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New Life and New Civilizations

Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, and More

One of the most appealing fixtures of Star Trek is that it takes place in a galaxy teeming not only with life but with civilizations. “Everything’s alive,” Captain Kirk says in “Metamorphosis.” “We estimate there are millions of planets with intelligent life. We haven’t begun to map them.”

Throughout its travels, the Enterprise meets many different species, although there are some striking similarities between these extraterrestrials. “Almost all the [Star Trek] aliens are bipedal, breathe the same air as us, are capable of interbreeding, and in fact differ only in the shape of their respective foreheads,” authors Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroeder point out in Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction.

After underscoring the blatant implausibility of such a setting, Doctorow and Schroeder nevertheless point to Trek as an example of how to create a cohesive science fictional universe. “It doesn’t matter that all this is ridiculous from a scientific standpoint,” they write. “We suspend our disbelief because these elements of the Star Trek universe always work the same way. They are internally consistent, and they follow rules that make sense within the framework of the story told.”

Indeed, creator-producer Gene Roddenberry and story editors including Dorothy Fontana worked tirelessly to ensure the show’s conceptual continuity. However, they didn’t just invent aliens; they also imagined whole societies, with cultures and customs divergent enough that viewers accepted individual species as distinct, despite their physical similarities. The extraterrestrials they envisioned served as the foundation for the wildly imaginative yet internally coherent panorama the Star Trek universe eventually became. Later Trek series introduced aliens such as the Borg, the Q, the Ferengi, the Bejorans, the Cardassians, the Founders, and the Xindi, among many others. These sequel shows also fleshed out and, in some cases, reimagined those civilizations created for the classic Trek program. Stripping away these addendums and revisions reveals Star Trek, the original species.

The Vulcans

Star Trek’s most popular character was (and probably still is) the Enterprise’s resident alien, the half-Vulcan Mr. Spock. He was the conscience of Star Trek. His status as an interested outsider gave him a unique, detached perspective from which to comment on the foibles of the human race. Viewers quickly became fascinated by the stoic, logic-based Vulcan society, a cornerstone of the emerging Trek mythology.

AMT’s figure model of Mr. Spock described the Vulcan as “Star Trek’s most popular character.” So he was, and probably still is.

Vulcan culture was by far the most fully imagined of all the extraterrestrial civilizations featured on the classic Trek series. Viewers learned (in episodes including “The Savage Curtain” and “All Our Yesterdays”) that eons ago, the Vulcans were a savage, violent people teetering on the brink of self-destruction. All that changed with the appearance of the great leader Surak, who established logic and the repression of emotion as the Vulcan rule of life. Those Vulcans who rejected logic and clung to emotion moved elsewhere, including to the planet Romulus (as audiences discovered in “Balance of Terror” and “The Enterprise Incident”).

Most of what viewers learned about Vulcans came from Spock. Only three episodes featured other Vulcans—“Amok Time,” “Journey to Babel,” and “The Savage Curtain.” (OK, make that four episodes, if you count the Evil Spock from “Mirror, Mirror” as a non-Spock Vulcan. Also, the animated adventure “Yesteryear” took place on Vulcan.) Through Spock, the basic tenets of Vulcan anatomy, ethics, and history were established:

• With their pointed ears hidden, Vulcans can pass for human (“The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Patterns of Force,” etc.). However, their physiology is quite different: They have copper-based green blood (“The Naked Time”); their hearts are located in the vicinity of the human liver (“Mudd’s Women,” “A Private Little War”), and they have no appendix (“Operation—Annihilate!”). Having evolved on a harsh, desert world, Vulcans developed extremely acute hearing and an inner eyelid that protected them from bright light (“Operation—Annihilate!”).

• Vulcans have much longer life spans than humans (as noted in several episodes), but mate only once every seven years. Their mating rituals date back to their savage, prehistoric past (“Amok Time”).

• They are telepaths, capable of joining minds with other entities (as seen in many episodes), exerting limited mental control over other people (“The Omega Glory”) and, when critically injured, shutting down nearly all life functions to focus all their energies on healing (“A Private Little War”).

