What an Idiot!/Live-Action TV/Star Trek

Examples of What an Idiot! in Star Trek include:

Star Trek: The Original Series

In the final episode, kooky Janice Lester switches bodies with Captain Kirk so she can stop being a woman and become a Starfleet Commander.
You'd Expect: She would be very careful not to do anything that would give her away, although she seems fairly confident that she can pull it off.
Instead: She makes official log entries as the captain, where she actually brags about how she's duping everyone. There is absolutely no good reason for her to do this. Only the fact that she's essentially insane can excuse her.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

In "Datalore", the Enterprise happens to find Lore, an identical twin robot of Data. At one point, when Data and Lore are alone, Lore reveals himself to be an Evil Twin by incapacitating Data, then claims that he is Data and that Lore attacked him, and he disabled Lore in response.
You'd think: That the very blatantly obvious fact that the two are identical would make Picard suspicious, and he would ask Lore something only Data would know to find out if he was really Data or not. Even if he didn't bother with any of that, you'd think he'd at least be sure to keep a careful eye on Lore and take any advice from him with a grain of salt, just in case.
Instead: Picard implicitly trusts Lore, believing he's Data, even when he does things that Data wouldn't do. Even worse, Wesley explicitly tries to point out the possibility to Picard, and Picard for some reason ignores him. Sure, he's a Creator's Pet, but that does mean he has a tendency to be right. The only reason everyone on the Enterprise didn't die due to Picard's appalling stupidity is that Wesley goes against orders and manages to save the day. Just for the record, Kirk would never have made that mistake.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The uber-cadet group Red Squad gets to go on a training mission in a spiffy new Defiant-class vessel. Halfway through, a Dominion attack kills all the senior staff, so the cadets are all that's left.
You'd expect: They fly home. They were not sent out as a warship. They're on a training mission. It's obviously over. They don't even have the expertise to make the ship work to its full potential.
Instead: The head cadet, having been made acting captain before the last senior officer died, refuses to come home. Instead, he starts running missions against the Dominion, getting the orders from people who think the qualified officers are still running the show. To his credit, he manages to live a while, but eventually gets almost all of them killed in a David vs. Goliath scenario.
The above leads into a smaller What an Idiot! moment for Nog, who finds himself aboard this very ship. Nog joined Starfleet. Unlike these idiot cadets, he's actually made it through the academy and outranks them all. Moreover, he's got a civilian dependent (his best friend Jake) to look after. On top of that, he has proof the "captain" isn't fit to command despite all the other reasons he shouldn't be flying the ship (see above).
You'd expect: Nog put his freaking foot down and make these people go home. He's got Jake to look out for and his own missions to deal with.
Instead: He gets drafted, more or less, and ends up a part of said mission which sees everyone else killed. Jake was even imprisoned during the whole affair. Nog barely makes it out with Jake and a random cadet. Hindsight is 20/20 as he acknowledges that the lead cadet was a bad captain, which he had already seen signs of well before putting himself in the situation.
In "One Little Ship", a new generation of Jem'Hadar soldiers, the Alphas, manage to take the Defiant. One of the older, Gamma quadrant soldiers serving as Second suggests they put the crew to death immediately, lest they try to take the ship back.
You'd Expect: The Alpha First listen. After all, the Gamma has probably done this before.
Instead: The First not only ignores his Second's suggestions, but pretty much lets the crew work on their own schedule. The Second makes every effort to cover for his superior's idiocy, but ultimately fails. If not for a timely rescue by Dax in a miniaturized runabout, the ship would have blown up the second it went to warp because the crew sabotaged it.
In the two-parter "In Purgatory's Shadow"/"By Inferno's Light", Garak and Worf are captured in a runabout and taken to an asteroid prison.
You'd Expect: Their ship be impounded, disassembled, or outright destroyed.
Instead: The ship is left, unguarded and completely active, in transporter range of the asteroid with no other ships in the vicinity. Escape is as simple as calling the runabout and having it beam them to safety.
** For Added Stupidity: This was actually brought up in a later episode when Sloane is auditioning Bashir for Section 31, which means, either then or in hindsight, even the writers knew it was contrived.

