Star Trek's 6 Most Ridiculous Alien Races
On paper, Star Trek has always been about exploring a fantastic universe teeming with exotic life. But in reality, the exotic aliens have to be played by actors, usually with something glued to their forehead.
Part of the central charm of the franchise is how they always try to get around these limitations with clever, imaginative writing. But on occasion, they'd just slap something together and call it a day. That's how we wound up with...
#6.
The Catullans a.k.a. Space Hippies
Appeared in:
Star Trek, Episode 76: "This Way to Eden."
When we call the Catullans Space Hippies, we're not joking. That's what they are. They're also responsible for what is probably the lowest point in Star Trek history, as you'll see shortly.
In the episode, the Enterprise is tracking a stolen spaceship, which they manage to catch up to when the irresponsible layabouts piloting it let the engines overheat. The ship stealing aliens are beamed aboard, and upon arrival they immediately start busting out trippy tunes on their space guitars and rebelling against the Man, rudely chanting "Herbert" at Kirk whenever he tries to talk sense into their thick hippie skulls.
Come on guys, be cool, if you just got to know Kirk you'd realize the only reason he keeps hanging around is because he's hoping for an orgy to break out.
It seems the Catullans are on a quest to find a planet named Eden, and after seducing the crew with rock music and their brazen navel-exposing women, they take over the ship. The Catullans find Eden and beam themselves down, but when Kirk and the crew follow only minutes later they find the Catullans have, predictably, all accidentally killed or injured themselves eating poison fruit or walking on acidic plants in their bare feet.
Silly space hippies, if only you'd listened to authority!
Oh and by the way, the main hippie who dies from eating poison fruit was named Adam. Get it? Adam? Eden? Consider your mind blown man.
Video Evidence of Catullan Lameness
Which brings us to the video clip, the aforementioned low point for Star Trek as a franchise. Charles Napier in rainbow colored hotpants jamming with Commander Spock? The seamy seduction of Ensign Chekov? Gene Roddenberry was clearly willing to go to any lengths to deliver his important anti-hippie message:
#5.
The Iotians a.k.a. Space Mobsters
Appeared in:
Star Trek, Episode 49: "A Piece of the Action."
Looking to score yourself some bootleg Romulan ale, a few green hookers and the best damn cannoli in the quadrant? Well head on over to Sigma Iotia II, home of low-down dirty space mobsters, the Iotians.
Never before has a man looked so smug wearing a straw hat and purple bow tie.
Now you're probably wondering, why the hell is there a planet populated entirely by cartoonish Italian mobster stereotypes? Don't worry, there's a perfectly logical answer.
See, 100 years before Kirk and crew stumbled upon them, a previous Federation ship had visited the planet and somebody left behind that classic piece of 22nd century literature "Chicago Mobs of the 1920s." Upon finding and somehow decoding the book, the Iotians, in a perfectly reasonable move, decided to completely model every aspect of their entire society after it. Holy shit, it's a good thing nobody left them a copy of Lolita.
By the way, this was hardly the only time Trek producers had the crew dress up in stock costumes and romp around some Hollywood backlot. How do you top space mobsters as villains though? Well...
We think that episode ended with Kirk punching Hitler.
Video Evidence of Iotian Lameness
Kirk goes undercover among the lotians, in a scene that somehow encompasses every single thing there is to love about William Shatner. Observe Shatner hamming it up as Captain Kirk hamming it up as an alien hamming it up as an Italian gangster.
So laugh all you want about the idea of a planet basing their whole culture around gangster stereotypes. We plan on basing our whole culture on William goddamned Shatner.
#4.
The Xyrilians a.k.a. Shemale Lizards
Appeared in:
Star Trek: Enterprise, Episode 4: "The Unexpected."
Sex and Star Trek don't mix. They keep trying; you'll notice the ads for the J.J. Abrams reboot love to show the lady taking off her shirt. But every episode and movie that has touched on the subject has wound up exploring new frontiers of awkwardness.
Even the birds and bees, a subject we trust seven-year-olds to be mature enough to handle, is enough to make the Trek writers lose their goddamn minds. For proof of this we refer you to the Xyrilians.
Xyrilian impregnation requires only minor physical contact, the men carry the children and only the genetics of the mother are passed on. So in other words, a brief brush of the hand with a woman and suddenly a guy is stuck carrying a baby that isn't even his.
