One of the fascinating things about this “third generation” of Star Trek (starting either with Star Trek 2009 or with Discovery) is the way the Star Trek universe has started to knit itself closer together by referencing existing backstory. For example, Discovery wholeheartedly embraced the idea that Andorians and Tellarites are key Federation members and should therefore be highly visible in Starfleet, building on lore originally implied in TOS, largely ignored by TNG, DS9, and VGR, and re-embraced by ENT. Prodigy, for its part, leaned very heavily on VGR for its worldbuilding source material.
This has also produced some interesting quiet exclusions from recent stories – not to suggest they’ve been “decanonized” or anything like that, but clearly have been deprioritized. The Tholians come to mind as a ready example of this. Like the Gorn, they debuted in TOS, received stray mentions in DS9, before making an on-screen return in ENT. I wonder if the SNW writers considered using the Tholians but balked at a villain that had such different atmospheric requirements, and all the consequences that entails in terms of dramatic presentation. The Denobulans also seem to fall into a similar bucket; outside of a pair of appearances in PRO, they have received nary a mention since ENT.
Then of course we have the lengthy list of “one-off” civilizations, including the likes of
-the Sheliak
-the Husnock
-the Tzenkethi
-the Jarada
-the Miradorn
And in terms of “underexplored corners”, I’ve only been focusing on the civilizations, but there are any number of other corners we could poke into. The Department of Temporal Investigations, the Corps of Engineers, the Federation Council, the Lunar Colonies… the Trekverse is littered with these little crumbs all over the place – tiny seeds of ideas that suggest opportunities for imagination.
For my part, I would love to learn more about the Sheliak. For one thing, they seem like they would benefit from the advances in CGI over the last 30 years. But I like that they seem equally matched to the Federation in terms of strength, and that their hyperfocus on legal compliance gives them a generally underused “hat” to wear in the Trekverse. They have some similarity to Vulcans, but taken to an extreme, and layered in with real disdain for “lower life forms” that I think would make for a fascinating “adversary” – I’d love to see Captain Pike or Captain Seven in a verbal jousting match with a Sheliak commander.
What is an underexplored corner of Trek lore that you think merits exploration?
The Tholians are at the top of my list. I was absolutely thrilled when it seemed that ENT was going to properly examine them; it’s a huge shame they never got the chance. STO tried to tackle them, but they were heavily limited by the bounds of canon.
A very close second - though they’ve definitely gotten more love since ENT - are the Andorians. My biggest problem with Trek’s portrayal of the Federation is that it’s very much a Humans Club. At best, it seems like the Four Founders are really the Humans, their babysitters the Vulcans, and the two jerks they found.
Would love to dig in more on the political realities of the balance of power between Earth, Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar.
Starfleet personnel are a subset of the total human population. Off the top of my head I’m not aware of any canon figure about what percentage of the human population is in Starfleet, or the total number of Starfleet, but presumably it is not a huge percentage of the total.
There are numerous notable civilian characters in Trek, but in general the franchise presents us with a vision where, contrary to the in-universe reality, civilian life is sort of at the periphery of Starfleet. Civilians are people that Starfleet personnel find to be colorful characters, sometimes become romantically involved with, people who serve Starfleet personnel when they’re on vacation or otherwise at leisure, sometimes criminals, etc.
The notable civilian characters we see on screen tend to have their entire lives circumscribed by Starfleet – think Jake Sisko or Keiko O’Brien.
I’d be really curious to see not just a human civilian character but a civilian world fully developed over the course of a series. What is it like to be “just some person” living their life?
I suspect this isn’t covered for a variety of reasons, but what we do see shows an Earth steeped in nostalgia blending with technology that alleviates the overwhelming majority of material concerns. No one needs to worry about food, shelter, clothing, or profit. They work to better themselves for its own sake and they relax and stuff.
I think the message is that Earth is boring and humans, having created paradise, left it for knowledge of the stars. Civilian life is coffee and breakfast in the morning before dropping the kids off at school, plenty of time to pursue niche hobbies, and probably also time to pursue some career interest and education.
However, you raise an interesting point in that civilians from the perspective of Starfleet officers are even more out there. These are folks who often wanted to go even further than the rest of society wanted to go. Fringe people with eccentricities to un civilized to stay within the Federation. The intersection of these two kinds of civilians is what I would like to explore.
A happy family who have lived in paradise are suddenly Swiss Family Robinson or Lost in Space style thrust into deep space and must survive without the comforts of paradise would be an interesting way to tell the story of what it’s like to be a civilian in the Federation.
There was that civilian led plan to create a new continent that Picard was thinking of leaving Star Fleet for.
Plus a lot of the guest scientists that go on the enterprise to study particular stars and planets or go to DS9 to study the wormhole seem to be mostly non Starfleet.
