Looking Out for the Little Guy
| Star Traks: TOSsed | |
| Episode name | Antares or Bust |
|---|---|
| Season | |
| Episode number | |
| Writer(s) | Alan Decker |
| Year | 2268 |
| Stardate | Unknown |
| Chronology | |
| Previous in series | Busted [TOS] |
| Next in series | Reign of the Clydesdale [TOS] |
| Previous in timeline | Busted [TOS] |
| Next in timeline | Reign of the Clydesdale [TOS] |
Colony supply runs are about as nice and easy as it gets…most of the time.
Summary
Featuring
Also Featuring
Author's Comments
Remember Avatar? I mean the James Cameron film and not the Nickelodeon cartoon. It came out in 2009, and, as you may recall, became a huge cultural sensation. The sequels might even have been released by the time you read this. It's also where the basic idea of this story came from. At the time, Avatar got a bit of criticism in some quarters for its plot, namely that it was very similar to the 1990 film "Dances With Wolves." Since the Na'vi in Avatar are blue, I saw a few people call it "Dances With Smurfs."
Now there's an obvious issue with that description. The Na'vi were like eight feet tall, certainly well taller than humans, hence the need for avatars. I'm not going to rehash the whole movie here.
But "Dances With Smurfs" stuck with me, and I thought that a Smurf-like species occupying a planet and not being pleased at being colonized was amusing. And it was another good TOS situation for the Clydesdale crew to face. TOS has a number of episodes where they go to some colony or facility to deal with whatever has befallen its residents (In fairness, TNG does too). For this one, though, I was thinking more of "Devil in the Dark" or "This Side of Paradise." Of course, Mike Harper doesn't really care what's going on at Lehrer Colony. He wants to unloaded his cargo and leave. He just ends up in the unfortunate position of wandering into the middle of this situation having to deal with it.
It took me a while to settle on what word the planet's residents would use for their language. I wasn't going to use "Smurf," but when I originally wrote the story, I put in "Narf" as a placeholder. I almost kept it, but a good friend who read the story rightly advised me to come up with something else. "Yenk," when said with the tone I have in my head, reminds me a little bit of the Martians from "Mars Attacks," but it works.
And Lehrer Colony is indeed named for Tom Lehrer (If you have no idea who Tom Lehrer is, go look him up. He's a giant in the history of comedic music.). There's no particular connection between any of his songs and this story. I just wanted to name something after him.