Top 5 Transporter Accidents

Aside from the holodeck, the one other piece of equipment in Star Trek that has caused the most problems has been the transporter. The concept of the transporter was created by Gene Roddenberry for the original series as a cheat. The show didn’t have the budget to shoot a shuttle landing on a planet every week, so he came up with the transporter. And almost immediately the problem seemed to be that it was too perfect a device. Nearly every problem could be solved by it, and so they had to limit its functionality. It only had a short range, it didn’t work through shields, and a hundred other things that kept the episodes from being only five minutes long. And then someone finally said “Hey, this think scrambles your atoms and airmails them down to a planet where it puts you back together again like a jigsaw puzzle, right? What would happen if something went wrong?” Badness, that’s what happens. But for the purposes of this list, I’ll stick to the more interesting and less fatal incidents.


5. “Realm of Fear” (TNG)

Most of us like to imagine that if we lived in the Star Trek universe we would be as suave as Riker, as smart as Data, and as well respected as Picard. But the fact is, we’re all Barclay and we know it. Lt. Reginald Barclay is the socially maladjusted everyman character that the viewers can identify with. He’s the only character on the show to ever use the holodeck for the same thing that all of us would if given the chance, scoring with Deanna Troi. Who can’t relate to that?

In this episode, the Enterprise responds to a distress call and beams aboard the USS Yosemite, whose crew appears to be missing. We learn that among the rest of his psychological problems, Barclay is also afraid of the transporter. He eventually manages to beam over and then back, but while he’s in the transporter beam he sees what looks like a large worm, floating inside the beam with him. And just before he materializes, the worm bites him on the arm. Just when it seems like Barclay has ingested more than his daily requirement of vitamin LSD, he starts to show other symptoms and diagnoses himself as having transporter psychosis, a debilitating disease that has no cure. But just when we think that we can also add hypochondriac to Barclay’s list of mental problems, it turns out that there really is something wrong with him. They discover some weird microbes on the Yosemite, and then they discover the same microbes in Barclay, and the only way to get them out is using the transporter. Barclay has to face his fear. While in the transporter, he sees the worms again, and for no discernable reason he decides to grab one. When he rematerializes, one of the crewmembers from the Yosemite materializes with him. Apparently the crew of the Yosemite became infected with the same microbes and tried to use the transporter on their ship to get them out, but somehow became trapped in the transporter.



So, if they were trapped in the transporter on the Yosemite, how did they get into the Enterprise’s transporter? And why did they turn into worms? And why did they bite Barclay? And what about Scarecrow’s Brain? Are you beginning to see the kinds of problems that can arise when you routinely disassemble your atoms and broadcast them across outer space? Why was this a good idea again?


4. “Rascals” (TNG)

It’s Jim Henson’s Next Gen Babies! Returning from an away mission, a transporter accident turns Picard, Ensign Ro, Guinan, and Keiko O’Brien into twelve-year-olds (just their bodies that is, their minds remain the same). And just when you think that that’s too outrageous to be believed, the ship is hijacked by Ferengi pirates. The adults turned kids manage to save the day ala “Home Alone” through trickery and their kidly wiles, and in the end Dr. Crusher manages to reverse the process. Unfortunately though, not before a misunderstanding landed Chief O’Brien on the Federation’s sex offender registry. Because of the error he was later forced to transfer to a broken down old Cardassian space station at the ass end of the galaxy.

My question is that once they discovered that the transporter could do this, why did they never do it again? Shouldn’t everyone in the Federation be Immortal right now? This is the fountain of youth here, and yet we never hear about it again. Shouldn’t we be seeing starships staffed with twelve-year-olds, like some sort of bad Stephen Ratliff fic gone amuck?




3. “Second Chances” (TNG)

So in addition to being the fountain of youth, the transporter can also be a cloning machine. In this episode the Enterprise ventures to a planet where some kind of space thing means that they can only use the transporters every eight years. The last time a Federation ship was there was eight years prior, when Riker was part of the evacuation crew and barely got out. So when they beam down imagine their chagrin when they meet Riker’s double, who never got out and has been living on this abandoned base all by himself for the last eight years. They eventually figure out that it was a transporter accident, and that this double is every bit as much Will Riker as our Will Riker is. Except of course he’s been living the last eight years like Robinson Crusoe in space, he has a problem with authority, and he’s still carrying a torch for Troi. Lieutenant Riker however ends up making the same choice that Commander Riker did, choosing his career or his relationship with Deanna, and takes a post on another starship. He changes his name to Thomas, and later he shaves his beard into a goatee, joins the Maquis and steals the Defiant. Talk about overcompensating for a more successful sibling. Maybe he should have changed his name to Garth Knight.