So do the males wear full-body condoms 24-hours a day? Why would a male sex even continue to exist if they don't pass on their genetic material? Why would women continue to sport obvious mammalian breasts and childbearing hips under their shiny silver jumpsuits if they have nothing to do with carrying the babies? Gene Roddenberry would have taped that shit down in the name of scientific accuracy.
Well, maybe not.
Video Evidence of Xyrilian Lameness
We could only find this brief trailer for the episode the Xyrilians appear in, but it hits the major notes. Commander Trip Tucker having the hots for an alien that looks to be descended from a salamander, pregnant dudes, people making lots of silly faces and of course the wrist nipple.
You thought "wrist nipple" was a typo, didn't you?
I'll second that the black-on-one-side species should have been on there. Also, when I saw the sexless species and the pregnant-male species, I expected to see the species from Enterprise that had THREE sexes.
ReplyAll 6 of the videos have been removed. Fan-fucking-tastic.
ReplyAlso, note how Voyager is the only one not on the list. Clearly Star Trek: Voyager is the best.
No DS9 either. DS9 is better.
Doesn't matter; all Star Trek episodes in all there incarnations are indelibly etched into every fan's brain.
"By the time the Enterprise arrives at Pollux IV, only Apollo is left for no particularly well-explained reason (other than a limited casting budget)."
ReplyI thought they explained that because their worshippers (Greeks) abandoned them, they wasted away and died.
exactly: 'no well explained reason'
Yeah you make some really good point. One race I was sad to not see listed were the Klingons. Now don't get me wrong when you are watching Star Trek as a kid or even now they are awesome but they do have a problem. They are pretty much based on Vikings,American Indian,and Sameri. They are pretty much any culture where war is the only valued thing,everyone wants to be a warrior,warriors are only supposed to fight and do nothing else,and anyone who isn't a warrior is looked down on and has no voice. The problem with this is history shows us again and again that these types of cultures while they will be powerful for a short space of time in the end they fall to those around them because science stops moving forward and most of the time they worship the past so they stick to battle tactics that are hundreds of years old and never change. In sort they end up hundreds of years behind other nations because no one wants to study science and saying that the old tactics don't work is often viewed as some kind of crime and can lose you power or get you killed. Plus any nation that has blood frueds among the members of it's government is going to fall into civil war all the time. Where do the Klingons get all their new ships? Who treats their wounds? We never see any Klingon scientist or doctors and doing anything on a ship besides firing guns seems to be looked down on so who would want that job? Where do the new ideas come from? In short I find it hard to believe they would not have been conquered by the Romulans long ago.
Reply Hide All See All 10 RepliesYou can't take that kind of logic into star trek, especially since if you were going to apply logic, you would have to look at evolution and notice that exclude humanity and the more hyper-aggressive creatures on earth tend to be more intelligent, add humanity and you get an outlier that is merely aggressive.
There is no reason to believe that simply being violent and warlike prevents scientific development, just look at America. The Klingons wouldn't even have gotten space ships if they weren't able to move forward.
Wait, did you just say that all Americans want is war?
It is explained in the Enterprise series that this is a relatively recent development among Klingons, and that science and the arts were in fact valued up until a couple generations before humans invented the warp drive. Presumably, since that makes it only 4-5 generations to Kirk at most, these arts have not completely died out and there are still some Klingons who study such things,
@Humility I take it you didn't read my whole post or you would have seen the examples I pointed to. In the 1800s One American ship pretty much took over Japan. The Vikings lost because they never changed how they built their ships. The American Indians seem to not have advanced much and lost. The Spartans ended up as a joke because they never changed their weapons or combat tactics. When your whole focus is war and that is the only way to have a voice in politics then yes people choose to do the one thing that they are honored for and sciences grands to a halt. If being warlike always let to victory as you say there is no way we could have beat the Germans in WW2. Please note how I sited that we never even hear Klingon scientist talked about let alone see one and only warriors have a voice and the leading families are always fighting each other for power. I don't see how this group of people moves forward or keeps up with the far more stable races that surround them. Sorry it just doesn't ring true to the history buff in me.
You spelled Samurai as "Sameri". You automatically lose the argument. Not only for the misspelling, but also for actively turning off or ignoring a spell check (that's automatically included in every modern browser) you obviously need..
