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Most underutilized alien race?

GalaxyClass1701

Captain
Captain
Which alien race throughout every series do you think was underutilized and had the most potential.

Two come to mind:

TNG: Parisites from Conspiricy
Tholians.
 
The (never seen) Tzenkethi. We know they occupy a reasonably big territory, so why have we never seen them?
 
I always wanted to see more members of that kinda fish-like species with the big ears. You know, the guy that Dr. McCoy tried to charter a spaceflight to the Genesis Planet with in The Search for Spock.

TNG: Parisites from Conspiricy

Agreed. I kept expecting them to at least make one token appearance on Voyager.

Voyager really dropped the ball with the Caretaker's race.
 
I always wanted to see more members of that kinda fish-like species with the big ears. You know, the guy that Dr. McCoy tried to charter a spaceflight to the Genesis Planet with in The Search for Spock.

TNG: Parisites from Conspiricy

Agreed. I kept expecting them to at least make one token appearance on Voyager.

Voyager really dropped the ball with the Caretaker's race.

Yes the did!
 
I think the Romulans were really underutilized. They got a great buildup and then...not much after that, at least not as much as they deserved. Course, I'm partial.

I'd also really liked to have heard more from the parasites from Conspiracy.
 
You can point to just about all the alien species shown to have representation with the Federation Council in the TOS movies.
 
Virtually all alien races were underutilized, because of the "alien of the week"-syndrome. We were lucky to see at least some of them in more than just one episode. I always thought it would be much more satisfying to limit yourself to just a few races that you could then explore in depth.

The exceptions to that rule were the Klingons and the Borg, obviously because they met some coolness-criteria of whoever was in charge.

I wish they'd have made good use of the Romulans like they did with the Cardassians in DS9 :( And I was really disappointed that ENT missed the opportunity to show us some of the underutilized races of the Federation. Yes, they made some effort with the Vulcans and Andorians, but why drag yet another race into the mix? That Xindi stuff just made me completely lose interest in the show.
 
Romulans, definately. There's really only a handful of episodes from each series that deal with Romulans, and there's never been in real development for them. Certainly not the the extent the Klingons have been developed. The only episodes that really examine Romulan culture or Romulan life are Balance of Terror, The Enterprise Incident, and Face of the Enemy. Add to that the've only been prominent in two movies. However in one, they played second fiddle to their newly introduced slave race, and in the other their homeworld got destroyed.

Voyager seemed to have a problem of creating cool aliens, and then never re-visiting them. The Vaadwuar were really cool aliens, and Dragon's Teeth even leaves the door open for them to return. The Hirogen were also really cool. And although we saw them more than once, they were rarely used. Voyager could have improved itself tenfold by developing these races instead of constantly running back to the Borg.
 
I would say Andorians, but Enterprise seemed to fill the gap on that one.

It would've been nice to get an explanation for the difference between the Trills from TNG and the Trills from DS9.

Guinan's race is still quite mysterious. If the El-Aurians were scattered throughout the galaxy, why didn't Voyager come across any?
 
Guinan's race is still quite mysterious. If the El-Aurians were scattered throughout the galaxy, why didn't Voyager come across any?

Probably because the Delta Quadrant seemed to be where the El-Aurians were running from.

I'm adding my vote to the Romulans being underutilised as well.
 
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