The sexiest Star Trek episodes, ranked

Star Trek contains multitudes. It is philosophy and comedy. It’s space opera and soap opera. It is often a legal procedural. And, just as vitally and consistently as any of its facets, Star Trek is horny.

Horniness is a nearly universal facet of the human condition that has given us some of our greatest works of literature, nay, of philosophy. And yet, sometimes an attempt to meditate on sexual desire completely flubs any veneer of the philosophical or romantic or fraternal and you’re left with… Well. You’re just left with the horniness. And sometimes it’s Star Trek’s horniest moments that seize our collective consciousness in an iron grip and never let go.

Star Trek was horny right from the pilot episode of The Original Series, when aliens kidnap the captain to trap him in a forced breeding program with a nubile young woman. But could the impact of one horny episode of Star Trek really echo down the decades to our modern lives? Absolutely, and we’ll prove it. These are the horniest episodes of Star Trek, ranked by the influence they’ve exerted on our culture

“Justice,” Star Trek: The Next Generation season 1

Horny rating: 4
Cultural rating: 0
What’s it about? A culture of sexually liberated aliens believes quite strongly in capital punishment.

The early seasons of The Next Generation are rocky. You can almost feel the production struggling to break out of the eggshell of the Original Series and hatch into what made Next Generation gel as its own bird. “Justice” is not one of those moments.

In a plot straight out of the TOS playbook, the Enterprise finds a utopian planet of sexually liberated humanoids, runs afoul of their only societal flaw — a draconian and randomized legal system — and discovers that they’re worshiping a false god.

But with the comparatively liberal mores of 1987 compared to 1966, TOS writer John D.F. Black and director James L. Conway relish in the sexuality of these aliens. The women are braless, the men wear a weird speedo/wrap that perfectly frames their exposed nipples, and the only way to get places is by jogging. When you do get there, parliament is just a massage parlor full of barely clad people doing aerobics and making out. Multiple women are getting handsy with Worf and it’s considered a mark of his alien character that he dislikes it.

But the real clincher on the episode’s horniness is that it’s not even relevant. The story is about Wesley getting the death penalty for stepping on some flowers. Their earnest, cheerful engagement in sexual play is pure set dressing — and pure horniness.

“Conundrum,” Star Trek: The Next Generation season 5

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 7
Cultural rating: 0
What’s it about? Two different women decide it’s exactly the right time to start a sexual relationship with Commander Riker, despite a sudden ship-wide bout of amnesia.

“Conundrum” does not have any particular influence, as an episode of Star Trek, but it rates highly on the horny scale for making the episode’s “fun subplot” from the simply preposterous notion that a ship full of coworkers who had just lost their memories would immediately get down to boning. Writers Barry Schkolnick and Paul Schiffer even hang a lampshade on it.

“For all we know, you and I could be married,” purrs Ensign Ro. “For all we know, you and I could hate each other,” answers Riker. He is right. Immediately after this they have sex.

“Favorite Son,” Star Trek: Voyager season 3

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 10
Cultural rating: 0
What’s it about? A whole planet of hot babes have an absurdly complicated plan to sex Harry Kim to death.

I applaud screenwriter Lisa Klink for this absolutely unhinged episode of Star Trek in which the Taresian species, whose sexual reproduction requires the death of the male individual, has developed an incredibly convoluted system of conning men into having sex with them. This involves infecting random alien men with a virus that slowly turns them into a Taresian; convincing the man that he’s been a Taresian all along, and was transported from Taresia as an embryo to be raised on his homeworld by unknowing parents (even if that homeworld was in a separate quadrant of the galaxy, a feat of engineering that would be of much interest to the stranded crew of the Voyager); conning the man into thinking that he’s been a special little boy all along whose destiny is to live on a planet where all the women are hot and all want to have sex with him and bow to his every whim; and then stealing his sperm and killing him. It’s b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

But, perhaps thankfully, it’s had no impact on Star Trek as a whole or the broader culture, so its rank remains low.

“Fair Haven,” Star Trek: Voyager season 6

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 5
Cultural rating: 1
What’s it about? Forced to batten down because of a space storm, the whole Voyager crew decides to get really into LARPing everyday life in a small 19th-century Irish town.

There are a number of Star Trek episodes that showcase the lust or love that can erupt between a crewmember and a holodeck character. “Fair Haven” is the only one that works.

Voyager is alone in the Delta Quadrant, and it would be ethically complicated for Captain Janeway to get involved with any of her crew. So when Janeway becomes sexually attracted to a fictional bartender, she mods his program to make him single and more erudite. Frankly, it’s a genuinely rare positive depiction of middle-aged female sexual desire.

