These creepy Star Trek aliens are guaranteed to make your skin crawl.
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00:00Hello my friends, how are you? Sean Ferrick here for Trek Culture, and as you might have noticed,
00:06things are a little different today. I'm wearing sunglasses. I just thought that the day that was
00:12in it I might just celebrate the fact that I can barely see. We've got lovely weather. Oh yeah,
00:16and that thing. We are here at the Vasquez Rocks. I have come on a wee away mission
00:22because we are going to talk about some of the creepiest aliens, and I think you know which one
00:28of them is going to be on this list. But before I get into that, I'm Sean Ferrick for Trek Culture,
00:33and here are the 10 creepiest aliens in Star Trek. Number 10, Armas. Six foot tall, big thing of goo.
00:42Creepy to begin with, but then you find out what Armas does in the course of the episode.
00:48The Next Generation's first season was not without its bumps, but the episode Skin of Evil
00:53delivered one of the most shocking moments in Star Trek history as we saw Lieutenant Tasha Yar
01:00get thrown across, let's be honest, Planet Hell. Planet Hell was of course Vagra 2 in this episode.
01:06This time the inhabitants of that planet had decided that they were going to leave all of
01:10their negative energy before, and in doing so they created Armas. Armas was a creature made of all of
01:17the ill will and evil, but unfortunately they never stopped to think, wait is this a bad idea?
01:25Well, Counselor Troi found out it was a pretty bad idea when her shuttle was brought down by Armas.
01:30A landing party was sent after to save her, and Tasha Yar unfortunately decided to poke the bear
01:37at just the wrong moment. Not simply content with killing Tasha Yar, Riker was dragged across the
01:43sand into the body of Armas in one of the creepiest and often parodied scenes in that first
01:51season of Star Trek. Armas may be many things in an episode that may be many things, but he is still
01:57deeply, deeply unsettling. Number nine, Salt Vampires, the M-113 creature. The very first episode of Star
02:06Trek that was shown on television was not actually the pilot, it was the man-trap. The episode focusing
02:13on Dr. McCoy and his lost love Nancy Crater. Throughout the course of the episode we see a lot
02:18of Nancy, but the real Nancy remains lost because what we find is one of the most iconic baddies of
02:27the original series. The Salt Vampire, you have probably seen this even if you've never seen an
02:33episode of Star Trek. You've got those kind of dreads that are hanging there matted, you've got
02:37those long fingers with those suckers on the underside, you've got that open gaping mouth, but
02:43that's only when the creature's been revealed. One of the even creepier elements to this is the fact
02:49that it can assume the form of others. The impersonation is so perfect that Dr. McCoy struggles
02:54to believe that this isn't the real Nancy Crater, and it takes Spock attacking quote-unquote
03:01Nancy for him to actually realise the real Nancy probably couldn't take a punch the way that this
03:06creature did. While this vampire has turned up in many parodies, as much of the original series
03:11Aliens have, that doesn't change the fact that the fact that it could be anyone has such an emotional
03:18beat to it and such a creepy beat to it as well. I suppose depending on how you look at it the fact
03:23that they kill the very last one is either absolutely brilliant or a big misdirect because
03:29one turns up in lower decks as well. Number eight, Gorgon. The third season of the original series of
03:35Star Trek is mixed at best. Bearing in mind it opens with Spock's brain and closes with the line
03:42she could have had a great life if only she hadn't been a woman. Listen, mistakes were made.
03:47One of the episodes this season, And the Children Shall Lead, often ranks among the lowest in the
03:54ratings when it comes to Star Trek, and there is a degree of fairness to that. There's a degree where
03:59that's maybe a bit harsh. The Gorgon in this was played by guest performer and lawyer Melvin Belli,
04:07who in a bit of stunt casting rocked up as this wonderful green friendly angel of the children,
04:13those same kids who had just killed all their parents. The episode effectively shows a bit of
04:19a Village of the Damned, Children of the Corn vibe when it takes the kids eventually realising
04:26what has happened and breaking down in tears to remove the power of the Gorgon. That's where Gorgon
04:33is creepy. Not in its admittedly very rushed makeup appearance, more so that it will con you
04:41into smiling your way through the slaughter of the ones that mean the most. And if that's not creepy,
04:48then I don't think I want to be your friend. Number seven, the Beta-12a entity. Now you might
04:53already have realised that we've got a few original series aliens on this list, because quite frankly
04:58what was wrong with the writers back in the 60s? There was some serious horror going on,
05:03and this isn't the last one either I can tell you. In the episode The Day of the Dove, we are
05:08introduced to a few things that will become iconic in Star Trek history. For example, Michael and
05:13Sarah appears for the first time as Kang. We also get the first appearance of the Klingon D7 battle
05:20cruiser. We also get Mara, Kang's mate slash wife slash... it's not really clear in the episode,
05:27but what we also get is everyone going flipping nuts. The point of this entity is that it is a
05:32non-corporeal being that, like many others in the Star Trek universe, feeds off those negative
05:38energies that the people put out. Not only that, but it amplifies them as well. So you see everyone
05:45running around with swords because tearing each other apart is effectively brunch to this thing.
