5 Worst Star Trek Romances, Ranked

We've all known that intolerable couple who kills a room's vibes with their mere presence. Maybe they're like the couple in the body horror flick "Together" — the aggressively codependent, hive-minded pair who seem unable to function independently. Or maybe they're a duo of toxic twin flames, perpetually acting out their own spicy "Bridgerton" scenes in public when they're not having glass-throwing, wall-punching brawls. Now imagine living out your days far from home, crammed into the confines of a Starfleet ship for years upon end, with such a couple. Such is the fate of any "Star Trek" officers unfortunate enough to find themselves serving alongside some of the franchise's worst pairings.

When you're trapped on a starship with a relatively small crew and nary a Tinder or Grindr in sight, just about everyone hooks up with everyone else at some point, do-si-do-ing their way through the decks in a game of romantic musical chairs. Between the fresh meat each new mission brings and the quasi-incestuous churn of a ship's dating pool, "Star Trek" ships tend to spawn new couples like fresh tribbles. Some pairings are perfectly lovely, from the will-they-won't-they dynamic of outstanding "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" characters Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) and "simple tailor" Elim Garak (Andrew Robinson), to the slow-burning flame of relationship goals imzadis Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) and William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes). 

But some "Star Trek" couples are straight from the darkest recesses of Gre'thor. One "The Next Generation"-era fan opined on Reddit, "No Trek writer has had any idea how to write a convincing relationship. They're all clearly the best a bunch of middle-aged men in the 1990s could manage." Raise a prune juice to the brokenhearted as we rank the worst "Star Trek" couples from cringe-inducing to absolute nightmare fuel.

In the world of Star Trek, just about everybody hooks up — even the robots, holograms, and tightly-wound Shakespeare-quoting captains. So of course it makes sense that even the former Borg had to get a turn at the Voyager dating pool. But of all the eligible bachelors "Star Trek: Voyager" writers could have paired Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) with, many "Trek" fans feel that Chakotay (Robert Beltran) was the worst possible choice.

The perplexing linkup was first teased in the episode "Human Error," developing more through "Natural Law," just a few episodes from the series finale. Narrowly surviving a shuttlecraft accident en route to a Warp Field Dynamics conference, Chakotay and Seven find themselves stranded in a jungle inhabited by the indigenous Ventu population. Living among the Ventu while nursing Chakotay's injuries, the pair end up growing closer, developing a relationship that will eventually leave Chakotay broken-hearted after her alt-timeline death in the series-ender "Endgame."

Other than that relatively cheap payoff in the finale, the relationship adds absolutely nothing to the series. Moreover, there's zero chemistry between the characters, especially when compared with their other romantic options. For most of the series, Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and Chakotay seemed like the obvious choice as a mature pairing who challenged each other. Sure, he was her second officer, but that was reworkable. As one fan mused on Reddit, "Chakotay could have resigned and we get two for one. A decent romance and less Chakotay." And their pairing couldn't be worse than Chakotay hooking up with an emotionally vulnerable lower ranking Starfleet officer. Likewise, Seven had nothing but crackling chemistry with the Emergency Medical Hologram (Robert Picardo) in comparison to the flat soda vibes of her very forced romance with Chakotay.

At some point about halfway through the writing of the show's final season, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" writer Brannon Braga thought it would be a cool idea to have esteemed ship's doctor hooking up with an ectoplasm-green space ghost that lives in a candle and just happens to be her own grandma's sloppy seconds. More specifically, he's the sloppy seconds of every female grandma in her line, passed down for generations like a cigar box full of costume jewelry. As the Dancing Doctor writhes in ecstasy, overcome by her grandma's ghost boyfriend's hanky panky talents, the cringe is so palpable it feels like it will manifest into a living green organism all its own.

Crusher's inherited entity boyfriend, the plasma candle-dwelling Ronin (Duncan Regehr), wastes no time seducing the next branch of her family tree at her grandmother's funeral. But far from a dream lover benevolently handing out vitamin D, Ronin is literally predating the women in Crusher's family line, isolating them from others as he uses their molecular composition to maintain a physical form.

Set in a colony meant to feel just like old Scotland, the episode is an unintentionally hilarious "Star Trek" fever dream from start to finish, from Troi and Crusher gabbing about boys in sexy space Jazzercise clothes to the resurrection of Beverly's zombie grandma. The end result left many fans scratching their heads over how it was ever greenlit. Posting in the r/startrek thread, "The cringiest Star Trek relationships?," one Reddit user confessed, "'I was reading a particularly erotic chapter of my grandmother's journal' legit almost made me do a spit take the first time I heard it."

