As a space opera franchise about exploring strange new worlds, it’s no surprise that Star Trek shows us a number of extremely weird planets. Most of the time, these worlds have a scifi explanation underpinning their weirdness. Meridian is a planet that occasionally phases out of our reality due to quantum cascades, while the episode Blink of an Eye introduces a planet where time passes super quickly because its core is made of tachyons. Sure. While those technobabble explanations may not be especially convincing, some Star Trek planets don’t even get that much. Naturally, this merits further investigation, so I’ve compiled five of the most bizarre for your enjoyment.
1. Ceti Alpha VI
We never actually see Ceti Alpha VI on screen, as it’s already been destroyed by the time Wrath of Khan starts. However, its influence is felt throughout the film, as the planet’s destruction apparently shifted Ceti Alpha V’s orbit, drastically altering the climate and killing many of Khan’s followers. At first, that sounded pretty unlikely to me, since a solar system’s star has way more influence on planetary orbits than the planets have on each other. However, it turns out that in at least some orbital models, removing a single planet can make the whole thing go haywire, so the idea is more plausible than I thought.
But Ceti Alpha VI’s destruction is a different case. All we get is Khan’s dialogue saying it “exploded.” This is, notably, not something planets do. Stars explode, and I have to wonder if the writers got a little confused because there’s a star named Alpha Ceti in real life. Otherwise, there’s simply no known mechanism for a planet to explode on its own. Planets are generally made of rock, gas, or ice, none of which is particularly explosive.
But, in fairness, Khan didn’t have any advanced sensors to study the explosion, so maybe there’s a scifi explanation he doesn’t know about. Ceti Alpha VI might have had large dilithium deposits, which The Next Generation portrays as causing the destruction of at least one planet. Or a planet killer might have wandered through the system and stopped for a brief snack.
However, that doesn’t explain the weirdest part: when the USS Reliant arrives in the Ceti Alpha system, it mistakes Ceti Alpha V for Ceti Alpha VI, which is how Khan escapes to start his revenge plot. I don’t see how that can possibly be the case. First, however Ceti Alpha V’s orbit was affected, it almost certainly wouldn’t end up in exactly the same orbit that Ceti Alpha VI used to have. Even if it somehow did, we’re supposed to believe the Reliant didn’t notice that the system had one too few planets? We’ve seen that Starfleet ships can detect a system’s planets and moons with just a few button presses.
Maybe the scan data was cached, so the monitor just put up an older image of the system? They probably should have at least refreshed the page a few times before beaming down.
2. Murder Planet
Our second planet comes from the franchise’s newest show, Star Trek: Prodigy. In the third episode, our scrappy heroes land on a planet where everything is trying to kill them, hence the name they give it. But things are weird even before that, as they detect the planet via a proximity alarm. That means they just happened to be passing close enough that the automated systems had to warn them of a possible collision. In space. Which is known for being really big and also really empty. Maybe Holo-Janeway changed the course a little so she could have the ship to herself for a while.
Once our heroes are exploring this strange new world, the hostile flora and fauna seem reasonable at first. We’ve seen plenty of planets with unusual predators before, so this barely raises an eyebrow. Presumably, the various creatures hunt each other when there aren’t any off-world protagonists around.
Oh no, of course it’s not that simple. Instead, we learn that the entire planet is a single superorganism and that its only source of sustenance is people who land from off world. I have questions. First, how can that possibly be enough food? I’m guessing that when they say the whole planet is a single organism, they just mean all the trees and plants are linked rather than the entire thing being meat down to the core, but that’s still an absurdly high calorie requirement. Unless there’s a constant stream of ships queuing up to be eaten, Murder Planet is probably going hungry.
At first, I expected a reveal that Murder Planet can move around. That would explain how it got close enough to set off the proximity alarms, and it would offer some justification for how it gets enough food. We even see a crashed Klingon ship there, which I assumed was more foreshadowing. Last time I checked, Klingon ships don’t generally frequent the Delta Quadrant. But no, the planet doesn’t move, or at least it doesn’t give chase when the heroes flee. It really is just waiting for anyone unfortunate enough to land there.
