That time a David Bowie song predicted a Star Trek plot two years in advance

David Bowie once wrote a song that somehow predicted a Star Trek episode.

Ever since David Bowie’s first big hit Space Oddity in 1969, the late rock legend has been linked to sci-fi. Though he only referenced sci-fi a handful of other times, Space Oddity was the kind of hit that defines one’s career. The BBC famously used Space Oddity to score its coverage of the moon landing, although they may have thought twice about doing that, had they listened to the lyrics and realized that the song ends with the Major Tom character stranded in space.

The other thing that David Bowie became inextricably linked with is arcane references and hidden layers of meaning, the sorts of things we might now call easter eggs. Bowie’s final album Blackstar was so chock-full of them that there’s debate as to whether its title was a deliberate reference to a similarly titled Elvis Presley song, thus portending his own death.

The intersection between sci-fi and easter eggs is also where Star Trek lives. As a die-hard fan of both Star Trek and David Bowie, I’m pretty sure I can say with accuracy that there’s only one Star Trek reference in Bowie’s oeuvre…

And that reference is a real doozy, because it’s also a prophecy.

Bowie was married to Somali supermodel Iman. Iman was in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, as Martia, a shapeshifter who Captain Kirk and McCoy encounter at the Klingon penal colony at Rura Penthe. Interestingly, since The Undiscovered Country was the last film featuring the original series cast, Iman/Martia was Captain Kirk’s last onscreen kiss.

The Undiscovered Country came out in 1991, the same year she married Bowie, they had met the year before.

But in 1989, Bowie released the song Sacrifice Yourself, which begins…

"Some days he feels so emptyJust a talking headMarried to a KlingonWho could cream him in the press"

Ok… so they never said that Martia was a Klingon, but in my headcanon, she was because I need this to work. She’s a Klingon who just happened to have superpowers – we know the Klingons experimented with genetic enhancement.

Sacrifice Yourself was part of Bowie’s underrated and all but forgotten alt-rock side project Tin Machine, and it was dropped from the LP edition of the album for time. So talk about a well-hidden easter egg!

The other sci-fi-Bowie connection is that Bowie shared his birthday with Roy Batty, the villainous android from Bladerunner, though his birthday was only mentioned in the book.

As for Star Trek referencing Bowie, Discovery’s Tilly sang Space Oddity when Stamets and Reno had to drill a hole in her head for reasons beyond my comprehension. That storyline didn’t make a lick of sense, but it brought Dr. Culber back from the dead, which more than justified it. (I will miss how truly bonkers Discovery could be).

Peter Gabriel’s cover of Heroes also featured in Short Treks.

Speaking of Heroes, the 1977 LP  that featured the iconically icy anthem was promoted with the tagline “The future belongs to those who can hear it coming”. Perhaps this was meant literally, as it seems Bowie did see into the future, and it revealed not only his personal life but also Star Trek casting news. Who knows what spoilers he could be telling us about Strange New Worlds season 2 if he were still around?