10 Star Trek Episodes That Paid Off WAY Later
Star Trek knows how to tease and deliver, even if it takes a little longer than expected.
Long-running franchises often live and die on the attention paid to fan service. While fan service would not be the only reason that a story can pay off years later, we as audiences are seeing more and more callbacks to early episodes of Star Trek as Discovery, Lower Decks and Prodigy continue on. Star Trek: Picard is effectively a sequel to The Next Generation, so it is arguably one giant callback itself.
Yet how many episodes pay-off in both unexpected and fresh ways? There are times when it is clearly deliberate - The Neutral Zone was always meant to tease the arrival of the Borg - and then there are those times when new writers pick up on threads and take them in different directions.
This list will encompass a bit of both - the intentional and the unintentional - episodes that paid off way later down the line. With new episodes dropping weekly between the newer series, there is already enough material for several of these lists.
Let the reader beware: there will CLEARLY be spoilers ahead, so you are now warned!
10. The Measure Of A Man
Coming in The Next Generation's second season, The Measure of a Man is considered by many audience members, including this author, to be the first truly great episode of the series. It is Star Trek firing on all cylinders - a bottle show that defines not only the importance of Data to the Enterprise, but affirms the right to life and liberty for all androids going forward.
The episode featured several follow-ups in The Next Generation's run, including The Offspring and Data's Day, but it would actually form the basis of two storylines in subsequent series.
The first comes in Star Trek: Voyager. The seventh season episode Author, Author is effectively a copy and paste of this episode, dealing instead with the Doctor's rights as owner of his creative output. In this case, it is a poor follow-up. The advocate of the day definitively declines to rule on the Doctor's status as a sentient being, which is both a deliberate nod to Data's trial, but a bit of a cop-out at the episode's end.
The direct payoff, however, is Bruce Maddox's appearance in Star Trek: Picard. He was badly affected by the synthetic lifeform ban following the attack on Mars, yet he created, with Alton Soong, a new race of androids based on Data's neurons. The inclusion of his character makes this a bittersweet continuation, particularly as neither Data nor Maddox live to see the ban overturned.