• Vulcans are known for their honesty. It’s said that they cannot lie and never bluff, although this isn’t entirely true. They are capable of misleading when necessary (“The Enterprise Incident”).

• Vulcan has never been conquered (“The Immunity Syndrome”). In “Return to Tomorrow,” Spock theorizes that Vulcan and Earth both may have originally have been settled by the same ancient alien race.

The Vulcan civilization was explored extensively in the Star Trek feature films (especially The Search for Spock), Star Trek: Voyager, which featured Vulcan security officer Tuvok (Tim Russ) and Star Trek: Enterprise, which featured Vulcan first officer T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) and many Vulcan recurring supporting characters. Today, diehard fans know that the Vulcans were the first Federation species to develop warp drive; that they made first contact with warp drive pioneer Zefram Cochrane in 2063 and helped the humans rebuild a war-ravaged planet Earth; and that they dislike touching their food. All this and much more were later additions. Over the years, writers and producers seemed just as interested in Vulcan society as they were in the franchise’s human “future history.” But that was fine, since most fans felt the same way.

The Klingons

Even more than the Vulcans, the Klingons Trek fans know and love today are a creation of the movies and sequel series, rather than the original Trek. The original Klingons looked very different and, more importantly, behaved quite differently than “modern” Klingons. Put simply, the original Klingons were one-note villains. Roddenberry didn’t especially like the species and discouraged his writers from using them whenever possible. Nevertheless, the Klingons became the most popular antagonists in the Star Trek universe, often showing up in novels and comic books during the 1970s. Toy company Mego never made a Sulu or Chekov action figure, but it produced a Klingon doll. One of model kit maker AMT’s most popular products was its Klingon Battle Cruiser kit.

Once The Next Generation came along, Roddenberry placed Worf (Michael Dorn) on the bridge of the Enterprise-D and set about reimagining the Klingons, borrowing from Japanese, Norse, and other cultures for inspiration. Over the course of Next Gen, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and the feature films, the Klingons were redefined as a warrior civilization with a deeply ingrained honor code similar to the bushido code of the samurai, a tribal society organized into distinct “houses” that compete for political influence, and a deeply spiritual culture. (Those who die honorably, they believe, will spend eternity in the Valhalla-like Sto-vo-kor, alongside Kahless the Unforgettable, founder of the Klingon Empire.) Klingons write operas. They drink “blood wine” and prefer to eat their food while it’s still alive.

Almost none of this originates from the classic Trek series.

Although Klingons turned up frequently (they appear in seven of the seventy-nine original episodes and in two animated adventures), they bore little similarity to the later Klingons. For starters, they look almost nothing alike—they’re just guys in bronze makeup and pasted-on mustaches and eyebrows, missing the fangs and prominent ridges in their foreheads of their later counterparts. The physical dissimilarities between these two generations of Klingons were supposedly explained away in a two-part Star Trek: Enterprise story, “Affliction” and “Divergence,” in which the Klingons conduct eugenics experiments using DNA from genetically enhanced humans; as a result, a generation of Klingons gain human features. However, this explanation does not account for why the Klingons Kor (John Colicos), Koloth (William Campbell), and Kang (Michael Ansara), seen without forehead ridges in their classic Trek appearances, looked like modern Klingons when they reappeared in the DS9 episode “Blood Oath.” (Perhaps they visited a plastic surgeon and got “forehead jobs.”)

More significantly, the original Klingons seemed amoral and unsympathetic. Rather than samurai or Vikings, the original reference point for the Klingons was the Mongol horde of Genghis Khan. (Not coincidentally, Genghis Khan fought side by side by Kahless in “The Savage Curtain.”) They were venal and underhanded barbarians—cunning, ruthless conquerors and merciless, totalitarian dictators of the worlds they conquered.

