Star Trek: 10 Most Mind-Bending Spatial Anomalies

I mean, duuuuuh! We all know the difference between a cosmic string and a quantum filament. One's a very long anomaly with a lot of mass; the other's a nearly massless very long anomaly. The cosmic string the Enterprise-D encountered housed a group of two-dimensional beings that 'short-circuited' Deanna Troi's brain, and the quantum filament the ship bumped into about a year later saw Data quite literally lose his head.

From that description alone, you might wonder why anyone ventures out of the Sol system in the coming centuries, although Earth and company are hardly a safe-haven, and it wouldn't be much of a star trek if they just stayed at home. Space is a vast and wondrous place, but it is also full of baffling irregularities and aberrations to its continuum that our tiny ape and lizard brains just aren't evolved enough to properly comprehend. Other species like the Vulcans seem to have a better time of it, but then again, they're not always as tough as they'd have us believe.

Perhaps Captain Janeway was ultimately right, nonetheless, when she said that there is little more impressive or scarier than watching a bolt of lightning split an oak tree on the plains of Indiana. Spatial anomalies truly exist all around us, ready to blow our minds at any second. Prepare to have yours just a little bit twisted!

Or the 'Kitchen Sink' Anomaly

You can call it what you want — 'spatial anomaly 521,' if you prefer the Borg designation, or the 'kitchen sink' anomaly, as Commander Chakotay nicknamed it — but a 'graviton ellipse,' as per the Federation database, will still be a giant glowing ball of subspace energy (30 million terrajoules' worth) that can emerge into normal space whenever and wherever it pleases. It's most certainly no solar flare, and it's definitely more than a little turbulence!

The most mind-altering aspect of this particular phenomenon is not its sheer size and intensity, however; as with all things in life and the 24th century, if you cut power and reverse shield polarity, the graviton ellipse will just drift on by. What is truly weird is that of all the graviton ellipses in all the quadrants of the galaxy, Voyager stumbled on the one that consumed the Ares IV command module over Mars in 2032. The same as in the teaser? Oh, yeah! Quite the coincidence!

What no one knew until then was that Lt. John Kelly, commander of the Ares IV mission, had survived for quite some time inside the graviton ellipse (humanity's first encounter with a spatial anomaly, no less). 31 years before the Vulcans (officially) showed up, Kelly also got the universe unravelling shock of his life when he saw the wreckage of an alien ship float past the window.