Star Trek: 12 Subplots That Went Nowhere

Not to pick on Lieutenant Worf's personal life, but truly the recurring thread of Worf's bad parental skills was apparently as uninteresting to the writers as it was the audience. Alexander Rozhenko cropped up in eight episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and four of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and neither show found a compelling story for the poor kid.

The producers were so disinterested in the continuing Alexander storyline, writer Joe Menosky wrote the premise of DS9's "Time's Orphan" during his time on TNG in the hopes of killing off the ¾ Klingon / ¼ human child. While producer Michael Pillar nixed the idea of killing Alexander, the episode was ultimately repurposed as a Molly O'Brien vehicle and Alexander continued to make occasional appearances in the franchise between long bouts of Worf seemingly pretending to not even have a son.

Alexander's time on Star Trek: The Next Generation was mostly spent being pawned off on Worf's adoptive parents, but the storyline resurfaced periodically to remind us that Worf was not a great parent and that "the higher, the fewer" is a terrible motto that still makes no sense. His (recast) guest spots on Deep Space Nine were slightly more tolerable, but the writers' and audience's distaste for the character seemingly manifested in Alexander's storyline which only served to make him look stupid before he just sort of disappeared again, this time for good.