10 Greatest Star Trek In-Jokes

In the far future, Miles O'Brien was, and will be, rightly en-statued as "perhaps the most important person in Starfleet history". Right along there with him was the less glowingly remembered Brad Boimler. (History has its own Effect.) On Boimler's forever-memorialised left arm was "one of the great birds of the galaxy," an in-joke which has a history to itself.

You might well know by now that the Great Bird of the Galaxy was Gene Roddenberry, or, rather, it was the nickname given to him by producer Robert Justman early in the run of The Original Series. In point of fact, in The Man Trap, Sulu says to Janice Rand, "May the Great Bird of the Galaxy bless your planet!" The epithet for Star Trek's creator certainly caught on.

By the time of The Next Generation, the Bird began to make an appearance in graphic form. For Roddenberry's 60th birthday gift in 1987, senior TNG illustrator Andrew Probert painted a full-colour Roddenberry-headed Bird of the Galaxy, with command uniform plumage, combadge, and NCC-1701 nacelles as tail feathers. A green Okudagram sketch version of the painting was then used on-screen as part of the rapid computer searches carried out by Data in The Naked Now and Conspiracy.