So the Dax symbiant was first hatched this year, or maybe last year, given that it’s 356 at the time of Worf’s wedding.
Dax Symbiant
- Thread starter USS Excelsior
- Start date
Source? Dax said she stopped counting at 300 and I don't recall anything specific.
The Worf wedding episode with those bachelor parties stated 356 years, around about 2375 so the symbiant could have been farmed this year or last year.
Okay, but it's not real, you know?
Also, why are the Trill people an awful lot like good looking humans. ( the main ones we see repeatedly) Similarly, the Bajorans.
It would have been better if the Trills looked like say lobsters or maybe octopodes?
The human audience has to be able to relate to these characters! Star Trek has noted since TOS that there would probably be more really alien looking aliens, but production necessity means casting humans to play the parts. So they invented the "parallel evolution" hypothesis to explain it.
I don’t buy the relatability nonsense. It’s make-up $$$ pure and simple. We can relate to Cardassians or Klingons or Jem Hadar or Horta or energy monsters well enough when the episode is written well enough.
Also, when “Journey to Babel” was written, they knew that pigs were smart animals, hence Telarites. CG and zoology being where it is today, I think octopoid Federation members would be pretty cool. And let’s see “cetacean ops,” already.
Also, when “Journey to Babel” was written, they knew that pigs were smart animals, hence Telarites. CG and zoology being where it is today, I think octopoid Federation members would be pretty cool. And let’s see “cetacean ops,” already.
I always wonder what the planning meetings are like when they invent a new species, then decide they're going to look exactly like humans. The Betazoids, for example. I imagine it's also a budget meeting.
But then you have examples where they're shelling out on the big screen, and they're still coming up with aliens who have no differences whatsoever. The Baku, for example. It's a combination of budget considerations and also a lack of creativity.
Xindi, perhaps?
Well, the Trill slugs only residing in good-looking people is a given: it's a fierce competition where only supermodels get hired. Why would a slug accept a mundane-looking host?
As for why the slugs would prefer humanoids to lobsters as hosts, this also directly follows from the broader Trek setup: choosing the most common body type around offers benefits everywhere. A humanoid host can operate machinery designed for humanoids, which is about 90% of the machinery we see. Such a host can mingle with other humanoids, too; being able to use humanoid dwellings is a big plus to begin with. Early TOS loved its fancy hexagonal doorways, suggestive of originally nonhumanoid inhabitants of the places depicted (intellectual property of Forbidden Planet, really), but humanoids could use those dwellings; lobsters or spiders would have more difficulty living in human houses.
Bajorans range from unkempt fat slobs to heavily made-up vamps. Trill hosts who tried that would surely feel a strong, uh, internal need to cease and desist...
Anyway, dramatically, the whole point of the Trills was that they looked human, hence the surprise that they weren't. Now, Bajorans might well have been lobster people, except I'm fully with kkt in that they had to look maximally human in order to elicit audience sympathies. This before it was decided to make them central to a whole spinoff, dictating cheapest possible makeup: the initial "Ensign Ro" appearance already required us to feel for the space refugees (who did appear in some not insignificant numbers in that episode already, admittedly).
It's the more random characters that are at liberty, dramatically as well as financially, to look truly alien - Linus in DSC, say, but also Saru - especially if the point is to make them stand out as intriguing and perhaps isolated.
In any case, happy birthyear, Dax!
Timo Saloniemi
the Trill world has been settled for longer than Earth, perhaps. It's had time to breed out ugliness by selection.
Why are we assuming that there is only one symbiotic species on Trill? There could be many more, each species specific.
I don't think we have any reason to believe in "species specificity", though. The very first episode to deal with the Trills, "The Host", already shows that at least two distinct types of humanoid are suitable hosts, one of these being humans. No doubt a thousand species are, then. It's just that when you have a choice between a generic humanoid and a Kriosian, there's no good reason not to pick the Kriosian. (But of course we couldn't tell if some other humanoid happened to have a Trill inside, this being more or less the whole point of the species.)
The hosts being picky is established along with all specificity actually being a devious lie spread by the slugs, who happen to hold all the reins and thus reserve the right to be picky by pretending to be specific...
Timo Saloniemi
The hosts being picky is established along with all specificity actually being a devious lie spread by the slugs, who happen to hold all the reins and thus reserve the right to be picky by pretending to be specific...
Timo Saloniemi
They look like humans because the network wants their aliens to be cheap and the audience wants their aliens to be ****able.
I remember on one of the audio commentaries on the Babylon 5 DVD sets (I think in Season 1), J. Michael Straczynski was talking about how he had wanted to include some really alien looking species (and they wanted to do full body aliens), but the main problem that they ran into and realized why Star Trek never did it and stuck to just doing heads, was the time required to get an actor into make up and the cost of that make-up. (Sure nowadays you can have someone wear a green suit and walk around and CGI in a lobster, but then you have the cost of the CGI to create that lobster and having it properly interact with the real actors and sets, and if you want it in multiple scenes, then it is just not practical or cost-effective). But then I think of how Star Trek TOS had the Gorn, a reptilian alien, and then Enterprise tried to recreate the Gorn in CGI (sure a lot has changed since 2004/05) and the CGI, even to this day, never was that effective. Sure the 60's reptile costume was kind of hookey, but it added "weight" to the action, something that the CGI lacked (and with the CGI, none of the actors really interacted with the CGI Gorn, aside from the one shot of a reptilian glove that someone stuck over their hand).
They say there are significant differences in how the human brain takes in CGI vs. non-CGI. And my apologies in advance for a Star Wars tangent, but that's why I always preferred puppet Yoda over the CGI one. At the same time, it was obvious that they had to stick with one or the other for the later movies, and for the fighting scenes, the CGI won out. I would still like to see a deleted scene, though, of them attempting a Yoda fight scene with the puppet.
As said earlier about makeup, though, all the way up to "Insurrection," they were still making alien species who were totally identical to humans without even bothering with modest Trill distinctions we saw in the series. Not even the slightest attempt, even for the big screen.
I though I heard that they initially wanted the tardigrade on DSC to be part of the bridge crew, but they realized it was too expensive even today. Still, they got close.
CG, I imagine, will also not effect the human brain like real people until it’s indistinguishable from the real thing.
Still, Yaphet (sp?) is one of my favorite characters on Orville, so I guess it depends on how you choose to use the CG, too.
CG, I imagine, will also not effect the human brain like real people until it’s indistinguishable from the real thing.
Still, Yaphet (sp?) is one of my favorite characters on Orville, so I guess it depends on how you choose to use the CG, too.
In Beyond, and probably ITD, there were alien species on the crew. Some CGI some makeup.
There is no reason that the Trek movies must have alien species.
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