Your Weird Trek Assumptions

[Shawnster]

Here's another weird one: For some reason when I was a kid I thought that the kanar that the Cardassians are always drinking was made out of fish. I don't know where I got that from

DS9 Trials and Tribbilations

WADDLE: I'm a merchant. I deal in gemstones, kivas and trillium mostly. May I?
O'BRIEN: Help yourself.
WADDLE: You know what Cardassians drink in the morning? Fish juice. Hot fish juice.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

As a kid, I already thought that as you approached the Neg-E barrier it would look like a foreshortened strip no matter the approach.

What got in my little head--was what that barrier was meant to keep *out*

Have either of those assumptions been proven canonically wrong? Of course, if it actually were a foreshortened strip, it wouldn't be much of a barrier. What was that line in TWOK, about "2-dimensional thinking"?

in 1966 the three kids including me who assumed we were the only people in the world watching Star Trek thought Spock was from a hot planet closer to the Sun than Mercury.

If I remember right, Blish's short story adaptation (if it's not novel-length, it's not a "novelization"!) of "Tomorrow is Yesterday," and possibly the draft script from which he was working, explicitly addressed that! And in so doing, he established for the first time in licensed print that Vulcan was a planet of 40 Eridani, decades before that was elevated to canon.

 

[Mudd]

Yeah, 40 Eridani was considered a likely place to have Earth-like planets, in the 1960s. It came up a lot in science fiction.

In fact, it's currently referenced in Project Hail Mary.

 

[FredH]

I don't know how weird this assumption is, but in 1966 the three kids including me who assumed we were the only people in the world watching Star Trek thought Spock was from a hot planet closer to the Sun than Mercury. The hypothetical existence of a solar planet referred to as "Vulcan" was still a thing in the mid-Sixties, or recently enough that it showed up in the occasional outdated science book in the school library (I read science books written by George Gamow!), and certainly in a lot of "golden age" science fiction stories.

Fictional planets of the Solar System - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Perfectly reasonable assumption back then, before the series locked it down. Could be entirely possible that that was the initial idea.

 

[FredH]

As a kid, I already thought that as you approached the Neg-E barrier it would look like a foreshortened strip no matter the approach.

What got in my little head--was what that barrier was meant to keep *out*

Come to think of it — PIC S1 gave us a pretty good candidate!

 

[seti alpha]

A line about Orions ‘dealing in green animal women’ led me to believe for many years that whatever Orions looked like, it was nothing like that green woman Pike’s friend (his ships doctor? I don’t recall.) was talking about.

I’ve read a novel that calls the green ladies Rigellians, and seen some old DC Star Trek comics from the ‘80s that depict Orions as bone white, so I guess I wasn’t the only one?

 

[Ceridwen]

A line about Orions ‘dealing in green animal women’ led me to believe for many years that whatever Orions looked like, it was nothing like that green woman Pike’s friend (his ships doctor? I don’t recall.) was talking about.

I’ve read a novel that calls the green ladies Rigellians, and seen some old DC Star Trek comics from the ‘80s that depict Orions as bone white, so I guess I wasn’t the only one?

And the men were blue in the animated series.

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

If only there was a dedicated forum where people could discuss Star Wars…

Perhaps one will eventually turn up.

 

[Greg Cox]

What got in my little head--was what that barrier was meant to keep *out*

That's actually the premise of my Q Continuum trilogy.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Child me could not compute that TMP Kirk and TOS Kirk were played by the same actor.

I remember thinking Scotty was recast for the classic movies

I was the same with Scotty. James Doohan looked just different enough in TMP that I thought the character had been recast. (To be fair, I was 7.) Nowadays when I look at the film, he looks more or less the same as he did on TOS, just a shade heavier and with a mustache.

I remember when I really young, I though that the "Big Three" of TOS were Kirk, Spock, and Scotty, both because they had three different division colors (gold, blue, and red), and because I don't think I noticed Dr. McCoy in the television ads for the Mego action figures.

 

[TheAdmiralty]

Child me could not compute that TMP Kirk and TOS Kirk were played by the same actor. It was the toupee.

The same majestic charisma though

 

[Forbin]

I assumed Andorians were insectile, probably because the Trek lit of the 70s * 80s (ie Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual) said they were. I mean, they have antennas! And according to that book, the antennas were their audio sense organs, rather than having human-like ears. Well, I guess nobody official ever read that - the movies showed them with ears, then of course Enterprise happened and they not only had ears but the women had boobies - thus making them mammals, not insects.

I assumed Cardassians were reptilian, and I think it's pretty obvious why one would think that. But of course we later got females with mammalian mammaries, and interbreeding with Bajorans.

 

[Khamsin]

I recently went down a rabbit hole reading about monotremes (platypuses, echidnas, etc.). They are primitive mammals that still retain several reptilian features, like having a cloaca, laying eggs, and having less developed thermoregulation.
That got me thinking, maybe Cardassians were somewhat like monotremes. It kind of fits with the narrative.

