Intriguing Star Trek: TNG episode was banned despite an overarching multiple-episode plot (and the visuals were to blame)

Whereas censorship has often come to dictate present day media, one wouldn't usually associate it with a legacy show such as Star Trek: The Next Generation. For all it's worth, Star Trek has been much acclaimed as a family show that one can watch with one's family members without reservation. Regardless of this, history tells us that there was indeed on Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that was deemed unfit for broadcast by the BBC.

The episode in question was the twenty-fifth entry from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, titled Conspiracy, and featured a thrilling mystery of parasitic aliens controlling numerous officers of the Starfleet.

Back then the sole broadcasting network that had the rights to exhibit the show was BBC in the UK and the network considered Conspiracy unfit for airing. The primary reason behind this was one particular scene in the episode featuring Lt. Commander Dexter Remmick's head violently blowing up.

Here's everything that we know.

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Star Trek: What was Conspiracy all about?

On the surface level, Conspiracy didn't feature much that would warrant BBC to ultimately ban the episode. It featured a storyline that could have been potentially stretched across multiple episodes. The premise was taken up from the nineteenth episode of the same season titled Coming of Age, which consisted of a high-level Starfleet conspiracy.

The plot of the Star Trek episode featured Captain Picard making an astounding discovery. Along with Commander William Riker and Dr. Beverly Crusher, Picard makes the shocking revelation that more than one high-ranking Starfleet officer was being controlled by parasitic aliens. They eventually come to know that Lt. Commander Dexter Remmick is functioning as the head of the parasites and settle upon confronting him.

The said confrontation soon turns violent, with the trio firing their tasers at Remmick. What followed next was deemed to be nightmare fuel for its time. Remmick's head exploded violently, scattering blood and gore everywhere, after being tased. Following this, a huge parasite creeped out of Remmick's stomach.

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Conspiracy was totally banned by the BBC

The gore and the violence mentioned above might be seen as nothing out of the ordinary in the present times. Yet for the BBC executives back then, this proved to be quite gruesome and they promptly banned Conspiracy. It was also revealed on Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Continuing Mission, A Tenth Anniversary Tribute that producers, Peter Lauritson and Rick Berman shared the BBC's belief that the episode was too gory to be aired on national television.

To determine whether the episode would be accessible to children, both the producers decided to have a trial. For this purpose, they approached Special Effects Supervisor, Dan Curry, who had a six-year-old son at the time of trial. After watching the entire episode, the child is quoted to have said the following:

"I really liked the part where the guy's head blew up! You know, you could make a Remmick action figure where if you pressed the button, his head blows up!"

Therefore this particular storyline featuring parasites caused such a strong reaction despite making allusions, they have never again been featured in the canon of the show. Nevertheless, there have been quite a few Star Trek tie-in novels that took up his idea.

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Brannon Braga speaks on the idea of making The Next Generation scarier

Brannon Braga was a writer on TNG who is credited with bringing in a lot of The Twilight Zone-like scary elements in the narrative storytelling of the show. In a 2017 interview with TrekMovie.com, Braga spoke at length about his journey as a writer on the show. When asked if injecting horror was a conscious effort on his part, Braga replied:

"It wasn’t a conscience thing to infuse Star Trek with such things, but I did recognize there is breadth of storytelling that would allow for such things. They were just the kind of stories I felt comfortable telling. I could never have written a Klingon two-parter. There are episodes that just aren’t in my DNA. And yeah, I am a horror fan. I saw room for terror on the show. There are scary things out there in deep space. And yes, my favorite show of all time is The Twilight Zone, and some of those shows had definitely been called Twilight Zone­-esque and that is a fair comparison. Not that I am saying they are as good, but it was what I was aspiring to."

He further added:

"I also had a keen interest in time travel, which I am pretty sure was not allowed on the show. Gene didn’t like time travel, because it strained credulity. I kind of skirted that issue by doing the time loop episode (“Cause and Effect”) so it isn’t really time travel, but it is a time travel episode…I think it is less important that it was time travel and more important that it was highly experimental. Next Generation, for its day, did some crazy things pretty effectively. With things like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, the time loop thing has been done, but at the time of “Cause and Effect” it was new. People were calling their televisions stations to say something was wrong with the broadcast, and that is when you have done something interesting."

He was also asked about his experience of working with producers Rick Berman and Michael Piller, and whether it was difficult getting the scary stuff past them. Braga commented:

"No, never once. From my recollection. Remember, I may have come up with an initial idea or wrote the story, but when it came down to breaking the stories scene by scene, we did it together. Everyone was part of the process. I really value in retrospect doing that show because, to quote Captain Picard, “The sky was the limit.” As long as you can executive it deftly."

Star Trek: The Next Generation is exclusively available on Netflix.