o/'...They're cousins, identical cousins...o/'

This accident more than any other reveals the horrible truth about the transporter. It doesn’t actually transport you, it’s more like a fax machine. It sends your information to another transporter, which creates a copy. The original, meaning you, is then destroyed. So essentially every time you step into the transporter, it’s killing you and creating a clone. Damn, no wonder Barclay (not to mention Doctors McCoy and Pulaski) hate the damn thing so much. I’m beginning to see their point.


2. “Tuvix” (VOY)

This is the exact opposite of what happened to Riker in “Second Chances”. Instead of taking one person and splitting them into two, in this episode the transporter took two people and combined them into one. Apparently it’s just really bad at math. It happened like this; Neelix and Tuvok were on some planet picking flowers (honest) and when they beamed up, only one person materialized. He called himself Tuvix, and he seemed to combine the best qualities of both men. He made a good tactical officer, a good cook, he didn’t have a stick up his ass, and he was only half as annoying as Neelix. The crew warmed up to him pretty quickly, with the exception of Kes who was a little disturbed by watching the mashed together corpses of her boyfriend and mentor walking through the corridors of the ship. The Doctor finally figured out how to separate them, much to Tuvix’s dismay. I guess he wasn’t too keen on being murdered, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Afterwards Neelix and Tuvok both agreed to never talk about the time that they were ‘inside each other’.


1. “Mirror, Mirror” (TOS)

The granddaddy of all transporter accidents, the model to which all other transporter accidents are compared, occurred during possibly the most famous episode of the original series. During a transporter accident, Kirk, Scotty, McCoy and Uhura are beamed aboard an Enterprise in an alternate universe. In this mirror-universe, the Federation has been replaced by the Terran Empire, a brutal totalitarian state. Where they take what they want, destroying any planet that gets in their way, and murdering your superior is the typical mode of advancement. They did make the female crewmembers wear two piece uniforms though, so I guess no universe is all bad. The mirror-universe would later be used in several episodes on Deep Space Nine, where all the female characters made out with each other, and one episode of Enterprise, where Hoshi became empress of the empire. For obvious reasons, these episodes were among the best of both shows.

This episode is also famous for creating the cliché of all evil twins having a goatee, since the mirror-universe Spock had one. Having a goatee myself, I personally find this stereotype to be very offensive. Just because I have a goatee, it doesn’t make me evil. There are so many other valid qualities that I have that make me evil, judge me by those. That’s all I ask.

Goatee = Evil

Honorable Mention: “Relics” (TNG)

This isn’t technically a transporter accident, since it was done on purpose, however it’s pretty cool so I think it bears including. The Enterprise receives a distress call from a transport ship that has been missing for seventy-five years, the USS Jenolan. When they follow the signal they discover a giant sphere, 200 million kilometers in diameter.

“That’s not a moon. Holy shit, it’s the fucking Deathstar!”

No, it’s not the Deathstar, it’s a Dysonsphere. It’s a sphere built to enclose a star, and the Jenolan is crashed on the surface of it. When they beam aboard they find the transporter jerry-rigged to run in a continuous cycle without rematerializing, and there’s still a pattern in the buffer. When the run the materialization routine, guess who it is. Scotty, that’s right! I guess that picture up there is a dead giveaway. Scotty then goes through a little culture shock about the Enterprise-D. He annoys LaForge so much that he kicks him out of Engineering. Then he goes to the holodeck to sit on the bridge of his old ship and get drunk on Ecto-Cooler. In the end, the Enterprise gets pulled into the Dysonsphere and Scotty and LaForge save the day by using the Jenolan to hold the hatch open like a doorstop long enough for the Enterprise to squeeze through. Scotty and LaForge patch up their differences, and Picard decides to give Scotty one of their shuttlecraft to replace the destroyed Jenolan. Which is a bit like giving a retired Army general a tank as a gift, but whatever. Troi also gives Scotty a kiss goodbye, which is odd considering that she had absolutely no interaction with him in the episode at all.




Additional

To review, the transporter can also function as a stasis device, a cloning machine, the fountain of youth, a gateway into other dimensions, and Jeff Goldblum’s pod from The Fly. You know what, I think I’ll just take the bus.