Well I don't know what browser you have but Firefox doesn't show misspelled words one Cracked for some reason. If you want to judge people so harshly go ahead but everyone makes mistakes once in a while. I guess you believe anyone who plays the wrong note once when they are in a band has no talent and should be banned from ever playing again. Have you ever made a spelling mistake in your life? I take it you were born able to spell perfectly? If not then by your own logic you are a worthless pile of garbage who has no right to exist and you should kill yourself right now.
Well I don't know what browser you have but Firefox doesn't show misspelled words. Sorry if that offended you so much. I guess you think anyone who isn't born perfectly able to spell is a worthless person. I assume the moment you were born you knew how to spell all words perfectly and have never misspelled a word in your whole life. I mean I assume you are not holding me to higher standard then you hold yourself.
I am using firefox right now and YES it does show misspelled words. Maybe you need an arrow pointing to it saying "misspelled word" if you notice the red wavy line under your words they are misspelled. I don't have a bone in this argument but falsely claiming firefox doesn't have a spell checker...well lies are not going to win any debate points.
Is is just me or did anyone else think that the American Indian doesn't belong on DrCrowRobot's list and is kinda racist?
@robot
i'm thinking that often-times the 'they were primitive' was applied by those people's enemies: 'we only managed to conquer these incas because they were violent and therefore primitive and backward, totally not because they spend all their resources on being kind to each other and helping the needy when we marched in and stole their toys' (of course both are ridiculous simplifications. and 'the noble savage who is still in touch with nature' is just as dehumanizing and racist as 'the primitive infighting savage in need of civilization').
the vikings stopped being dicks once they figured out there was more money in trade than in warfare. they set up numerous outposts all over europe which were eventually assimilated into the native population.
the samurai can be compared to european knights when it comes to 'how they see themselves' (as noble self-sacrificing warriors with lots of influence) vs 'how their contemporaries see them' (violent mercenaries who talk about chivalry a lot, but throw all those nice principles out of the window as soon as the actual fighting starts).
the nazi's? they were pretty fond of science (and of pseudo-science, like that concerning racial differences).
@kitekasame
according to a big part of the world the answer is: 'yes. america is constantly trying to provoke war, both to steal resources and to provide a justification toward its citizens for its crippling defense-budget'.
So, Xyrilian males are the ones who become pregnant. The female's genetic material enters the male's body, the fetus gestates there, and this is the standard arrangement for the entire species, so why the hell are they described as males in the first place? This is obviously not a situation like seahorses, for instance, in which a female deposits eggs into a brood pouch. I don't care which parent has breasts; the one who impregnates the other is the male.
Replyin their case the onces providing the genetic material are less 'male' and more 'parasitic'
All these episodes were weird but I love them!!!
ReplyI'm with you!
It's "The Way to Eden", not This.
ReplyWrist nipple!
ReplyToga scrotum!
Also Riker was a creep
ReplyTrip was a dirty bastard! sure T'pol was a hottie but that guy would F#@k anything! Even Kirk showed some restraint! If Trip had been beamed down to a desert planet to fight that Godzilla lookin f#@ker he wound totally have boned the poor lizard into nextweek.
ReplyAt least the Greek God thing halfway made sense.
Replyye think so?
That breast inspector picture is perfect.
ReplyThe Iotians were silly fun but the Space Nazis episode just gets stupider every time I see it, and for several reasons:
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesOne, Nazi Germany wasn't efficient. To be fair, Inside the Third Reich (Albert Speer's memoir which best explains how incompetent the Nazis really were) wasn't out when the episode was made, but surely there had been enough scholarship in the two decades since the war for any reasonably intelligent person to comprehend that the Nazis were a bunch of boobs (I would think the fact that they lost would have been a clue, if nothing else).
Two, even if you believe the whole efficiency nonsense (and, to be fair, the late 60's/early 70's were the high water mark in the whole "command and control" mentality in public policy, so the writers did have some excuse), why the heck would you pick the Nazis to emulate? It's not as if there haven't been plenty of authoritarian/totalitarian regimes throughout history, so why would pick one of the most evil to emulate? Heck, if they wanted to keep the snappy outfits and heel clicking but be less genocide-y 19th century Prussia would fit the bill (I suspect the prop department didn't have enough Pickelhauben in stock). Okay, it's the 23rd century, so a historian like Gill (the Space Fuhrer) might look upon Hitler the way we look upon, say, Ivan the Terrible or Vlad the Impaler, but, still, if I was going to go with absolute monarchy, I think I'd pick Louis XIV or even Wilhelm II over those two.
