Creepypasta stories

The lost episode of Star Trek

This is difficult to talk about, but confession is good for the soul apparently, and I've kept this secret for twenty years. For all of that time I've been itching to tell what happened on that night back in 1996; but I'm been afraid that people would assume that I was insane; or worse, was joking.

After I graduated from high school in 1996, my dad got a job in Toronto. Since I hadn't gotten into a decent school, I was stuck in junior college exile for a year, and I moved with my parents.

One of the few American TV channels we got in Toronto was Fox-29, out of Buffalo. I was pretty fond of this channel because of the shows they would show really late at night. For instance, on Saturday morning at 3 A.M. they would show reruns of the underrated 90s version of The Untouchables with Tom Amandes and William Forsythe. They also ran reruns of the original Star Trek series at 4 A.M. on weekdays.

It had been a very long time since I'd seen an episode of the original Star Trek. I'd grown up in Madison, and Channel 3, the local CBS affiliate, used to run the reruns at midnight during the week. However around 1990 or so they replaced the old series reruns with reruns of The Next Generation. However by that time I'd seen pretty much every episode of the original series, though once in a while I'd come across an episode I missed. (For instance, I'd never seen Dagger of The Mind, so I was one of the few people not in the know when South Park did a parody of it a few years later.) So I was not surprised, but pleased when I realized that the episode I was watching that night in November, 1996 wasn't one I'd seen before.

It started out with the Captain's Log noting that the Enterprise was beginning a survey of space that had recently been ceded to the Federation by the Romulan Empire. There was an exposition-filled scene in the conference room where Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty discussed how a recent revision of the treaty between the Federation and Romulus had resulted in a previously human-controlled area of space being given back to the Federation. Spock discussed the planet they're headed towards, which had a human colony numbering 2 million before the area had been given to the Romulans in the original peace treaty. The "teaser" ends as Kirk says that they should be careful; all of the colonized planets in this area of space had been handed over with the human colonies intact. The slow ships they had back during the handover wouldn't allow them to evacuate the colonies before the treaty went into effect; so the Federation abandoned them. (I remember this vividly because I thought that this is where the TNG/DS9 writers got the idea for the Maquis.) Therefore it's quite possible that people in the colony might be hostile towards them.

It was at this point that I started to notice strange things. The opening credits didn't contain Kirk's "Space, the final frontier" narration. This wasn't all that unusual, since some of the very early episodes I'd seen on videotape had this version of the credits. But what did seem strange was I'd noticed that the uniforms and sets all looked like they did during the later episodes, and not the early episodes where they still had leftovers from original pilot (The Cage).

I was taking a leak during the first commercial break, and when I got back the first act had already started, so I missed the episode title. However, there was a "special appearance by" credit for an actress called Jane Winton.

Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and a redshirt beamed down outside of the location of the largest settlement on the planet. I noticed that the redshirt sort of looked like me, but he had a flat-top haircut, and was a great deal thinner.

Kirk and the rest walk into the settlement and find that it has been abandoned. They find several buildings which have been completely destroyed. Scotty takes a reading on one of the burned down buildings, and says that it looks like it was destroyed by a disruptor.

It was around this time that I started noticing another weird thing about the episode. The red-shirt didn't seem to have any connection to what was going on; I noticed in medium shots when he was out-of-focus he could be seen moving around in the background with some purpose, but in shots where we could clearly see his hands, he doesn't have his tricorder or phaser out. In another scene as Kirk and Scotty are talking, he looks directly at the camera for several seconds before walking off.