10 Star Trek Episodes With The Highest Stakes

Star Trek has often delivered episodes with such grandeur that we the audience need a few minutes to come down once the credits roll. These offerings can be single episodes, two-parters, or even films - ramping the action up to eleven, and nailing the premise.

The franchise has rarely shied away from tackling the cataclysmic, even if sometimes it leaves the world-ending as something a bit smaller. Maybe just the one world this week, we can try for the Empire in a fortnight.

The examples on this list are episodes and films that have offered a true glimpse of the end of all things, for crews, for continents, and beyond. There are also a number of them that, as of writing, remain unresolved, so there's still a strong chance that we could see sequels, prequels, requels, and sidequels of lists along the way. 

Honestly, sometimes we just want a list of 10 Top Flowers Boothby Planted At The Academy. This is not that list. 

As Star Trek: Enterprise's third season came to a close, the stakes couldn't have been higher for Earth, Starfleet, and Captain Archer's crew. The Xindi Reptilians had gone rogue, breaking away from their council, destroying other Xindi who came to stop them, and were focused entirely on eradicating humanity. 

Not the nicest saurians in the galaxy.

The Xindi superweapon had been deployed, despite the efforts of the late lamented Degra, and was en route to Earth. If Archer and Hoshi couldn't stop it, it was curtains for our future. Earth had already felt the searing power of a miniature version of the deadliest ballgame in existence, with 7 million bodies lining those courts. 

Meanwhile, Enterprise itself was tasked with destroying the Sphere Builders' physical bases in the Delphic Expanse, lest they turn the galaxy into uninhabitable (for humanoids) waste. With the clock ticking to judgement day, it truly came down to the wire for Starfleet's first family - and as the dust settled, seemingly not all of our favourite faces made it back home again.