In the Star Trek episode “The Devil In The Dark” a mining operation on some planet is being attacked by a “monster” that has already killed dozens of people, burning them alive so almost nothing remains. The Enterprise arrives to help and the crew investigate. They discover that the so-called monster is a silicon lifeform and it seems to be intelligent. Further investigation and mind-melds reveals that the lifeform is the Horta, and it is a mother, trying to protect its eggs from being destroyed by the mining. There’s no real enemy here, just a misunderstanding to be overcome.

I consider this to be a sort of ideal episode of Star Trek. They come across new life, they are in conflict at first, but over time they realize that the alien isn’t a monster, it is a person of its own kind, with a different way of life. Different, but no less real. It’s about learning to communicate and deescalating a situation from a horror story to a first contact.

And, of course, the alien is not humanoid in appearance at all. Its a rocky blob that we are still asked to care about because it is a living being. Not every episode of Star Trek can be this, but I appreciate every one that is, and always want more.

I’m always kind of surprised the Horta has not become a more iconic part of the franchise. I have read that there have been attempts to show more of them in cameo roles and that there have been Horta in Starfleet in books and stuff, but it has yet to happen on screen. It’s a shame.

That guy over there is Solok. We all know Solok, right? He was a Starfleet Captain during the Dominion War, and he captained a ship made up of a predominantly Vulcan crew. That’s good stuff. Mean ol’ PDR is always going on about how humanity is over-represented in Starfleet and how we need to see more aliens, so PDR must love Solok, right?

I do not. Solok is a jerk.

Solok is a Vulcan-supremacist, who loves picking on humans (especially Ben Sisko) and “proving” how much he, as a Vulcan, is their better. Not just humans, either! When he winds up making an all-Vulcan baseball team to mock Sisko, Solok makes it clear he also thinks it is stupid for Bajorans or Ferengi or Trill or Klingons to deny Vulcan superiority. Solok thinks that he’s Logic’s gift to the universe and loves to tell you about it.

And what really shows what a prick Solok is can only be the design of his team’s uniforms. He decided to decorate them with the Vulcan symbol of the IDIC, an icon used to acknowledge the uncountable ways the universe can present itself, and to appreciate the beauty that results from that. The thing is basically the Vulcan way of saying equality is good, and here we have Solok wearing it while he tries to prove that Vulcans are better than everyone else. It ain’t right.

I fully acknowledge that the humans in Starfleet can be annoying, and I’ve absolutely seen them mock Vulcans in ways that I consider racist. But that doesn’t mean Solok needs to also be a racist.

Hey, you know how the Prophets of Bajor exist outside of time and didn’t understand how linear time works until Benjamin Sisko from Earth taught them? (Let’s ignore for now if Sisko taught them at some point, they should always have known for now.) And you know how they also give visions of the future to their worshippers on Bajor? Well, what if Benjamin Sisko’s physical appearance provided the beauty standards that made Bajorans evolve to look like humans?

Yes, I’m at it again, complaining about how too many aliens in Star Trek look like humans. But this time I’m providing a reason it works. Sure, canonical Star Trek has already provided an excuse (which I do not like) for why so many aliens look like human, and they’ve doubled down on that excuse in recent years. But I find my theory here more interesting in this case.

There already exists a fan theory, one that I had nothing to do with and am only using here as fodder for my own theory, that Cardassians and Bajorans are a single species that has diverged in evolution after some of them made their way to Cardassia from Bajor. I’m not gonna bother looking it up again for this post, but that idea is based on evidence such as Bajorans and Cardassians being able to very easily produce offspring together (many Trek hybrids, notably Vulcan/Human ones, are mentioned to require technological intervention to make a viable offspring, but Bajoran/Cardassian ones have been shown to happen as mistakes). Also, there’s the matter of a natural space-warp thingy that just happens to bring primitive spaceships from Bajor to Cardassia where those ancient Bajoran astronauts (who were active thousands of years before human ones) could have crashed and lived out their days starting a new species in the process. There may be more evidence, I don’t remember, but the gist of it is that the ones who wound up on Cardassia evolved into Cardassians.

