I like the Xindi. The idea of 6 separate sentient species evolving on one planet fascinates me. I think they seem like good Federation material since they have proven they can overcome their differences and present a united front. My favorite are the Aquatics. They remind me of our dolphins here on Earth. They are considered to be highly intelligent, but we haven't yet learned to communicate with them. The Xindi are very advanced for having learned each others' vastly different languages and adapted to each others' needs. I wish we could have met the Avians.
yeah, i'd have love to see what the Avian Xindi looked like... I always got the odd impression that the Aquatic Xindi could have shared some remote connection to the probe we saw in ST:Voyage Home... if the Xindi kept the aquatic species alive for a reason, because they knew a probe was out there to talk to aquatic species... M
There's nothing to say the Avians were definitely extinct, a colony just hadn't been discovered yet. We never did see Vilix'pran...
Space faring aquatics, how cool would that be? One TNG novel had a Dolphin-like race traveling in suits if I remember.
I liked the Reptilians eating live mice too. I read a review of that episode once which was very negative about that. The reviewer thought that eating cute cuddle animals was just a cliche to emphasize how "evil" the Reptilians really were. To me, I thought it was a realistic depiction of their diet. Reptiles on earth eat live small mammals. I would rather see that than have them toasting with some ale that they probably couldn't digest anyway.
Klingons eat live gagh, and probably other live stuff. But because gagh isn't cute people don't get upset
Eating rodents is just a natural thing for a reptile to do. Of course, the reviewer probably never knew that and just assumes animals chase each other around in nature for fun before going home to the families with their tea in the oven...
THe Aquatics and Insectiods were both awesome. Both pretty unique beyond the "humans with funny foreheads" aliens.
The Avians - they were extinct, a racial characteristic that would have improved my liking of the other races too...
^ No one likes the moss covered Aboreals? I thought the Reptilians were intense. I also think it's amazing they all get along as well as they do when their own biology has set them at odds agenda wise. It's a very interesting concept.
I love the whole Xindi concept. Count me as an Arboreal/Sloth fan! Actually, I'm a fan of all of 'em. They are grand fun to put into fan fic (warning: I will now tell you about fan fic. Hide if you must). I wrote a little girl Arboreal and pictured her as resembling the Tenniel drawings from Alice in Wonderland. I've also got a human-Klingon-Sloth hybrid who's a doctor. Powerful and paranoid, a nasty combo. I see Henry Rollins there. I also wrote a teenaged Reptilian girl (very Valley girl-like, picture her with a phone glued to her ear and constantly doing her nails - I mean, claws. Plus a Reptilian-human hybrid who is bullied and fights back with disastrous results. Insectoids are kind of challenging to make sympathetic; I do have a scene where my heroine (she's Chef's assistant) whacks one in the face with a cast-iron skillet. Haven't written Aquatics much yet, as they are tough to get into a scene with anyone else.
Aquatics. They're so darned zen. You can imagine even when their giant ship got blown up, they just went: "Oh dear".
I liked the insectoids and reptilians the best. I thought the CGI for the insectoids was pretty well done as was the makeup for the reptilians.
I'm very fond of the Xindi; all of them, really. I liked the strange nobility represented in the Xindi Council; how these five races clearly can't stand each other (well, Arboreal/Primate and Reptilian/Insectoid seemed friendly enough, but beyond that...) and yet they remained truly committed to the idea of the Xindi as a unified people. After the homeworld was lost they could have fragmented, but they built the council instead. And throughout Season Three, there was a sense that they were trying to make it work. They're like a five-way racial feud sitting around pretending to be an alliance, and they no doubt have a regularly changing "[...] days without civil war" sign on the council door, but despite all this they're still in it together. That undercurrent of loyalty was definitely their most striking feature, and did a lot to convince me that they indeed had potential to one day join the Federation. And that, when the Xindi-Primate councillor said he thought the Reptilians would come back to the council eventually, he was right. I think the Arboreals and Aquatics were my favourites; the slower-paced, more contemplative Xindi. Perhaps because Xindi were introduced as a military threat, and it was a good move to have two of the races seem far removed from the Proud Warrior Race trope; reinforcing the sense that it's a complicated situation, not just "aggressive race attacks". It's a shame we never learnt very much about Xindi culture(s). From what we did get, the most interesting bits relate to how the Xindi races view one another. There's a good bit in one of the novelizations where a Primate has a string of racist observations: "The Reptilians thought with their brainstems, the Insectoids didn't think at all, and the Arboreals...they thought, all right, they thought about napping upside-down in trees".