10 Most Intense Star Trek Cold Opens
You hit play on the episode, and these Star Trek stories upend everything you thought you knew.
Crafting the perfect cold open isn't the easiest thing to do. For Star Trek, there will always be that section of the audience who has 'seen it all,' and therefore impressing them with something new and shocking is a tall order. To be frank, Trek doesn't always land on deck.
A cold open must drop us directly into the plot and grab a hold of us - how to do that when Star Trek is best known for cerebral, long-form stories?
Any writer will tell you that the opening line of a book is the most important - it's how you hook your audience. Following that, the first paragraph needs to keep the reader's attention, and so on. The same is true for film and television - so many of our favourite episodes open in a way so attention-grabbing that it is hard to let go.
Then, some tackle the problem from a different direction, choosing a quiet, intriguing instigation of events over the bombastic approach. With a mix of styles and substances, these openings are the ones that were able to successfully hold us from the jump - regardless of whether the rest of the episode lived up to the start.
10. Cause And Effect
What is more intense than watching your favourite ship and crew explode in a ball of flame? Doing it multiple times, we suppose, although we weren't to know that was in store as Cause And Effect burst onto our screens in 1992. The infamous time loop episode, directed by Jonathan Frakes, began with a bang.
The audience is given no context or any time to breathe. The ship's starboard nacelle is on fire, throwing the Enterprise-D into a spin. On board, the crew is scrambling to control the situation before Picard gives that fateful order to abandon ship, to no avail.
No one escapes as the hero ship of The Next Generation is destroyed - cut to credits.
This cold open is a masterwork in grabbing and holding the audience's attention. Why is this happening? Who is responsible? Why does Ro Laren have that haircut? These are all questions that need answering - you can bet good money that everyone came back after the credits finished rolling.