Among its other virtues, Star Trek: Lower Decks has served as a massive reclamation project for one of the franchise’s most misunderstood species.The green-skinned Orions have been a part of Star Trek since the original pilot, but the series has rarely known what to do with them. The sexism of their origins was compounded by the franchise’s subsequent direction, leaving them a curiously important species about which little is known. Lower Decks has changed all of that with one of its main protagonists – D’Vana Tendi – who was forced to leave Starfleet and rejoin her family of notorious pirate raiders at the end of Season 4.
Season 5 picks up right where its predecessor left off, and once again, the series pulls back the curtain on Tendi’s people to reveal fascinating new details. Of course, Lower Decks is a comedy, and while it takes Orion culture seriously, it has no problems sending up Star Trek’s bungled earlier efforts to develop the species properly. That includes direct references to a notorious episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series. Blue Orions – who appeared just once before being justifiably abandoned – make their return in the Season 5 premiere. As expected, they’re both utterly ridiculous and absolutely at home in Lower Decks’ corner of the galaxy.
Lower Decks Is an Orion Reclamation Project
The Orions were something of a dirty secret to Star Trek for many decades. They first appeared in the original pilot “The Cage,” which described them as “animal women” who had the power to ensnare men’s minds. They only appeared twice more in The Original Series, once disguised as an Andorian and once as the seductive inmate of a mental institution. Needless to say, the impression of the race as Mata Hari-style slave girls did not age well, and the Orions were put on the back burner (along with a number of other species from The Original Series) with the advent of the Next Generation era.
Star Trek: Enterprise made an attempt to rehabilitate the Orions’ image, notably in the Season 4 episode “Bound,” which maintained that the Orion “slave women” were the secret rulers of their society, with the men as their actual slaves. It did little to address the core issues of sexism, and again left the green-skinned aliens in the lurch. The J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies did better by placing several Orion women in Starfleet, but again leaned into the idea of their seductive abilities rather than fleshing them out further.
Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 Premiere Details
It took a one-two punch from more recent Star Trek series to finally put the species’ house in order. Star Trek: Discovery’s third season made the Orions major adversaries, led by the pirate queen Osyraa, who proved to be one of the strongest and most engaging adversaries in years. At the same time, Lower Decks premiered, with Tendi front and center. While Discovery opened the door to better things for the species, it was Tendi who really stepped through it. The enthusiastic junior science officer was an instant hit among fans, shattering the stereotypes of dancing slave girls once and for all while lending a few intriguing glimpses into the culture she came from.
Later seasons brought more information, including the revelation that Tendi comes from a pirate family and that her combat skills are off the chart. It culminates in Season 4, Episode 4, “Something Borrowed, Something Green,” when Tendi, Mariner, and T’Lyn visit the Orion home world for a wedding. The episode revealed the species as a complex matriarchal society, incorporating previous facts such as their hypnotic pheromones and reputation as criminals into a far more nuanced image. Leveraged into returning to her family in the Season 4 finale, Tendi’s fate in Season 5 promises to reveal even more about her species.
Lower Decks Brings Back Another Kind of Orion
Lost amid Star Trek’s other efforts to deliver the Orions is a very strange episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series that makes use of them. Season 2, Episode 1, “The Pirates of Orion” pits Kirk against a male Orion captain who holds the cure to a fatal disease contracted by Mr. Spock. The episode is reasonably exciting, as Kirk has to test his wits against a foe happy to cut and run at the first opportunity. It does, however, present the Orions as blue-skinned (not green-skinned as they were in The Original Series) and clothed in bizarre green uniforms.
The episode also refers to them as “O-REE-ahns,” mispronouncing the name even though it appears in the title. To top it all off, an Orion woman had previously appeared in The Animated Series Season 1, Episode 12, “The Time Trap,” green-skinned and more or less matching the species’ appearance in The Original Series. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was infamously dissatisfied with The Animated Series, and it vanished from public view for decades after it originally aired. That let the franchise quietly ignore the blue-skinned Orions and their odd accouterments without any ramifications.
Even the most die-hard fan would admit that it was probably the most sensible move. Lower Decks, however, takes great delight in shining a spotlight on the franchise’s embarrassing little details. It holds a particular affection for The Animated Series, and has mined a number of funny sequences from its predecessor’s more ridiculous moments. That includes a skeleton from the giant clone of Mr. Spock in Season 1, Episode 7, “The Infinite Vulcan” and the squid-like Vendorians from Season 1, Episode 6, “The Survivor.” It may have been inevitable that Tendi’s return to her people would involve another look at the supremely goofy Blue Orions.
Lower Decks Opens Season 5 with Blue Orions
“Dos Cerritos” finds Tendi leading a team of Orion raiders in her role as the Mistress of the Winter Constellation. Her crew soon comes into conflict with a crew of Blue Orions who are after the same wrecked ship. They’re dressed in the same ridiculous outfits as the Blue Orions in The Animated Series, and are largely hostile to their green counterparts under Tendi.
They’re also male, which hints at a larger gender gap between the species. True to her Starfleet ethos, Tendi is less willing to treat them as enemies, even healing one of their number when a member of her crew stabs him.
Naturally, Lower Decks knows just how to twist the knife, making sure the Blue Orions come across as overconfident twerps. They still pronounce their name with the long “e” and otherwise behave the way they did in The Animated Series. The other Orions find them insufferable, but they’re clearly part of the same society, and adhere to the same loose rules.
Orions are far from the only Star Trek species with such cultural divides, but Lower Decks pulls it off by embracing the very silliness that a more dramatic series would studiously ignore.
The goofy elements in past series become an elegant part of the franchise’s canon, and make sense within the framework of its universe. Lower Decks has become quite adroit at the feat, which is essentially an extension of its core ethos of presenting Star Trek’s unsung heroes in a new light. That includes the clunkier corners of the franchise as a whole, and frankly, they don’t come clunkier than the Orions. Lower Decks performed miraculous damage control simply by making Tendi a terrific character, but it’s done so much more by developing her species with such creativity and care.
Doing so within the constraints of a 22-minute episode is similarly amazing, and now with the addition of the Blue Orions, the show has indicated that it will leave no stone unturned when it comes to one of Star Trek’s oldest alien species. As Lower Decks’ final season continues, it’s amazing to consider what it has accomplished with the Orions – warts and all – without ever losing its sense of humor about them.