The Klingons first appeared in “Errand of Mercy,” in which they occupy Organia and rule the sheeplike, pacifist Organians pitilessly, even disdainfully, murdering hundreds of innocent civilians in retaliation when Kirk and Spock attempt to resist. Viewers at the time would have recognized this as a parallel with the Nazis, who answered acts of sabotage by murdering civilian hostages in places like France, Poland, and Eastern Russia.

In “Friday’s Child,” Klingon agent Kras (Tige Andrews) foments a civil war among the primitive residents of Capella IV, attempts to swindle them out of their mineral resources, and tries to stab Captain Kirk in the back—literally. As Worf might say, he is “without honor.” Meanwhile, Kras’s ship dupes the Enterprise away from the planet using a bogus distress signal but slinks away when given the chance to engage in a straight-up fight with the Federation flagship.

Mego’s Klingon action figure bore a slight similarity to William Campbell’s Commander Koloth, from “The Trouble with Tribbles.”

Photo courtesy of Trace & Trev’s Twisted Toys

The Klingons are up to more underhanded tricks in their next few appearances, too—poisoning a grain shipment in “The Trouble with Tribbles,” instigating another civil war among a developing civilization in “A Private Little War,” and trying to start an interplanetary conflict in “Elaan of Troyius.” In “The Savage Curtain,” Kahless is presented as one of history’s vilest villains, not as the founder of a great civilization.

The only original Trek episode to moderate this dim view of the Klingons is “Day of the Dove,” in which a hate-eating sentient life force traps Klingons and humans together aboard a crippled Enterprise and lures them into an escalating war. Faced with a common enemy, humans and Klingons finally set aside their differences and work together. Commander Kang (Michael Ansara) would serve as the model for future Klingons, who were intimidating but respectable, adhering to a harsh but comprehensible honor code. Back in “Errand of Mercy,” the Organian leader Ayelborne (John Abbott) had foreseen that “in the future, you and the Klingons will become fast friends.” But “Day of the Dove” was the first story to provide any real inkling of this.

“Day of the Dove,” featuring Commander Kang (Michael Ansara) and Mara (Susan Howard), began the transformation of the Klingons from one-note villains to more sympathetic characters.

The Klingons returned in two animated adventures (“More Tribbles, More Troubles” and “The Time Trap”), but were once again depicted as amoral and duplicitous. Nevertheless, the Klingons remained fan favorites. As Next Gen redefined and elaborated on their culture, their popularity soared to unimagined heights, eclipsing even that of the beloved Vulcans. No quarter of the Star Trek universe has inspired more ardent devotion. The most invested fans proudly produce elaborate Klingon costumes and makeup to wear to conventions and learn to speak Klingonese. Some write poems and operas in the language. A group of fans has even translated the Bible into Klingon: “yeSuS ‘IHrIStoS, [Qun’a’ puqloD] Delbogh De’ Qa’e’ taghlu’. nemSovwI’ yeSay’a paq ghItlh pabtaH ghu’: SuH bIghoSpa’, lenglIj qeqbogh QumwI’wI’’e’ vIngeHlI’.” (For you non-Klingon readers, that’s “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way.’”) One can only wonder what Roddenberry would make of this development.

The Romulans

The Romulans are descended from Vulcans who rejected the rule of logic and left their home world during the “Time of Awakening,” millennia ago. Physiologically, they remain virtually identical with their Vulcan “cousins,” but their culture is entirely distinct. The Romulans remain warlike and belligerent, their society organized around military principles with a profound emphasis on duty. They waged an interstellar war with the humans in the earliest days of the United Federation of Planets. When that war ended, a Neutral Zone was established as a buffer between Romulan and Federation space. Nevertheless, the Romulans sometimes venture beyond the Zone to attack Federation targets. They developed a Cloaking Device that rendered their ships invisible both to the naked eye and to computerized scans, technology that threatened to alter the balance of power in the galaxy. All this viewers learn over the course of the Romulans’ three classic Trek appearances, in “The Balance of Terror,” “The Deadly Years” (in which the Romulans make what amounts to a cameo), and “The Enterprise Incident.” Romulans also appeared in three installments of the animated series (“The Survivor,” “The Time Trap,” and “The Practical Joker”) but were not the primary focus of any of those stories.

