Star Trek: 10 Greatest Genre Episodes Ever

Genre episodes can be a fun departure from a standard episode of Star Trek. As the franchise is so rooted in SciFi overall, veering away from that, or at least altering the genre to fit another trope, can break up the flow of a season - something that Strange New Worlds is taking to the bank at the moment.

In that show alone, we've seen a musical, a zombie infestation, a role-playing D&D-inspired episode, alongside animated team-ups and some good old-fashioned time travel, if indeed we count time travel as a genre.

Yet Star Trek has experimented with form for decades, peppering its ongoing series with frights, laughter, and weeping. The Original Series had both incredible freedom and the restraints of '60s production limits, to play with this. Still, it had many examples of various genres, including some properly frightening moments.

The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine also continued this trend, though of course every iteration of Star Trek has its opportunity to break the actors out of the technobabble-of-the-week. Naturally, comedy is something Trek has visited on many occasions. There is something about those tight space suits and the arched eyebrows of the Vulcans that lends itself to farce. On the flipside, tragedy has just as many examples in Trek's history.

For this list, we are concentrating on the televised portion of Star Trek, so we will visit the movies at another time. For now, it's a director's dream as we dive into the list of genre highlights across the years.

For our first entry, we had to ask ourselves: what constitutes Science Fiction? Further to that, how could we pick the best example of it within Star Trek itself? First, the definition, from Britannica.com:

Science fiction, a form of fiction that deals principally with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals.

In choosing Schisms, we have used the Solanogen-based lifeforms experiments upon the crew of the Enterprise-D, as well as the threat of alien abduction in general, to guide our choice. Science fiction, as broad a term as it is, often deals with things like technological advancements, as well as body modification - both of which are on show here.

In the spirit of full disclosure, there are many examples of science fiction as a genre in Star Trek, which is as obvious as it is challenging to pick any one example to rise above the rest. Time travel, as we indicated in the introduction, may appear on another list as its own genre, so many of the options for science fiction will be up for consideration there.

For the episode here, there are several moments that help it stand out as an example of science fiction. Riker's missing time, that chilling scene on the holodeck, poor Ensign Hagler's fate, and the climax in the aliens' realm all combine to tell one of the most enduring, disturbing stories in Trek. The Next Generation undertook many experiments during its run, with Schisms skirting the line of scifi and horror carefully. 

For the close encounters element of this episode, it is our choice for science fiction - and we have all been in that room before, haven't we?