By Jesse on Tuesday, May 07, 2002 - 9:46 am:
I know, I know: some have two bumps on their head, some three, some have a ridge on their nose. BUT 99% OF ALL RACES are so close to being human that with a simple prosthesis the VOY crew can beam on down and interact with them with NO problem. To me, VOY demonstrates one of the problem Trek has these days: a lack of imagination when it comes to other races. Does anyone else agree?
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By Alice on Tuesday, May 07, 2002 - 10:35 am:
Absolutely. Look at what Doctor Who was doing in the early seventies vis-a-vis alien life forms. They may not have had the technology, but look at what was achieved with a fraction of budget and n-times the imagination!
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By Blue Berry on Tuesday, May 07, 2002 - 1:22 pm:
Parallel evolution. Similar niches on similarly environment (class M) planets. Weird aliens without a weird environment (like the horta) are not believable. (Well, to me, anyway.)
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By The Undesirable Element on Friday, May 17, 2002 - 1:21 pm:
Can you say, "Production costs"? I knew you could.
TUE
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By ScottN on Friday, May 17, 2002 - 1:52 pm:
TUE, we're nitpickers. We don't deal in reality.
The real question is, using info from the Trekverse only, why are all races in the DQ "just like humans".
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By Jwb52z on Friday, May 17, 2002 - 10:26 pm:
ScottN, perhaps they are also part of the plans that those who seeded the primordial oceans that we saw in "The Chase." It's just an idea.
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By Blue Berry on Saturday, May 18, 2002 - 9:03 am:
They usually go to class "M" planets. Similar ecological niches, similar shaped beings. Look at Australia, Africa, and South America. There are many analogous animals. (Of course half-Klingons [and quater Klingons] are another issue.) They didn't discover all the life forms in the Delta Quadrant, just the ones that like the same stuff we do (like O2.)
When the went to that "Deamon planet" (class J, I think) the aliens were wierd puddles.
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By Jwb52z on Saturday, May 18, 2002 - 10:35 am:
They were "weird quasisentient puddles" to be exact.
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By CornPone on Monday, May 20, 2002 - 5:20 am:
Farscape does a pretty good job of making aliens actually look well, alien
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By Jwb52z on Tuesday, May 21, 2002 - 1:55 am:
CornPone, the only thing there is that they have different skin and eyes instead of a different forehead or nose. The only exception is the little "ex emperor."
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By Jesse on Tuesday, July 02, 2002 - 8:34 am:
I can understand production costs. The problem really is the writing. Think of it this way:
Voyager drops out of warp by a planet and hails it. The "prime minister" or "first minister" or "primary governor" responds immediately. Doesn't seem like a big deal, except...
(1) Why does every planet have a communications system that is instantly compatible with Voyager's?
(2) Why is every planet's communication system centralized so that general hails are automatically routed to the chief of state's office?
(3) Why does every single planet have a unified government? Aren't there any planets with separate nations?
(4) Not only can Voyager's universal translator translate the alien language immediately, but the body language and cultural concepts are so completely aligned with humans' that there is rarely any language barrier. People make recognizable gestures and facial expressions. What happened to the days of the Horta or "Shaka, When the Walls Fell"? (A side note: Enterprise appears to be correcting some of these flaws.)
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By Josh Gould-DS9 Moderator (Jgould) on Tuesday, July 09, 2002 - 5:11 pm:
(3) Why does every single planet have a unified government? Aren't there any planets with separate nations?
The planet in Blink of an Eye didn't have a unified planetary government.
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By Josh M on Wednesday, July 10, 2002 - 1:46 am:
Not at the beginning anyway.
This has been a problem with every ST show, not just Voyager.
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By LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, July 10, 2002 - 10:29 am:
The one exception I can think of is Attached(TNG), and that was only because that point figured prominently in the plot of that episode.
Josh, what indication did Blink of an Eye(VOY) give as to this?
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By ScottN on Wednesday, July 10, 2002 - 10:54 am:
When Orbital-1 returns, they're worried that it's a trick from the other country. Also, IIRC, Voyager watched several wars.
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By Will on Tuesday, July 16, 2002 - 10:11 am:
Production costs, shmoduction costs. We're talking Paramount here, people! A 90-year old company that makes mega-bucks and knows that Trek is their bread and butter, so surely decent alien masks could have been produced if the make-up man had had a little more creativity. Babylon 5 did an excellent job on a number of recurring aliens, but by the end of 7 years of TNG I was truly sick and tired of the bumpy-foreheads. Not just foreheads could be changed, but hair color and eye color, but this was rarely used.
Spock once said that humans and humanoids made up only a tiny portion of life in the galaxy, but he might have had to re-think such a statement if he'd been on Voyager.
I remember an early Voyager episode (1st or 2nd season) where Belanna was on an alien planet that should be over 60,000 light years from Earth, and yet they shook hands like Earth people! I thought to myself then that there's only so many greetings one could create, but that one has always bugged me.
Give me a Zygon or Sontaran over a bumpy head any day!
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By Brian Fitzgerald on Tuesday, July 16, 2002 - 1:48 pm:
Babylon 5 did an excellent job on a number of recurring aliens.
Not only that but B5's budget was only about 3/4 that of the trek shows of the same time.
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By Josh M on Monday, November 18, 2002 - 9:48 pm:
Because the show is about the human condition.
(no reality right?)
