The 12 Worst Star Trek Transporter Accidents in Series History

If Star Trek has taught us anything, it’s that stepping onto a transporter pad is a little like agreeing to be turned into very organized glitter and then reassembled by a computer that occasionally has bad days. Sure, it’s convenient. But across the franchise, some of the worst transporter accidents have produced body horror, ethical nightmares, and “maybe I’ll just take the shuttle” energy that would give even the bravest Starfleet officer pause.

From classic The Original Series mishaps to deeply weird detours in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and even the films, transporter malfunctions are one of Trek’s favorite ways to explore identity, mortality, and what it really means to be “you.” Let’s beam through 12 of the most unsettling mishaps in Star Trek historyand why they still fascinate fans.

What Counts as a Star Trek Transporter Accident?

In-universe, transporters convert matter into energy, transmit that pattern, and then rebuild it atom by atom on the other side. When everything works, you arrive looking exactly the same, just slightly annoyed that your molecules have technically been murdered and reprinted.

An accident happens when something interferes with that procession storms, faulty generators, stray orchids, time anomalies, or just plain operator error. Sometimes the result is survivable (if emotionally scarring). Other times, it’s a one-way trip to “we don’t talk about that transporter log anymore.”

The list below pulls from fan rankings, official synopses, and long-running Trek discussions to highlight the worst of the worst. These are the accidents that made viewers rethink the whole “safest way to travel in Starfleet” claim.

The 12 Worst Transporter Accidents in Star Trek

1. 75 Years in a Transporter Buffer – “Relics” (TNG)

Let’s start with a mishap that’s equal parts horrifying and heartwarming. In Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Relics,” the Enterprise-D finds the long-lost USS Jenolan, missing for three-quarters of a century. Inside, Geordi La Forge discovers that the transporter has been jury-rigged to hold a pattern in its bufferMontgomery “Scotty” Scott himself, trapped in suspension for 75 years with another crewmate whose pattern sadly degrades beyond recovery.

Scotty’s survival is a miracle of improvisation, but it’s also nightmarish: he’s effectively frozen outside time, with no awareness that decades have passed. The accident raises a big question: if a person can be stored like a file, how many “you”s are still sitting in neglected buffers across the fleet?

2. Into the Mirror Universe – “Mirror, Mirror” (TOS)

During a storm in the classic episode “Mirror, Mirror,” a transporter glitch swaps Kirk, Uhura, McCoy, and Scotty with their counterparts from a brutal parallel universe. Instead of the optimistic Federation, they find the Terran Empirecomplete with agonizers, assassination-based HR policies, and one extremely iconic goatee on Spock.

This isn’t a body horror accident; everyone remains physically intact. But the psychological shock of waking up in a world where your friends are ruthless tyrants is its own kind of nightmare. It’s a reminder that transporters don’t just move bodiesthey can fling you into entirely different moral universes.

3. La Forge and Ro Become “Ghosts” – “The Next Phase” (TNG)

In “The Next Phase,” a faulty generator causes a transporter failure that leaves the Enterprise crew convinced that Geordi La Forge and Ro Laren died in an accident. In reality, they’ve been shunted into a different phase, invisible and intangible to everyone else.

They wander the ship like ghosts, watching their own memorial preparations and realizing how quickly Starfleet has to move on. Only by cleverly manipulating a weapon overload do they alert Data to their presence and get phased back into normal reality. It’s a chilling take on the idea of being out of sync with the universestill alive, but unable to connect.

4. The Creation of Thomas Riker – “Second Chances” (TNG)

Few transporter mishaps cut as deeply into questions of identity as “Second Chances.” Years earlier, on the USS Potemkin, a transporter malfunction reflected a beam back to the surface of Nervala IV, accidentally creating a duplicate of William Riker. One Riker beamed up. The otherlater known as Thomaswas left behind, stranded for eight years before being rescued.

Unlike Kirk’s good/evil split in “The Enemy Within,” Thomas isn’t a distorted half; he’s a full, legitimate person with the same memories up to the point of divergence. The accident forces everyone to confront an uncomfortable truth: from the transporter’s perspective, there was nothing “wrong” with creating an extra human being. It just… happened.

5. Time-Travel Trouble – “Past Tense” (DS9)

In Deep Space Nine’s two-parter “Past Tense,” a transporter mishap sends Sisko, Bashir, and Dax back to 2024 San Francisco. They arrive right before the infamous Bell Riots, a pivotal historical event in Star Trek’s timeline. When the real Gabriel Bell dies prematurely, Sisko has to assume his identity to keep history more or less intact.

