Lonely Among Us (TNG)

[StrangeDevice]

And which would be the more practical for the story they were trying to tell. A costume would work if they wanted to really highlight the differences between the guest cast and the main characters, but if you wanted to do something that required the audience to empathise with them or allow the actor to strut their stuff, you'd need something closer to their later makeup.

Personally... I think I prefer the former. I do enjoy a well-tailored costume and the not-TOS atmosphere of that first season did rather well in that regard. I'm a bit surprised that they didn't try for puppets later on actually, given how well the neural parasites turned out from a production standpoint.

[MissKittyFantastico]

Before Nimbus III became the Planet of Galactic Peace, it had small research facility on it where Dr. Richard Daystrom developed the M5 Multitronic unit.

And before that, Dr. Phlox established the Federation Medical Ethics Board on the planet.

In the 24th Century the Nimbus III Archaeological Mission, having time on their hands while they waited for Prof. Galen to bring back the Kurlan naiskos he'd promised to return any day now so they could complete their landmark study of it, stumbled across evidence that the Iconians had used Nimbus III as an early-warning base to protect their homeworld from enemy attack.

[FakeGeekGirl]

I looked up the Selay on Memory Alpha to see if there was anything else written about them and their culture.

Apparently not. It's extremely sparse. They just have a couple of background mentions in other materials but never appear again. Feels like a waste of good makeup and prosthetics.

I might be more used to Star Wars where the lack of new material up to 1999 means that even the ice cream maker guy that ran through Cloud City got a name and backstory eventually.

I'll just have to insert my own new headcannon that other than being snake people, they're a bunch of easily relatable average joes that got into a genocidal war with Anticans over a well developed sense of smell and a suggestion of a shower that was taken as the worst insult imaginable.

That sounds amazing.

It's relatively rare Trek doesn't have a lot of background fleshed out, but it does happen. When it does, there's always headcanon.

[Durandal_1707]

Well, given that the Anticans apparently are fond of eating the Selay as food, uh, I don't think I require a diplomatic misunderstanding to understand how their relations could go to hell.

[ScreamingDoom]

In the 24th Century the Nimbus III Archaeological Mission, having time on their hands while they waited for Prof. Galen to bring back the Kurlan naiskos he'd promised to return any day now so they could complete their landmark study of it, stumbled across evidence that the Iconians had used Nimbus III as an early-warning base to protect their homeworld from enemy attack.

Later on, Nimbus III becomes the site of the Admiral Janeway Memorial Temporal Care Center.

A week later, an accident at the TCC leads to information falling through time and space and ending up on 1990s Earth where it inspires a group of genenigeers to create Khan and his supermen.

[MissKittyFantastico]

But even after being shut down in favour of opening a new Stellar Phenomena Advisory Office ("Tell Spock not to hurry, supernovae are sublight, he's got plenty of time") they still had all that temporal care equipment stashed in the storage shed, and eventually dusted it off to set up the headquarters of the Temporal Integrity Commission ("What's Braxton doing in the brig? Well who's left to run the place? What about this Daniels guy, he seems sensible.")

[Beastro]

People like to think kids are dumb. They're ignorant, but perceptive. Watching Early TNG on weekends when there was nothing else on gave me an early dose in Left wing arrogance and self-righteousness. I see now looking back that when that sort of thing bugs me from the left, it has it's heart in episodes like this.

With that said, I do find it amusing how passed over these races have become given the mark up work used on them. IMO, they got more use being minor races in Birth of the Federation and they are some of the least useful minors to recruit into your faction.

[FaxModem1]

I think one of the major reasons the alien costumes weren't used more often was because of the ability to emote, and for cost of extras. Putting ridges on someone's forehead? They can still show a full range of characteristics. Need someone in the background? Don't want to spend all those hours putting an extra in the makeup chair when you can just slap on a costume or apply ridges in less than an hour.

Though, I've never really put much thought into it. How varied were the extras in DS9? Voyager and TNG kept most of their Starfleet extras as just humans in jumpsuits. I know DS9 did some variations. How many were Starfleet and Bajoran personnel, and how many were other alien races?

[MissKittyFantastico]

Memory Alpha has quite a list of random aliens, starting with a section just for the ones that showed up on DS9 - seems like they had a bit of budget set aside as standard to slap alien makeup on extras for Promenade-filler, besides the standard Bajorans and humans. Some of them were reused from TNG; presumably since the camera was never focused on them and they had no lines, it was easy enough to reuse appliances on different actors without having to tailor them overmuch.

It wasn't just the never-named aliens too, I'm sure I recall a couple of Pakleds meandering along the Promenade at one point. I like to imagine Quark conned them into living and working in his stock room, and that's where they were for the rest of the series.

[J!!]

i remember seeing something on tv at some point a long time ago, where they interviewed a makeup guy who'd worked on star trek (don't know which show). if i recall correctly, he claimed that as a rule roddenberry always wanted to be able to see the actors' eyes and mouths; without those two things, their performance was lost.