10 Greatest Star Trek In-Jokes

Rarely is anything more meta than the time Star Trek looked through a telescope and saw itself. Star Trek: First Contact is one big self-reference, a trek to the past to ensure its own future. Zefram Cochrane needs 'some kind of Star Trek' as much as it needs him.

In that film, 'First Contact' gets a direct nod, although that was far from the first or the last movie or episode title name-drop in dialogue. They toasted "the undiscovered country" in The Undiscovered Country, and Captain Janeway provided a counterpoint "counterpoint" in Counterpoint, amongst many other examples.

Star Trek is also more subtly self-referential at times. In The Next Generation's 80th episode Legacy, the Enterprise-D has to bypass an archaeological survey of Camus II, which happens to be the last planet visited by another Enterprise in its 79th and final episode (yes, we are counting them like that). According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia, the Camus II mention was a deliberate "tip of the hat" to Turnabout Intruder on the part of Rick Berman, Jonathan Frakes, and producer Eric Stillwell.

Of course, the end of the beginning of this kind of Star Trek is a prophecy of itself: "We've only postponed the invasion until, what… the 24th century?"