Judging by some of the reactions to Star Trek‘s newest show, you might find it hard to believe that the sci-fi franchise’s lore has always been rather fluid. Even before Starfleet Academy introduced apparently challenging changes, almost 1000 years into the future from the heyday, there’ve been multiple Star Trek retcons. Not all of them were radically transformative (there were also a significant number of production tweaks that changed starship layouts shockingly often), but Trek fans do tend to notice. You can’t just change the color of Klingon blood and get away with it, scot-free, no matter what the reason.
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But so-called “Nu-Trek” gets a lot of heat for changing things, even if they improve broader lore. Why can’t a Klingon/Jem’Hadar hybrid be the eventual legacy of Odo’s return to the Dominion at the end of Deep Space Nine? And at the same time, you get confirmation of Harry Kim’s eventual admiralcy, so some changes are balanced. Not all are entirely necessary, though. Like the one confirmed in the first episodes of Starfleet Academy, when a background extra revealed that the Cheron – the black and white faced aliens from TOS episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” – are still around in Star Trek‘s distant future. And for some, that might seem impossible.
How Starfleet Academy Retcons The Cheron (Or Does It?)
Famously, the Cheron were the center of a thinly-veiled racial allegory, as Gene Roddenberry reflected racial tensions in a species that had destroyed itself over its aesthetic difference. The two survivors of the destroyed planet Cheron, named Bele (Batman’s Frank Gorshin) and Lokai (Lou Antonio) were mortal enemies, and were unable to settle their differences by the end of the episode. The reasonable assumption would have been that they, too, eventually destroyed each other and the race died out (or a single survivor persisted thanks to their longevity). The fact that only two natives had survived made the message of their story all the more tragic.
But Starfleet Academy has now rewritten that tragedy. While there’s nothing to say that Cheron don’t reproduce asexually, Starfleet Academy’s introduction of a young female Cheron probably means Bele and Lokai can’t have been the only survivors. It’s not out of the realms of possibility that a family escaped, of course, which simply has to have been the case, making the tale of two rage-addled rivals chasing one another across the universe somewhat less poignant. Honestly, unlike the Jem’Hadar/Klingon change, I’m not sure there’s a great deal of value in bringing the Cheron back without it simply being about ticking off fan nostalgia. If anything, it just raises questions that will surely never be answered.
This also isn’t the first time the species has appeared since The Original Series: another appeared in the Section 31 movie briefly. That character, Virgil, was a Section 31 Concierge, with basically no backstory, but clearly more than Bele and Lokai made it off Cheron before the doomed planet’s demise. If you’re looking for any further depth, it seems that Bele, Virgil, and the Starfleet Academy new recruit all have black on the right side of their faces, suggesting that perhaps Lokai’s side “lost.” Whether we’ll get any more than that from Star Trek is unclear, but it definitely feels unlikely.
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