10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek: The Animated Series

The transporter’s always been one of the least credible pieces of core technology in any Star Trek. Its basic functionality isn’t believable, and its malfunctions — like splitting Kirk into Jekyll and Hyde, or hot-swapping crewmembers between parallel universes whilst trading underwear with their counterparts — are beyond preposterous. It got worse with subsequent series, where it became a reset button for medical issues and even people beaming themselves out into space.

But, believe it not, it’s the animated show where the transporter-undo to non-transporter problems first rears its silly head, twice. Thrice, if we count “The Terratin Incident” wherein beaming the miniaturized Enterprise crew members returns them to their original size. But in that case, it’s not restoring altered bodies to their original structure, rather, it just returns compressed molecules to their normal spacing.

The real offenders? "The Lorelei Signal” depicts life force-drained and prematurely aged male crewmen restored to youth and virility via transporter. Spock says the transporter holds the molecular pattern of their original bodies when they beamed down to the planet, and Kirk asks if it can be programmed to repattern them as they were. Spock says the odds against it working are ninety-nine point seven to one. So, of course, it works. Then, in the series’ final episode, the counter-logical “The Counter-Clock Incident”, the transporter is used to restore the anti-aged crew from babies and children into adults because it retains a memory of their original molecular structure. Both far pre-date Dr. Pulaski's transporter reboot in TNG's “Unnatural Selection”. 

But, where did all the mass go when the crew withered into aged shadows of their former selves, or into children with maybe a quarter of their adult volume? That’s not just putting atoms and molecules back into the correct order, that’s adding and subtracting mass, er, en masse.

Transporters are dumb.