A couple Star Trek Thought back I talked about Captain Solok, who was in charge of the T’Kumbra,a ship with a predominantly-Vulcan crew. Although Solok is a complete tool, I am completely a fan of there being Starfleet vessels where humans are in the minority, it they’re there at all.

The T’Kumbra is not the first such vessel. I know that the USS Intrepid on the original series was a Vulcan majority ship that was destroyed. And I don’t remember the name of it right off, but I believe that Geordi LaForge’s mother captain a vessel that had a crew largely composed of Vulcans. That ship was also destroyed. The T’Kumbra is lucky the Dominion War ended before someone decided to say it was a casualty. Anyway, as far as I’m aware, that’s the full extent of what we’ve canonically been shown for Starfleet ships where Humans aren’t the bulk of the population.

Granted, pretty much ALL Starfleet vessels are made up of a mix of species working together, which is as it should be in the Federation, but if 99% of Starfleet is human, it feels like tokenism when we see an alien. Obviously they want a mostly-human cast for the ships that the shows are set on, but you’d think we’d at least get glimpses of ships with crews made up predominantly of the other Federation founding races now and again. Give me a ship with Tellarite or Andorian crews at the very least.

But it isn’t just my desire to see a more diverse Starfleet that makes this make sense. Alien species should also be adapted to different climates or atmospheres or gravitational constants. Surely you’d want a ship for Starfleet officers who are best suited to live in arctic conditions, and why not have one for aquatic species? These would be easy enough to convey by just having our boring human captains talk to them over a viewscreen and it would make the universe feel that much more rich.

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.

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 years-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.