Supporting Cast — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “The Broken Circle”

 I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this one very much. I find the setup hard to believe — Admiral April is informed of a serious threat to Federation security, and he just ignores it because of politics, so the only recourse is to steal a starship? Isn’t that the kind of situation where you call in Starfleet Intelligence? Surely there must have been an alternative plan that April would’ve gone for.

Also, while I admit that having Spock steal the Enterprise from spacedock to rescue a member of his crew has a certain symmetry to it, it’s a very contrived symmetry and it kind of undermines the impact of TSFS’s theft. Also, despite the precedent of TSFS’s dialogue, shouldn’t it really be called hijacking rather than stealing?

The whole “warp catchphrase” thing has become tiresome and overdone by this point. And it made no sense to put in a comic-relief sidebar in this particular situation where going to warp was a matter of immediate urgency.

I hate what they did with M’Benga and Chapel here. First off, Chapel served in the war? Didn’t the pilot establish that she came from a civilian exchange program (in keeping with “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” establishing that she only joined Starfleet 5 years before the episode, or about a year after this)? Also, I loathe the attitude that a doctor and a nurse have to be turned into super-badass fighters in order to be cool. Saving lives is infinitely cooler than punching and shooting people. Worst of all, the episode fell back on the ugly, deeply wrong assumption that torture is a means of interrogation. No. You can’t get reliable intelligence out of people by hurting them; it’s actually counterproductive. Torture is not interrogation, it’s abuse and bullying, nothing more. It badly undermines M’Benga and the show to reduce him to this.

Pelia is an interesting character, but if it’s known that a race of immortal humanoids was living in secret among humans on Earth for centuries, then in “Requiem for Methuselah,” why didn’t Kirk, Spock, and McCoy suspect Flint was a Lanthanite when he revealed he was immortal?

I do find the show’s approach to Spock and Chapel interesting. It recontextualizes TOS without necessarily contradicting it. Spock losing his emotional control here and having to fight to regain it could explain why he was so much more controlled and distant in TOS. It was inconsistent how someone who’d served alongside humans for 11 years under Pike could be so seemingly naive about humans in TOS. But it’s not so inconsistent if he’s overcompensating for his past loss of control.

As for Chapel, I just reviewed her dialogue in “The Naked Time,” and her line to Spock about knowing that Vulcans have emotions despite what people say makes more sense in the context of what we know now. (Although “They say the men of Vulcan treat their women strangely” doesn’t fit, but then, that line has aged badly and is best ignored.) TOS’s Spock-Chapel relationship can work as two people who used to be close and are uncomfortable with their past baggage, rather than the distant unrequited crush it was intended to be at the time. (Not so sure about “Mudd’s Passion,” though; that was just an embarrassment to Chapel all around.)

“…a Vulcan lute, which we know Spock plays regularly years hence in the original series. And M’Benga is the one who gave it to him! Which is fabulous!”

Except we saw that Spock already had the lute on the wall of his quarters in “Spock Amok” last season. So that doesn’t quite work. At most, M’Benga encouraged him to play it more. (I wonder if we’ll see the beginnings of Spock and Uhura’s duets this season.)

As for the Klingon makeup thing, I can’t understand why people who can accept Pike and Spock and Number One and Chapel and M’Benga having different faces and voices, or the equipment and uniforms and transporter effects having different details, are unable to accept the Klingons having different makeup. It’s just different artists interpreting the designs differently, the same way different actors interpret a character differently.

It did bug me, however, that the VFX team mistook the Klingon battlecruiser’s warp nacelles for cannons. Also, why did they make the planet’s rings, described in dialogue as made of ice and rock, look like they were made of dilithium (the vivid red dilithium of the modern shows as opposed to the pale pinkish quartz look it used to have)? Plus, the fake Federation ship was described in dialogue as Crossfield-class like Discovery, but it clearly wasn’t of the same design. The Secret Hideout shows have a bizarre inability to keep the VFX consistent with the scripts. But then, they’re streaming shows, so given what I’ve learned about the conditions provoking the writers’ strike, the writing staff may not be allowed to visit the set or supervise post-production, which is the sort of thing that leads to that kind of error.

I wondered if the flag officer April was talking to at the end might be Nogura, but Memory Alpha says it was Commodore Tafune. Anyway, I’m not happy with the season arc involving a potential Gorn war. We’ve had way too many war storylines in Trek by now, and SNW’s “They’re just monsters” approach to the Gorn is the worst thing about the series.