In these early appearances, the Romulans were presented much more sympathetically than the Klingons. The unnamed Romulan commanders played by Mark Lenard in “The Balance of Terror” and Joanne Linville in “The Enterprise Incident” are likeable people trapped in a culture they realize is misguided but feel powerless to combat. As with the Vulcans and the Klingons, later series and movies greatly expanded viewers’ “knowledge” of the Romulan civilization. Romulans were featured extensively on Next Gen (where they made twenty-one appearances), DS9 (sixteen appearances) and in the feature film Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). But unlike the Klingons, the Romulans’ fundamental nature changed little. They remained aggressive, unscrupulous conquerors bent on expanding their Star Empire throughout the galaxy. And individual Romulans were rarely depicted with as much empathy as the characters played by Lenard and Linville.

The Orions

The green-skinned Orions are a highly troublesome species, a consortium of thieves, cutthroats and slave traders united under the banner of the Orion Syndicate. They claim political neutrality, but often insert themselves into interplanetary disputes, playing competing factions against one another to suit their own purposes. The Orions enslave captured aliens and also practice piracy and espionage. Orion women are known for their allure (partially the product of powerful pheromones) and for their voracious sexual appetite. Orion “slave girls” are prized in dark corners of the galaxy, such as Rigel IV. These “facts” viewers learned through the Orions’ three appearances, in “The Menagerie (Parts I and II),” “Journey to Babel,” and “Whom Gods Destroy.” Orions also featured prominently in the animated episodes “The Time Trap” and “The Pirates of Orion.”

The Orions were one of the most colorful and compelling of all the alien civilizations featured on Star Trek. Yet, despite the rich story possibilities offered by this species, the Orions were ignored by the franchise throughout the 1980s and ’90s. No Orion ever appeared on any of the Star Trek series set in the twenty-fourth century (Next Gen, DS9, and Voyager) or in any of the first ten feature films. This may have been because certain aspects of the Orion culture were similar to those of the Ferengi, introduced on The Next Generation. Eventually, however, the Orions were featured in three episodes of the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise, and an Orion Starfleet cadet appeared in director J. J. Abrams’s 2009 feature film Star Trek.

The Andorians

With their blue skin and conspicuous antennae, the Andorians were arguably the most distinctive-looking of all Star Trek’s alien species. But after a prominent first appearance in the excellent adventure “Journey to Babel,” they all but vanished from the franchise for thirty-four years. The Andorians were one of a handful of species (along with the Vulcans and the Tellarites, among others) on their way to a key diplomatic summit in “Journey to Babel”; one member of the Andorian delegation proved to be a surgically altered Orion spy, out to sabotage the meeting. Beyond their striking physical appearance and the fact that they value honesty, however, little was revealed about the Andorians in “Journey to Babel.”

Andorians reappeared as background characters in a few more episodes (“The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “Whom Gods Destroy,” and “The Lights of Zetar”), a pair of animated installments (“Yesteryear” and “The Time Trap”), the first and fourth feature films, and two Next Gen adventures (“The Offspring” and “Captain’s Holiday”), but their culture remained a blank slate. They never appeared at all on Deep Space Nine or Voyager. Finally, Star Trek: Enterprise provided an elaborate and fascinating portrait of Andorian society, beginning with “The Andorian Incident” in 2001. Over the course of sixteen episodes, mostly concentrated in the show’s final two seasons, Enterprise portrayed the Andorians as a proud, mildly xenophobic warrior race and long-standing antagonist of the Vulcans. It revealed that they originate from an icy moon of the gas giant Andoria, have blue blood, and can regrow damaged antennae. Commander Shran (Jeffrey Combs) became a prominent recurring character; he played a pivotal role in the founding of the Federation.