If Crusher-Ghost Candle is cringey and Chakotay-Seven is yawn-inducing, the unholy union of Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo) and Kai Winn (Louise Fletcher) in "Deep Space 9" elicits little more than disgust. Both figures are almost unflinchingly evil Star Trek villains. In "Waltz," Benjamin Sisko opines, "Everything seems to be a shade of gray. And then you spend some time with a man like Dukat, and you realize that there is such a thing as truly evil." Likewise, Winn is an unabashedly dark-hearted religious Vedek who is capable of just about anything as a means to her ends, with her long list of misdeeds ranging from assassination attempts to a school bombing. When they start to vibe in the Season 7 episode "'Til Death Do Us Part," it's positively nausea-inducing.

The episode sees the Cardassian Dukat undergo a good old-fashioned "Star Trek" facelift to transform him into a Bajoran so he can manipulate her. Adopting the alias Anjohl Tennan, a purported Bajoran farmer, Dukat convinces Winn he was sent by the Prophets. After worming his way into her affections, the two carry on until things come to a head in the series finale "What You Leave Behind," and Dukat ends up trapped with the Pah-wraiths for all eternity.

Thrown in toward the end of the series, their relationship seemed almost comically evil. For many fans, their union feels like shipping Voldemort with Dolores Umbridge in "Harry Potter." One r/startrek fan called their mutually serpentine love match "quite the disturbing twist," adding, "lying in bed together feeding each other fruit they'd scalped from the starving Bajoran farmers — urgghh."

Individually, they're more or less fine (if annoying). But together, "Voyager" characters Neelix (Ethan Phillips) and Kes (Jennifer Lien) are one of the most universally hated pairings in all of "Star Trek." They first arrive on the Voyager as a two-for-one deal when the pair ask to tag along after helping the crew out in the season premiere "Caretaker." But instead of a couple of extra helping hands, they bring their own reality drama on overdrive, with most of that chaos emanating from Neelix and his generally maladjusted role in their relationship.

And then there's the age gap. Kes is an Ocampan, a race with a nine-year lifespan. She's less than two years old in the Season 2 episode "Elogium," despite having lived aboard Voyager for some time. This suggests Kes certainly wasn't a mature one-year-old in the series pilot — in fact, she was likely a teenager in Ocampan terms. Kes is young, impressionable, relatively sheltered, and in many ways, almost childlike when she meets the worldly Neelix, a Talaxian who is markedly older even after accounting for the exchange rate. But instead of stepping in as a protective uncle figure, Neelix is much more inclined to be her controlling daddy with a capital D. It felt wrong when the show first came out, but it feels much worse with each passing year.

There's really no romance between them aside from Neelix calling Kes pet names and behaving like a jealous fool from time to time. Instead, as one fan wrote on r/startrek, "Neelix was creepy, controlling, jealous, annoying and overbearing. Kes was basically a child ... since Neelix knew her before the show even started it feels like a grooming situation."

The only "Star Trek" relationship that's more cursed than Neelix and Kes is the alternate timeline union of Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) and Linnis Paris (Jessica Collins), the human-Ocampan daughter of Kes and Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill). As the relationship appears only briefly in "Before and After," which finds Kes experiencing her life through a state of temporal flux, it's easy to overlook how deeply depraved this whole situation is. 

Linnis is introduced as the future Kes' now-adult daughter, as it's also revealed Kes has lost almost all of her memory engrams. Future Kes has a grandson named Andrew, the child of Linnis and Tom's longtime bestie Harry Kim. That's all very touching until you really start to think about it. As Tom's best friend, he would have been there for Tom and Kes from the moment they first learned they were expecting, watching her grow up and caring for his best friend's child, just as any uncle would do. Even on a generational ship, it's hard to imagine at one point he thought it was a good idea to start dating her. As one fan contemplated on r/startrek, "I mean what are you even supposed to say...'I know you're my best friend and all but I really want to [hook up with] your daughter'. And what about her? 'Hey Daddy can I [hook up with] your best friend'?" Other fans compared this to the similarly cursed pairing of Jacob and Renesmee in the "Twilight" series.

But then again, as some fans noted, Harry doesn't have a great dating track record to begin with. "First a hologram, then a drone," observed one r/startrek user, with another Reddit user chiming in, "Him and LaForge would have been best pals."