@7/Chase: “I’ve long been hoping that SNW would tell a story about how Kor, Kang, Koloth, and the rest of their smooth-headed brethren ended up essentially running the Empire for a decade or so.”

I see it just the opposite way — the ridged Klingons are the ones in charge, and they relegate the smooth-headed Quch’Ha to segregated ship crews on the border with the Federation. That’s how it’s been portrayed in some of the novels, including my own Rise of the Federation, though I was borrowing from John M. Ford’s “Klingon-human fusions” in the classic novel The Final Reflection, and from the Imperial Chinese policy of “use barbarians to deal with barbarians.”

After all, if you look at history, empires rarely use the ruling race or class as front-line troops. That’s what the more expendable peoples they conquer are for. That’s why Nemesis was so smart to establish that the Romulans used Remans as cannon fodder in the Dominion War. That’s how every empire should operate (and how the Dominion operates with the Vorta and Jem’Hadar), but Trek insists on misusing the word “empire” for monocultural powers.

@21/LadyBelaine: I’ve long thought the best way to deal with the “Klingon forehead issue” would be to have revealed that “Klingon” is not the name of a species, but the name of a civilization with members from multiple species, or perhaps the name of the religious community based on Kahless’s teachings. Star Trek, like a lot of sci-fi, has far too great a tendency to equate species with identity, which is way too simplistic. It would be great to see a cultural identity that wasn’t based on genetics.

@22/David Pirtle: I’m not looking forward to more of this show’s take on the Gorn either, but after rewatching “All Those Who Wander” yesterday, I’m taking solace in the line about the Gorn being “genetic chameleons.” That implies that the species takes multiple different forms, which might be quite different in behavior as well as anatomy. This idea was already used in one of the novels, Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire by Michael A. Martin, which posited that the TOS rubber-suit Gorn and the ENT CGI Gorn were two different engineered subspecies. So whatever problematical monster-movie stuff the show does with the Gorn, I can just assume they’re a distinct offshoot of the species from the one in “Arena.”

About M’Benga and Chapel fighting Klingons, one other problem I had with it is that Klingons are supposed to be much stronger and more durable than humans. Even doped up on some kind of performance enhancer, I can’t believe two humans would have the physical strength to outfight that many Klingons.

(For a moment there, when the scene went into slow motion, I thought the stuff in the vial was going to turn out to be Scalosian water and M’Benga and Chapel were going to escape at superspeed. Except I forgot that Chapel was in “Wink of an Eye,” so the usual “It was classified so nobody knew about it years later” excuse wouldn’t work.)

Incidentally, I realized something today that I’ll never be able to unsee: Ethan Peck’s Spock bangs are a fake hairpiece stuck onto his real hair. Whaa? Leonard Nimoy spent three years with most of his eyebrows shaved off so he could be made up as Spock. How hard can it be to get your hair cut with bangs?

@57/fullyfunctional: “Did I actually hear Ortega say “pedal to the metal”? Gotta love a callback to Galaxy Quest which is a callback to Trek, lol”

Huh? No, that’s truckers’ CB-radio slang from the early 1970s, referring to driving at top speed (with the gas pedal pushed all the way to the metal floor).

@58/Corylea: I don’t see how having bangs could impair one’s ability to get a job, since you can just comb them back and use some hairspray or gel to change their look, and it wouldn’t take that long for them to grow out a bit more. And the fake bangs on Peck just do not look convincing or particularly good.

@60/fullyfunctional: “It was also a rather prominent catchphrase for Tommy Webber, the child prodigy helmsman in Galaxy Quest”

And it is natural enough that two different helm officers — two different “drivers” — could both make the same reference to commonplace drivers’ slang without it being a direct reference from one to the other. Correlation does not imply causation, especially when the correlation has another obvious explanation. I’m sure you could find plenty of other examples in fiction, both before and after Galaxy Quest, of spaceship pilots saying “pedal to the metal.” It’s hardly a rare expression.

@62/kkozoriz: The show is clearly ignoring that line from “Galileo” about Spock’s first command, just like “Memento Mori” last season ignored the line from “Dagger of the Mind” about Spock never having mind-melded with a human before. In both cases, I don’t mind the retcon, because it’s implausible that Spock could’ve served in Starfleet for 13 years before TOS without ever being in those situations. It’s the prerogative of fiction to refine its continuity over time rather than being slavishly bound to early details (which is why we don’t still talk about James R. Kirk, lithium crystals, and Vulcanians), and this is a refinement that makes more sense than the initial claims. Particularly since it would be far too limiting to the writers if they forbade Spock from mind-melding or being in command.