Which brings us to the final point: Murder Planet isn’t actually that difficult to escape. Its vines are slow and easily destroyed or dodged. The only real point in its favor is that it can create psychic illusions to lure in prey, but these are so obvious that our heroes quickly realize what’s going on. The only reason Prodigy’s characters have trouble is that they’re a dysfunctional crew of misfit youngsters who don’t know what they’re doing. Most adult crews would have little difficulty getting away, and I can only assume the dead Klingons were really drunk when they crashed.
3. Ocampa
As a species, Voyager’s Ocampa are pretty inexplicable, but it’s their planet we’re talking about today. Which is also called Ocampa. How do you do, fellow humans from the planet Humans?
Anyway, Ocampa’s most distinctive feature is the entire surface being a desert. This is explained with dialogue about how the atmosphere lacks “nucleogenic particles,” which apparently makes rain impossible. We learn later that nucleogenic particles were accidentally destroyed by some very advanced aliens, but that doesn’t matter because nucleogenic particles aren’t a thing. There is such a thing as nucleogenic isotopes, but that term refers to particles created in naturally occurring nuclear reactors. Which is all very cool, but none of it has anything to do with rain.
My best guess is that the writers are referring to the microscopic particles of dust that raindrops condense around, which are often called “nuclei.” Those particles are essential for rainfall, but for there not to be any, Ocampa would have to be completely free of dust. I promise there is still dust on Ocampa. Neelix helpfully kicks some up while he’s nearly getting everyone killed by the Kazon. Instead, what the writers have done is invent a completely fictional substance that’s supposedly required for rain and then say the planet doesn’t have any. Next, we’ll probably learn you can’t start fires on Ocampa because there’s no phlogiston.
This also leaves the question of where all the evaporating water goes now that it can’t fall as rain. I suspect some of it would condense as dew, but the most dramatic effect would be constant cloud cover. Rather than a blue-sky desert, Ocampa would be uniformly overcast and probably a lot colder. The relationship between clouds and climate is complicated, but on the whole, more clouds means cooler temperatures.
Finally, why do all the Ocampa (the species) live underground? We’re told that they were moved down there by a powerful alien called the Caretaker because the planet’s remaining water is several miles below the surface. Let’s accept this premise and not ask about setting up giant condensers to catch all the water floating around as clouds, because we’re feeling generous. It still raises the question: Has the Caretaker never heard of a pipe?
To be sure, it’s no easy feat to run pipes several miles underground, but you know what’s way harder? Moving an entire civilization several miles underground! Just pump the water up to where the people already are so the whole population doesn’t have to go apartment hunting at once.
The other possible explanation for moving underground is defense. Indeed, the first episode shows us some very angry Kazon camped out on the surface, unable to reach the subterranean Ocampa civilization. How would aboveground Ocampa defend themselves from the Kazon and other hostile aliens? The same way they did before it stopped raining, I imagine. Or maybe the Caretaker can handle that, since he has a giant space station full of guns.
4. Xindus
The list isn’t even over, and we already have a second planet destroyed before we ever get to see it. This one is from Enterprise, and it’s the homeworld of the fearsome Xindi. Early in season three, our heroes* spend an entire episode searching for Xindus, only to end with the dramatic reveal of a debris field instead. Very interesting. Intercut with that storyline, we also have the beginnings of the plot where Tucker and T’Pol give each other sexy massages, which is significantly less interesting. But I digress.
Unlike Ceti Alpha VI, we actually get some exposition on how Xindus was destroyed. The planet was apparently “geologically unstable,” and the Xindi who lived there were constantly at war. As the war dragged on, some of them* planted powerful explosives along “seismic fissures,” and that’s what did it.
