The Best Star Trek Transporter Mishap Episodes

Eight years before the events of this Season 6 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) steps onto a transporter pad, not knowing that getting beamed off the surface of Nervala IV would inadvertently create a duplicate of himself. The strange event forces Riker to confront his past in a very real way — specifically in terms of his willingness to abandon his earlier romance with Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) for the sake of his career.

Naming himself Thomas Riker, the transporter duplicate returned in a Season 3 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as an antagonist and member of the Maquis. The last we see of him, he’s made a prisoner by the Cardassians. His ultimate fate is never revealed, but the most likely outcome is that he was executed by the Dominion, along with the rest of the captured Maquis, when they took over Cardassia.

In what remains one of the most controversial Star Trek episodes among fans, a trip through the transporter merges the Vulcan security chief Tuvok (Tim Russ) with the Talaxian morale officer Neelix (Ethan Phillips) to make a brand new person — Tuvix (Tom Wright).

It takes the crew of Voyager a few weeks to figure out how to safely separate Tuvok and Neelix, by which point Tuvix has made friends, worked with the crew, and sees himself as an individual distinct from either the Vulcan or the Talaxian. To bring Tuvok and Neelix back, he argues, would mean murdering Tuvix. Fans still debate about whether or not, when Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) brings Tuvok and Neelix back, it’s a surgery or an execution.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had significantly fewer holodeck mishap episodes than its contemporaries TNG and Voyager, but in Season 4’s “Our Man Bashir,” it makes up for the absence by combining a holodeck mishap story with a transporter mishap story.

While Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) happens to be enjoying his James Bond fantasy program in the holosuite, a runabout explodes and the transporter patterns of the runabout’s crew are stored in the holosuite because it’s the only place on the station with the memory to bear it. Consequently, DS9 regulars like Kira (Nana Visitor), Worf (Michael Dorn) and even Ben Sisko (Avery Brooks) take on the roles of characters in Bashir’s program.

“Our Man Bashir” not only gives Star Trek fans a great transporter mishap episode, but a wonderful nod to the heyday of 007, not to mention an important step in the development of Bashir’s character.

The 21st century is a dark time in Star Trek lore, and a transporter mishap sends Ben Sisko, Julian Bashir, and Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) back to that difficult time in the two-parter “Past Tense.” The story finds Bashir and Sisko struggling among the most impoverished of San Francisco’s citizens, while Jadzia finds herself a guest of Chris Brynner (Jim Metzler), one of the city’s wealthiest men.

With the bleak looking 21st century looking much more like the real world than the utopia the heroes are trying to get back to, “Past Tense” is a cold splash of water for anyone hoping we’ll one day achieve what the fictional people of the Federation have.

We’re kind of cheating here because this classic Star Trek crossover doesn’t come about because of a transporter mishap so much as a transporter working better than anyone ever expected. When the Enterprise responds to a distress call from a ship that’s been missing for seventy five years, they run into Captain Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) who kept himself alive by keeping his pattern cycling in the transporter buffers (though sadly his colleague Matt Franklin is lost).

“Relics” is a fantastic episode of Star Trek. It not only gives us one of our few chances to see a character from the original series interact with the cast of The Next Generation, but it tells a moving story about the elderly being made to feel irrelevant.

In this later episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the transporter patterns of The Doctor (Robert Picardo) and Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) briefly merge, causing the 29th century technology of the Doctor’s holo-emitter to interact with Seven’s Borg nano-probes, ultimately creating a new Borg.

The new Borg — named One (J. Paul Boehmer) — unintentionally becomes a threat when the Collective learns about him and comes calling with the hopes of assimilating his vastly superior technology. One makes the choice that settles things himself, and his solution makes “Drone” one of the most heartbreaking episodes of the series.

Of course, you had to know this was coming. It was the original Star Trek that was home to the most impactful transporter mishap tale — “Mirror, Mirror” which introduced us to the dark Mirror Universe. Because of an anomaly, Kirk (William Shatner) Scotty, Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) find themselves in a parallel universe in which the benevolent United Federation of Planets is replaced with the brutal Terran Empire.

The Mirror Universe would prove popular enough that it was brought back for DS9, Enterprise, and in particular was heavily mined in Star Trek: Discovery.