10 Star Trek Cliffhangers That Were Never Resolved
There's nothing Star Trek likes doing better than teasing us with an unanswered mystery.
Not every cliffhanger needs to be resolved, which is half of the fun. Not knowing a thing can be almost as exciting as discovering the truth about it, so perhaps some of the entries here should be swept away, destined forever to be the great unknown. However, where's the fun in that? Theorizing is the other half of the fun.
Across the shows, there are plenty of stories that seemed to set themselves up for a revisit along the way. Whether it's Kirk's frequent point-and-laugh treatment of the Prime Directive, or just the simple hope of getting a letter to a loved one, through all sorts of temporal anomalies, there are so many questions that Star Trek simply hasn't offered answers to.
Now that the franchise is enjoying more content at one time than perhaps ever before, some of the entries here beg to be answered. Lower Decks, Picard, Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy are all in a position to follow up on what happened with those parasitic bugs, or whether there are still space gangsters out there, accosting passers-by with Tommy guns and sneers. Let's get to it, Star Trek.
10. What Happened To The Bugs?
This is a cliffhanger that almost definitely will never be resolved on-screen, and not just because the effects have dated considerably since Conspiracy's airing in the eighties. The parasitic life-forms that infected Starfleet were originally meant to be the Borg, though the insectoid nature of the creatures was too ambitious for the capabilities of both model makers and CGI at the time.
The episode does end with a message being beamed out into space, revealed as a homing beacon. It is a frightening and deeply ominous way to end this story, which accidentally is given greater depth in the Enterprise episode Regeneration.
Archer reveals at the end of that episode that the homing beacon the Borg sent would take about two hundred years to reach its destination. Could the same then be true of the Parasite's message? Is Starfleet facing a new invasion sometime around the middle of the 26th century? Could the crew of the Enterprise-J have to fight off their own people, infected again with new waves of these dreadful little creatures? It's a possibility, one that's ripe for mining in this latest age of Star Trek.