Vote up the transporter malfunctions on Star Trek that make you reconsider beaming up.
Gene Roddenberry and the other ingenious minds behind Star Trek have come up with some brilliant technology for the Star Trek universe: warp drive, food replicators, the Holodeck, and one of the most fantastical of all: Star Trek transporters.
Imagine a world where commuting to work doesn't exist; you just beam yourself over. A world where you never have to worry about being late to a movie or business meeting. Where you can travel great distances in a matter of seconds. Sounds great, right? Well, maybe you'll reconsider when you think about all the things that can go wrong. Transporter malfunctions happen, and they're not pretty. Below, you'll find a veritable cornucopia of horrifying Star Trek transporter accidents. Vote up the ones that will make you rethink ever wanting to step on a transporter pad.
The Enterprise receives a distress call from the USS Jenolan, a ship that has been missing for seventy-five years. After investigating, the crew finds no survivors, but LaForge notices that the transporters had been reconfigured in a strange manner. Amazingly, a pattern is still in the system's buffer and had suffered no degradation. He rematerializes the stored pattern, beaming Original Series character Montgomery "Scotty" Scott onto the transporter pad.
In "Mirror, Mirror," Kirk, McCoy, Uhura, and Scotty are sent to a mirror universe after a transporter accident during an ion storm. In this alternate reality, the Enterprise is a warship for the malevolent Terran Empire. The only way Kirk and crew can return back home is by impersonating their mirror-universe duplicates and outsmarting an evil, goatee-sporting Spock.
A faulty generator causes a transporter failure, leaving the crew of the Enterprise to believe Lt. Comm. LaForge and Ensign Ro were killed. But Geordi and Ro survived; they just beamed into a different phase than everyone else, free to wander the ship, but unseen and unheard by the rest of the crew. They observe their own funeral preparations before purposely causing a disruptor overload, which tips Data off to their whereabouts, allowing him to re-cloak them.
An explosion prevents Captain Sisko, Worf, Kira, Dax, and O'Brien from materializing on the transport pad. To save them, the transporter chief is forced to download their physical forms to the holodeck... right in the middle of Dr. Bashir's James Bond-inspired holodeck program. To further complicate things, the crew doesn't have their own memories and believe themselves to be the characters from the program. It's up to Bashir to keep his fellow crewmen alive in the game, because if he can't, they'll die in real life.
Captain Picard, Ensign Ro Laren, Guinan, and Keiko O'Brien are returning from a botanical and archaeological expedition when their shuttlecraft is enveloped by an energy anomaly. An emergency transport to the Enterprise yields unusual results: Picard, Ro, Guinan, and Keiko reemerge on the transport pad as 12-year-old children!
Sisko, Bashir, and Dax are sent back in time to 2024 San Francisco after a transporter accident. They inadvertently change history by allowing Gabriel Bell, a key figure and activist during a period of rioting, to be killed. It's on them to restore history before they can travel back home.
