Oolite Bulletins

...Elite wasn't their first appearance.

One of my older friends at my local Astronomy club said he'd recently been reading Status Quo (enjoying it too fortunately) and he said...

"Ah, yes, I see you pinched the idea of the Thargoids from Kenny Everett."

Cue blank stare from me.

"Captain Kremmen? No...? I suggest a Google..."

So I did. With rather surprising results. I wonder if Robert Holdstock, Ian Bell and David Braben consciously chose the Thargoids?

Biggest revelation... there is a Thargoid homeworld - Thargoidia! They are described as having transparent heads, furry green eyeballs, seven legs and three lips at the time - I wonder what calamity befell them to turn them into insectoids!

All shall be revealed.

Cheers,

Drew.

Nice find Drew - now where in the 8 is Thargoidia........I reckon you turn left at Raxxla.

Well, well, well. Considering how Risque The Kenny Everett TV show was, I remember being allowed to watch it as a small child - I never looked at my Dansette top-loading cassette player the same again, after I saw my first episode of Captain Kremmen. Odd, how I didn't associate the name...

Thank your friend Drew - marvellous find!

I somehow never heard of it.. But there are some Captain Kremmen episodes up on youtube.

Maybe the insectoid appearance is actually due to technorganic battle suits and the real Thargoids remain hidden away from sight.

drew wrote:

...Elite wasn't their first appearance.

Biggest revelation... there is a Thargoid homeworld - Thargoidia! They are described as having transparent heads, furry green eyeballs, seven legs and three lips

Do they look something like this?

This is just a troll thread, right? Nothing in Elite was original. If you think it was, I hope you're not too disappointed when you find out about the trumbles, Drew.

Well, I'm sure there's some handwavium out there to explain it away, maybe its something like what happened in Star Trek to the Klingons, in the original series they looked mostly human, but in TNG they looked a lot different. I think the writers explained it away as some sort of disease.

ADCK wrote:

Well, I'm sure there's some handwavium out there to explain it away, maybe its something like what happened in Star Trek to the Klingons, in the original series they looked mostly human, but in TNG they looked a lot different. I think the writers explained it away as some sort of disease.

Nope. In reality they were always supposed to look like they did, but there wasn't the budget. They explained it in the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" (i.e. Worf explains to Dax and Sisko - by initially saying "I don't want to talk about it...") as this (paraphrasing): The Klingon High Command in early conflicts didn't win as often or as easily as they expected against the puny Federation/Humans - so they did something they don't normally do, they took Prisoners of War and experimented with them - producing a half-human/Klingon which fought like a Klingon, but thought (a bit) like a Human - but it didn't bring enough success, they half-breeds were badly thought of and treated within the Klingon society and were eventually cleansed from Klingon society. ("It wasn't one of our more honourable moments." Worf notes)

DaddyHoggy wrote:

ADCK wrote:

Well, I'm sure there's some handwavium out there to explain it away, maybe its something like what happened in Star Trek to the Klingons, in the original series they looked mostly human, but in TNG they looked a lot different. I think the writers explained it away as some sort of disease.

Nope. In reality they were always supposed to look like they did, but there wasn't the budget. They explained it in the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" (i.e. Worf explains to Dax and Sisko - by initially saying "I don't want to talk about it...") as this (paraphrasing): The Klingon High Command in early conflicts didn't win as often or as easily as they expected against the puny Federation/Humans - so they did something they don't normally do, they took Prisoners of War and experimented with them - producing a half-human/Klingon which fought like a Klingon, but thought (a bit) like a Human - but it didn't bring enough success, they half-breeds were badly thought of and treated within the Klingon society and were eventually cleansed from Klingon society. ("It wasn't one of our more honourable moments." Worf notes)

Worf actually says "We don't talk about it with outsiders," but there was no other explanation given in that episode (which is one of my favourite episodes of DS9). There was a story arc about it in Enterprise, in which experiments with genetic material from the Augments created a flu-like plague, which caused the physical alterations.

I haven't watched the episode for about 5 years, so it was done from memory, so please forgive me! It's one of my favourites too though!

I was sure the explanation was in that story? Perhaps it was in some of the comics, book, magazines, etc I was reading at the same time. I'm pretty confident that's the story, so I must have got it from somewhere...