Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, to celebrate Halloween being upon us, we review the role ghosts have had in the history of Star Trek.
Ghosts and spirits are often referred to in Star Trek as a way to describe new life forms encountered that do not conform to normal, understandable ways. This is similar to the episode Oasis covered on last week's main show, where it turns out there are no ghosts haunting a stranded ship once the Enterprise crew learns the real story behind the Kantare colonists on board. Another example is the TNG episode The Loss, where Will Riker refers to two-dimensional life forms as ghosts before later discovering their true nature.
It makes sense that ghosts and ghost stories are shared more to help understand cultures in the context of Star Trek. Indeed, we find out about many of our main races and cultures by the spirit stories they tell from homeworld religions and the like, including Klingons with the jat'yln, Bajorans with pagh, and Ocampa with comra. But these ghosts and spritis rarely actually invade the space of our favorite starships and crews.
There are some notable exceptions. In Enterprise, a disembodied transporter signal from a man named Quinn Erickson is found to haunt ships that entered The Barrens in the episode Daedalus. This is the episode where we learn all about transporter inventor Emory Erickson and his quest to recapture Quinn, his son lost in the reduction to practice of the working transporter. Although not technically a dead person's spirit, the long-lost transporter signal of a person does share many of the same qualities we would associate with a ghost, so perhaps this is how we can make ghosts become real in the future.
In Voyager's Barge of the Dead, B'Elanna Torres dies in a shuttle accident and ends up on a Klingon barge of the dead, which is kind of like a ghost ship serving as purgatory on the way to hell for dishonored Klingons. B'Elanna interacts with other dead folks in this episode, making this as close to a Klingon ghost story as we would get. Thankfully, Kahless did not appear as a force projection in this episode.
And then there's Sub Rosa, the episode that trumps all other bad episodes in TNG. While anaphasic lifeforms are not technically a ghost, the females in Doctor Crusher's family were host to such a lifeform that decided to pose as the ghost of a 17th Century Scotsman named Ronin, based on the similarities in how that lifeform appears non-corporeal at most times. If you want to be truly horrified in more ways than one this Halloween, I can think of nothing more scary to put on your television than Sub Rosa.
So enjoy your Halloween candy and spooky movies and shows, and don't forget to include Sub Rosa in your weekend viewing enjoyment. Or don't, and enjoy it more.
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