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.”