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.

In one of my previous Trek Thoughts posts I mentioned that I was trying to say something about Bolians, but I got off track. And considering all my Trek Thoughts posts since have also NOT been about Bolians, I guess I never got that train of thought back on track. Well, I have a lot of thoughts about Bolians, so maybe I can just say a bunch of those things and probably cover what I wanted to say.

Of the many species we see in Starfleet, Bolians are one of the most common and most recognizable. They’re always turning up in crowd scenes in Federation space. We’ve seen them in civilian roles on starships and space stations all the way up to being Captains and Admirals. I’ve not crunched the actual numbers, but I expect that if we looked into it, we may have seen more Bolians in Starfleet than Andorians.

So here’s some stuff about Bolians:

• I Was Disappointed That Bolians Were Not A Federation Founding Species: They have, I believe, appeared in most of the shows in the Star Trek franchise since The Next Generation, meaning they missed out on TOS and TAS, but also the key one for point, Enterprise, the show that depicted the founding of the Federation. There we saw that that the founding races of the Federation were Vulcans, Andorians, Humans, and Tellarites. All species that have been shown to be all over Starfleet’s upper ranks in similar proportion to Bolians (except those humans, who really crowd out the other species). IF they were taking a look at the demographics that made up Starfleet and saying the most popular ones are the founding ones, Bolians should have made the list. I have to assume it’s just the fact that no Bolians appeared in TOS or TAS that held them back. And that’s a shame. For what it’s worth, we’ve seen Bolians on Strange New Worlds, so we know they were around back in those days. If they were founders, I guess maybe they were early joiners. Or did they join… at all???
• Are Bolians Even A Federation Species?: As far as I can remember, we’ve never been told outright that Bolians are a member species of the Federation. But that’s the thing: in spite of the way it is often spoken about, including by me a mere sentence ago, the Federation is not actually made up of member species, it is made up of member planets. It could very well be that the Bolian homeworld –without looking it up, I want to say Bolius, but the fact I don’t know for sure says something of the predicament here– it could be that that homeworld is NOT actually a member of the Federation, but that there are simply enough other Bolian worlds that one of them is a member. Or, there could be Bolian immigrant populations in other Federation worlds (an idea I like, actually). Going solely from my memory, one bit of evidence that they not members would be the existence of a prominent bank on their homeworld that I think someone on DS9 robbed one time or something? The Federation is famously a post-currency organization, so why would they need a bank? Well, plenty of reasons. They have to deal with other galactic interests, some who do have currencies. And also there’s the existence of things like safe-deposit boxes. Basically what I’m saying is that that could be evidence, but isn’t necessarily. We also know that when a Bolain on Lower Decks was promoted to captain of a ship and arrange an all-Bolian bridge crew (pictured), this was seen as a novelty, perhaps even progressive. Is that a sign of a non-Federation species finally being well represented, or is it just that ANY non-human species making it big in Starfleet is big news? Again, I could see either case. Anyway, there probably is a solid answer on Memory Alpha, but that isn’t what this is about.
• I Think Bolians Like Wigs: Bolians are almost always depicted as being hairless. ALMOST always. And personally I think they are hairless, I think that they just have things that are like wigs that they wear for fashion reasons. I mean, why wouldn’t they? If humans can shave their hair or wear fur coats, there’s bound to be aliens who do similar things from different angles.

Those are my thoughts on Bolians. Thank you. Have a nice day.

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.”

Hey, Star Trek: Discovery ended. Why not do a post about that, PDR? Okay, I will! It’s time I pulled Discovery aside and looked deep into its eyes and gave a teary-eyed speech about how much I believe in it.

Discovery is, by no means, my favourite Star Trek. I don’t think I was the target audience. Discovery came after an era of relative Treklessness and I’m certain the goal was to appeal to a new generation of fans. Well, the problem is that I generally have different tastes from what appeals to new audiences. For example, I am on the record as thinking that almost all of our fiction these days is at least 20% too action-packed. Discovery was too action-packed.