“Fair Haven” will forever live in the minds of Voyager fans for writer Robin Jill Berger’s indelible line “Computer, delete the wife.”

“Sub Rosa,” Star Trek: The Next Generation season 7

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 10
Cultural rating: 2
What’s it about? The one where Doctor Crusher fucks a ghost.

Everything I just said about the importance of normalizing middle-aged female sexual desire? It does not apply here. “Sub Rosa” builds a solid wall of serviceable romance novel tropes that clash mightily with Star Trek’s science-fiction setting. The whole episode takes place on a planet that has been terraformed to resemble the climate of Scotland as closely as possible. There’s a vague but menacing groundskeeper and a “ghost” that turns up when anyone lights a family heirloom candle. The latter turns out to be a lightly vampiric energy being.

That is, after he has dubiously-consenting ghost-sex with Doctor Crusher multiple times on screen. He also did this with her grandmother, and great-grandmother. Doctor Crusher, “Sub Rosa” says, has a family heirloom fuck-ghost/energy vampire.

We must recognize a bit of the cultural impact of “Sub Rosa” for its infamy among Star Trek fans. I know I’ll never forget an episode that shows a character getting off on reading the most erotic passages of their beloved grandmother’s journal.

“The Naked Now,” Star Trek: The Next Generation season 1

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 8
Cultural rating: 5
What’s it about? The away team brings back a horny disease.

It’s easy to forget that “The Naked Now” is the second full episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that the folks behind TNG wanted you to know, as soon as narratively possible, that the robot fucks.

“The Naked Now” is another situation like “Justice,” where we have original series writers D.F. Black and D.C. Fontana rewriting an unused Gene Roddenberry script from the Original Series, but this time with the TV censorship board of 1987. The returning away team breaches quarantine and the crew becomes taken by a transmissible disease that nominally gets everyone — even the non-biological android — drunk.

Functionally, however, it apparently makes security officer Tasha Yar carnally desire Data. This is expressed in a scene in which Yar casually explains that her childhood was riddled with sexual abuse and Data, who has not been infected yet and is at this point completely sober, explains that he is “fully functional,” “in every way,” and is “programmed in multiple techniques.”

I repeat myself: This is the second episode of Next Generation, and the writers want us to know that butch-haired female security officer and the mildly androgynous male android are heterosexual as soon as possible. That’s where this episode’s cultural impact comes from: Data is one of Star Trek’s most fascinating characters, but he’ll never escape the “fully functional” jokes. The episode where he and Tasha Yar have a really uncomfortable seduction scene for entirely contrived reasons will always be there.

“Mirror, Mirror,” Star Trek: The Original Series season 2

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 3 rising to 7
Cultural rating: 7
What’s it about? The away team accidentally transports into a parallel universe of EVIL.

“Mirror Mirror” contains the first appearance of Star Trek’s infamous Mirror Universe, where all sentient life innately possesses fewer social and ethical inhibitions and the totalitarian Terran Empire rules federation space. And honestly, it’s not that horny. Kirk finds out that his Terran counterpart has a “captain’s woman,” apparently a position of intimate duties that female officers aspire to, but we don’t get many details.

However, from those horny seeds grew horny fruit. When writers behind Deep Space Nine returned to the Mirror Universe decades later, it was with with an emphatic statement: This is the universe that fucks. The Mirror Universe counterparts of multiple ostensibly straight DS9 characters turned out to be thirsty bisexuals in shrink-wrapped pleather. Following that lead, Enterprise revisited the captain’s woman, and by the time Discovery came around, bisexuality and promiscuity had lost their shocking quality, so the Mirror Universe boldly ventured into sexual kink.

The role of “Mirror, Mirror” in making Star Trek hornier is not a small one. And it’s the entire reason the goatee is associated with the evil twin trope. That’s true cultural impact.

“The Menagerie,” Star Trek: The Original Series season 1

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 4
Cultural rating: 8
What’s it about? The Enterprise’s previous captain had a really weird day once.

“The Menagerie” is The Original Series episode that famously reuses footage from Star Trek’s unaired pilot as an extensive flashback, and introduces Captain Pike, now the unlikely star of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s also the very first appearance of an Orion slave girl.

From a single brief reference to the hypnotic movements and savage appetite of the green-skinned “Orion slave girl,” sprang Star Trek’s Orions, an alien civilization culturally predisposed to space piracy and organized crime. And Orion women, naturally, relish their ability to warp the minds of men with their sex pheromones. They’re far from the only instance of Trek’s “sex pollen” tropes, but they’re the only one where it’s attached to a specific sentient species.

