Any person who knows me and has ever had to endure my thoughts about Star Trek knows one thing for certain: PDR wishes the aliens in Star Trek were better. I am, in general, a fan of science fiction that presents us with aliens that are weird and imaginative. Classic sci-fi novels have given me a taste of alien minds and I just crave more forever. I feel like if we can expand our minds to encompass the weirdest and most unearthly viewpoints, then understanding our fellow humans gets a little easier. That’s one of the coolest things about sci-fi, I think. Star Trek is the most prominent ongoing source of cool sci-fi ideas that I ingest, so I want the best aliens to be in that franchise. They’re not though.

Star Wars, for example, had aliens that really impressed me as a child. Growing up I very much enjoyed a documentary called Star Wars Classic Creatures: Return Of The Jedi. I’d go do far as to say it was my favourite Star Wars movie. A lot of it is about the design of the aliens in Star Wars and how they brought them to life with puppets and stuff. When I came to be a Star Trek fan around aged ten, one of the first things I did was sketch little alien puppets that I would put on the show if I could. Even then I recognized the “rubber forehead aliens” the franchise was famous for as a weak spot.

But why do they look like humans? Well, the budget is one of the first and foremost reasons. It’s hard to make the actors look like aliens without paying for it. And also, they want those actors to be able to emote and stuff to get things across to the audience. Of course, they’ve given an in-universe explanation for why the aliens in Star Trek are basically just humans, and believe me I’ll get to that garbage in a future Star Trek thoughts post.

As for the desire to make it easy for audiences to connect to the characters? Well, I call that laziness at this point. We’ve got Vulcans and Klingons and Bajorans and literally a hundred other aliens that already can do that. Use one of those if you need to. Any time they create a new race of aliens that looks like humans they are simply being too lazy to work that little bit harder and make the connection to the audience through better writing or acting skill. I’d go so far as to say that if you put that effort in to reach the audience, the connection would actually be stronger.

It’s hard to argue with the budgetary concerns. Star Trek is a show being made to profit some jerks and if those jerks don’t get their profit they stop making Star Trek, with or without cool aliens. But make-up technology has surely gotten cheaper over the years. CGI as well. And puppets are an almost untapped potential for aliens in Star Trek. Also, at this point either one or two ongoing Star Trek shows are animated (the fate of Prodigy is up in the air as I schedule this post). The shows have done a little bit of cool alien design, but they both feel like they are sometimes limiting themselves to humanoid aliens because that feels more like “Star Trek”. I consider Lower Decks especially guilty of this. This animated show has given us aliens that looks just like humans but are orange or have bumps on their head or whatever. Look at the aliens on Rick and Morty, a show that I believe shares some creative DNA with Lower Decks, and those aliens are ALIEN. Lower Decks could do that. But, apart from the occasional exception, they don’t.

The quality of Star Trek’s aliens has definitely improved since I was a child, I don’t deny it. But it also feels like a failure every time they take the lazy way out. And I will complain about it until that changes. I’ve kind of rambled this time, but I can promise now, more of my Star Trek thoughts will be about this, though more focused.

I don’t think it’s too early for me to say that I am enjoying this show less than I did Earth 2, but I’m not yet ready to claim this is a bad show, and certainly they’re able to try some interesting things. Large swathes of this episode are without dialogue and, even if there is some clearly-mandated-by-higher-ups clumsy narration at the beginning, I found this to be a bold choice for television of the era.

One of our top two favourite handsome In-Vitro cast members, Cooper Hawkes, gets to star in this one. He’s recruited for a secret mission that goes badly and he winds up stranded on a Chig-occupied planet waiting for extraction that he may or may not be able to get to. Hawkes spends a lot of this episode killing Chigs and being haunted by a corpsey sexylady (who, being bad at faces, I didn’t realize was played by the same actor as Vansen until after, and I don’t know what is relevant about that to the scenario). This is interspersed with flashbacks to Hawkes’s birth and training in the In-Vitro training facility (we see text on screen and In Vitro is apparently not hyphenated, but I ain’t changing now). We see that Hawkes first began to question the propagandistic programming they were being fed when he saw a bird (appropriate given his name) and he was considered “defective” and had to escape. All good stuff.