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By constanze on Tuesday, November 26, 2002 - 11:05 am:
Actually, I think it would be much more interesting to have aliens that look just like humans, but have a very different culture instead of the other way round (aliens with funny noses or ears, but american/western culture and behaviour). Sometimes some strange aspect of a culture is referred to, but I never get the impression that the writers wanted to create a different culture that was thought through to the end; most of the alien cultures are rip-offs of existing ones (or rather, rip-offs of the popular culture idea of existing ones: klingons are warriors with an honour code like the native americans or medieval japanese, ferengi are a satire on current business tycoons, bajorans are a satire on spiritual people. The way the bajorans and the cardies, which for me are a portrayal of the fascists, could have been interesting, but I didn't see enough of DS9 to pass a final opinion on this one now - I just got the impression that the potential of this relationship and the allegories presented in the cardies pragmatic view versus the federation's ideals would have been interesting, but was mostly lost.).
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By Anonymous on Tuesday, July 01, 2003 - 8:31 am:
For Paramount, it was an...
un-Acceptable Risk!
though Spock would probably explain it as some "Parallel Planet Developement" yadda yadda...
What Voyager needed were more puppets; some more "YODAs"
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By omnidragon on Tuesday, July 01, 2003 - 4:48 pm:
am i the only one around here who saw the next gen ep called the chase? it revealed the "reason"
why so many human like race were around. a race who i forget he name of were among the first races around. they when to ever planet they counld find and seeded the planet with starter D.N.A.
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By Josh M on Wednesday, July 02, 2003 - 12:15 am:
I don't think that the portrayal of the Bajorans and their spirituality was meant to be satirical...
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By constanze on Wednesday, July 02, 2003 - 10:25 am:
omnidragon, am i the only one around here who saw the next gen ep called the chase? it revealed the "reason" why so many human like race were around...
While this may account for humanoid species in the alpha quadrant, it doesn't explain why there are so little cultural differences between the species, and neither does it explain why the species in the delta quadrant are humanoid (as the board title asks).. Unless the first race seeded the delta quadrant, too.
So far, I haven't seen evidence one way or another, just the fact that the delta quad. is very far away, so maybe the first race didn't get there.
Josh M, I perceived the spiritual side of the bajorans as satirical because up to this time, every encounter with god(s) or spiritual belief system on trek was written with the outcome and attitude of "there is no god(s), only advanced aliens, and anybody who believes in spiritual things is a moron; enhanced humans are much too smart and scientific to believe in anything". Cf TOS meeting Apoll, TAS meeting Cuclucan (sp?), TNG meeting the stone-age vulcans, who believed in picard. And the DS9 season pilot reveals that the bajoran prophets are ... aliens living in the wormhole.
So if the attitude of ST as a whole is violently anti-spiritual, the bajorans appear primitive and unenlightened.
The other reason the portrayal of the different races is satirical is that each race has only one characteristic: all klingons are warriors, all bajorans are spiritual (or angry resistance fighters), all ferengis are capitalists, all cardies are brutal, cold-blooded soldiers, etc. Whole societies portrayed in TOS and TNG are based on flimsy understandings of earth history or countries' habits, like in the TOS ep. set in ancient Rome. This is more like a spoof than an accurate portrayal of ancient rome.
(Some of the non-canon novels have tried to rectify this one-sided view with non-stereotypical people, but many continue this "lets do a whole race/planet based on old japan as shown in shogun" motive. Or as a guide to good SF-stories put it, the typical showmark of bad SF is "It was raining on mungo this morning" (where mungo is your average alien planet).)
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By omnidragon on Wednesday, July 02, 2003 - 4:44 pm:
well who knows what king of tech that first race had maybe they did seed all the quadrents
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By Thande on Friday, June 04, 2004 - 1:35 pm:
I always assumed they seeded the whole universe, never mind just one region of the galaxy.
Though I think the point at stake is that Voyager had quite a lot of races who looked almost exactly like humans (the Sikarans, the Qomar, the Quarren, the Kyrians, the Taresians, the Krenim, the people from the Weird Speeded Up Planet and the Mikhal Travellers to name but lots).
Personally I think even TOS did AOTW makeup better than VOY. Look at the Troyians or the Orions or the Andorians. Even the TOS Tellarites were better than some of the rubbish on Voyager. Despite one or two early slips, Enterprise also seems to be outdoing Voyager on AOTW makeup - not to mention the Xindi of course.
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By Mark Swinton on Sunday, September 05, 2004 - 4:14 pm:
Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development - or whatever it was - was mentioned on occasions in the Original Series. Although a bit of a stretch, it was the creators' attempt to explain away their real-world production costs.
The pity is that, though faced with such costs today, modern Trek's creators simply chose to ignore that little part of Classic Trek canon - in much the same way as they ignored the Eugenics Wars rather than trying to explain them away in the Voyager episode "Future's End." It would have been wonderful to hear at least one reference to Hodgkin's Law on DS9 or Voyager...!
Don't forget the Mari and the Lokirrim. They also seemed to perfectly resemble humans, and also had very attractive females, IMO.
Anyway, the recurring theme of humanoid lifeforms with heads, two arms and two legs, and that also breathe oxygen and communicate verbally, well, it just seemed to be par for the course in the Star Trek Universe. Nothing really wrong with that, I suppose.
But I also did like it when the various crews would encounter non-humanoid and non-corporeal lifeforms as well. That was cool, it brought a little variety to the various plots. And then there were the highly advanced and powerful lifeforms that were mostly immortal and possessed god-like powers, the fact that they would assume humanoid form and communicate with our heroes, that I thought was pretty cool as well!