Spock’s emotional, religious cult-leading half-brother. Quickly realizing that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are the most dangerous crew members, he sends them to the brig, but sees potential marks in Sulu and Uhura. As he does with all prospective followers, he uses Vulcan telepathy to unearth their deepest emotional pain, and mind-melds to take it away. This creates a natural high and an emotional bond to the one who “healed” them, and Sulu and Uhura are soon helping Sybok to seize the bridge from Chekov. 

Scotty busts out Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, but then clumsily knocks himself out. As Uhura tends to him and tries to tout the virtues of Sybok, Sulu pursues the escapees with weapons drawn, though it takes Sybok to capture them. The effect wears off by the time Sybok confronts a false alien god, and Sulu finally has no problem aiming Enterprise’s weapons at Sybok and “God” both.

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Gene Roddenberry was notably progressive by the standards of the ’60s, envisioning a future in which Americans and Russians, men and women, and people of all races could work together on a starship crew. What he was not, at least by today’s standards, was a feminist. So while Uhura’s presence on the bridge was noted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a huge step forward in representation, her worst moment still falls back on the stereotype of “silly woman likes cute thing.” It’s a classic “Star Trek” trope that things are not as they initially seem, so of course an innocuous, purring furrball quickly reveals itself to be a menace, reproducing as quickly as a virus and threatening to overwhelm the Enterprise and consume all its food supplies.

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Luckily for Uhura and everyone else, the Tribbles prove to be metaphorical canaries in the coalmine when they consume poisoned grain, revealing a secret plot by disguised Klingon Arne Darvin. Klingons and Tribbles, it seems, have a history of animosity — it figures that cute aliens which appeal most to feminine crew members would be the ultimate antithesis to the most macho warrior species in the galaxy.

It’s still a lapse in duty for expert linguist Uhura. Even if she couldn’t actually speak Tribble, her vast knowledge of alien languages and cultures should have come into play. It’s a good thing she never encountered the murderous Moopsy.

In “Wrath of Khan,” we can partly blame Captain Terrell. The moment Chekov sees that the spaceship they’ve discovered is the Botany Bay, he knows what’s coming, but before he can convince his colleague, genetically enhanced super-maniac Khan has shown up, sensing his ticket off of the desolate world on which he’s been stranded. It’s pretty convenient that the only other major lifeform on the planet is a sand eel whose young can crawl into the brain and render it susceptible to suggestion. It does make us wonder, though, how the Reliant’s scanners apparently only picked up Khan’s people as life signs, and not these omnipresent eels.

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What happens next is a case of Chekov just following orders he can’t disobey with a baby eel in his ear, but that’s not necessarily a good excuse. He attempts to take the Genesis device — a  terraforming torpedo that erases any existing life before creating it anew — and claims it’s under Kirk’s orders. Chekov is also with Khan’s crew when they kill many of the personnel aboard starbase Regula I. We don’t know how directly Chekov had a hand in the killings, but he was left as a sleeper agent to kill Kirk.

That order proves to be one step too far. Kirk is clearly so awesome that even when brainwashed, his crew won’t kill him, and the eel leaves Chekov’s body, in a scene Roddenberry hated.

Mira Romaine (Jan Shutan) is presented as a Starfleet Lieutenant and scientific specialist. While on the Enterprise, she’s in charge of transferring equipment to Memory Alpha, a space library full of intergalactic knowledge. Yet when she begins to fall for Montgomery Scott, he refers to her as “the lass,” prompting other senior crew members to refer to her as “the girl.” Lieutenant Romaine would be more appropriate, but again we see that Gene Roddenberry, while progressive for his time, was no feminist.

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If it were just words, Scotty’s casual sexism wouldn’t necessarily stand out. In this case, his casual misogyny leads to disaster. When the Enterprise flies through a cloud of alien souls, they connect instantly to Romaine, but Scotty dismisses any concern as a result of her not being used to space travel. Again, this woman is a Lieutenant in Starfleet. When it becomes even clearer that something’s amiss, he tells her not to talk about it, because again, it’s probably just her inexperience and she doesn’t want to be pegged as mentally ill. Any woman who has ever had real medical concerns dismissed by a doctor will recognize these conversations.