Star Trek: Voyager

An earlier episode of The Next Generation had a wormhole with a stable entry point on one side, and a constantly jumping exit point on the other. Voyager finds this wormhole during the second season. They also find the Ferengi that were stranded in the Delta Quadrant, who have set themselves up as gods among a bronze-age people.
You'd Expect: That they would make a beeline for the wormhole, or at least grab the Ferengi first and then hightail it back to the Alpha Quadrant, letting 5 or 6 generations of the bronze-age people undo all the damage that was done.
Instead: They try to fix all the meddling of the Ferengi, who escape and even destroy the Wormhole.
Future Janeway plans to negate her own timeline by helping Voyager get back much earlier than intended. She'll have to break a lot of rules to accomplish her plan, though.
You'd Expect: That any of the people who indirectly/directly help her mission (Barclay, Miral Paris, Harry Kim) would have gotten some sense and realized that Janeway would erase the past twenty-plus years of their lives if they allowed her to continue through with her plan.
Instead: Barclay and Miral unquestionably go along with the plan (Miral even tests the device to make sure it works!), and even Harry Kim is somehow swayed after Janeway talks to him. Basically, everyone in the future has to act like an idiot in order for Janeway's plan to work.
Weighing Janeway's need to get back home ASAP with the lives Voyager could have potentially saved over the next several years makes her choices seem more suspect. Janeway is told point blank by her future counterpart that, over the next two decades, she'll only lose 26 crew members (which is an average of about 1 per year), but that Voyager will have met and helped countless races all the way to the Alpha Quadrant. Either way, though, Tuvok will still end up going insane - no one can do anything about that.
You'd Expect: That, knowing this information, Janeway could have come back home as a legend and still kept Chakotay and Seven alive by not assigning them to away missions. Plus, the ship now has advanced Borg armor that would repel most enemy attacks.
Instead: She (with the help of her counterpart) destroys a Transwarp Hub and sails right on home, content in the knowledge that she's saved a few more crewmembers at the cost of thousands - if not tens of thousands - of people who would potentially benefit from Voyager's assistance. Not to mention all the technology and information they would pick up along the way.
In the episode "Timeless", Harry Kim and Tom Paris manage to build a slipstream drive like the one on the alien ship from "Hope and Fear". Problem is, it destabilizes after a few minutes, so they have to make constant course corrections. Harry tries but can't keep up, killing the entire crew except himself and Chakotay. A future version of Harry Kim rewrites the past so that the ship drops out of transwarp after two or three minutes in its trial run, so that it doesn't crash and kill the crew.
You'd Expect: Harry to realize the technology works in short intervals, and use it to "puddle-jump" the ship all the way to Earth. After all, if you have a proven window of stability, then you can just stop before passing that window. The crew (including Harry) know this fact for certain, and discuss it at length.
Instead: Janeway decides the technology is too dangerous and orders it dismantled, while being disappointed that their experiment didn't work. But it did work! You just cut ten years off your journey, and were seconds away from making it back home!!!
"Innocence": The crew finds a planet were the people claim the "children" they have are aging backwards and so they want them back.
You'd Expect them to be suspicious after the fact the aliens tried to kill them at every turn, refused to cooperate and provide no proof.
Instead they hand them over.
For Added Stupidity This already happened to the Feds... and it turned out to be an intelligence test (TAS novel).
In "Someone to Watch Over Me", the Doctor and Paris have a bet going to see if he can teach Seven how to go on a date without being her usual overbearing self. After an early attempt is messed up by Seven tearing the guy's ligament during a dance, the Doctor takes her himself for the "final exam", so to speak, which is a dinner being held for an alien ambassador. The Doctor's teachings work, and Seven does splendidly.
You'd Expect Paris to wait until after the dinner to settle their bet.
Instead He does so when Seven is literally standing right next to him, forcing the Doc to admit to betting on her performance. She is righteously pissed, and storms out.
For Added Stupidity This can't even be excused as Paris being vindictive about losing. He seems to have completely forgotten Seven was standing there, as he hastily tries to take responsibility when she gets mad about it.

Star Trek: Enterprise

The Xindi in their arc of season 3. They hate humans, they are building an Earthshattering Kaboom gun. Now at this point they have five major advantages: Their enemy has no clue they exist, they have four hundred years to refine their prototype, they have allies who give them technology and can see the future, they live in a remote and inaccessible part of space, and they can travel nigh-instantaneously across the universe. Now they complete a Small Country Shattering Kaboom prototype of their weapon, and...
You'd Expect: They test it on some out of the way moon or planet no one will miss. Then they use the data from that test to refine their final version, teleport it over to Earth, and destroy the planet with one shot.
Instead: They test the prototype on Earth itself. Earth immediately sends The Enterprise after them, which: finds them, destroys their next prototype, convinces them not to blow up Earth, and murders their future-seeing allies. Good job, Xindi! You failed only because of your own stupidity.
- From "The Expanse", in that arc:
  - Duras waits until Enterprise reaches the solar system until he attacks, allowing Starfleet to quickly deploy reinforcements and drive him off.
  - Starfleet didn't seem to mobilize its Solar System Defense Forces until after the weapon was destroyed! The twenty or so ships we saw welcoming Enterprise back would have been helpful against the Xindi weapon and the one ship escorting it!

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