Star Trek has an Andorians problem

For a founding member of the United Federation of Planets, we’ve seen very little of the Andorians.

If you’re like me, you love Star Trek for a variety of reasons. Whether it be the starships, the advanced tech, the show’s positive outlook on the future or the vivid characters, Star Trek has a bit of everything for everyone. What I’m here to talk about here today are the characters…specifically, the Andorians.

Now the Andorian race is certainly not a new species by any means, they’re a founding member of the United Federation of Planets, however they’ve been severely neglected as it pertains to the various series over the last 50+ years of episodic content. Of all of the various races on Star Trek, the Vulcans and Klingons are the two who we’ve explored at fairly great lengths. Heck, there’s a whole Klingon dictionary out there and fans who can speak the language fluently!

But as a founding member of the Federation, I can’t think of any antennae’d blue-skinned crewmembers of a Federation ship from any series. In fact, aside from Thy’lek Shran, who was expertly played by Jeffrey Combs on Enterprise, I can’t think of any other Andorian characters who have been fully fleshed out!

That’s not to say that we haven’t been introduced to the Andorians.

Of course, we did get Hemmer on Strange New Worlds for a season, but he was actually a member of the Aenar, a subspecies of the Andorians. While Vulcans are literally sprinkled into every series, there’s really a dearth of blue-skinned, antennae-sporting aliens! Even the Ferengi received a lot of love on Deep Space Nine, where Quark, Rom, & Nog took us back to Ferenginar and had dealings with Brunt, Ishka, & Grand Nagus Zek numerous times over that series’ 7-year run, but they weren’t even thought up by Gene Roddenberry until The Next Generation.

At least, when it comes to the Star Trek video games, Star Trek Online gave us Va’Kel Shonn as the Captain of Enterpise-F in the game. However, it’s not like you have a whole lot of dealings with him, he’s just a nonplayer character who is used a few times in the game and not a whole lot of thought is put into his character. For what it’s worth, he could be portrayed as a Bolian, Rigelian, or a Denobulan since they don’t explore his character at all.

Truth is, it was only really over Enterprise’s 4-year run that we truly explored Andorians while Jonathan Archer and his crew got to go to Andoria, where they steered clear of the ice-bores, met the Aenar, and even the Captain took part in an Uchaan duel to the “death”! I really think there’s more to this race that needs to be explored.