As transporter accidents go, this one doesn’t involve melted limbs or cloningbut its stakes are enormous. A single glitch nearly derails history, showing how fragile the Federation’s bright future really is. Also, this episode hits differently now that we’re actually living in the 2020s.

6. Starfleet Kids’ Club – “Rascals” (TNG)

“Rascals” is one of those episodes that sounds like fan fiction gone rogue: a shuttle caught in an energy anomaly forces an emergency transport, and when the patterns re-form, Captain Picard, Ro, Guinan, and Keiko have been physically de-aged into 12-year-olds.

The episode plays parts of this for comedytiny Picard scolding adults is goldbut the implications are scary. Starfleet doesn’t have a handbook for “my body is preteen, my brain is middle-aged.” The accident blurs the line between age, authority, and identity. Are you still the captain if your feet don’t touch the deck from the command chair?

7. Two Captain Kirks – “The Enemy Within” (TOS)

In one of the earliest and most famous transporter accidents, “The Enemy Within,” magnetic ore dust contaminates the transporter beam and splits Captain Kirk into two beings: one gentle but indecisive, the other violent and impulsive.

The “good” Kirk quickly becomes paralyzed by self-doubt, while the “evil” Kirk runs wild, assaulting crew members and nearly dooming a landing party stranded on a freezing planet. Reintegrating them nearly kills Kirk and raises a deeply Trek-like point: our darker impulses aren’t a glitchthey’re part of a functional whole. The transporter here becomes a psychological scalpel, slicing apart what should never be separated.

8. Inside-Out Bodies – Star Trek: The Motion Picture

During the early scenes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, we witness one of the franchise’s most disturbing transporter failures. As Kirk and Scotty monitor an incoming beam-in, something goes catastrophically wrong. The partially re-materialized forms of science officer Sonak and another crew member arrive distorted and screaming, their anatomy grotesquely rearranged. Starfleet Command calmly informs the Enterprise that the “pattern” didn’t survive when they tried to recover it back at headquarters.

We never see the full horror onscreenjust reactions and audiobut that almost makes it worse. It’s the transporter accident you can’t shrug off with technobabble; it’s just plain lethal.

9. The Moral Nightmare of Tuvix – “Tuvix” (VOY)

On Star Trek: Voyager, a trip to collect plant samples goes sideways when an alien orchid interferes with the transporter, merging Tuvok and Neelix into a single hybrid being: Tuvix. He has Tuvok’s discipline and Neelix’s warmth, plus his own distinct personality. Over time, the crew bonds with him. He belongs.

When the Doctor discovers a way to reverse the accident and restore Tuvok and Neelix, Tuvix begs to live. Janeway must choose between preserving one sentient being created by a transporter mishap or effectively killing him to bring two others back. She orders the reversal anyway. Fans still argue about whether she committed murderor did what any captain would have done.

10. Microbes in the Matter Stream – “Realm of Fear” (TNG)

Lieutenant Reg Barclay already hates transporters. In “Realm of Fear,” his anxiety spikes when he sees writhing, worm-like creatures around him in the matter stream during transport. He initially believes he’s suffering from transporter psychosis, a rare but terrifying condition.

The truth is weirder: quasi-energy microbes invaded his system mid-transport, causing pain and blue energy flashes through his body. Those “creatures” he saw in the beam are actually trapped crew members from another ship, frozen in transit. To rescue them, Barclay has to willingly face his worst fear and grab one of the forms while mid-transport. It’s both a psychological horror story and a reminder that the matter stream is anything but empty.

11. Trapped in a Spy Holonovel – “Our Man Bashir” (DS9)

In “Our Man Bashir,” a runabout explosion prevents Sisko, Dax, Worf, O’Brien, and Kira from safely materializing. To save them, their transporter patterns are stored in the holosuite, mapped onto characters in Dr. Bashir’s James Bond–style spy program.

If the holosuite fails or any of the “characters” die in the story, the real people will die too. The transporter has effectively turned the cast into very fragile save files trapped inside Bashir’s pulp-fantasy power trip. It’s one of the franchise’s most fun bottle episodes, but also a quiet reminder that Starfleet’s idea of “backup storage” is incredibly stressful.

