10 Star Trek Cliffhangers That Were Never Resolved

10. What Happened To The Bugs?

This is a cliffhanger that almost definitely will never be resolved on-screen, and not just because the effects have dated considerably since Conspiracy's airing in the eighties. The parasitic life-forms that infected Starfleet were originally meant to be the Borg, though the insectoid nature of the creatures was too ambitious for the capabilities of both model makers and CGI at the time.

The episode does end with a message being beamed out into space, revealed as a homing beacon. It is a frightening and deeply ominous way to end this story, which accidentally is given greater depth in the Enterprise episode Regeneration.

Archer reveals at the end of that episode that the homing beacon the Borg sent would take about two hundred years to reach its destination. Could the same then be true of the Parasite's message? Is Starfleet facing a new invasion sometime around the middle of the 26th century? Could the crew of the Enterprise-J have to fight off their own people, infected again with new waves of these dreadful little creatures? It's a possibility, one that's ripe for mining in this latest age of Star Trek.