Star Trek: 10 Most Overused Plot Tropes

Oftentimes, in order to stir up some drama among the usually professional and logical characters in Starfleet, the writers will turn to alien mind viruses. The amount of times that someone has turned mad because of some alien plant, relic, or entity is truly difficult to count.

The most well-known example is of course the Original Series episode, The Naked Time, in which a mysterious contagion swept across the Enterprise and caused the entire crew to lose their inhibitions and act drunk, many of them getting very intimate with each other. Later, on The Next Generation episode, The Naked Now, this entire story played out for the Enterprise-D crew nearly exactly the same. Apparently this type of virus is so common in space that Starfleet even has a "naked time" holodeck training simulation for Officers to prepare them, as we saw in the episode, I, Excretus, in Lower Decks.

Additionally, in the Original Series episode, This Side Of Paradise, Spock turned against Kirk due to the effects of psychedelic alien spores, and in the Lower Decks episode, Second Contact, a bite from an alien insect turned into a zombie-like pandemic that spread through the Cerritos crew.