@71/rm: I saw a quote from Carol Kane that Pelia’s accent is meant to be non-specific, a hodgepodge of various things to suggest that she’s lived all over.

Also, one can assume that when Spock said “one of my ancestors,” he meant Arthur Conan Doyle, not Sherlock Holmes.

@75/Antipodenaut: “So Pelia the new Lanthanite … Is this a character creation/royalties thing? Because using an El-Aurian might mean they have to pay residuals?”

No, that’s not how it works. That applies to individual characters, not species. Enterprise changed T’Pau to T’Pol to avoid having to pay Theodore Sturgeon’s estate, but they were still able to make her a Vulcan without having to pay anyone.

Besides, El-Aurians aren’t a species you can attribute to a single creator, since they weren’t even given a name until six years after Guinan was introduced, and due to vagaries of scheduling, the name that was created for Generations actually made its screen debut in DS9: “Rivals.”

Also, El-Aurians hardly have a monopoly on the “virtually immortal humanoid alien” market. And they’re different from El-Aurians in that apparently a whole community of them lived among humans for centuries, whereas Guinan was the only one of her kind on Earth and only spent a finite amount of time here on her travels (though Picard season 2 retconned it as more than a century longer than “Time’s Arrow” had implied).

Incidentally, the Lanthanites’ name is extremely on-the-nose even for Trek aliens, since it comes from the Greek lanthanein, “to lie hidden.” (See also the lanthanides, aka the rare-earth elements from lanthanum to lutetium, named because of their scarcity and the difficulty of discovering and extracting them.)  Maybe it’s not their real species name, but just a demonym they adopted for themselves as they lived in hiding on Earth? I sincerely hope so.

@79/jaime: No, I’m fairly certain they said they’re aliens who were hidden among humans. Trek wouldn’t use a name like “Lanthanite” for a human subpopulation, only for an alien species, because Trek is extremely and frustratingly rigid about equating identity with biology. Also, if immortal humans were a thing that had been known since the 22nd century, the TOS crew wouldn’t have been so startled by Flint’s immortality.

Incidentally, if the first Lanthanites revealed themselves in the 22nd century, but Amanda Grayson was one of the first humans Pelia outed herself to, then how does the timing for that work out? If we assume Amanda was in her 30s when Spock was born in 2230, she would’ve had to be born in the last decade of the 22nd century. So did Pelia reveal herself to Amanda when the latter was a small child, or did she stay in the closet longer than others of her people? And what does that imply if she was reluctant to reveal herself to humanity? Were the Lanthanites subject to prejudice when they first came out? Hmm, I suppose there could’ve been some lingering anti-alien sentiment and Terra Prime sympathizers in the wake of the Xindi and the Romulans.

@85/durandal: That’s exactly my point. Trek has an overabundance of on-the-nose alien names already, so please, let’s stop doing that.

@93/mr_d: That’s an interesting analysis of Klingon power dynamics in-story, but it doesn’t make me any less sick and tired of seeing that exact same scene, of a protagonist beating someone up until they give out information, played out ad nauseam in fiction. It’s a vastly overused and tiresome device, and as I said, these writers have shown that they should be capable of better than such a cheap, nasty plot trick.

“So the very top of the nacelle is the warp coil housing, while the middle and bottom is the Disruptor housing and deployment unit.”

Which strikes me as a really terrible idea. It hardly seems safe to have something as volatile as a humongous cannon right next to your engines. For that matter, it hardly seems wise to have something that produces as much heat, radiation, and spatial distortion as a warp nacelle right next to your primary weapons. It seems kind of like storing gunpowder next to a furnace.

@96/krad: It’s always seemed to me that the intention of the Kelvin and DSC Klingon redesigns (both done by Neville Page) was the same as the intention behind the TMP redesign in 1979: to use advances in makeup technology to make the Klingons more strikingly alien than they had been before. Personally I think the DSC design went overboard on that front, and they dialed it back after the first season, but it was their prerogative to experiment and try new things. After all, the TMP redesign got rethought too, with the Burman Studios in TSFS replacing the single mid-forehead spine extension of TMP with the individualized bony forehead plates that have been the standard ever since.

As for the SNW Klingons, I gotta say, I don’t like the new makeup much. Sure, in principle, it returns to the now-classic Michael Westmore design, but somehow the forehead appliance looks more artificial, like they’re making it out of the wrong materials or painting it too flatly or something.