The main problem with this explanation is that it fundamentally misunderstands how planets work. Geological instability generally refers to the frequency of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other seismic events. It’s completely possible to create such events artificially, though thankfully we humans haven’t yet figured out how to weaponize them. Natural or artificial, seismic activity can be absolutely devastating for anyone living on the planet, but the planet itself isn’t in any danger. Planets are held together by gravity, not by the action of tectonic plates. The Xindi’s explosives could certainly have rearranged their planet’s surface, but that’s it.
To destroy a planet, geologically unstable or not, you need enough energy to overcome the gravity of all those tons of rock pressing down on itself. And unless you can somehow start your explosion in the planet’s core, you probably need to peel it apart one layer at a time. First the crust, then the mantle, etc. We know the Xindi don’t have explosives powerful enough to do that for two reasons. First, if they did, then the geological instability wouldn’t have mattered. Second, the entire plot of season three is about the Xindi trying to invent a planet-destroying weapon.
One last oddity about Xindus is the Xindi themselves. They’re not a single species at all, but six different species that evolved sapience independently and from completely different lineages, but also at the same time. That’s pretty unlikely, but the really weird part is that one of them has gone extinct by the time the show starts. These are the Avian Xindi, and we’re told that they didn’t survive Xindus’s destruction like the other five Xindi species did. But we’re also told that the Avians had several off-world colonies, one of which is a major set piece. So… did they just not have a stable breeding population after Xindus exploded? It’s only been a century or so; there should still be at least some of them left!
5. Earth Duplicates
The Original Series features a number of planets that appear to be duplicates of Earth, or at least certain slices of Earth’s history. The most famous are probably Mobster Planet and Cowboy Planet,* but those two both have scifi explanations. The mobster aliens were using their super mimicry to copy a book about 1920s gangs, while Cowboy Planet was created by powerful beings to test Kirk’s morality.
Much weirder are the planets that clearly duplicate Earth with no explanation at all. That’s right: planets, plural. This happens not once, not twice, but three times. Our three lucky contestants are:
- Miri: a 1960s planet where all adults died and all kids stopped aging
- Omega IV: a planet where the Cold War turned hot
- 892-IV: a planet where the Roman Empire never fell
Each time the crew encounters one of these worlds, everyone is astonished at how Earthlike it is. Then they get on with the episode, never addressing how this could possibly have happened. It’s puzzling from a storytelling perspective as well, since none of these episodes require an alternate-Earth premise to work.
Miri’s episode is about a world with no adults, and that could happen pretty much anywhere. The Enterprise could easily have encountered an alien world where all the grown-ups died, leaving the children to fend for themselves. Omega IV gets a little more use out of its premise since it’s supposed to be teaching a lesson about the Cold War, but again, an alien parallel would have worked just as well. Star Trek is famous for its parallels to real-world issues, and that wouldn’t have had viewers wondering why this guy from another planet knows the Pledge of Allegiance.*
Rome Planet is by far the weirdest, since I’m not at all sure what point the writers are trying to make. Most of the story is about Kirk resisting the temptations of wealth and power* that another Federation captain has already succumbed to. Again, this could happen with any alien empire; it doesn’t have to be Rome specifically. Near the end, we are told that Space Rome will eventually be brought down by the worship of Space Jesus. That’s a blatant misreading of Roman history, but maybe the writers wanted to do a puff piece about Christianity?
It’s also possible that the writers just really liked period pieces and wrote them into Star Trek regardless of justification. This type of planet is completely absent from The Next Generation, as in that show, the writers could simply use the holodeck when they wanted to visit Earth’s history. While TOS and TNG had largely different creative teams, there was enough overlap that I can imagine such a transition taking place.*
There was a time when I thought Star Trek’s most inexplicable planets were all behind us, but the new era has given me hope. Prodigy has already entered the ring with Murder Planet; will we see the other shows step up as well? Strange New Worlds seems like a particularly strong contender, with its heavy dose of TOS nostalgia. Maybe Pike will visit a planet that’s just like Earth from the distant past of the 1990s. How historical!
