Star Trek: 11 Greatest Unfinished Story Ideas

7. Close Encounters Of The Star Trek Kind (TNG: Schisms) Throughout Star Trek there have been numerous instances of comedy, political intrigue, romance, and war stories, but there have only been a couple of times where Star Trek has drifted into the realm of horror (the Enterprise second-season episode Dead Stop is one such example). The episode Schism is a perfect example of such. In essence, Schisms is an alien abduction story that perfectly creates a growing sense of fear. Riker discovers that an alien race from another space-time continuum is abducting the crew and performing various physical experiments on them. Just as the crew devises a way to seal the rift between the two dimensions, a energy pulse similar to a probe slips through and escapes out into the depths of space. Maybe the crew isn't as safe at the end of this episode as they hoped they were. Seeing how the brave crew of the Enterprise is just as vulnerable to the things that go bump in the night would have been a great starting point for exploring the darker corners of the galaxy. As Q once warned Picard, there are terrors in the galaxy equal to the wonders to behold, but Schisms was the last time this particular nightmare gripped the audience's hearts and minds. (On a more lighthearted note, this episode contains what is one of the funniest moments of the TNG series: a recitation of a poem written by Data about his cat, Ode to Spot. "Felis Catus, is your taxonomic nomenclature/An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature?" Beautiful!)