10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek: The Animated Series

8. The Counter-Clock Insanity

Kirk Jerk TAS Animated Series
Paramount

Many a Star Trek segment features an outlandish premise, but “The Counter-Clock Incident” takes the cake. The Enterprise gets dragged into a parallel universe where everything runs in reverse… when it’s convenient to the story, anyway. Space is white and stars are black, which suggests stars absorb light and empty space emits it. Time runs backwards there… sort of. 

When Karla 5 is in Kirk’s universe she speaks backwards, but when the Enterprise crew are in her universe and things are reversed everyone speaks the same way. People in this Cuckooland are born elderly and anti-age towards infancy, which makes one question how a mother births a grown adult (ouch) in this opposites day nightmare. Kirk and crew age in reverse, rapidly becoming children incapable of running the ship … whose clothes conveniently and correctly scale with them. Why the crew de-age so quickly is never addressed in-episode but writer John Culver suggested that relativistic physics was reversed too so time would pass at an accelerated rate for people moving faster rather than slower. 

Does your head hurt trying to understand this nonsense? Mine does. Let’s just Benjamin Button this right off.

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Maurice is one of the founders of FACT TREK (www.facttrek.com), a project dedicated to untangling 50+ years of mythology about the original Star Trek and its place in TV history. He's also a screenwriter, writer, and videogame industry vet with scars to show for it. In that latter capacity he game designer/writer on the Sega Genesis/SNES "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — Crossroads of Time" game, as well as Dreamcast "Ecco the Dolphin, Defender of the Future" where Tom Baker performed words he wrote.