Star Trek: 10 Character Fates Worse Than Death
8. Being Trapped In A Transporter For 75 Years Only To Be Lost For Eternity
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "Relics," the Enterprise stumbles across a Dyson sphere. Such a structure is constructed around a star and uses all the energy the star produces, which makes them massive artifacts more than 180 million miles in diameter.
When they locate the Dyson Sphere, they find an ancient shuttle, which crashed upon the surface, so an away team checks it out. They find that there are still two patterns locked in the transporter's pattern buffer on a loop, which meant there was a possibility of retrieving whoever was stuck inside.
Geordi manages to reverse the process, and who should come out, but Montgomery Scott! After he is revived, he attempts to recover the second pattern, but it has degraded too much for it to work, and his work at the console proves fruitless.
Trapping the two men inside the buffer was an ingenious means of survival, as it took 75 years for anyone to stumble upon their wreck, but it came at a cost. Scotty, once the gem of Starfleet engineering, was now an old man, who found himself out of touch. As for his buddy, who was lost, he managed to be dematerialized and lost into oblivion, and neither fate seems like one most people would choose.