“Star Trek: Voyager” is Peak Sci-Fi Horror

Every Star Trek show had scary moments, but Voyager’s many horror-themed episodes remain suspenseful thirty years later.

Star Trek came from an era when most television shows had twenty-plus episode seasons. They had time to explore every corner of emotional experience, from adventure to philosophy and romance. Star Trek: Prodigy even gave us a Trek specifically for kids.

Star Trek is usually about a vessel and crew that are exploring space. In 1995, Voyager debuted with a twist: the eponymous ship was getting lost in space (but not Lost In Space). An alien threw them seventy light years away from home in the Alpha Quadrant. In the unfamiliar territory of the Delta Quadrant, Voyager and her crew faced novel survival scenarios.

Although the first season revisits a lot of common Trek themes, Voyager’s creators had a clear fondness for horror. Season 2 is almost entirely horror episodes, one after another.

In the Delta Quadrant, nobody can see you depersonalize

Episode 2×03, “Projections,” was the first episode that got my skin crawling. Our holographic Doctor is activated to find himself alone. When his holographic projectors behave unpredictably, he has to face questions about who — or what — he is. Confusion rises through the episode until the very end. Multiple potential endings could lead to the Doctor’s death–or the ship’s destruction.

Voyager turned the classic Trek plot of “alien in heat” into body horror in 2×04 “Elogium.” Kes suffers a back lump where she’s meant to grow babies, sweaty primal fear, and sticky yellow hands for “bonding” with her mate. Whether this episode is more aligned with Trek’s fetish content or their horror content is up to the viewer–but the sticky hands definitely send it into horror territory for me.

Only two episodes later in “Twisted,” our crew faces hopelessness in the face of a distortion field they can’t stop. The ship becomes a labyrinth. The captain is disabled when she stumbles into the field, leaving her mumbling nonsense and the crew without leadership. The last act is dedicated to Starfleet officers consigning themselves to death in the cold void of space.

It’s immediately followed by “Persistence of Vision,” which plays with gothic horror tropes. Janeway descends into madness as she confronts the ghosts from inside the holodeck in her daily life. It quickly escalates to violent hallucinations across the crew. Did you know Star Trek could have floating bodies dripping blood? Neither did I!

None of these compare to 2×10 “Cold Fire,” which is still the scariest for my money. It’s an overt homage to 1977’s “Suspiria,” since the manipulative villain is named… you guessed it… Suspiria. Our psychic (witch-like) Kes meets others of her species and tries to expand her mind powers. In what becomes one of the bloodiest episodes of Trek, Kes accidentally boils a colleague’s head. The practical effects are outstanding. It scared me as a kid, and I’m still scared!

2×15 also gives us the widely misunderstood “Threshold.” It’s an easy episode to mock — the last few minutes feature the captain and a lieutenant turning into lizards and having lizard babies — but most of the episode is top-tier body horror. Lieutenant Paris turns from a swaggering test pilot into a decaying transwarp mutant. By the time he’s peeling off his scalp and yanking out his tongue, he’s happy about it, and we’re nauseated.

Right after “Threshold,” Voyager performed an homage to Silence of the Lambs in “Meld.” Can you believe there’s an episode where Ship Cop Tuvok has to mind meld with an actual serial killer? The serial killer zens out on the Vulcan brain. The Vulcan gets the urge to murder. It’s unhinged. And it’s not a one-off! They give the serial killer a whole subplot later on the show!

Season 2 is also the origin of the notorious “Tuvix,” which is only horror if you hate Tuvix, as any rational person should.

Voyager never forgets its horror backbone

Although Voyager’s season 2 has a remarkable run on horror episodes, their love for horror never goes dormant for long.

We get more horror in 3×18 “Darkling,” where the holographic Doctor acquires the personality of a killer and holds Kes hostage, and in the nightmarish 4×13 where an alien invades the crew’s dreams.

Some horror threads show up in episodes like “Alice,” with a haunted ship that seduces its pilots. Hauntings often get revisited, as in “The Haunting of Deck 12.”

Later in the show, Brian Fuller of Hannibal fame wrote twenty of Voyager’s episodes. Star Trek gave him plenty of opportunity to hone his horror TV writing skills.

He’s responsible for an episode so bleak I’ve only watched it once. “Course: Oblivion” takes the characters we love, gives them hope, and then kills them one by one — with the twist that these are biomimetic copies who think, feel, and act like the originals. It’s a bold and haunting episode. I’m still upset about it in the best possible way.

If you like horror in space, Voyager is the best Star Trek show for you. I’ve been obsessed with it for almost my entire life, and my esteem for its more gruesome, frightening episodes only grows with time.

Author: SM Reine

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