In the present, while stranded on the planet fighting the Chigs, he is about to kill a Chig when he notices it looking up at that planet’s equivalent of a bird (and I was very happy to see this example of alien life, I assure you). With this, Hawkes (and the viewer) finally comes to think of Chigs as persons with maybe different personalities and points of view and whatnot. Maybe it’s just that they all look exactly the same because of their armour, but I suspect that they probably have a lot of similarities to In-Vitros, who are trained from day one to be soldiers. Later Hawkes has a moment of bonding with a Chig (probably the same one who watched the bird, but how would I know). And later still, he has to fight some more and realizes that one of the ones he killed was the same one he had the moment with. It’s a shame. It’s a tragedy. It’s war.

Well, I sure wasn’t expecting this: it’s a Christmas episode. And it’s a religiousy one too.

Instead of their usual space planes (which actually don’t see that much use now that I think about it), this time with Wild Cards are in a mid-size ship where they can all be together doing different jobs (there’s a communications position, and pilots, and turrets, and cetera). They get in a fight with the Chigs and get blown off course or whatever and are left pretty much dead in the water.

Back on the Saratoga, they are assumed dead but McQueen doesn’t believe it. He’s able to convince Ross to let him use resources to look for the main cast. They figure out that the Wild Cards can hear their radio calls, but not respond, which keeps the search going, but the Saratoga is searching the wrong part of space. That means that the team gets to all react to being stranded, drifting toward enemy lines, and it’s Christmas above it all.

Amusingly, we learn that Hawkes left the In-Vitro training before learning what Christmas is or who Jesus was. There’s a tinge of “teach someone the true meaning of Christmas” to his plot, but I wish there’d been more. I wish the show had gone on to be fully about teaching him Christianity. I would have laughed. McQueen’s plot is about not losing faith that the team is out there. Mildly religious stuff. But then there’s Wang’s plot. He’s the type who will cross himself when he thinks he’s going to die, so he was probably religious growing up, but now, after all he’s had to see and do during the war, he’s a non-believer. Thus, it is through him that the miracle that saves the day comes to pass. While Wang is on communicator duty, he picks up a strange code that he translates and uses to find the location of a nearby comet. This “some scientific language” goes on to explain how the ship could adjust its momentum to fall into orbit around the comet, which will carry them back to the Saratoga. And because Wang has faith in the message, he does a spacewalk to adjust the thrusters and does the dang thing. And then they have a Christmas party.

So the theme of the episode is mostly vague “faith” stuff, but Jesus and Christmas are specifically mentioned, something you don’t get in Star Trek. We don’t get explanations for where the strange code came from (though the comet used is clearly analogous to the star the Magi followed), or why a group of passing Chigs didn’t shoot the ship. These are just miracles. If we learn that the Chigs celebrate Christmas too, I will be highly entertained.

Some other stray notes: 1) There are definitely extras among the Wild Cards for the last couple episodes, but I have no idea if they’re the same ones who were introduced in that one episode. I ain’t gonna check. 2) At one point in this episode the team picks up a transmission from Earth, assumed to have been beamed out into space long ago. It’s the Adam West Batman theme song. I approve. 3) There’s also a point in here where it seems like the team can hear Chig fighters flying by not only through their ship walls, but through space. Generally with sci-fi shows I assume that the sound in space is just for the benefit of the audience, but the team hears the ships flying by and react to them and everything. Sound definitely travels through space in this, I guess. 4) Commodore Ross plays guitar for the missing team, which was cool.

This one starts with West being brought back from a combat scene, the only survivor of the Wild Cards. I guess they must’ve killed off most of the cast between episodes. Well, at least we’ll get a West-focused episode that isn’t about him pining for that ladyfriend of his.

When he comes to, West asks McQueen what happened to the rest of the team and McQueen is like “You know what happened, you told us.” The team is dead and they even have a recording of West saying so in his distress call. West can’t remember what happened, so the bulk of the episode is him stressed out and having hallucinations and such while insisting that they aren’t dead. McQueen is sympathetic, he is the only survivor of his team from the pilot after all, but he assumes West just has survivor’s guilt. Meanwhile, the doctors basically say “It’s really inconvenient for him to think his friends are still alive, so we could just do some sci-fi brain stuff and make him forget them” and that almost happens. In the end though, West’s memory comes in and he reveals that he sent the distress call as part of a plan to ambush the Chigs, then got separated from the rest of the team. Anyway, now that they know that they go and save the team, who held up fine while they were thought dead behind enemy lines for a couple days.

I like when war stories make war look bad, because I’m biased because I think war is bad, so seeing West suffer trauma and even break down in tears at the end is a plus for me. I’ll even allow the happy ending this time, because realistically I never expected anything else. Felt like a bottle episode. Not much to comment on. In the future they still use big loud floor buffers like we have now.