What happened to all the 'human' aliens?

[The Laughing Vulcan]

In terms of production, it was the advent of prosthetic make-up that made the forehead of the week alien a constant after, say Season 3 of The Next Generation and of course the movies following The Motion Picture, and races like the Klingons and Romulans were retconned-ish into developing bumpy heads.

But when Kirk's Enterprise would find aliens on a weekly basis who basically looked human in a different Theiss costume, and almost the same in the first couple of seasons of The Next Generation, it does raise the question as to why we didn't see again, races like the Sigma Iotians, the Eminians, the Argelians, the Fabrini, the Capellans, the people of that Roman planet, the Ligosians, or even the people of that Justice planet.

Will we see 'human' aliens again any time in Star Trek, and will there be an explanation as to why there are so many such aliens, the way Enterprise eventually explained the TOS Klingons?

 

[Oddish]

We have Betazoids, El-Aurians, and Lanthanites.

 

[B.J.]

I really doubt we'll see any new indistinct-from-humans aliens without a story reason for it. It just raises more questions than the writers are interested in answering, and would tend to pull attention from the story they're trying to tell. Plus it would just look lazy these days.

 

[Tribblesonmars]

I thought there was an episode of TNG that explained why there were so many humanoid aliens? Something like an ancient race that seeded the galaxy?

 

[Mage]

I thought there was an episode of TNG that explained why there were so many humanoid aliens? Something like an ancient race that seeded the galaxy?

Sure, but that's humanOID. OP means basically looking like a human but with a weird costume.

 

[Turtletrekker]

I imagine the most obvious answer that would be budget increases.

 

[Oddish]

And aesthetic decisions.

 

[BillJ]

Lack of creativity.

 

[Christopher]

We saw the occasional fully human-looking alien in early Voyager; "Time and Again" relied on it, as Janeway and Paris were flung back in time with no opportunity to prepare disguises. There were some aliens in season 1 whose only alienness was in their hair adornments. More recently, the Kalar in Strange New Worlds: "Among the Lotus Eaters" were portrayed as human-looking, though that was following the precedent established in "The Cage."

I thought there was an episode of TNG that explained why there were so many humanoid aliens? Something like an ancient race that seeded the galaxy?

But that included prosthetic aliens like Klingons and Cardassians.

Trek gave us three different explanations for humanoid aliens. "Return to Tomorrow" suggested that Sargon's people had colonized planets throughout the galaxy and might have been the Vulcans' ancestors, though the writers or their science advisors were wise enough to reject the nonsensical trope of humans being seeded by aliens. "The Paradise Syndrome" introduced the Preservers as having transplanted at least one human population to an alien world, and implied that they might be responsible for humanoid aliens. And TNG: "The Chase" established the Progenitors, the first sentient species in the galaxy 4 billion years ago, which seeded the primordial soup of worlds throughout the galaxy with DNA programmed to encourage the evolution of humanoids like themselves. (Fandom often mistakes them for the Preservers, but they lived billions of years apart and had completely different methods; the Progenitors created life, the Preservers simply relocated it.) Discovery's final season also featured the Progenitors.

I tend to think each of these explains a different thing. The Progenitors explain humanoid aliens in general, and their ability to interbreed. I presume Sargon's people are the ancestors of near-human species like Vulcans, Bajorans, Deltans, etc. particularly the telepathic ones. And the Preservers are responsible for some of the Earth-duplicate cultures, though most of the ones we saw in TOS can't really be explained as transplants from Earth. Although I doubt they limited themselves to humans. I'm convinced that the Vians in "The Empath" were likely to be the Preservers, since they had the same goal and methods, to rescue an endangered population by transplanting it to another planet. Or else "Preservers" is not the name of a species but rather an organization of conservationists like Greenpeace, perhaps including members of multiple species. (After all, how dumb would it be to portray an entire species engaging in only a single activity?)

 

[Starflight]

I like to imagine that the human-looking aliens we see on screen are actually completely nonhuman, unless the plot states otherwise. The "Taste of Armageddon" race was a bunch of little rabbit people as far as I'm concerned. "We've admitted it to ourselves, we're a killer species!", but he's squeaking it with a little rabbit hat on his tiny head.

TAS does appear to suggest that overtly nonhuman aliens are very common, I think the apparent abundance of human-identical species in the live action series is best just considered a production reality rather than necessarily an in-universe fact.

 

[Christopher]

I like to imagine that the human-looking aliens we see on screen are actually completely nonhuman, unless the plot states otherwise. The "Taste of Armageddon" race was a bunch of little rabbit people as far as I'm concerned. "We've admitted it to ourselves, we're a killer species!", but he's squeaking it with a little rabbit hat on his tiny head.

TAS does appear to suggest that overtly nonhuman aliens are very common, I think the apparent abundance of human-identical species in the live action series is best just considered a production reality rather than necessarily an in-universe fact.

It's certainly possible that what we see is an imperfect approximation, as Roddenberry said was true of the Klingons when they were redesigned for TMP. Trek aliens are often redesigned when they reappear in later series. Offhand, I can't think of any purely human-looking TOS alien species who were reintroduced with prosthetics, but there's the near-human example of the Tiburonians, who just had big convoluted ears in TOS, but in DS9 had the ears plus a series of small horns or spikes down the center of the forehead.