12. The Accidental Borg Super-Drone – “Drone” (VOY)

In the Voyager episode “Drone,” a transporter malfunction mixes Seven of Nine’s Borg nanoprobes with the Doctor’s 29th-century mobile emitter, creating a new Borg drone designated “One.” One rapidly evolves into an advanced Borg with technology far beyond anything in the 24th century and inadvertently pings the Collective, risking Voyager’s destruction.

Unlike most Borg, One is curious, compassionate, and eager to learn what it means to be an individual. The tragedy is that his very existence puts everyone in danger. Ultimately, One chooses self-sacrifice to protect Voyager, turning a random transporter glitch into one of the most emotional arcs in the series.

Why Transporter Mishaps Hit So Hard

All of these accidents share a common theme: they poke at the fragile boundary between the self and the technology that moves it around. Is a person in the buffer “alive”? Is a duplicate less real than the “original”? If you merge two people into a single being, which life matters more when you have the power to undo it?

By turning those philosophical questions into dramatic crisessometimes with phasers, sometimes with orchidsStar Trek uses transporter accidents as a storytelling Swiss Army knife. They can be spooky, tragic, funny, or deeply ethical, often all at once.

Fans, Fear, and the Transporter: of Trek Experience

Ask a room full of Trekkies which piece of technology they’d most like to try in real life, and transporters will rank pretty highright up until someone says, “Yeah, but what about Tuvix?” and the whole conversation derails into a 40-minute ethics debate.

That’s part of why these accidents loom so large in fan culture. They’re not just plot twists; they’re thought experiments. Viewers bring their own experiences, anxieties, and philosophies to each episode. People with a fear of flying often relate hard to Barclay in “Realm of Fear.” His sweaty, nervous avoidance of the transporter bay looks exactly like anyone inching toward an airport gate while silently bargaining with the universe.

For others, episodes like “Second Chances” or “Relics” hit an entirely different nerve. The idea that a version of you could be stuck in a buffer, or stranded on a planet because of a transporter error, taps into fears about being forgotten or left behind. Fans who grew up moving a lot, changing schools, or feeling like their “old life” had been erased sometimes see themselves in Thomas Riker or in Scotty waking up in a century that has moved on without him.

Then there’s the Tuvix question, which has practically become a fandom rite of passage. Online forums, convention panels, and late-night watch parties all circle back to it eventually: was Janeway right? Fans bring in their backgroundsreligious beliefs, views on medical ethics, personal experiences with end-of-life decisionsto argue for or against her choice. A single transporter accident turns into a crash course in moral philosophy, dressed in Starfleet uniforms.

Even the more lighthearted mishaps, like “Rascals,” resonate on a personal level. The episode is goofy, sure, but it also touches on ageism and identity. Many fans who feel “younger on the inside” than their birth certificate suggests see something honest in child-Picard insisting that he’s still the captain. Others connect with Ro’s storyline, where getting a second childhood forces her to reconsider a life defined by trauma and conflict.

What’s fascinating is how often these stories spark real-world “what if” scenarios. In casual conversation, fans will half-jokingly say things like, “I’d never use a transporter; I’ve seen The Motion Picture.” Underneath the joke is a genuine unease about emerging technologieswhether that’s teleportation, AI, or any tool that touches the core of who we are. Star Trek exaggerates the risks for drama, but it captures something real about how people feel when machines get very close to the borders of identity and consciousness.

In the end, the worst transporter accidents stick with us not because they’re gory or flashy (though “inside-out Sonak” definitely qualifies), but because they ask deeply human questions in a sci-fi wrapper. Would you step onto the pad knowing that, somewhere out there in the Trek universe, a version of you might still be wandering invisible through a starship, arguing with your own duplicate, or waking up in the wrong century? For many fans, that lingering unease is exactly what makes Star Trekand its cursed transportersso compelling.

Conclusion: Still Willing to Beam Up?

Transporters are one of Star Trek’s greatest inventions and one of its most reliable sources of nightmare fuel. From Kirk splitting in two to Tuvix begging for his life, from Scotty’s decades in a buffer to La Forge drifting out of phase, these 12 transporter accidents showcase the best and worst of what happens when technology tangles with identity.

Would it be worth the risk to skip traffic and instantly pop over to another planet? Starfleet officers keep saying “yes,” but episodes like these are the reason so many fans quietly choose the shuttlecraft instead.