Star Trek: 15 Most Hilariously Unthreatening Alien Races

13. The Horta - "The Devil in the Dark" €“ TOS

A generation of older Star Trek fans won't have liked pizza as children, and there's a good chance that this alien is the reason why. The only thing that's believable about this creature is Leonard Nimoy's expression of pain when Spock tries to mind-meld with it. He's probably channelling the ridiculousness of the situation of pretending to telepathically communicate with what looks like a party size pile of plastic vomit. It's literally a carpet of plastic and foam with some poor schmuck sweltering inside, crawling around the floor of the set in an attempt to convince the viewers that it has the capacity to burrow through rock as easily as people move through air. After seeing it shuffle away from Kirk in fear of the phaser he held in his hand, you had to doubt that it could move though anything unless it was a double door and didn't have a staircase. Even the name isn't acceptable. The only way we know its name is through Spock's mind-meld, so we're taking his word that that's its name, but how exactly does Spock receive vocalized thoughts from something that looks like the results of what the dog brought up last night? Is it a coincidental collection of various thought impulses that somehow Spock translates into combination of vowels and consonants? Maybe it's just something that Spock can't pronounce and makes up for the sake of the lesser humans he's palling around with? Either way, both visually and vocally, this patch-work, plastic horizontal human camp-carpet is hardly convincing.