I don’t want to be fully negative about the show, though. Sure it did a lot of things I don’t approve of. I didn’t like the way it felt the need to tie itself so directly to old Star Trek characters like Spock. First of all, I feel like that makes the universe feel smaller, but also I don’t understand why you’d do something like that when you’re trying to make an accessible new show. I also didn’t care for the show’s reliance on Trek concepts that generally I’ve had enough of, like Section 31 and the Mirror Universe. Not only was the show not giving me anything new, it was the stuff I enjoyed least?

But really, I don’t want to be so negative. Sure it had a real bad time with introducing a supporting cast. I genuinely believe it didn’t intend for characters like Detmer, Owo, Rhys, et al to matter. I think they had them as featured extras and then got stuck with them. We’d occasionally get one of them stepping up to give a whole paragraph about their backstory or personality. I noted it when Airiam was killed and we were supposed to care as if any of the characters mourning had ever been anything but props prior to that point. It got better, though. I came to kinda like those characters after all.

Heck, let me just work out some more of my negativity: Discovery more serialized than I like out of a show, especially early on. I can’t imagine myself ever sitting down to watch season one or two in full casually. I think an idea Star Trek is one where you can go back and watch a single episode and get a full story. And then! The later seasons still had overall plots, but presented in largely episodic chunks. I liked that, though it didn’t help their case that the last season is basically a sequel to The Chase which felt like a personal sleight against me. ALSO it bugged me how nobody seemed to like to sit down on the show. I felt like most of the big discussions were people standing in a circle, tensions roiling. I felt like this was a way to “improve” on the Next Generation-style conference room scenes. But I like those. People on Discovery should have demanded chairs.

Okay, but Discovery did have good stuff. First and foremost: it brought Star Trek back to me. Also, I liked some of the cast. Saru, for example. Which reminds me: cool aliens! The show had some! Most were relegated to background extras, which is fine by me, but they also gave us a closer look at Saurians with Linus. And the Osnullus (pictured)! They appealed greatly to my desire to see a more visually diverse Starfleet. I hope we’ve not seen the last of them with the end of this show. Oh, and I’m also glad to hear that we’ve not seen the last of the extra-distant future setting. I don’t want them to abandon that era just to set shows at a time when they can pull in characters from other shows. Again, that would make the universe feel small.

Anyway, I will watch any Star Trek show. That’s a fact. The question is, would I have watched Discovery if it had been a show of equal quality but NOT a Star Trek? I don’t know. But even if I didn’t, I would have seen it as a show with some neat ideas.

Oh and— wait— did the finale reveal casually that Book is a beekeeper?

I’m one of those Star Trek fans who doesn’t think the United Federation of Planets is a perfect utopia (you can often recognize us by noting that we think Deep Space Nine the best show). It is a governmental system with a lot of flaws. But I’ll say this: it sure seem pretty darn close. So much so that, were I a human born into that society, I sure wouldn’t leave. And yet we see humans on Star Trek all the time who seem to prefer to leave the relative paradise of the Federation to just go elsewhere.

A lot of the time these unaffiliated humans seem to just be scoundrels who want to go to places where they can scheme and profit. Maybe they just feel like the “rules” in the Federation don’t give them room for that. We’ve seen that kind of personality exist within the Federation (Richard Bashir comes to mind), but if that’s how you get your jollies, certainly leaving the Federation may be your only choice. And then I suppose there’s some amount of people who have a kind of wanderlust, but also an aversion to structure that makes them avoid Starfleet or any of the other various scientific organizations the Federation has to offer. Certainly I, PDR, would never feel at home in Starfleet, so I can understand that much. But you know what I don’t understand? The people who live on Tasha Yar’s homeworld. Sure, they ones born there are presumably caught up in it through no fault of their own, but surely the adults are trying to leave, right? Get out of there, people! There are whole worlds for humans that are paradise, just around the corner. Surely the Federation would take in such refugees the way they did Tasha, right?

Anyway, it says something about the Federation that humans are willing to leave it, but I’m not sure what right now. All I know is that I started this as a post about Bolians and it changed to this as I started writing, so my next Trek post will have to be the one about Bolians.