05:50By the time we meet it, it had already caused the destruction of the Klingon ship, so thanks very
05:56much to the remastered version so we can see a nicer version of it. But those Klingons suddenly
06:00arrive on the Enterprise, they're beamed over, they're saved... yeah no. So hijinks ensue, lots of sword
06:07fighting. It's only stopped at the end by the combined laughter of Kirk and Kang in one of the
06:15first, and honestly most fun, joining together of Starfleet and the Klingons that we get in Star Trek.
06:23Number six, Redjack. The original series episode, Wolf in the Fold, was written by Robert Bloch,
06:29who's most famous for writing Psycho. However, Bloch had a long-running obsession with Jack the Ripper
06:36and had previously written pieces featuring Jack in terms of confessions and what-ifs.
06:44This is no different. What's truly creepy about Redjack in this episode is that, like several others,
06:50it's a possessing entity. But it is one of the darkest episodes that we had yet seen of Star
06:57Trek, considering the cold open finishes with Scotty standing there, knife in hand, with an exotic
07:03dancer dead at his feet. While the episode itself has issues, for example the suggestion that Scotty
07:09was in an accident caused by a woman, and so McCoy recommended he go to a strip bar. Throughout the
07:14episode we get seances, we get non-corporeal talking, we get the reveal that the original Piglet
07:21was in fact this mass-murdering hater of women. Not really, I dare you to go back and watch that
07:26episode and not hear Piglet every time he speaks. This entity, it moved from Earth, it moved to the
07:32Rigel colonies, it has been killing throughout time. And in fact there's an even scarier moment
07:38right at the end when Redjack takes control of the Enterprise itself. And actually, for the 1960s,
07:46for a network television show, this was deeply unsettling. They don't dial it back for Star Trek.
07:54Now, it is defeated, but Wolf in the Fold, and in fact Redjack, that's a character that's going to
08:01stay with you long after the credits roll. Number five, flying parasites. I mean, the clue's in the
08:07description there, really. I don't really want to meet these things, so when the episode Operation
08:13Annihilate comes up, I think I'm just going to take a hard pass. You enjoyed, and I'll see you
08:17again in the next season. How does that sound? I bet someone who really wished they could have said
08:21that was the ill-fated Sam Kirk. Before I go on, spoilers I guess to anyone who hasn't seen
08:29Operation Annihilate and is really enjoying Sam Kirk in Strange New Worlds. Don't worry, it's
08:35about 10 years in the future, okay? When Kirk and crew, the main Kirk I should say, and crew beam
08:40down to the planet, they find that Jim Kirk's brother is dead, his sister-in-law Aurelian is
08:45dying. Now, thankfully his nephew is spared, but the rest of the colony are effectively dead by
08:51these parasites that attach to the back of the victim and just suck out all that they need and
08:58leave them to die in agony. We nearly lose Spock to these parasites as well because of the pain
09:04that they inflict on him. Now, the funny thing about these things is that they look like that
09:08plastic vomit that you buy in the joke shop, which kind of stands to how creepy they are that you can
09:12take something that looks like a zit someone's just popped and it's still actually freaky. I am
09:18going to do a hard pass on these. I'm going to skip this episode. I'm going to see you in the next
09:22season. Number four, unnamed parasitic beings. Now, I should say before I go on that Star Trek Online,
09:29whether you want to accept it as canon or not, has called these creatures the bluegills. They infect
09:34the host by entering often through the mouth and they're only identified by increased physical
09:40strength of the victim and also a small spike that could be a breathing apparatus that sticks
09:46out the back of the victim's neck. This is another one of those creations where in the first season of
09:51the next generation we are given, despite the issues that season faced, a genuinely paranoid,
09:59unsettling episode. Conspiracy probably is the best episode of the first season of the next
10:04generation. You get other captains, which is something we actually hadn't really seen very
10:08much of in Star Trek The Next Generation up to that point. We see we get the visit to Ditalix B
10:13from the opening moment. You just get this sense of something's very wrong with Starfleet. It had
10:20been set up a couple of episodes earlier with the arrival of Admiral Quinn and Lieutenant Commander
10:25Remick in the episode Coming of Age. When Quinn arrives this time and you see him just brush off
10:30the suspicions that he had last time, straight away Picard tells Riker that's not Gregory Quinn.