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My guess with TOS is that they had a really low budget and thought it was a clever money-save to just reuse set pieces that other TV shows/movies recently built and used.
Still, though. That doesn’t necessitate making things QUITE so Earth-like. It particularly doesn’t necessitate the establishing shot of the planet in Miri, showing that the freaking continents are just like Earth’s continents too, or why everything has almost the same NAMES in Omega IV…
For some reason, Husband and I talked about the Earth-like TOS-planets just the other day, and I said “no, the Rome planet had an explanation, it was a Star Trek officer who crashed there and wanted to recreate Rome”, and Husband goes “no, you’re thinking about the Nazi planet, where a Star Trek officer wanted to recreate Nazism to build efficient autobahns, but to his surprise, it didn’t stop there” and I’m like “right, I mixed them up”. It happens so often it’s even hard to keep them apart! (Also, in a contest of “worst plans in the history of fiction”, that’s gotta be a top contender. Right up there with the X-men plot where mutant haters tried to make Nightcrawler the Pope.)
Yeah. It’s super weird. But also one of the things that make TOS so fun to watch – the sheer weirdness it veers into, over and over.
#5 is another symptom of what I think is the fundamental problem of Star Trek as a franchise. They allowed production limitations to drive worldbuilding all too often.
This is why they still use transporters despite the fact that it would be hard to design a worse piece of technology from a dramatic standpoint. It’s also why they frequently fail to use environmental protection despite the obvious risks, or why their concept of combined arms means phasers and fists.
Also, I found Star Trek Prodigy rather odd as a concept. While I get the idea of a kids story taking place in Star Trek, I’m not sure why it didn’t just take place at Starfleet Academy. Given the holodeck as an obvious training device, there are plenty of opportunities for interesting dramatic scenarios with relatively low stakes that focus on character development. Even the idea of Gwyn’s arc could still fit, in which she is now an infiltrator who has conflicting emotions after she learns what Starfleet really is. This could then build up to a dramatic ending as her loyalty is tested while the characters are on some sort of training voyage.
Wow, I did *not* know that there was a “nazi planet” episode of Star Trek. I followed the wiki link and… just wow. My mind was blown, and not in a good way.
It must be doing wonders for the “Star Trek out of context” clip compilations (I did not check before writing this comment).
It’s not great! It’s supposed to be an anti-Nazi episode, but it uses a badly mistaken idea about how fascism and Nazi ideology works
Yeah, that’s the most upsetting part. It’s like some writers (not just the Star Trek TOS ones) think that governments run on some kind of point-buy system, where you can min-max morality for efficiency and power.
It also apparently contains another one of my most despised tropes, “the dictator orders the hate to stop, and fascism is solved forever, yay!”
Also, also, it seems to Godwin’s Law the Prime Directive, which is kinda funny.
The main lesson to be taken from Patterns of Force, in which a Starfleet officer introduces fascism to a lawless world because of its great efficiency as a system of government, is that Starfleet Academy desperately needs to overhaul its political science and history curriculum.
To be fair to the script writers, very few people at the time wanted to deal with the fact that the real actual Nazis were inefficient bunglers who believed in some weird shit, and I mean beyond the racism like believing humans originated at the North Pole, because they just finished fighting them and the reality would be too depressing.
My take on the episode was that the planet asked the Federation for help getting its economy back on track, but they didn’t want a handout. The Federation debated various economic systems – one of the ones that rose to the top was this old thing called “fascism”, which no one had any real experience with for centuries. So in the way that things get done in large bureaucracies, the idea stuck, and a version of fascism was put into place on the planet. However, one of the big shots on that planet did some more research (the kind the Federation didn’t bother doing), and realized he could use it to put himself into power….
My guess that the real reason we had earth duplicates was because of budgetary issues. Its a lot cheaper when you can go through storage to get the costumes for a planet.
