The Star Trek: The Next Generation S4 Scene That Fans Are Still Distraught Over

You would think, after having spent almost 30 years off the air, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" would be done hurting us. That's just not how things work, though. A lifetime later, it's still a show that elicits emotions — joy when Data (Brent Spiner) learns how to dance or Q (John de Lancie) celebrates his reinstatement with cigars and a mariachi band. Sadness when Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco) rejoins the Collective, or when the first two seasons of "Star Trek: Picard" exist.

And sometimes, revisiting the old classics can evoke a bad case of combination misery and heebie-jeebies, as recently became a point of discussion over on Reddit's r/StarTrek forum. The question, posed by u/Pretend-Dirt-1760: "What is [the] most disturbing moment" in the "Star Trek" franchise?

The answer, according to one Reddit user, appears in Season 4, Episode 25 of "TNG." "Lady half transported through the floor in TNG," they wrote, inspiring hundreds of fellow users to virtually applaud and pump their fists and agree that they, too, were not okay.

The scene in question, from the episode "In Theory," takes place when the Enterprise-D winds up stuck in a nebula that's frigging lousy with pockets of dark matter. The dark matter causes unpredictable distortions in space. Sometimes it knocks stuff off of a desk or piles furniture up in the corner of a room. Sometimes, like in the case of an unlucky lieutenant (Georgina Shore), it phases a person halfway through the floor, causing them to let out an agonized scream and then die, leaving behind the kind of mess that janitors have historically left for the night shift to take care of. 

Adding to the surreal horror of the situation is the fact that the death is sort of a side note in an episode mostly focused on Data trying to learn how to be Lieutenant D'Sora's (Michele Scarabelli) boyfriend with all the subtlety and thoughtfulness of a C-tier issue of "Betty and Veronica Digest."

It's an undeniably disturbing sequence, and one that clearly left a traumatized taste in viewers' mouths. Back on Reddit, a virtual group therapy session rapidly materialized. "Poor lady gets merged with the deck, horrifying thought," wrote u/Champ-5, "Yet not one thought [was] given about her after that, because the emotionally unstable lieutenant was surprised when the emotionless android didn't have emotions." Harsh, but fair. "Yep, that's the one that sprung to mind as well. It was just so jarring," added u/BlueGlassDrink. "I still remember this and I'm pretty sure I only saw the episode once when I was a kid. Like probably 25+ years ago," added u/_unmarked.

"Star Trek:" Shaping minds and haunting dreams since 1966.