The Worst Things Captain Kirk Has Ever Done

While we only ever got to see three years of his tenure as the commanding officer of the Enterprise on the original TV show, there are several references made to Captain James Tiberisu Kirk's long and notable history with Starfleet throughout the series. One of the most interesting comes in season 1's "The Conscience of the King," where we find out that years before he had his own command, he was one of nine eyewitnesses to the massacre of over 4,000 colonists by their governor, Kodos. 

The good news is that Kodos was believed to have died during the altercation that followed. The bad news is that he actually didn't die at all and instead went into hiding, becoming a famous Shakespearean actor whose performance of Macbeth was renowned throughout the galaxy. That's not exactly a low profile, so he probably shouldn't have been surprised when Kirk showed up during one of his performances after being tipped off by someone else who'd been present for the massacre — and who was murdered shortly thereafter, a fate suffered by most of the other witnesses — that Kodos was still alive. So, what does Kirk do with the information that this devious psychopath with a body count of at least 4,007 is still out there and may still be actively murdering? 

He invites him onto the Enterprise. You know, where all of his coworkers and friends live, including one of the other witnesses? Shockingly, this directly results in two more attempted murders and one that actually happens when Kodos himself is phasered to death by his own daughter on stage in front of an audience. The big twist? Kodos wasn't the one murdering the witnesses. It was his daughter doing that so that he'd never be caught. Kirk, by the way, also invited her onto the Enterprise, and of course tried to seduce her while investigating her dad for mass murder. That might not be as morally awful as some of the other things Kirk has done, but it's definitely very weird.

If there's one thing Star Trek loves, it's evil duplicates. The introduction of the Mirror Universe in the original series is arguably the show's most significant contribution to the language of pop culture — especially in the way that Spock's infamous goatee became a visual signifier of an evil twin —  and the trend continued as the franchise revisited it time and time again. Plus, we got Data's bad brother Lore and Riker's transporter malfunction twin on The Next Generation, and while the latter wasn't necessarily "evil" in that first appearance, he did show up on Deep Space Nine to steal a spaceship and use it in a terrorist attack. 

Before the Mirror Universe, however, Kirk had another experience in doubled troubles when a transporter accident — lot of those going around — split him into two different Kirks. Naturally, one was good and one was evil, and when we say "evil," we mean it. Bad Kirk sexually assaults Yeoman Janice Rand in a scene that's still genuinely harrowing and upsetting to watch over 50 years later, and she only escapes when she scratches his face, giving the audience a convenient way to tell them apart. It is, on a very visceral level, the worst thing viewers ever saw Kirk do, and it's worth remembering that this wasn't a Mirror Universe version. This was a part of the real Kirk, a terrible piece of his personality that was always in there, and would be once it was added back to the whole, which is a very disturbing plot point to contemplate.

Here's the thing, though: the other half, Good Kirk? He also sucked, just in a completely different way. He wasn't running around trying to force himself on members of the crew, but he was weak-willed, indecisive, and easily manipulated. Bad Kirk even takes advantage of his counterpart's spineless nature to escape and attempt to assault Rand again. The worst part? The entire point of the episode is that Kirk actually needs both sucky halves of his personality to function as a human being, with McCoy even saying that Bad Kirk isn't actually bad, "just... human." That's a rough diagnosis, doc. 

"The Trouble with Tribbles" is remembered as one of the most fun episodes of Star Trek, and for good reason. It introduces the iconic furballs and their tendency to breed exponentially, gives viewers the best bit of physical comedy in the show's entire 79-episode run when Kirk is buried in a pile of them, and even manages to tie its goofy plot in to the oh so serious looming threat of war with the Klingons. It's a fun, lighthearted romp that everyone can enjoy.

Unless you start thinking about what happens after the credits roll, that is. In order to rid the Enterprise of its Tribble problem, Kirk and his crew beam them over to a departing Klingon ship. Considering that there's a very real (if comedic) threat to the Enterprise from the Tribbles overbreeding and gorging themselves on both the ship's stores and an entire planet's food supply, this act is essentially dooming the Klingons and the Tribbles aboard their ship. The Tribbles are said in the episode to reproduce so prodigiously that a single Tribble can potentially have 100,000 descendants in about two days, so there's no way the Klingons' food supply is going to survive more than a few minutes. Think about it for even a second, and you'll come to the same grisly conclusion we did: either the Tribbles eat the Klingons, or the other way around. 

This isn't just conjecture, either. In an episode of Deep Space Nine, which takes place about a century after "The Trouble with Tribbles," there's a mention of "The Great Tribble Hunt," in which the Klingon Empire eradicated the entire species from the galaxy after they became an ecological threat of cosmic proportions. It's unclear whether outer space is subject to the Geneva Conventions, but that kind of devastating biological warfare should probably be brought up at Kirk's next evaluation.

There's really a litany of Kirk's mistakes leading to the events of Star Trek II, including the first of the movie's big reveals: David Marcus, Kirk's long-forgotten son, who never knew his father, since Kirk decided to boldly go away from any parental responsibilities.

To be entirely fair to Jim T., we learn in the movie that his absence from David's life came at the request of David's mother, Carol. She recognized that both she and Kirk were devoted their careers, and he wasn't about to give up command of a starship on a mission to explore the final frontier, and the accompanying endless stream of sexy robots and half-naked green ladies that went along with it. Rather than co-parenting across parsecs, she told Kirk that she wanted to raise David alone, presumably because being a single mom is a little easier in the 23rd century. With that, Kirk happily went back to the Enterprise, without ever mentioning that he had at least one kid out there. Also, to his credit, once he reconnects with his adult son, Kirk does make an effort. That's something, even if it leads to the most awkward hug of all time.

Okay, now let's stop being fair and get into some real talk. It's totally fine to prefer cruising around the galaxy to being a stay-at-home dad, but if that's your deal, then maybe don't have a kid. We have to assume that by 2250 CE, birth control will have gotten to the point that parenting is purely optional. Or, if you do have a child and you think you might wind up getting real grumpy about it a few years down the line, maybe make the slightest effort to be present in their life rather than just agreeing that your job is way more important and bailing to the beta quadrant. Oh well, what's the worst that could happen? It's not like David's going to grow up wanting to prove something to his absent father and wind up getting stabbed in the chest while trying to wrestle Klingons, right? Right. 

The 2009 Star Trek film rebooted the franchise by shifting everything into an alternate timeline, letting the franchise revisit the characters of the original series while telling new stories that weren't set in stone by the future history of The Next Generation. While most of the characters are the same, there are some huge differences in how the events play out — the planet Vulcan is destroyed, for example, and rather than the militaristic aesthetic of the original Enterprise, everything in the new timeline looks like it's happening in an Apple Store.

Some things, however, are so deeply ingrained in the universe that they persist throughout the divisions between realities, and one of them is the fact that Jim Kirk is a horny sex creep. The rebooted movies present him as a habitual womanizer who can't even be bothered to remember the names of the people he's sleeping with, which actually is a big change. Say what you will about Original Kirk space-seeding his way across the galaxy, but he never seemed like he was emotionally detached. 

The worst example comes in Star Trek Beyond, when he meets that timeline's version of Carol Marcus. She asks him to turn around so that she can strip out of her uniform for some reason, only for him to start leering at her over his shoulder after taking a peek. Again, in fairness, he doesn't know she's stripping to her Starfleet skivvies when his curiosity initially gets the better of him, but once he does know, he definitely doesn't look away until she starts to get miffed. That long moment spent ogling her could probably be chalked up to surprise... if he wasn't hitting on her a few seconds before, despite being her superior officer. Who's in charge of HR on the Enterprise these days?