Three, even if there was a logical reason for picking the Nazis as a template, why would you use the same symbols, terms, etc.? Okay, the immediate answer is that Gill was just plain lazy (and it's not like Hitler was going to sue for copyright infringement), but he had to at least suspect that sooner or later other Federation ships would come out that way and that all the goosestepping and swastikas (to say nothing of the racism and genocide) would raise a few eyebrows, lead to an official Starfleet inquiry, and make the next faculty meeting he showed up at a bit awkward.
Of course, he probably had tenure and so thought, "Eh, the heck with it."
Recognizability.
Yeah you make some really good point. One race I was sad to not see listed were the Klingons. Now don't get me wrong when you are watching Star Trek as a kid or even now they are awesome but they do have a problem. They are pretty much based on Vikings,American Indian,and Sameri. They are pretty much any culture where war is the only valued thing,everyone wants to be a warrior,warriors are only supposed to fight and do nothing else,and anyone who isn't a warrior is looked down on and has no voice. The problem with this is history shows us again and again that these types of cultures while they will be powerful for a short space of time in the end they fall to those around them because science stops moving forward and most of the time they worship the past so they stick to battle tactics that are hundreds of years old and never change. In sort they end up hundreds of years behind other nations because no one wants to study science and saying that the old tactics don't work is often viewed as some kind of crime and can lose you power or get you killed. Plus any nation that has blood frueds among the members of it's government is going to fall into civil war all the time. Where do the Klingons get all their new ships? Who treats their wounds? We never see any Klingon scientist or doctors and doing anything on a ship besides firing guns seems to be looked down on so who would want that job? Where do the new ideas come from? In short I find it hard to believe they would not have been conquered by the Romulans long ago.
Yeah you make some really good point. One race I was sad to not see listed were the Klingons. Now don't get me wrong when you are watching Star Trek as a kid or even now they are awesome but they do have a problem. They are pretty much based on Vikings,American Indian,and Sameri. They are pretty much any culture where war is the only valued thing,everyone wants to be a warrior,warriors are only supposed to fight and do nothing else,and anyone who isn't a warrior is looked down on and has no voice. The problem with this is history shows us again and again that these types of cultures while they will be powerful for a short space of time in the end they fall to those around them because science stops moving forward and most of the time they worship the past so they stick to battle tactics that are hundreds of years old and never change. In sort they end up hundreds of years behind other nations because no one wants to study science and saying that the old tactics don't work is often viewed as some kind of crime and can lose you power or get you killed. Plus any nation that has blood frueds among the members of it's government is going to fall into civil war all the time. Where do the Klingons get all their new ships? Who treats their wounds? We never see any Klingon scientist or doctors and doing anything on a ship besides firing guns seems to be looked down on so who would want that job? Where do the new ideas come from? In short I find it hard to believe they would not have been conquered by the Romulans long ago.
How many times your going to repeat this same rant? Sheesh seriously 2 min later you repeat the same thing, you double post here as well. Borderline Klingon spam.
I think what should have been on this list was that one race of aliens that communicated by stating cultural references that only they could understand. It was an episode from Star Trek: the next generation and I think the race was called the Talamarians (or the name was similar to that name). The reason why the Talamarians was ridiculous was because that form of communication couldn't work at all if you are speaking in technical terms. How could that race of aliens be able to design schmatics as complicated as a space faring starship or discuss any form of scientific/mathematical thought while communicating all of their thoughts through literary allusions?
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesYeah everything was metaphors and s**t, lIKE SHAKA WHEN THE WALLS FELL! and so on. How do you explain a complex engineering or tactical issue like that?
Simple. 'Geordi in the Holodeck with the hot science chick.' Anybody that knows what the metaphor MEANS can deduce what they are talking about, and therefore get the message across. Besides, design schematics don't necessarily need language, and from what I remember of that episode, it seemed an awful lot that that particular race was still in the rudimentary stages of space travel and culture.
That's actually one of my favourite episodes of TNG. And it would be pretty easy to devise cultural metaphors to explain all manner of complex ideas, provided you had the proper context for a frame of reference. Any Trekkie would instantly know what I meant if I said "Barkley; his mind expanded".