@98/jaimebabb: I dunno… It seems that a trademark of the Secret Hideout shows is that they don’t really worry about being consistent in alien makeup design (or Starfleet uniform design or warp effects) from one series to another, but just let each show’s art department do its own thing. SNW uses basically the same Andorian design as DSC, but the Tellarite seen in “The Broken Circle” abandoned the tusked look of the DSC Tellarites in favor of something closer to the original TOS design, but wrinklier. And both are distinct from the way Tellarites look in Prodigy, which is distinct from Lower Decks‘ cartoon interpretation of the ENT Tellarite design. https://twitter.com/gaghyogi49/status/1670174477617963010

So DSC’s Klingons don’t imply Worf had to look like that any more than SNW’s Tellarites mean Jankom Pog has to look like that. At this point, they’re basically just straight-up telling us, “This is creativity, don’t take it so literally.”

@100/jaimebabb: Sure, maybe people jumped to that conclusion in 2017, but I’m saying that we can put it in perspective now and see that whatever assumptions people had then about the redesign’s implications for Worf or whatever proved to be unfounded.

And as I pointed out, TMP’s “complete aesthetic reset” was followed promptly by another reset. The familiar template for ridged Klingons was not the TMP redesign, but the Search for Spock re-redesign, which was quite different. The TMP version was a rough draft that was never seen again. So assuming that the Discovery redesign would be fixed and immutable forevermore was forgetting Trek history, and of course it proved to be a false assumption within a year, when the DSC Klingon design was toned down, restoring hair and shrinking the skulls to a more human size.

@112/kkozoriz: “The problem with him is that they went beyond the norm.”

Yes, that’s exactly my point: since all Illyrian populations practice genetic modification routinely, being modified is the norm for them, in a way it isn’t with humans. It’s not a small group trying to change their species’ nature, it is the species’ nature to be genetically modified in one way or another. So applying the law to them discriminates against the entire species, which is racist as hell and is not the purpose the law was intended to serve. So the letter of the law needs to be changed to better fit its spirit, and that means accepting that genetic modification in Illyrians is their species norm. That way, Number One gets to stay in Starfleet while the law as defined in DS9 still stands.

@117/kkozoriz: “But then the Illyrians get an advantage that’s denied to all the other races in the Federation.”

Do they? Different Federation species have different attributes already. Vulcans are naturally as physically and mentally superior as human Augments. Some species have superhuman senses like telepathy or sensing electric fields. Lanthanites are naturally almost immortal. Plenty of species have advantages others lack.

The whole point here is that the law shouldn’t be applied on the level of whole species, because that’s racist and obviously wrong. The point is that the law should only be about enhancements beyond a given species’ own typical range of variations, so as not to stigmatize entire species for being different from each other.

“Being genetically augmented isn’t their normal situation because they would have had to reach a fairly high level of technology in order to do it.”

That makes no sense. It is the normal situation for most Illyrians alive during the existence of the Federation. Who cares what was “normal” centuries in the past? It used to be normal for people to keep slaves. Now it’s abnormal. Laws exist for the benefit of the people alive in the present, so they should be based on the conditions and needs of the present.

@122/northman: “True, but you’re positing that exact thing by saying this one species should be exempt from the law every other Federation species has to follow.”

No, I’m saying the law needs to be rewritten to specify that it only refers to departures from a given species’ typical range of attributes, rather than being a crude ban on all genetic engineering, because that unfairly discriminates against Illyrians (and probably Denobulans too). Law is not morality. If a law is unfair to certain people, it needs to be changed to become more fair.

After all, every Federation species is already different in its abilities. So one can’t be simple-mindedly rigid about something like this. The law has to allow for nuance and situational variations. Fairness doesn’t mean forcing everyone to fit the same Procrustean bed; it means adapting the system to accommodate people’s differences from one another. That’s why wrestlers have weight classes.

As Jean-Luc Picard once said, “There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even history itself is an exercise in exceptions.”

@123/kkozoriz: “Deltans have to take a celibacy oath in order to serve in Starfleet.”

But not to be citizens of the Federation, which is a completely different subject. Plenty of people who join military organizations have to obey restrictions that aren’t binding on civilians, for instance, being forbidden to wear their hair a certain way.

Besides, let’s not lose sight of the parameters of the discussion. We know already from preview clips, and just from common sense, that Number One is going to keep her position as Pike’s first officer. It’s a given that she will be allowed to stay in Starfleet. So the point of this speculation is not to debate whether it will or should happen, because we know it will. The point is to consider possibilities for how it will happen.

