When I watched Deep Space Nine as a child, I liked Odo, but I thought of him as a cranky old man. It was only later that I realized that this was incorrect. Odo was young. Cranky, yes, but young.

If we get an exact estimate of his age in the show, I missed it, but I did notice than in the later seasons he mentioned his youth being “thirty years ago” or something close to it. So, at the beginning of the show he was the equivalent of a human in his twenties. And that means while he was on Terok Nor, he was basically a teenage who had been recruited to serve a fascist regime. He never spent any time as a child, he presumably started looking like a Bajoranoid adult as soon as he started looking like a person at all. It’s no wonder he’s grumpy.

I also began wondering on this watch if Odo’s inability to emulate other faces perfectly wasn’t a bit of a psychological thing rather than a skill issue. In his formative years, sure, that imperfect attempt to emulate a Bajoran appearance he couldn’t get it right, but in time that “imperfect” face became his face. Odo is someone who felt very comfortable within rigid rules and codes, so having a mental “rule” about his self-image surely felt like something he could not easily switch on and off. Pretending to be a serving tray, that Odo can do. Pretending to be a person other than Odo? That could lead him down lines of thought he didn’t want to deal with.

Naturally I can’t let a post go by without talking about aliens in Star Trek and Odo is, of course, one of very few main characters in the franchise who are not a member of a humanoid alien species. The fact he gets to look exactly like one surely helps this to have happened, but he’s really goo. It was always disappointing to me that when we saw other members of his species, they defaulted to a look that resembled his. I guess it was done for ease of the viewers (and makeup designers), so we’d mentally connect them to him. I dunno, maybe if they’d looked different it could have played into his distance from them. Would he have wanted to make himself look more like them? Would that have caused him self-image problems? I guess we’ll never know. (When we saw some other Changelings on Picard’s show, they defaulted to a different form, I admit, but Odo was long gone by then.)

I’ve just recently finished a year-long rewatch of Deep Space Nine that has taken almost as long as it must have when I watched it the first time. I’ve held off on a lot of Star Trek thoughts because I wanted to finish watching the show first. Well, I’ve opened the floodgates so I expect I’m gonna have a lot of DS9-related thoughts here over the next few months.

Today’s thought is one that I had when I watched the finale as a child (looks like I would’ve been 17 when the show ended): The Ferengi should have been involved in the final push against the Dominion.

In the episode before the finale, our beloved Ferengi everyman Rom is given the position of Grand Nagus. He’s in charge of the entire Ferengi government (admittedly with a council of some kind as well), and he has many ties to the allied Alpha Quadrant governments. What would be a better way of proving his people’s value to those allies than helping in the war? It wouldn’t even have to be a big help. Just a handful of ships seen among the fleet. You could have them led by a Ferengi like Leck who enjoys a challenge. That alone would make the Ferengi plots tie into the Dominion War plot a bit more nicely.

Aside from that, maybe acknowledge supply lines being bolstered by Ferengi forces and talk about more Ferengi cadets heading to Starfleet Academy to follow in Nog’s footsteps. After all, establishing good relations with the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans would be very good for profit.

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.”