10:37That final scene that sees Picard and Riker facing off against Remick is a heavily edited episode.
10:44I mean, it actually took me until the 2000s to realize what happened at the end of that scene
10:49because it had been so censored on every version that I had seen up to that point. I didn't realize
10:55the fact that they got that lovely actor, they sat him in the chair and they blew up his head!
11:00These aliens are seriously creepy and although, yes, there was one of those kind of you kill the
11:05queen and the rest die moments, a signal was sent out from Starfleet. It was a homing signal. Now,
11:13there has been suggestions that this was the setup for the Borg, but as that went in a different
11:19direction, the Bluegills very much could be coming back. Number three, the Vidians. I would argue that
11:27the Vidians are possibly one of the creepiest but most tragic villains in all of Star Trek because
11:35they are affected by the phage, which is analogous to a leprosy type disease. Before the phage
11:40affected them, they were a society that excelled in art, they excelled in the sciences,
11:46they were well regarded in the Delta Quadrant, and once the phage hit them, they became one of the
11:54greatest terrors in their region. You see, what the phage does is it effectively dissolves the body
12:01from the inside out, and the Vidians, in their desperation, have taken to harvesting the organs
12:07of other species to keep their own bodies alive, were introduced to them with the removal of
12:13Neelix's lungs, which is a heck of a way to open an episode. However, that's not the creepiest moment
12:20with the Vidians. A few episodes later on, the episode Faces is shown. Now, it's mostly remembered
12:26for the fact that we split Bolana Torres between her human and Klingon sides, and there's some good
12:32back and forth between the two versions, but what's really memorable is that poor Durst, oh poor Durst,
12:41he'd been introduced the episode before to set him up, and then Durst, Paris, and Bolana go on an
12:47away mission where they get captured by the Vidians. He is played by the same actor who plays the lead
12:52Vidian. The reason for that is that as the episode goes on, the Vidian has fallen in love with Bolana's
12:58Klingon side, and thinks as a way of wooing her, she'd like him better if he had Durst's face grafted
13:04onto his own. I remember this vividly from the mid-90s when I was far too young to be
13:11watching this Cronenberg body horror, and he just smiling down at her, and I was like,
13:16I may not be an expert at romance, but I'm not doing that. Number two, the Borg. If you have come
13:23from Frank Chavez's original article of this, you might be surprised to see the Borg at number two
13:27instead of number one, but we felt a very important change needed to be made to this list. But before I
13:32explain what that change is, let's think about the Borg. Now they have been overused in all of
13:37Star Trek at this point, so they have lost a little bit of that terror that was inspired by
13:42them originally, but I want you to hold on to the word originally. Let's go back and see what the
13:48Borg really are at their core. So I'm not talking about when they're facing off with Janeway,
13:54although great scenes, and I'm not talking about when Borgatti owns a new transwarp corridor,
13:59because why wouldn't you? I am talking about that very first episode, Q-Who. The Borg were used
14:06as an example by Q for just how unprepared Starfleet was for what was out there. Now we
14:14had seen, look at the other aliens on this list, we've seen some pretty creepy things throughout
14:18the original series, so you might have been left wondering in 1987, 1988, ah sure, what else could
14:24we be dealing with here? And then we found out. That arrival of that first cube led to one of the
14:30most pulse-pounding episodes that the next generation had done to that point. You see, in a way,
14:38they're cybernetic beings that have been a mix of organic and synthetic. Okay, yeah, we've seen
14:45versions of this before, that's not that scary. Very bloody scary when they're coming after you,
14:49though. We see one drone beams into engineering. It does not give two figs about the fact that they
14:55don't want him in engineering, especially when a very lucky security officer tries to stop him,
15:02and he gets thrown across a room, and you might be like, Sean, how would you consider that lucky?