Plus, of course, we’ll know the answer for certain in less than four days. So it seems pretty pointless to argue about it as if the outcome were somehow up to us. I proposed a possibility; either it will be the answer given in the episode or it will not. The episode itself is the only thing that will determine that.

@125/northman: “Maybe you didn’t mean it that way, but it sure sounds like you are saying that the Illyrians as a species should be allowed to ignore the prohibition against genetic enhancement because it is a cultural norm for them…”

Not at all. I am saying that the law should not be merely against any genetic enhancement, but more specifically about genetic enhancement beyond the typical range of traits for a specific species. Keep in mind that, as defined in previous series, the Federation does not outlaw genetic therapies for human illnesses or disabilities. Genetic engineering is permissible as long as it remains within the typical range of variations for a species rather than serving as an attempt to elevate one subset of that species above others. Since the typical range of variations for Illyrians includes genetic modifications as a matter of course, not for conquest but merely to improve their health and functionality in their chosen environments, it is therefore consistent with that law to allow them to continue to practice such modifications. (One could argue that, say, an unmodified Illyrian would be disabled on a higher-gravity planet, so modifying them with superior strength would be correcting that disability.)

After all, what matters is the spirit and purpose of the law, not just its letter. The intent behind the law is not mere Luddite paranoia about genetics, but the prevention of the emergence of groups like the Augments who would use their enhancements to dominate others. Since Illyrian genetic engineering is practiced by the whole species to adapt themselves to environments, it’s an egalitarian practice, not a power move by wannabe dictators. So it’s an abuse of the intention behind the law to use it as an excuse to persecute them as a species.

“And I will note that the Illyrians are completely free to continue as is. No one is saying they cannot continue to practice their genetic enhancements to their heart’s content, only that they cannot join the Federation so long as they do so.”

Which is racist as hell and anathema to the core principles of the Federation. That’s tantamount to saying that a law forbidding Muslims or Jews from becoming Americans was okay because they could still live elsewhere. It’s a horrible position to take, especially given that life in the Federation is probably better and safer than life most anywhere else.

And we know the show’s writers agree, because in “Ghosts of Illyria,” they had M’Benga explicitly refer to the ban on Illyrians as a new form of bigotry. Number One’s whole arc in the show is an allegory for discrimination against marginalized groups. So it’s bizarre to think they would want the audience to take the side favoring discrimination.

“Also, what would constitute “departures from a given species’ typical range of attributes” in a species that routinely engages in extreme modifications to live in various environments (amongst other enhancements, as we have seen with Una’s supercharged immune system)?”

That is exactly the point. It’s not about defining some acceptable range of capabilities; that’s just looking for an excuse to be intolerant and build walls between people. It’s about protecting people’s right to be themselves and not be subjugated by a group with authoritarian intentions. Since the Ilyrians modify themselves in so many different ways, there’s no hierarchy to it, no meaningful way to define any of them as “superior” to others. A trait that’s superior in one environment would be harmful in another; for instance, the Aquans from “The Ambergris Element” are superior at living underwater but inferior at living on land.

Of course, the whole genetic-engineering ban is stupid and always has been. It makes no sense to outlaw a beneficial science because of the fears of its abuse, especially when the historical event that sparked such fears happened before anyone currently alive was born. Societies don’t work that way in real life. The ban was a bad idea and it’s obvious the SNW writers don’t agree with it, but they’re stuck with it because of continuity. Still, they’re doing what they can to address its problematical aspects and find a way around them for Una.

@143/mr_d: “How’d I lose you? That’s what you put into energy weapons. They’re designed to process that into something to destroy a target with. It doesn’t interfere, it enhances.”

The point is that there’s a profound difference between the internal energies that a weapon is designed to use and external energies that interfere with its operation. If you light the fuse of a cast-iron cannon, the cannon will fire the way it’s supposed to. If you set a roaring fire underneath that cannon, it won’t help the cannon work any better; on the contrary, it will probably overheat and crack the casing, rendering the cannon useless.

The reason Matt Jefferies put warp nacelles out on struts is that they’re supposed to be radiating dangerous energies for a good distance around themselves. You’re thinking about the internal energies that would be channeled through a weapons system, but I’m talking about the dangerous radiation, waste heat, and space-warping that anything near a warp nacelle would realistically be immersed in.

“There’s clearly not a mechanical issue with placing Directed Energy Weapons on the engines in universe.”