What gets me is that the metaphoric nature of their language foiled the Universal Translator, yet this device that somehow converts the concepts of alien language into our native tongue -- and remember the whole plot of the episode was that it wasn't able to understand the concepts -- is still able to form a facsimile of English out of it. If it had no idea what "Shaka when the walls fell" meant, how did it know that Shaka was a proper name and whatever the alien word for "wall" was wasn't?
I dunno, maybe that works. Maybe a better question is how do they discuss things for which there are no historical precedents? Seems like "You and me, right now" would be said a lot.
Whatever it was still one of the best TNG episodes. :)
the only reasonable explanation i've heard about that so far is that it's only an official language for special occasions (like diplomatic missions).
if it were a real language there's also the problem that after just one generation all the references would lose their meaning: for them 'shakka' is just the word for peace, rather than a reference to a story
I remember a race of retards that were able to hold hostages and only Data was able to save the Enterprise. There was also that race of people with half black/white faces that hated each other so much, they decided to fight for eternity in some floating cube, rather than lice in peace.
Replythe Tardians?
You are confusing two original series episodes. - SPOILERS - The half black/half white aliens were from "Let That be Your last Battlefield." They ended up beaming down to their destroyed home world to kill each other, as the rest of the members of their respective races had done. The fighting forever in some floating cube was from "The Alternative Factor," The combatants were a humanoid named Lazarus and his anti-matter twin. They had to be trapped there because if they came into contact in either the positive or negative universes, it would set off a catastrophe that would destroy both universes.
Why are you all staring at me?
i also love how many star trek nerds are battling it out in the comments
ReplyShe canna' take much more of this, Cap'n!
...as do I...
i LOVE Space Mobsters!!!
ReplyThe Tamarians are the lamest alien species of all Star Trek, not to mention the most implausible. How the hell a race with such an unpractical system of communication could develop technology let alone space travel? Just imagine two Tamarians trying to put together an engine, when the words for simple concepts like "nut" "bolt" and "screwdriver" imply narrating an ancient fable.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesOh! Were those the guys who kept going on about "when the walls fell"?
they were but as an English major i found the idea behind their communication fascinating. we have cultures here that don't have past or future tense in their language sooo, i think its just a different take on ideas like that
Implausible yes, but still one of the finest TNG stories.
those cultures that have no past or future tenses just say things like I do the laundry yesterday instead of I did the laundry yesterday. Some Australian Aborigines have no concept of left and right! Wierd huh?
"Shebulo, when his buggy fell apart and everyone laughed" means "Hey dude, I think you need to tighten that nut" works for me. :)
I loved the Original Series. So before you bash it to hard, remember that they were always working on a low budget. Also, the episode with the Iotians was great. And if anyone would like to challenge me to a game of Fizzbinn, you're on.
ReplyThe nazi one was pretty good to... and I'm actually surprised you didn't mention the episode in which they visited a planet that was just like 20th century Earth except the Roman Empire never fell. Obviously, hey ended up in gladiator costumes fighting in the coliseum. Bread and Circuses, I think its called.
Yeah, that was an awesome series. It WAS laughable, but it was also awesome.
the males carry the children? biologically speaking (i know gender is a tricky issue) doesn't that mean they're female? i mean, isn't that the only criteria in most species?
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesNo. I'll cite the seahorse of earth. The male carries the babies.
Yeah in a pouch. The male only carries the eggs AFTER the female lays them.
I agree with Auto and Rayos. Clearly, they were just male-looking females and female-looking males. I've heard crazier things.
Maybe the females pass eggs to the male who fertilizes the eggs with stem cells,the same way we clone s--t like sheep?it would be like the seahorse if the little seahorses were clones of their mothers...
You're not really talking about gender, now, you're talking about sex. (It's the difference between biology and culture.) I'm not sure if the definitions have changed, but when I took biology ages ago, sex was defined based on which member of the species carried which germ cell, sperm or egg. In this case, it's no clear that that definition even applies anymore since the "males" don't carry any such cells, apparently. Actually, it's not obvious that our definitions of sex will have any meaning beyond Earth, period. (They even break down for plenty of life on Earth, come to that.)
A better question maybe: if the males carry a baby that isn't theirs that's basically implanted there by a female (who isn't interested in the male's biological interests) and doesn't require the right set of organs to carry (an alien male, not biological equipped to carry any offspring, let alone this species'), how is this baby not a parasite? It's like those species of wasps that implant their eggs in insects so that when the babies hatch, the devour their way out.