10 Most Messed Up Deaths In Star Trek: Discovery

Not even the spore drive could help these flee their deadly Star Trek fate.

Star Trek Discovery Messed Up Deaths
CBS Media Ventures

'Screaming' is a half-rhyme of 'streaming'. The move from broadcast television to what was then CBS All Access (now Paramount+) would bring with it Star Trek's first f-bomb and also a freshly frightening amount of… effed-up final exits. Star Trek had done gore before — we're not saying it was the butt bugs (it was the butt bugs) — but the one that brought it back did rather up the ante on gruesome ways to go.

Star Trek: Discovery's first season was tonally a lot darker than we had been used to, though they were going somewhere with that, if you just stuck around. You won't be surprised to learn, therefore, that most of the deaths on this list come from that initial outing, with a few extra from after for good (or bad) luck.

Seasons two to five of Discovery did equally continue what is now — as our previous lists on this theme have shown — the grand Star Trek tradition of wiping out all, or a decent chunk of, life in the galaxy, only to bring it back… or not. Sentient AI, exploding warp cores, dark matter anomalies, and whopping Breen dreadnoughts, Discovery had more than its fair share of existential threats, though we'll probably find out that it was all merely part of Grudge's murderous master plan! "She's a queen," sure, but with that name, what exactly was her beef?

Cat conspiracies safely aside, let's fire up that spore drive and jump right to it!

10. Aunt's In Your Trance — Tolor

Star Trek Discovery Messed Up Deaths
CBS Media Ventures

In the 31st-32nd centuries, the 'Emerald Chain' was, in essence, a rebranding of the one-time — and long time ago — 'Orion Syndicate,' with no O'Brien around to sniff them out (… or was he?). The galactic crime gang had traversed the aeons, now permeating the galaxy with the latest after-whiff of post-Burn. The Chain was led without pity, but with pit for a trance worm, by Orion 'Minister' Osyraa. It's her chiselled-chinned, and rather dopey, nephew Tolor, however, who concerns us here.

In the Chain, like the Syndicate, every badly done deed comes back to bite you. That's not karma, just standard operating procedure. Auntie Osyraa had already killed Tolor's father when he was only a child, so at least, in a sense, she was keeping up a family tradition when she fed him to the trance worm — the mesmerising animal from Kwejian.

Tolor had been responsible for his own particularly messed-up death when he sent one of his slave labourers, Lai, running right into the perimeter forcefield of the salvage yard on Hunhau for daring to take a water ration. The impact decapitated the poor Bajoran instantly. Tolor would then become a light snack for his Auntie's pet worm for having 'let' another escape — the Andorian, Ryn. Beamed into the pit, and in spite of his cries of "Please Aunt Osyraa, no", Tolor was flung, torn, and quartered moments later.

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Jack Kiely is a writer with a PhD in French and almost certainly an unhealthy obsession with Star Trek.