Everybody wears a hat

I've been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently. When it was on the air, I didn't really watch it regularly until the 4th or 5th Season, and even then I only caught maybe 2 out of 3 episodes. The first few seasons I only caught sporadically, though I did manage to catch the ones that were relevant to the overall storyline.

It's been a while since I've really watched any Star Trek, aside from a movie here and there. I had kinda forgotten about a lot of the niggling things that always kinda bugged me about the franchise. Or to be more accurate, I discovered that while I thought I'd exaggerated them in my mind, I really hadn't.

The big thing that always annoyed me about Trek is the whole Planet Of Hats deal. Planet Of Hats is essentially when a world (or an entire race) can all be defined by one trait. All Klingons are warriors. All Cardassians are jingoistic patriots. All Vulcans are emotionally-repressed logicians. Hell, I remember a 7th Season episode of DS9 where a serial killer was tracked down and was found to be a Vulcan. He was clearly demented, but he still believed in logic above all else. The only problem was that his logic had become horribly warped.

I would find myself asking questions regarding the silliness of a notion of an entire race being drawn from a single template. If Klingons were all honor and glory all the time, then when did they invent indoor plumbing, let alone faster-than-light space travel? If Ferengi spend all their time worshipping at the altar of profit, who's taking care of their infrastructure?

And even if we get past that, and assume that there are Klingon carpenters, or Ferengi scientists (actually, there was one in an episode of The Next Generation, but he freely admitted he was an oddity among his people), that still doesn't explain why every race but Humanity has coalesced into a homogenous whole. Granted, Humans in the Trek universe seem to have one major culture, but they still at least have a sense of historical identity. Characters identify themselves as Irish (Miles O'Brien), or French (Jean-Luc Picard), or whatever. And yet every Ferengi follows the same Rules of Acquisition, and if they talk about home, it'll be their race's homeworld, not any country they come from.

I can kinda understand in the case of the Vulcans; the ones who didn't want to bury their emotions and embrace logic as a way of life left and became the Romulans. And they did it long enough ago that signs of diverging evolution is obvious among the two. Romulans have this kinda ridge thing in their foreheads that Vulcans don't have, even if the only other way to tell them apart is their hairstyles (and even that's marginal).

On the note of hairstyles, what exactly happened in the fashion world between then and now? Members of certain races always seem to wear nearly identical clothes. Klingons all wear black and grey armor. Romulans all wear big bulky tunic-like deals. Cardassians all seem to wear the same outfit, though since 99% of the Cardassians encountered on the show are military officers, that can be forgiven. Say what you will about Ferengi, at least they seem to have a sense of individual style. They might even show more than humans, who seem to mostly be walking around in loose-fitting pajamas.

In Star Trek, the Federation is touted as being beyond silly ideas like prejudice. Well, that sounds all well and good, but it rings a bit hollow when it turns out they don't have to be prejudiced; all the aliens on the show are living out the prejudices for them.

I imagine this got its start in fantasy races. All dwarves are fierce warriors and fiercer drinkers. All elves are wise and mystical. All orcs are savage barbarians. It's a logical extension, since when you get right down to it, the main difference between Sci-Fi and Fantasy is that one usually claims to have a scientific basis behind the wild stuff going on (or at least pretends there is), and the other says "fuck it, it's all magic, you know?"

The trend seems to be waning recently. I know at least one case, in the first Mass Effect game, where an alien calls out a human character on this exact convention, stating sarcastically "Because humans are all different, but every krogan is exactly alike." I hope this trend continues, because I think it'd be more interesting to explore some truly heterogeneous aliens races, then just saying "What would it be like if everyone on a planet were like this?"

-Long Days And Pleasant Nights