Most colonists of new colonies are also civilian. Jake Sisko’s future fame shows artists are celebrated in their lifetime.
So lots of civilian opportunities, we just don’t see them on screen a lot.
I think prior to the Borg near capture of Earth and the Dominion War, Starfleet life is seen as more of a civil service life. Something that’s nice if you have a calling for but it’s not the only way to enhance your life and humanity.
Honestly, the Federation itself. I always thought you could make a really interesting show that was a mix of Federation politics and Starfleet intrigue; maybe a show about the Federation government on Earth that delved into Federation society and dealt with an overarching plot. Like maybe a season where a Federation colony at the edge of Federation space gets into conflict with another race/government, and for a season you get a mix of stories from the colony, a Starfleet ship sent to the colony to support, and the Federation Council on Earth.
Federation politics could be really interesting, but the shows always paid kind of disappointing lip service to it. One key example is in the DS9 episode “Rapture” when Bajor is being accepted into the Federation; the fact that a Starfleet admiral rather than a civilian Federation representative was overseeing the proceeding was lazy to me. Plus the entire ceremony was tiny and anticlimactic (and obviously barely got started since Sisko interrupted). Great potential for some real insight into the government but instead it’s just some rando admiral.
Yeah I came here to say the same thing.
That being said, I think it’s a risk because any depiction of Federation life might be very close to current reality and thereby undermine a lot of the utopia they currently only allude to. Una’s recent trial, for example, very much felt like a contemporary courtroom drama.
What I would like to see is more screen time for non-Starfleet agencies. Bring on the Federation diplomatic corps or, as you say, the relationship between Starfleet and its civilian leadership.
The biggest gap in the existing series is the one-two punch of the Romulan War and the founding of the Federation, which we only missed due to ENT’s cancellation. Finding some way back into that era, beyond Riker’s holodeck program, would be number one on my wishlist.
I think I’d prefer if they explored strange new worlds more than calling back to existing lore. Then again, what the TNG era did with the Klingons was amazing, and if somebody had made that argument then, we would’ve missed a LOT of quality content.
Maybe it’s possible to dig deeper into some existing species, if done right.
I was very happy to see the Pakleds come back in Lower Decks.
Would be fun to see what happened to “time machine inventor” Berlinghoff Rasmussen.
As a Relaunch Litverse fan, I really liked the introduction of the competing Typhon Pact as a way to bring in a number of the less profiled species.
Having a different kind of interstellar government from the Federation in a Cold War rivalry for planets and civilizations was an interesting backdrop for the entire era. Creating an opponent that brought together a number of the less known species including the Breen, Tzenkethi, Tholians, Gorn as well as remnants of the Romulan Empire was inspired.
We never got to see as much of the Typhon Pact in the books as I would have liked. The concept though was inspired and one that would fit well in the early 25th century portrayed in Picard.
As for the Sheliak, the novelverse has them in conflict with the Breen for additional complexity.
The newest era of Trek hasn’t hesitated to integrate some of the more successful experiments from the novels, including Una’s name and Illyrian genetic modifications. The Typhon Pact of the Litverse has a lot to offer without being a direct competitor to the world building since Nemesis.
I thought the Miradorn were interesting. The twin bond that they have seems to suggest they have some kind of mental abilities, some way to connect the two people. They were listed as ‘quarrelsome’, could be an interesting mirror for the Tellarites, coming from a non-Federation species. They sided with the Dominion in the war, too, so they don’t seem to think much of the Federation. Could make for an interesting antagonist.
edit: Thought about this some more. What if the twinned Miradorn didn’t refer to brothers from the same mother? Perhaps their whole society consists of twinned people. Perhaps they have some sort of process where they bond two of their people together, for life, and that’s how they run their world. Think of how dangerous an adversary that would make, there’s always two of them. Even better if they have some sort of 2 person hive mind between them, so that they can work together seamlessly, even at a distance. Like some kind of organic grassroots Borg.
I had a similar thought about the Denobulans the other day (I’m on an ENT watch through). I guess I missed them in Prodigy.
Back on point, have the Suliban or the Xindi been mentioned at all since ENT?
I wonder if it’s too late for the suliban in SNW given how heavily they’re leaning into human augments. I imagine their story would be pretty similar. Like after the Temporal Cold War, Starfleet should have spent plenty of time and effort forcing them to roll back all those upgrades they got from the future, but there’s probably a group of still-advanced suliban out there practicing the old ways yadda yadda…. Most of that potential got taken by Una.
When the kids find that Federation outpost in episode 11, the one guy staffing it is a Denobulan
Xindi showed up in the later half of PRO. They ran security at a seedy trade hub the kids were trying to hitch hike from. The thing was though that these were Xindi Reptilians and this was a snowy Ice world… Kinda a problem when ENT dedicated screen time to saying Reptilians were cold blooded (though to be fair Reptilian’s did have an inclination to bio-engineering they could have just made themselves warm blooded).