 

[FredH]

I assumed Andorians were insectile, probably because the Trek lit of the 70s * 80s (ie Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual) said they were. I mean, they have antennas! And according to that book, the antennas were their audio sense organs, rather than having human-like ears. Well, I guess nobody official ever read that - the movies showed them with ears, then of course Enterprise happened and they not only had ears but the women had boobies - thus making them mammals, not insects.

I assumed Cardassians were reptilian, and I think it's pretty obvious why one would think that. But of course we later got females with mammalian mammaries, and interbreeding with Bajorans.

I mean, these are aliens: they didn’t evolve from reptiles or mammals or insects, even if we call them that; they evolved from ancestors that had certain traits that happened to parallel those Earth-biology categorizations, but also had certain traits that didn’t — or which mixed traits that if they were Earth-derived we would describe as improbably mixing from separate categories.

 

[Henoch]

And the men were blue in the animated series.

And in TOS Journey to Babel. The best way to pass for a blue skin Andorian with fake antenna, is to be a blue skin Orion. The Orion spy's identity was so good that a 23rd century autopsy will be needed to tell the difference.

KIRK: We damaged their ship. They destroyed themselves to avoid capture. Bones, Thelev's body will be brought to your lab. I want an autopsy performed as soon as possible.
SPOCK: I think you'll find he's an Orion, Doctor.
MCCOY: Orion?
SPOCK: Intelligence reports that Orion smugglers have been raiding the Coridan system.

 

[Henoch]

I thought the "Seven" in the title "The Galieo Seven" referred to the number of the shuttlecraft, not the seven people aboard.

You're probably now aware of this, per Wiki, The Galileo Seven was "inspired" by the 1939 film Five Came Back that starred Lucille Ball. I watched the movie a few years ago. They had to whittle down a larger group, like 10-11 people. The final selection of five survivors in the movie is not as clean as the TOS episode gives us.

 

[Dar70]

This thread was inspired by a completely random memory I had this morning. I first got into Star Trek when I was thirteen years old, in 1998. That year I borrowed the first six Star Trek movies from the library, one after the other, and when my uncle (who was an old school fan) heard I was getting into it he sent me a VHS tape he had put together full of what were, in his mind, the best episodes of the original series.

I knew about The Next Generation and the other spin-offs. It was the '90s, you couldn't not (I had gotten an issue of Disney Adventures Magazine in, I think, '93 that was all about the show). Insurrection wasn't out yet, First Contact was still a big deal (at least to me) as it was being hyped on VHS and DVD in rental stores.

Here's where the weird assumption comes in: Until I finally got around to watching the thing, based solely on the commercials for the home video releases, I thought for sure that First Contact was a remake of the Borg episodes of The Next Generation (which I had not seen yet, I had only read and heard about them). I could not tell you why I thought this, what previous media consumption led me down this thought path, only that, in 1998, I would have been adamant that was the case.

I am pretty sure I saw Insurrection in a movie theater in late '98 or early '99, and I don't remember if I rented First Contact before or after that, but I wasn't walking around with this assumption for too terribly long in the grand scheme of things.

Still... Weird.

Anyway! Did you ever make any weird assumptions like this about Star Trek? Maybe your youthful brain was working overtime, or you just misheard a line that didn't get clarified for you until reading a book or watching with captions on...

Haha. Funny. Yeah I had a lot of assumptions. I didn't know that TOS was the future when I first saw it when I was in grade school.

 

[FormerLurker]

I mean, these are aliens: they didn’t evolve from reptiles or mammals or insects, even if we call them that; they evolved from ancestors that had certain traits that happened to parallel those Earth-biology categorizations, but also had certain traits that didn’t — or which mixed traits that if they were Earth-derived we would describe as improbably mixing from separate categories.

Agreed. The same is true for the Klingons: they look reptilian with the scales and all, but their females have mammary tissue. The best explanation is that they are not from Earth, and developed those traits under very different conditions from what we know.

 

[Admiral Archer]

I had the Playmates Enterprise-D when I was around 4 years old, and assumed the stickers for the windows at the front of the saucer section was the main viewscreen. Even now that I know it's correct location is in the dome at the center of the saucer section, to this day I still believe every ship in Starfleet has always had a viewscreen that was actually a window at the front of the bridge, with holographic displays for various settings (such as the hologram in First Contact that can make it look like a wall) including a more opaque setting to block out sunlight when orbiting a star.

 

[Cicero]

I mean, these are aliens: they didn’t evolve from reptiles or mammals or insects, even if we call them that; they evolved from ancestors that had certain traits that happened to parallel those Earth-biology categorizations, but also had certain traits that didn’t — or which mixed traits that if they were Earth-derived we would describe as improbably mixing from separate categories.

I think it's better to consider Star Trek species with fantasy-world logic, rather than sci-fi. That any alien species is humanoid already doesn't make sense.