The Tellarites

Like the Andorians, the Tellarites first appeared in “Journey to Babel” and were then largely forgotten. But at least the Tellarites had some personality—they were pugnacious, argumentative and greedy. Their physical appearance was also unmistakable: they were stubby, hairy humanoids with piglike snouts. During “Journey to Babel,” they were embroiled in a trade dispute with the Vulcans and Andorians. A member of the Tellarite delegation was murdered by the Orion spy. The Tellarites demanded justice and pointed a suspicious, furry finger at Sarek of Vulcan.

After this memorable debut, however, the Tellarites also faded into obscurity, appearing as extras in “Whom Gods Destroy,” “The Lights of Zetar,” and the animated “Time Trap.” (Additionally, shots of Tellarite makeup tests turned up in the closing credits of “The Deadly Years” and “A Private Little War.”) The Tellarites reappeared, again as background characters, in The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country, and in isolated episodes of Next Gen (“Conspiracy”) and Voyager (“Non Sequitur”). Finally, again like the Andorians, the Tellarites were belatedly revived by Star Trek: Enterprise, appearing in nine episodes. It was established that they, along with the humans, Vulcans, and Andorians, were founding members of the United Federation of Planets.

The Tholians

The Tholians appeared in just one episode, but it was one of Star Trek’s most memorable adventures—“The Tholian Web,” in which Captain Kirk is lost in an interdimensional rift, while the Tholians attempt to capture the Enterprise in a net of energy beams. Along with the Horta from “The Devil in the Dark,” the Tholians were one of very few nonhumanoid species to appear on the classic series. They are a highly technologically advanced insectoid race but also extremely xenophobic and aggressive, making them fearsome adversaries. However, as with the Andorians and the Tellarites, future Star Trek series seldom explored the story possibilities presented by the Tholians. Although the species was mentioned in passing on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, the Tholians never appeared again until they were revived by Star Trek: Enterprise for three episodes, including the two-part Mirror Universe tale “In a Mirror, Darkly.”

The Gorn

The lizardlike Gorn were another fierce and aggressive race who made a single, unforgettable appearance on Star Trek—in “Arena,” of course, one of the most famous of all Trek adventures—and then seemingly evaporated (although a Gorn can be glimpsed briefly in the animated episode “The Time Trap”). In this case, however, the disappearance was more understandable. After all, the Gorn suit was expensive and tricky to shoot. And putting a stunt actor in a latex suit was unthinkable on the sequel series, when audience expectations regarding special effects were far higher. In 2005, Star Trek: Enterprise used computer animation to revive the Gorn for the Mirror Universe adventure “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II.” Like Kirk before him, the Mirror Universe Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a Gorn and eventually outwitted his reptilian adversary.

Other Species

The preceding overview covers all the major extraterrestrial civilizations featured on Star Trek, including those fleshed out later in the history of the franchise. However, this is by no means a comprehensive survey of all the alien races encountered by the crew of the Enterprise. Many others also appeared, including the thought-casting, bubble-headed Talosians from “The Menagerie”; the technologically advanced but coldhearted Vians from “The Empath”; the kind but too-ghastly-to-look-at-and-live Medusans from “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”; the xenophobic, telepathic, nonhumanoid Melkotians from “Spectre of the Gun”; and the rocklike, meddlesome Excalbians from “The Savage Curtain.”

Then there are the numerous species whose appearance seemed virtually identical to humans but whose cultures were markedly different: the docile, red-skinned, blonde-haired residents of Gamma Trianguli VI from “The Apple”; the peace-loving, superadvanced Metrons from “Arena”; the “totally hedonistic” (according to Dr. McCoy) Argelians from “Wolf in the Fold”; the extremely imitative Iotians from “A Piece of the Action”; and so on. There were also superadvanced, “pure energy” beings such as the Companion from “Metamorphosis,” the Kelvans from “By Any Other Name,” Sargon and friends from “Return to Tomorrow,” and Trelaine and his parents from “The Squire of Gothos,” among others.

Life, indeed, seems to be everywhere in the universe of Star Trek.