10 Greatest Star Trek Pets

7. Christina The Therapy Tarantula

What is it with Starfleet personnel taking random animals home? Considering how much of the galaxy's flora and fauna has tried to kill them over the years, you'd think they'd know better.

We don't get to see much of Christina, the gorgeous tarantula that Miles O'Brien rescued from Titus IV, but that just makes her story all the more tantalising. In Realm of Fear, Reginald Barclay struggles with his phobia of transporters (totally legitimate; those things are terrifying), but O'Brien's on hand to lend some moral support. He shares that he had a fear of spiders until he was forced to crawl through a Jefferies tube full of them. We'd like to hear Counsellor Troi's professional take on replacing one horrific image with another, but at least he tried.

By showing Christina to Barclay at the end of the episode, O'Brien offers a quiet reassurance that he, too, can learn to live with the things he finds difficult. The fact that Christina most definitely awakened a new fear in the man was unintentional. Unless O'Brien has a sadistic streak that no one knows about. We also have to appreciate the irony that Barclay would later be transformed into a monstrous arachnid during the episode Genesis. Was his brush with Christina some kind of cosmic foreshadowing?

But the real question is what happened to Christina? We follow the saga of the O'Brien family through The Next Generation and into Deep Space Nine, but we don't remember seeing hide nor hair of her. Did she escape into the tubes? Was she hoovered up? Was she eaten by O'Brien's adopted cat, Chester? Was she transported onto a Klingon ship? Answers on a postcard, please.