1) I assumed that they didn’t bother to check whether all of the planets were there, and that the effects of the cataclysm on Ceti Alpha V caused its environment to resemble Ceti Alpha VI – consider that they did not realise anything was amiss even upon landing, suggesting it still looked right. They were specifically heading for Ceti Alpha VI, and would have paid no attention to the whereabouts of Ceti Alpha V. It was in approximately the right place, and everything looked right. …Though it’s still weird that, in a known system, used as an improvised penal colony, Starfleet never knew that a planet exploded somehow.
2) I guess you could argue that the superorganism lies dormant with an extremely slowed metabolism until agitated by the presence of prey. When starving, it possibly cannibalises components of itself in much the same way a starving human body breaks down some of its own tissues for nutrients. It may also have some means of extracting and metabolising nutrients from the planet’s inorganic matter, though this would be in finite supply. Possibly there are or at one time were other life forms on the surface, or even spaceborne organisms in its vicinity, and it now relies on passing crews for sustenance only because it was too successful and hunted all native prey to extinction. So I think it could make sense if it didn’t evolve for its current state, but rather has grown out of control and profoundly altered its environment, inadvertently to its own detriment.
3 and 4) Okay, yeah, these don’t make any sense at all. Also have to wonder why any side in a civil war would settle on destroying their own planet?
5) Miri easily makes the least sense. No explanation for its being an exact physical duplicate of Earth is ever provided, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the episode. The other two are weird because they’re justified using a concept which makes a lot of sense, but is used way too literally – “Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planet Development.” It helps Star Trek’s abundance of humanoids with surprisingly familiar cultures make sense – essentially, similar environments will tend to develop similar species, and similar species in similar environments will tend to develop cultural similarities. This has precedent in real biology, sociology, and anthropology in the form of convergent evolution (unrelated species evolving similarly due to similar environmental pressures) and environmental determinism (cultures developing semi-predictably in response to environmental factors). Definitely doesn’t mean people on other worlds will have the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance, though. And the Rome one would instantly have been much less egregious if things were just named differently. A humanlike species developing something extremely similar to the Roman Empire with a similar polytheistic religion? Sure, why not. But there’s a lot of distance between that and them actually calling it Rome and having gods with names like Jupiter (and maybe don’t make the aesthetics EXACTLY the same).
1) That would still be… odd. They’d likely notice the absence of Tau Ceti V instead, then. But that could also just make them incautious, hurrying to ‘Tau Ceti VI to complete their mission ASAP before dealing with whatever made Tau Ceti V disappear. And it might look similar on landing, given it’s shifted to the same orbit (and therefore blackbody conditions), and frankly it’s unlikely they’d ever been to that part of Tau Ceti VI to notice a difference.
Thought process basically going like ‘Oh shit, the fifth planet is missing. Isn’t that where we dumped Khan? Maybe he did something to it or…, anything that can destroy and or move a planet is above our pay grade, pass it up the chain and double time the evacuation before something else happens.
2) Yeah, I… it’d probably make more sense to just make it… basically a carnivorous plant. It’s an autotroph that incorporates biomass that happens to land on it in order to… maybe build its ‘brain’ or something similarly small and important. It benefits from something outside ‘food’ brings, but the vast bulk of its biomass is just sustained by sunlight. (Which, basically, makes it a Kardashev I organism)
3) If somebody did something remarkably uncanny and coated the entire planet in hydrophobic dust or something… that might do the trick, which might just be within the capabilities of the more advanced Star Trek races. Or Uninvolved Bullshit. The Caretaker is also clearly kind of an ass.
4) I mean… a smaller version of the planet killer that took more… effort, could plausibly be responsible. Or maybe it just started with blowing up the plates and then escalated from there. As for why… getting way too into MAD?
5) Rome planet worshipping Jupiter could plausibly be explained by the simple fact the greco-roman gods are totally real in Trek. Maybe this planet was another one of their… attempts?