The universe is not real. Things only happen in it because creators decide they do. So it’s nonsensical circular reasoning to cite the in-universe things the creators decide to depict as a justification for their choice to depict them that way. It’s the design choices of the creators that I’m critiquing. For the reasons I discussed, it is an implausible decision to claim that it’s okay to put weapons on top of warp engines. It ignores the reasons why warp nacelles were designed the way they were back in 1964.

@145/mr_d: “It’s not nonsensical, I always start from the Watsonian perspective in situations like this, binding the work being discussed to real world conventions make far less sense to me.”

On the contrary. It’s perfectly valid to analyze fiction in terms of how credible its ideas are. Especially in a franchise like Star Trek, which Roddenberry strove to make as credible as he could. When I was growing up, Trek was the only SFTV or film franchise that made any effort at all to be plausible, and though it often fell short for budgetary or dramatic reasons, I appreciated that it at least tried, when virtually nobody else bothered. So when more modern Trek productions fail to be credible, I find that disappointing.

If anything, the recent shows are doing better in terms of scientific credibility thanks to the input of Dr. Erin McDonald, the science advisor. In particular, I practically wept with joy when “A Quality of Mercy” finally explained how the “motion sensors” in “Balance of Terror” worked — it’s gravitational microlensing! Of course, it’s so simple! So that just underlines how disappointing it is when they do something implausible.

“If the Bird of Prey’s warp coils are indeed in the wings themselves, that also counts.”

No, because the BoP’s engines are not on the wings. They’re the big “shoulder pad” pieces on the aft part of the ship (the BoP was designed to look from the front like a charging linebacker), and there are only disruptors on the ends of the wings. It looked to me like the D-7 here was retconned to work the same way, with a big glowy engine thingy on the back.

@142 & 147: Dang, when I wrote Living Memory and delved into Uhura’s post-Nomad memory loss, maybe I should’ve included a mention that she’d lost her knowledge of languages including Klingonese. Although it’s a moot point now, since SNW’s Uhura backstory with her parents and brother dying directly contradicts my depiction of her family in Living Memory.

@149/kkozoriz: I phrased that ambiguously — I didn’t mean to say she’d forgotten every language, just some of them including Klingon.

Besides, Swahili is Uhura’s native language, which is why “The Changeling” showed her reverting to it and why she heard the Melkot’s telepathic probe message in it. It would be harder to forget your native language than one you learned later. There are indications that first and second languages are stored differently in the brain. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090708094825.htm

@159/Christopher Valin: “If the performance enhancing drug that M’Benga carries around turns out to be an ongoing storyline, I’m wondering if that somehow leads to him no longer being Chief Medical Officer of the Enterprise in TOS. That inconsistency is one of the things I’ve been wondering about since the series began.”

I don’t see it as an inconsistency. It’s not unheard of for a person to leave a leadership position and then take a subordinate position under someone else — an obvious example is Spock being captain of the Enterprise prior to TWOK and then returning to the first officer post after TVH. In real life, I’ve seen TV showrunners take jobs under other showrunners on later series — sometimes even working under showrunners who used to work under them.

Although, given the actors’ respective ages, I often wonder if TOS’s M’Benga is actually Joseph M’Benga’s son.

@161/Bill: I’ll never understand why people hear “centuries-old humanoid aliens living among us on Earth” and immediately jump to “El-Aurians” as if that were the only other example of the idea in the history of science fiction. I mean, Apollo’s people lived among us as gods for several thousand years; “Who Mourns” said they came 5000 years ago, but in real life the era in which the Greek gods were worshipped was between 2-4000 years ago, and Apollo claimed they didn’t leave until worship of them died down.

Guinan was just visiting 1890s Earth as far as “Time’s Arrow” established; it wasn’t until PIC season 2 that her visit was revealed as lasting more than a century. So this association of El-Aurians with aliens living on Earth for centuries is a connection nobody would’ve made before last year. Yet somehow people keep talking about it as if it were the obvious and exclusive possibility.

And yes, it’s repetitive, but how many Trek aliens have guided human evolution (Sky Spirits, Gary Seven’s sponsors), been the source of our mythology (Apollo, Kukulkan, the Megans), or abducted humans to other worlds (Preservers, Briori, Skagarans)?

And how do you get from Gorn to Borg? SNW’s Gorn are more a ripoff of Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise. They’re nothing like Borg; Borg are dispassionate and clinical, SNW Gorn are hyperaggressive and ravenous.