Without being pegged quickly enough as a problem, the alien souls destroy the library and kill its crew. Romaine, once returned to normal by Kirk and Spock, is left to clean up the Memory Alpha mess. Good one, Scotty.

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One of the most popular “Star Trek” episodes also contains one of televised sci-fi’s best examples of the butterfly effect, in which tiny changes can cause drastic consequences. Having overdosed on a dangerous medication, Dr. McCoy runs through a time portal into Earth’s history, immediately erasing the existence of the Enterprise. Kirk and Spock follow to try and discover what he has done, so that they may undo it.

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They all find themselves in Depression-era New York City, and encounter Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), a humanitarian who runs a charity mission and accurately predicts the peaceful, future world of the Federation. The only problem is that Spock soon figures out, via hacking into his own tricorder, that she must die for the original timeline to exist. If not, she will meet with president Franklin D. Roosevelt, delay the United States’ entrance into World War II, and thus allow Nazi Germany to develop the atomic bomb first, with which they will win the war and destroy Earth as we’ve known it. By saving her life, McCoy allowed millions to die who otherwise would not have.

By coming back early enough in the timeline that they reach Edith Keeler before McCoy, Kirk and Spock are able to prevent McCoy from saving her life, even though hopeless romantic Kirk has already fallen for her. The Captain’s pragmatism nonetheless wins out over the doctor’s more short-sighted humanism.

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Some fans might semi-facetiously say that the worst thing Spock ever did was to create the Kelvin timeline, which yielded one very-good movie and two mediocre follow-ups. Canonically, though, they’re not wrong — in the storyline itself, Spock’s creation of the Kelvin timeline had worse consequences than anything else our favorite half-Vulcan ever did.

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Spock had been working underground towards peace between Vulcans and Romulans. In the post-“Next Generation” timeline, when a supernova threatened to destroy Romulus, he was therefore well-placed to help. Using “red matter,” a substance that can generate black holes, he created a vortex to suck up the supernova, but not in time to prevent the destruction of Romulus. The ensuing black hole, however, drew his ship and a Romulan vessel called the Narada back into the past. Captained by Nero, the Narada first encountered the USS Kelvin, killing George Kirk, the father of Spock’s best friend Jim. Some 25 years later, Nero got revenge by destroying Vulcan with red matter, marooning Spock on the nearby world of Delta Vega in the perfect position to watch his home planet implode.

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Due to the nature of time travel and alternate universes, Vulcan still exists in the prime timeline, where it’s known in the future as Ni’Var after welcoming Romulan refugees. Kelvin-timeline Spock, however, must cope with surviving a genocide partly caused by his alternate self’s actions.

In season 2’s “The Apple,” Kirk and crew are sent to the planet Gamma Trianguli VI, ordered to make contact with the inhabitants, due to strange signals a previous ship encountered. At first, Kirk and his team make repeated comparisons to the Garden of Eden, just so we’ll get the point, and are promptly ironically undercut by poison-shooting plants and exploding rocks. The local humanoid population, however, are peaceful, childlike, and nigh-immortal, with all their needs provided by a super-computer deity named Vaal.

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Kirk initially gets mad at himself when the first (of four) red-shirt deaths occurs, saying he should have aborted the mission then and there. Later, he and McCoy decide that this is a society in stagnation, and they need to be freed. Vaal proceeds to get mad when Chekov makes out with Yeoman Landon and two of his people try to copy the behavior; he teaches his people to kill, and locks the Enterprise in a tractor beam. Kirk ensures Vaal is starved of fuel, then has it blasted with phasers and destroyed. The surviving people, who are so weak and naive that even Chekov can kick their asses, are left to their own devices, which Kirk tells them will be great. They can have sex now, but Vaal won’t protect them from deadly rocks and plants.

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Spock notes that Kirk has basically played the role of the serpent in Genesis; Kirk responds by implying Spock looks like Satan.