Star Trek: 10 Weirdest Holodeck Episodes

Star Trek is, no doubt, at its best and whackiest when the most elaborate of sci-fi premises are really just an excuse for a 'James Bond' episode. The holodeck is already a great medium for the writers to let their imaginations run wild, but combine that with a complex transporter problem, and you've hit peak weird. Julian Bashir — must…avoid… doing… the… James Bond… reverse name thing… — plays the titular role, and Garak is the real Miss Moneypenny. Really, what could go wrong?

If you thought Voyager was cavalier with its auxiliary craft, Deep Space 9's runabout is barely on screen before it explodes in Our Man Bashir. The transporter is knocked out of commission mid-beam out, and Sisko, Dax, Kira, Worf, and O'Brien's patterns start to degrade in the buffer. Then, the holographic hijinks begin.

Where to put all that data? You can't just dig out a couple of external hard drives! The solution is to transfer the information everywhere. All of the five's physical patterns wind up on the holodeck with an initially baffled Garak and Bashir, but their neural energy (because that has to be stored on the quantum level) finds its way to every last bit of computer memory the Station has to offer. In modern parlance, they'd been uploaded to the cloud. Bashir and Garak are forced to play out the secret agent program to its conclusion, with their friends and colleagues quite literally inhabiting the supporting roles.