5) Wow… that would actually make an enormous amount of sense! Too bad they didn’t think of that. Except if it were the result of two civilisations founded or influenced by the same beings rather than a supposedly natural cultural development along a predetermined path, then they wouldn’t be able to have the part about the inevitable rise of Christianity and consequent fall of the Romans Empire, because everyone knows that’s exactly how it happened in Earth’s history [sarcasm]. …Wait a second. Does… does that mean that Space Rome has a Space Jesus?
Even if you’re not a drunk Klingon, if you crash into a planet that is all “organism”, where would you get the tools and materials to fix your ship before being eaten by the slow vines? Or maybe the Klingons died in the crash anyway and the planet only consumed them.
There are some plot points made by Larry Niven about Hiper lux speed and gravity wells. If Murder planet can control it’s gravity pull it don’t need to move.
Minor nitpick to make, but it’s not weird at all for a species to share their name with a planet, imo. We already use country names as adjectives, making the jump to planet names is reasonable if we assume planets are unified political entities (as Star Trek and other space opera works do all the time).
And calling humans “Terrans” or “Earthlings” is not that new on the sci-fi scene either.
I think it might be the other way around, though. The inhabitants would name the planet and thus also give themselves a name as its inhabitants – if they are unified, so they feel no need to distinguish between different groups. As long as it’s not a ‘Planet I,’ ‘Planet II,’ ‘Planet III,’ etc. scheme, but more something like our ‘Mercury,’ ‘Mars,’ ‘Earth,’ etc. one, it makes sense.
There are a lot of possible ways things could be named, but I’d certainly consider it entirely probable. One determining factor would be when the dominant language developed. When we coined “Earth” and “human,” we had no concept of planets or of the potential for civilisations beyond Earth; we would probably name it and ourselves differently if new languages develop and rise to prominence. On a smaller scale, there are many examples of peoples who connect strongly enough with the land they occupy that they do not have separate names for their land and their culture. Still others, mostly those relatively isolated in their early history, commonly have names translating simply to “people,” and thus would logically be assigned a demonym derived from where they’re from. If we didn’t have the terms to specify our species as human or Homo sapiens and simply called ourselves people, we would probably describe ourselves in terms of being from Earth if we encountered a people from another world, necessitating differentiation where previously none was needed. It makes much less sense if there’s more than one sapient species native to a planet, though – the Xindi would realistically have six different names, and not just be named for their planet (which two of them wouldn’t even be able to pronounce) followed by a descriptor of their distinguishing traits.
Another episode gave a possible reason for those other planets. In “The Paradise Syndrome” Kirk finds an obelisk left by the Preservers. They had taken Native Americans from Earth to this planet so their culture wouldn’t be ruined by the Europeans. So on other parts of that planet there could be populations of other cultures from Earth and other planets left to develop alone.
Then when they meet…?
But that episode had another dumb problem. Scotty should have just set up some rockets on the asteroid’s surface to gradually move the asteroid out of the way, to a new orbit where it would never come near the planet.
The obelisk presumably diverts any other asteroids and meteors that come near.
So we can postulate that the Preservers made Miri’s Planet a duplicate of Earth and took endangered populations there as well, on other parts of that planet.
They took pagan and Christian Romans to the Roman planet and fiddled with them so they spoke English. But there’s no excusing that the Christians didn’t explain clearly that they meant the Son, not the Sun. And Rome did have “Sun Worship”.
And the Preservers took some Yankees and Commies to Omega IV to see what would happen there, left Italians on Sigma Iotia, etc. The Murder Planet was a Preserver experiment which went awry.
There’s no excuse for Ceti Alpha; they could have postulated a giant volcanic eruption, or a meteor impact ruining the ecology.
The Preservers also took humans from other more obscure cultures and left them on planets where we find humans.
Maybe the Preservers are Gary Seven’s people.