Star Trek: 10 Shapeshifting Aliens That We Know About

To be fair to Lieutenant Levy, it's not a conspiracy theory if you're right. The Vendorians were lurking around far more corners than certainly Boimler thought, but who knows, maybe we're all taking part in a giant morality test without knowing it. Let's just surrender our collective neck to the brood pod now!

Analogous to the Allasomorphs, the Vendorians could, as Spock once put it, "rearrange their molecular structure into anything with the same general size and mass". In their untransformed state, however, they were not the amorphous blob we would later become more accustomed to where shapeshifters were concerned. Instead, the Vendorians looked typically more like a squid. We first met a member of this mutable species when one came aboard the Enterprise in the form of legendary space trader Carter Winston in The Animated Series episode The Survivor.

At that point in history — the mid-23rd century — few people had ever seen a Vendorian. To quote Spock once more, "[the Vendorians'] practice of deceit as a way of life puts them off limits," and as such their homeworld, Vendor, was "quarantined". Before such a radical sentiment is permanently assigned to ink, however, it should be noted that the Vendorian impersonating Carter Winston actually tended to the real McCoy for a year before his death. Even the giant squid has a giant heart!