15:06Because he wasn't injected with the nanoprobes that would be added in the next few episodes that
15:12featured the Borg. They're not just scary robots that want your technology, they want your biological
15:19and technological distinctiveness to add to their own. They assimilated Picard. Now think about that,
15:25you'd have three seasons where this Shakespearean actor was getting more and more grounded in the
15:30role. He was dignified, he was very, you know, measured in everything he did, and he didn't stand
15:40a chance against the Collective. He became Locutus, and we get what is arguably the greatest cliffhanger
15:47ending in all of Star Trek when Riker orders Worf to fire. The Borg are, at their core, terrifying.
15:56If they were to launch a full-on assault, there is very few that would ever have a chance of stopping
16:02them. Species 8472 did, and then Voyager went and mucked that one up, didn't they? The one last thing
16:08I will say about the Borg is that despite their being overused, despite being sometimes they took
16:13the veil off, when you strip it back to its core like they did in the Enterprise episode, Regeneration,
16:20these Swedish-sounding cybernetic zombies are terrifying, and if they're coming after you,
16:26you better pick out your alcove. Number one, the Gorn. Okay, so this was the change to Frank's list
16:34that I made here, so please make sure you go and check out Frank's article originally.
16:38But I gotta explain why I put the Gorn at number one. Why do you think? But also, also, bear with me.
16:44Even a couple of years ago, if I was to have the Gorn at number one, you might have looked at this
16:49and said, really? The hissing rubber guy from Arena? Creepiest? Well, he did get a bit creepier in that
16:59episode of Enterprise where they tried to do him in CGI, and an attempt was made. They lost some of
17:05their creepiness when they rocked up in lower decks. I mean, I would both love to attend a Gorn
17:09wedding, and also I would love to run as fast as I possibly could away from a Gorn wedding.
17:13You know, we'll see how the mood takes me. All this, all this, you're like, not getting creepy. I'm not getting
17:19creepy. Then Strange New Worlds came along, and Memento Mori made me realize where if I hear the
17:26Gorn are coming, I am getting the absolute sh** out of there. The Gorn were being set up throughout
17:33the first season of Strange New Worlds as someone to genuinely be feared. You had Leanne Nooney in
17:39Sing had a horrifically traumatic experience in her childhood where her family, and in fact the
17:45whole ship that they were on, were killed by the Gorn. But wouldn't it be lovely if they had only
17:51been killed? The Strange New Worlds Gorn owe an awful lot of inspiration to Dan O'Bannon and
17:56Ronald Shusett Jr.'s Xenomorph that was, of course, introduced back in Alien. Ironically, the same year
18:02that Star Trek The Motion Picture came out. Space was a very mixed place that year. These are fast,
18:07these are frightening, these are also much more animal than, say, the previous Gorn that had
18:14appeared had been. I mean, you didn't look like you were about to have a conversation with these dudes.
18:19But of course, let's talk about the spit that gets you pregnant. That might sound very silly, doesn't
18:26it? Bet you Hemmer didn't find it so funny. This was it. This was the episode we lost Bruce Horak's
18:31Hemmer because he got infected with Gorn babies, which again, if you've seen Alien, unwelcome dinner
18:39guest, that's what we're looking at here. The Gorn may have been one of the most beloved jokes in
18:43Star Trek history for a long time, but then Strange New Worlds came along and says, nah, hold my
18:50rubber suit. We're gonna change this up. That's it for our list, folks. Thank you very much for watching.
18:54If you reckon I missed something that is so super creepy it must be included, let me know in the
18:59comments below. And again, as I say, don't forget to check out the original article by the wonderful
19:04Frank Chavez. Thank you very much for watching along. Thank you very much to the wonderful Tom
19:07who's edited this video. Sorry if you've had to have a little bit of wind, but the person who was
19:12supposed to hold the wind, they called in sick today. Remember you can catch us on socials at
19:16Trek Culture on Twitter and at Trek Culture YT over on Instagram. You catch myself at Sean Ferrick
19:21on all the various socials. You can catch Tom at TomCFinn. Everyone, make sure you look after
19:26yourselves until I see you again. Make sure that you live long and prosper. And if you're
19:30out the LA way, well, buy for a visit. It is pretty cool. Thanks very much.