Apparently I did not pay close attention to Prodigy at all. I missed both the Xindi and Denobulan appearances.
I wouldn’t think the Xindi Reptilians would bio-engineer themselves into warm-bloodedness. In ENT, they were really proud of their cold blood and considered it “superior” to the other warm-blooded Xindi races.
I would really like to see a series which focused on establishing a colony and the specific challenges that settlers face. There are probably a lot of interactions between civilian Federation organizations, civilian individuals, colonial governments, and Starfleet. I think there’s a lot to explore here.
The automated repair station from ENT’s Dead Stop (AKA The Ware) The novels presented an interesting idea of these rogue clumps of machine learning forming symbiotic relationships with sentient life that have the developed grey matter the Ware needs, but are filtered from becoming advanced, tool using, space fairing civilizations due to essentially lack the physiology like the opposable thumbs common to progenitor seeded humanoid races.
I would like to point out that Denobulans have appeared a few times on Lower Decks as well.
Good call! Yeah, I think it’s really interesting how the two animated series have utilized more of those callbacks and deep cut references. I had mixed feelings about the last season of LDS, but PRO felt wall-to-wall like solid Star Trek and good television. These recent tax writeoff shenanigans notwithstanding, I imagine that the animated series are cheaper to produce – I wonder if on the whole it might just make more sense for the franchise’s future to sit in the animated world.
(Of course, I’m tacitly suggesting here that “deep cuts” and “callbacks” are what “make” something into good Star Trek, and I don’t really believe that at the end of the day.)
Certainly not. But they are nice to see.
I’d love to see more about the cultural and social revolutions which occurred in Ferenginar which were happening in the background of DS9 that resulted in the first Ferengi to be a trade union leader becoming Grand Nagus.
I think Nagus Zek and Moogie were working on ways to modernise Ferengi culture but the realpolitik of it means it can’t just have been the two of them. I feel like there was a coalition of feminists and Ferengi workers in the proletariat growing in popularity.
Ferengi’s seem to have been isolated from the Dominion War but it doesn’t mean they weren’t impacted by it, as the 3 biggest Empires closest to them were all actively in full scale war mode. I also think it’s likely that prior to the war there may have been a kind of Gold Rush into the Gamma Quadrant which left many Ferengi investors overextended when the war started and the quadrant was cut off.
I think Zek and Moogie were trying to reform in this context. It’s Russia in 1916-17 without the overt involvement in the war.
Ferengi workers and women, surrounded by the cultural hegemony of the Federation must have been causing strikes, protests and riots in the background, and the wealthy class of Ferengi were weakened due to their gamma quadrant investments failing.
While Rom was radical to lead a strike in the first place, it’s possible he was seen as a moderate by the time of Season 7 after a few months of continuous disruption to Ferengi economy and politics. Also as a hero of the Allies fighting the Dominion who saved millions of lives with his role in keeping the wormhole closed and the resistance, he’d have a good diplomatic influence to regain trade with those powers and access to DS9 as a port.
So my working theory is that there was a gradual revolution in Ferengi culture, and that a coalition of Ferengi trade unions, feminists, Federation enthusiasts and socialists and democratic reformers were able to claim victory at the same time as the war ending.
But of course the FCC and the power of Capital amongst the elite must still have been immensely strong. 100% of a culture won’t change overnight - but however the Ferengi left coalition gained influence (I’m thinking at least a general strike and riots - why else is Zek’s message to Quark so garbled that he thinks he will be the next Grand Nagus) Rom was seen as a good compromise by both sides. The FCC working on their prior intelligence will see him as the moron brother of minor barkeeper they may be able to keep in line and manipulate, and who at this time is less radical than demands of some Ferengi revolutionaries, but to the left he’s hugely symbolic as their first trade union leader. Both sides also accept that diplomatically he’s going to be popular with the Federation.
There’s no way Rom gets to be Grand Nagus without massive social and political change, without some kind of Marxist dialectic happening in the background.
I think Rom is the Social Democratic compromise between various political movements and also the first wave of further integration into the Federation and its ideals.
But we only get the surface level information of it. I think there’s at least a double episode in it. Maybe a future Ferengi Star Fleet officer in Discovery could retell this story of cultural evolution after first contact with a particularly capitalist new alien culture.
Whatever happened to Paris and Janeway’s salamander kids from Threshold? Show us what happened there like a few million generations later. Have far future salamanders create time travel or whatever and then come back to the “present” and cause some hijinx. I know the Threshold episode is… controversial, at best, but it happened. Use them salamanders.
Seems like a awesome Lower Decks episode waiting to be made.
Link for the clueless like me.
