5 aliens Star Trek: Strange New Worlds can give the Gorn treatment to

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds could improve the legacy of these three aliens.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did a great job of bringing the Gorn out from a cheesy, plastic, joke, to an actual, living, and breathing alien race that is utterly horrifying. The Gorn are not just scary but they now hold a unique place in Star Trek for their one-of-a-kind, in-universe, backstory, and lore.

Strange New Worlds should get a lot of praise for the way they modernized the Gorn, and it got me thinking; what other aliens if given the same opportunity, could Strange New Worlds improve?

That’s not to say that every alien can be improved, nor is it to say that every alien in Star Trek needs to be improved but we identified five aliens that we think would do well to get more time in Star Trek, especially through the same type of world-building lense that the Gorn got.

Five aliens that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds can help improve the legacy of

Suliban

The Suliban were arguably Enterprise’s worst alien race. They weren’t scary looking, they weren’t all that effective and honestly, they looked like someone designed their skin out of Nickelodeon’s old Gak substance. Exploring more of what they are, or what they fell into becoming after Enterprise may give the Suliban a much-needed lore lift.

Breen

The Breen don’t need the whole Gorn treatment, as they’re a pretty cool alien race all on their own. What they could use, however, is a bit more lore and back story. Even if the information is eventually classified, or “lost to time”. Having a Redshirt getting killed by the Breen after they see it without its mask would give viewers a look at what it is, but without altering history. Granted, the Breen “no one has seen one without its mask” trope has been shot to hell thanks to contradictions in Deep Space Nine anyway, so why not just make it a gag?

Have a Breen get unmasked and declare that no one has ever seen their face and live and Captain Pike could be like, “uh, plot armor?” Then it gets even funnier as Spock could “tell a joke” to the Klingons about how no one ever saw them without their helmets before and lived to tell about it. That way the Klingons could over embellish as they tend to do, and thus Deep Space Nine’s use of them would make way more sense.

Salt Vampire

This could be explored in the background, similar to that of the Gorn but maybe even more so. What happened to all the Salt Vampires? That’s something that I think would be a very interesting story to explore in Strange New Worlds, especially if it’s the fault of someone on the bridge of the Enterprise. It could even be a situation where, like at the end of TNG’s “Conspiracy”, that no one realizes anything went wrong, thereby killing off the Salt Vampire species by pure accident, and no one being any the wiser to it.

Tholians

The Tholians have never had the special effects available to bring them to life properly. Strange New Worlds have that technology and now is the perfect time to really flesh them out.

Xindi

I think an episode where George Samuel Kirk is exploring the history and extinction of the Xindi-Avian would be a fascinating concept.