10 Biggest WTF Star Trek Moments

Throughout the long history of Star Trek, there have been so many moments that have absolutely shocked us to our cores. Since the very beginning with The Original Series, Trek has given us some of the most mind-bending stories on television.

Of course there's your everyday sentient nebulas, evil holograms, alternate realities, temporal anomalies, and transporter clones, but some of Starfleet's discoveries have left us particularly dumbfounded. Moments like these can entirely change how we see the Trek universe (for better or for worse), or simply make us wonder what the writers were smoking.

In this list, we're going over some of the most jaw-dropping and confusing moments in Star Trek history, that leave you with nothing to say but 'WTF?'

In The Next Generation episode The Game, an alien named Etana brought a mysterious device aboard the Enterprise known as the Game. The device was originally seen as a simple 'gaming headset' with the goal of landing discs into a series of cones. However, it was later discovered that winning the game activates the pleasure centres of its user's brains, causing them to become painfully addicted and barely conscious.

Data was able to disable the devices at the end of the episode, and we didn't see them again until recently in the Lower Deck episode Kayshon, His Eyes Open. In this episode, it was part of the collection of Kerner Hauze, which made a lot of sense, seeing as he was known to hold on to several odd and dangerous items from across the galaxy.

However, things were complicated when we started seeing Ktarian games pop up elsewhere. A Cerritos crewmember can be seen playing the game in the episode wej Duj, and one appeared at the Wadi recruitment booth in the episode Reflections (clearly, the Move Along Home game got old). Even Dal from Star Trek: Prodigy found one of these devices aboard the Protostar, and was playing the game in the episode Kobayashi before getting walked in on. Confusingly, these things seem to be everywhere now, including aboard Starfleet vessels.

It's likely that, after the events of The Game, someone found a way to render the Ktarian headsets harmless, or at least lower their threat, until they eventually became no more than what the Janeway hologram called a 'silly cone-and-disc game'.