Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Orions

When it comes to aliens in Star Trek, let's talk green until we're blue in the face!

Orions Star Trek Enterprise
CBS Media Ventures

The Orions were amongst the very first of Gene Roddenberry's alien creations, though it took a while for us to get a true look at a member of the species, and a lot longer to get a far less stereotyped one. Like the make-up, from the outside, it might have seemed a bit basic being Orion. Like the Muppet, being green was far from a breeze.

Until very recently, the Orions had pretty much exclusively been portrayed as career criminals — i.e. pirates — and/or 'sex slaves' of the Syndicate, and its 32nd-century re-brand, the Emerald Chain. What The Original Series began, Star Trek: Enterprise compounded for the species' second live-action appearance. The only partial exception to that rule in the interim — and she still did the dance — was Devna from The Animated Series episode The Time Trap.

Star Trek: Lower Decks changed perceptions, and the record, completely with D'Vana Tendi. Eternal optimist, and science officer, Tendi was a Starfleet first for the Orions on screen, or, including Kelvin, a Starfleet second, after Gaila in Star Trek (2009). Scientifically speaking, Orion civilisation must have been more advanced than most at some point in its past, too. Doctor Roger Korby's "translation of medical records from the Orion ruins" proved revolutionary for the Federation's "immunisation techniques" of the 23rd century. There was, however, a mysterious "Great Plague" in between.

And then sometimes, just sometimes, you've got to embrace the stereotypes and go full-on pirate for the loot. Those Blazzards still need to feed!

10. Green Is The New Green

Orions Star Trek Enterprise
CBS Media Ventures

Technically speaking, the first Orion to appear in Star Trek was Marta in Whom Gods Destroy. Vina, as "Orion slave girl" was a Talosian illusion in The Cage, and doubly so in The Menagerie, Part II. In Journey to Babel, Thelev was an Orion but had been surgically altered to look like an Andorian.

Alien projections of an alien imagination still require very real make-up. "Believe me, it was not easy to be green," Susan Oliver, who played Vina, noted in Starlog, issue 135. Finding green make-up that would stick to the actress' skin proved so difficult that they had to "sen[d] for help from New York".

As detailed in The Making of Star Trek, prior to Oliver, test footage was shot in the green make-up with another "actress" — Majel Barrett. However, when the developed film was returned, Barrett's face strangely appeared as non-green as it normally was.

"Paint her greener!", Gene Roddenberry insisted, but the same thing kept happening for the next three days. "We had her so green you couldn't believe it," make-up artist Fred Phillips noted. Eventually, they realised what was going on. Assuming it was some weird error, the technician at the film lab had been correcting Barrett's green face each time during the development process.

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Jack Kiely is a writer with a PhD in French and almost certainly an unhealthy obsession with Star Trek.