The Orion slave girl is still one of Star Trek’s minor mascots, as instantly recognizable iconography. A still of an Orion slave girl was the final image in The Original Series’ season 1 credits, and it has been a popular cosplay for decades. Deep Space Nine brought back some fleeting references to the concept, while Star Trek: Enterprise devoted several episodes to kinda-sorta subverting it, while J.J. Abrams chose casual sex with an Orion babe as the frame to introduce his 2009 take on Kirk and Uhura. It took the comedy series Star Trek: Lower Decks to introduce an Orion main character and give her something more to do than be a sexy criminal.

There may not be a direct, citable link between the Orion slave girl and, say, the Twi’lek dancer in Return of the Jedi or the Asari of Mass Effect, but the role of the Orion slave girl in popularizing and normalizing the sci-fi trope of “seductive female aliens that look basically like hot ladies but are a weird color and like to dance on tables” can’t be discounted.

“Plato’s Stepchildren,” Star Trek: The Original Series season 3

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 3
Cultural rating: 9
What’s it about? God-like aliens play a particularly mean-spirited game of The Sims with the bridge crew.

No matter how many examples arise to disprove it or lessen its claim to fame, “Plato’s Stepchildren” just can’t shake the legend that it had the “first interracial kiss on television.” And while it might be more accurate to describe it as the “first kiss between a Black person and a White person in a scripted American TV series,” there’s no doubt that the episode received significant executive pushback. The story of how the production dabbled in malicious compliance in order to get the kiss on air is genuinely entertaining.

But the thing nobody ever talks about is that the whole point of the scene is that Kirk and Uhura don’t want to kiss each other. The Platonians’ goal is to provoke surrender by humiliation, beginning by impinging on the dignity of their victims. When that fails they move on to making people kiss.

Nobody doing the smooching here is actually horny about it — it’s the use of sexual acts and sexual transgression as a tool for narrative escalation that puts this episode in the horny category.

“Amok Time,” Star Trek: The Original Series season 2

Image: Paramount

Horny rating: 4 rising to 11
Cultural rating: 10
What’s it about? Spock has to fuck or he’ll die.

What’s interesting about “Amok Time,” the first appearance of the Vulcan concept of pon farr, is that there’s a lot less overt sexual content in it than you’d think.

For the uninitiated: Every few years, each adult Vulcan is taken by a biological urge to mate with their life partner. If the urge is left unfulfilled, it can kill them within a week. In the final stages of pon farr, stress hormones reduce them to a state akin to an aggressive animal intelligence. But in “Amok Time,” Spock is only interested in sex with one specific person, and when she denies him, his biological drive is sated by a bout of (secretly simulated) combat to the death.

This is key context when considering the significant body of Star Trek episodes that revisit pon farr, discard the idea that it can be treated by sating aggression instead of sex, and frankly wallow in using it as a plot device for dubious consent.

In Star Trek: The Search for Spock, an adult woman must have sex with a mindless teenage Spock to save his life. Voyager takes two bites of the pon farr apple, first with Tuvok undergoing the mortification of explaining his lust to a coworker and then sating it with a hologram simulation of his wife. Then in “Blood Fever,” the psychic fallout of a Vulcan coworker’s pon farr puts non-Vulcan chief engineer B’Elanna Torres into an amnesiac state so sexually aggressive that a senior officer of the bridge crew orders another one of her coworkers to have sex with her and everybody’s like Yeah I guess that’s fine. Enterprise frankly simplifies things by having some space microbes put Vulcan officer T’Pol into an uncontrollable lust just as she starts a one-week quarantine with a coworker who must nobly resist her lusty pleas.

Whether or not it meant to be, “Amok Time” is inarguably among the most influential Star Trek episodes ever made. It was the point at which the Kirk/Spock wing of Star Trek fandom became inevitable, creating a community that coined the term “slash” for fanfiction featuring queer parings and contributing hugely to the history of fanzines and the origins of modern fan convention culture. And it handed the franchise a ready-made template for pure horny plot contrivance.

And it has not been limited to Star Trek culture either. “Amok Time” contains the first appearance of the phrase “Live long and prosper,” and the Vulcan salute, now considered so universal a reference that it’s a damn emoji. The music of its climactic fight has become a universal (satirical) sound cue for one-on-one combat. And it’s widely acknowledged as popularizing scifi erotica tropes that would grow into the internationally popular Omegaverse romance genre and its permutations.

“Amok Time” is the horny episode of Star Trek with the most impact on Trek culture, mainstream culture, and horny culture itself.