Celebrate the Feast of Saint Patrick with These Pat-Trek Classics 

Top of the mornin’ to all of ye who will be wearing green this March 17th! As you know, we here at Trek Movie like to mark holidays throughout the year with a collection of recommended episode to help you celebrate. And this year St. Patrick’s Day is no different! So curl up with these classics and your favorite green beverage.


5. Fair Haven (VOY)
How could someone named after a city in France program such a great holoprogram set in Ireland? Well this question, and many more, are answered on the Voyager stand-by. Also features one of Captain Janeway’s best lines, a sentiment we’ve all shared at some point when she falls for a character in the program: “Delete the wife.”

This introduced the Irish home away from home in the Delta Quadrant, which would be revisited later in …

4. Spirit Folk
The crew returns to Fair Haven, where the holocharacters start to suspect all may not be as simple as it seems in their bonny wee village. Note that “Spirit Folk” is one of only two Trek episodes where Star Trek All Access showrunner Bryan Fuller has sole writer credit.

Also Harry almost kisses a cow.

3. The Naked Time (TOS)
Do you need some ideas for a good Irish drinking song? Well look no farther than the 1701’s junior officer Kevin Riley, who – under the influence of the Psi 2000 virus – regales his shipmates by endlessly singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”

2. By Any Other Name (TOS)
OK Scotty is (in case you missed it) Scottish and not Irish and, while those two cultures may seem very similar to outsiders, it would be rude to confuse the two … but this one gets on the list because of the awesome scene where Scotty drinks the alien under the table using green booze.

I mean c’mon. That’s as St. Patrick’s Day as it gets, right?

DISHONORABLE MENTION: Up the Long Ladder (TNG)
So this is a Trek Movie first, but we’d like to award a dishonorable mention to this second season episode which showed TNG wasn’t quite there yet, which features a ghastly Irish immigrant stereotypes that somehow survived to 1989.

Reminds me of that Simpsons where they say that Whacking Day was created as a holiday to beat up the Irish “but twas all in fun.”

NOT MENTIONED: If Wishes Were Horses (DS9)
Now you might think that we’d add this DS9 outing to our list, in that it features Chief O’Brien meeting the wee Rumpelstiltskin, who the trailer blandly (and somewhat inaccurately) describes as “the ultimate enemy.”

Which of course… he isn’t. He’s also not an Irish leprechaun, but rather Rumpelstiltskin is a German dwarf. Alas!

1. The Wounded (TNG)
A dramatically more serious entry than anything else on the list, this fourth season TNG episode is the one that really established Miles O’Brien as a character who could carry an episode – and ultimately inspired DS9. The climax of the episode features O’Brien and his erstwhile captain singing the Irish war ballad “The Minstrel Boy.”

Also earlier in the episode said captain accused O’Brien of getting a silver tongue by kissing the Blarney Stone. And if that tradition has survived to the 24th Century, so too will St. Patrick’s Day!