There have been a couple of cases where it went in the other direction -- where a species introduced with a prosthetic-forehead makeup was redesigned to something simpler for practical reasons. The Trill were a forehead species in TNG: "The Host," but for DS9, they simplified it to just spots, so it would be easier to apply on a regular basis and wouldn't hide Terry Farrell's beauty. Ktarians in TNG: "The Game" had bulbous foreheads, but VGR changed it to a few forehead spikes for Naomi Wildman, because she was introduced as a newborn baby and they needed a makeup that could be easily applied to a baby without discomfort, and presumably a similar consideration applied with the two child actresses who later played the role.

 

[Nerys Myk]

There are Illyrians who look just like Humans on Strange New Worlds Including Una "Number One" Chin-Riley.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Didn't The Original Series already explain it, with the Preservers and whatnot seeding people from Earth's past around the galaxy?

It's the TOS duplicate Earths I want an episode explaining. Just rip off the Shatnerverse explanation, I loved that (the galaxy is a petri dish, the Mirror Universe is the control universe, our Earth may not be the original and there are dupes of Vulcan and Andoria too)

 

[Christopher]

Didn't The Original Series already explain it, with the Preservers and whatnot seeding people from Earth's past around the galaxy?

I already addressed that. It was implied that was the case, but it doesn't necessarily hold up to analysis, and it's just one of the three different humanoid explanations TOS & TNG floated over the years.

People have built the Preservers up into this godlike ancient power, but they can't have been ancient. They transplanted populations in danger of extinction, and Native Americans weren't in danger until after European colonization began, so they couldn't have been taken earlier than maybe the 17th century. Not to mention that cultures evolve over time, so Spock wouldn't have been able to recognize the ancestral tribes of Miramanee's people if they'd been taken significantly before European contact. That makes the Preservers a modern civilization, not an ancient one. And nothing they did required any technology much more advanced than the 24th-century Federation -- just ships and a big tractor beam. And they somehow thought the way to "preserve" an endangered population was to stick them in the middle of a dangerous asteroid field with only one defense emplacement that only one person per generation knew how to operate, which suggests that the Preservers were really, really bad at their job.

There's also the fact that there's never been a canonical mention of the Preservers since "The Paradise Syndrome" (because the Progenitors are not even remotely the same group despite people confusing them for decades, having lived and died billions of years earlier), which suggests that their influence was not as widespread as "Syndrome" implied.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

I tend not to think of the Preservers as a species, but rather than an altruistic mindset that possesses star-faring species, temporarily or otherwise.

Despite the Prime Directive, we've seen Preserver behaviour at least twice with the Federation, once when Nikolai Rozhenko compelled Picard's Enterprise to save one village of a dying world by taking them on a holodeck journey to another world, and while self-preservation motivated Kirk's actions, he did travel through time to bring back an extinct species of whales.

 

[Christopher]

I tend not to think of the Preservers as a species, but rather than an altruistic mindset that possesses star-faring species, temporarily or otherwise.

Yes. A single activity like that would define a group or a movement, not a species. I figure either it's a Greenpeace-like organization, or it's a label archaeologists have coined for the groups behind various, possibly unrelated transplantations over time. (At least, I suggested that once in a book as a handwave for the inconsistent ways the Preservers have been portrayed in tie-in literature, though it's not necessary in canon, as the Preservers have only been mentioned once.)

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Will we see 'human' aliens again any time in Star Trek

There are, of course, other subtle ways to create alienness in Human-looking characters - clothes, rituals, super/strange powers. Having aliens look anatomically alien is more interesting and obvious at a glance, if sometimes more time-consuming and costly.

Why might any aliens appear human on today's Trek shows?

* Consistency - the same species looked like humans on previous shows
* To avoid fans asking why they look different, which may or may not require devising a reason for it (e.g. augment virus)
* They can change form - human-like happens to be the one they usually/often default to
* To be mistaken for humans/go undercover with little to no alteration (time travel on Earth, etc.)
* Cheaper costuming
* Some other plot reason

 

[Takeru]

TAS does appear to suggest that overtly nonhuman aliens are very common, I think the apparent abundance of human-identical species in the live action series is best just considered a production reality rather than necessarily an in-universe fact.

Right, isn't one of the reasons the romulans weren't used that much TOS because even just doing pointy ears was more expensive than klingons? They had the capability to do more alien aliens but clearly the budget was limited and they had to decide when to use them and when not, so Journey to Babel got ears, snouts and antenna for everyone but many other episodes had to make do with nightgowns made out of shiny fabric.

 

[Christopher]

Right, isn't one of the reasons the romulans weren't used that much TOS because even just doing pointy ears was more expensive than klingons?

Maybe to an extent, but back then, having recurring aliens at all was not a given. Not that there were a lot of other space shows to compare TOS to, but any kind of continuity was more the exception than the rule. So maybe they figured having Klingons as recurring bad guys was enough. Possibly the only reason they reused the Romulans in "The Deadly Years" was because they already had stock footage of Romulan ships they could recycle, and that set the precedent for bringing them back one more time in "The Enterprise Incident."

 

[The Salt Umpire]

Maybe to an extent, but back then, having recurring aliens at all was not a given. Not that there were a lot of other space shows to compare TOS to, but any kind of continuity was more the exception than the rule. So maybe they figured having Klingons as recurring bad guys was enough. Possibly the only reason they reused the Romulans in "The Deadly Years" was because they already had stock footage of Romulan ships they could recycle, and that set the precedent for bringing them back one more time in "The Enterprise Incident."

And it was even cheaper to use footage of Klingon ships as Romulan!

Also, westerns would use a standard type of dress for First Nations people...no matter the nation in that episode or movie.