What PDR is suggesting is: what if the ones who ended up on Cardassia are actually closer to “original” Bajorans than “modern” Bajorans are? Those on Cardassia are outside of the direct influence of the Prophets, but those back on Bajor are getting the visions from the beings who know the future. And some of those visions are surely of the Emissary, the great religious figure from the future who is none other than Benjamin Sisko. And if even a handful of Bajoran artists get such visions, they’re gonna make art that depicts a figure like Sisko and the people are gonna revere that figure. If that figure looks human, humanoid necks and foreheads and skin tones are gonna be appealing to the people. Natural selection would happen and those traits would be selected more often, passing along genes that hew closer to human traits. In the thousands of years of separation, Cardassians surely evolved to their new world as well (maybe that’s when their love of heat came into it), but I definitely think that Bajorans used to look closer to Cardassians back in the day.

The only flaw with this theory (the ONLY flaw, I will not be accepting any other flaws because as I so confidently say there are no others) is that the visions from the Prophets that we usually see don’t typically involve figures from the distant future, but instead people already known to the person having the vision. But hey, it only takes a couple of visions to a couple of artists over the millennia to start the thing rolling. Once one artist is doing it, others could emulate that one, and before you know it smooth foreheads are just the most popular thing and the divergence has begun.

I’ve said before that I’d like more interestingly-designed aliens in Star Trek and I’m about to do it again.

Early in my days as an uncle I bought many books for the kids. I want them to enjoy books. That included some sort of Alphabet of Star Trek book. It wasn’t a great book. The art is wonderful! Colourful and fun. But the text is boring. They don’t even make the effort to rhyme or anything. It’s certainly not a great introduction to the franchise for children.

But remember, an important thing about me is that I like aliens. That’s a big thing for me. So when I got to the page for letter S, which is about Starfleet Academy, and found this gang of student waiting for me, I was pleased.

Sure, I’ll admit that they aren’t EXTREMELY alien aliens. They basically fall in line with Trek’s preference for humanoids with little difference, but the differences are significantly bigger on these ones than they are on Vulcans or Betazoids or whatever. More eyes. Fewer eyes. Fancy skin tones. Gills. It’s not much, but it’s something (after all, we are meant to understand that these are aliens who can exist easily on Earth and could serve on Federation ships alongside their more well-known species). These ones look like something I’d find in a Space Quest game, which is a compliment for sure (and it would be nice if the franchise had aliens as cool as its parodies).

So obviously, we need to make these aliens canonical to the Star Trek universe. Certainly it’d be harder in live action than on a cartoon, so do it in a cartoon. And you could even staple it to the existing lore to help a sense of verisimilitude. On Deep Space Nine we got a mention of a Doctor Trag’Tok, who had three eyes, but we never saw him. He could easily be the same species as the blue cadet there.

Also, I’d want the two one-eyed cadets to be two examples the same species. There are big differences between them, sure, but not so big as we can find between humans. Let the aliens have some diversity for once.

Now, you might say “PDR, you only want to see these aliens used again because they were in a book you gave to your niblings.” and I would say “Yes, that’s correct. But also, all that stuff about how I want Trek to have better aliens on top of that.”

This one still technically has to do with the depiction of aliens on Star Trek, but it isn’t about my craving for better designs. This one is about places where multiple species of aliens hang out.

Now, I’m not talking about places like Starfleet ships that are 80% human, 15% aliens that look human, and 5% the occasional cool alien. I’m taking about places where humans are strictly in the minority but there is a wide variety of aliens on display, making for an exotic locale. You can usually find these in the forms of shady businesses where a cadet might get stabbed in the heart, bars where greedy business owners illicit deals with shady alien traders, and neighbourhoods where idiot Boimlers can bumble around and not know the right way to deal with the people there. The idea generally is that if you’re in one of these racially-(specially?)-mixed areas, you’re somewhere seedy. I think a lot of it is an attempt to recreate the feel of the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Which, sure, if you want to create a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but the United Federation of Planets is meant to be a near-paradise of dozens of worlds, working together, right?

I admit, we’ve had a few good scenes of aliens in, like, military meetings and stuff (generally in the movies and usually with plenty of humans still there), but apart from that, even Star Trek’s places of mixed species company are seen as bad neighbourhoods where “decent human folk” should fear to tread.

I demand that Star Trek show us some scenes that are as diverse as a Mos Eisley drinking establishment, but are wholesome. Give me an alien crowd in a library or a farmer’s market or something. Show us that aliens can get along without it being a threat.