The Top Ten Sexiest Aliens of All Time (and Space)

Admission: I didn't actually come up with ten. But if I could actually get a list like that together, wouldn't it be cool? I'm thinking that this could blossom into a wonderful discussion where we help introduce one another to new aliens with giant sex-appeal (and maybe tentacles).

Before we get started, I want to make it clear that I know of many more aliens than those that made this list. I'm not a sci-fi super geek/ expert by any means, but I do have a fondness for the genre and have been steeped in a diluted pot of it since I was a child. (And also, as genres go, I think it's one of the more fun ones.) The list is so short because I found myself being rather picky. Jessica and John (my alien-sexiness panel) talked it over with me and offered many more ideas, but I only wanted to choose those whom I was personally attracted to. Please, feel free to fill the comments with your own preferences.

I placed upon my list two other restrictions:

1. If the alien looks just like a human, their alien attributes must significantly enhance their sex appeal. They can't make the list based on the good-lookingness of the actor who plays them. This is why no Cylons made the list -- the sexiest, in my opinion, of the lot of them is one that you don't even know is a Cylon until very late in the series. And of their Cylon attributes -- how they put their hands into mechanized goo or get rebirthed out of more goo -- nothing can be said. The Cylon Raiders are actually a bit sexy, I think, in the same way that horses are a bit sexy. But John pointed out that they weren't actually aliens anyway since the Cylons were built by Cylons which were built by Cyclons which were [...] which were built by humans.

Jessica was more rigorous in her exclusions. She and her co-workers decided aliens who looked like humans were disqualified altogether.

2. I limited my list to one alien per story/universe/series. I did this because I thought that the post devolving into a close look at why I think the ninth doctor is sexy and the tenth doctor is sexy and the - etc. - would be dull.

So I actually have a top four sexiest aliens of time and space. Drum roll:

4. The Elites

These are aliens from the Halo universe. They are the most powerful alien race among the Covenant (a sort of alien UN). Elites are sexy at least partly because of a lack of competition - the rest of the Covenant is pretty ugly. Brutes are big and stupid, Grunts are small and stupid (but kind of cute), Hunters are large colonies of worms... Elites, though, are bold colors and they're fast and smart and tote an array of phallic-like weapons. (And although they have all those weapons, their seemingly preferred death-blow is a kick to the face, which says, arguably, that they like being close to you.) John takes issue with their backwards-facing knees, but I'm untroubled.

3. Q

From the Star Trek universe, Worf loses out to Q for me, which might be an unpopular choice. (It was to Jessica.) I will admit that somewhat in violation to restriction #1, Q earns several sexiness points for his dashingly well-formed chin. But his alienness helps immensely -- he's somewhat of a contradiction. (And complexity is sexy.) He's humanity's ambassador and judge from the Q Continuum. Their interests are in whether or not humanity deserves to exist; whether or not our potential makes up for the harm we've done to one another and to the universe. It is, essentially, a question of our responsibility, maturity, and goodness; all the while, Q himself acts immaturely and even maliciously. He's a great boy with a magnifying glass and we are his ants. Of course, this could all be a cover for his tenderness towards humanity, and through all his bored-seeming stunts, his pranks, his disrespect of authority, I think he has a deep-seated good heartedness and a desire to see humanity become something more than we thought we could be. 

2. Predator

Obviously. As Jessica points out: dreadlocks and fishnets. I'd like to add to that list his bulging, albeit slimy, quadriceps.

I saw Predator for the first time at Jessica's house in middle school or high school. (I can't remember when, exactly.) She was having a party, maybe a birthday party, and the movie was on in the living room. Since lots of people were over, the movie was muted. I was transfixed. I watched the whole thing - sans sound - and don't remember talking to anyone. After I finished, and most people had gone home, I started the movie over. This time I watched it with the sounds on. That night, when I went to bed, I had a wonderful dream: I dreamt that I was in the jungle, lying next to a lake who's banks were squeamy gray mud. The Predator was looking right at me! and I had to keep covering myself with this mud. I slid slowly and slowly into the lake. The jungle was full of bright greens and teals. I don't know if that sounds like fun, but I had a very good time.

And if that doesn't do it for you, there's still the dreadlocks, fishnets, and irresistible thigh muscles. (Obviously)

1. The TARDIS

Not just a time machine and space ship, the TARDIS is an alien in herself. She gets put (somehow) into a woman's body in one Doctor Who episode. She tells the doctor that she stole him rather than the other way around. And while sexiness is often thought of in terms of a viewer and object - of something to be determined by staring at something and making a static judgement - I think the sexiest trait in someone/somebeing else is the ability and opportunity to go with that person (or, you know, whatever). To  go see other things with that person, to set out for time and space, to be headed in the same direction - especially in a brand new one. 

Because you know what they say: "New directions lead to nude erections" and what's sexier than that?

Adama's Question

Commander Adama and his ship are going into retirement. The fleet, it seems, doesn't need them anymore, the new technology and the younger officers have made these two obsolete. And Adama is old -- he's known as "old laser face" due to a long life of acne scarring -- and the ship is a barely-space-worthy bucket. Besides, the colonies are experiencing a time of peace. The cylons haven't tried to wipe out humanity in 40 years. At his ship's decommissioning, Adama begins his to-be-expected speech before abandoning his note cards to ask, "Is humanity worth saving?" He's not demanding it; he comes across as world-weary and tired, and he's wondering if perhaps the cylons have good reason for trying to kill us off.

As the show progresses, Adama's speech from that first episode kind of hangs in the background. Well-fleshed out characters commit acts of cowardice, choose to protect themselves at the expense of others, breach loyalties, become alcoholics, despair, and perform executions (with only 45,000 people left in existence), and, though culpable, I don't want to condemn them because I can't see myself doing better in their shoes.

For a sci-fi show, it's pretty Earth-bound (pun non intended). The ships are very industrial looking, their walls the color of soot; the sounds of boots on steel, pistol shots and lockers closing make up the sound effects; the camera moves around at eye level showing faces and conversations rather than the wide panning of space.

Oh, I'm talking about Battlestar Galactica, by the way, a concept with a bag of TV-series attempts with mixed results. The Riverside West crew watched the 2004-09 one in its entirety. I'm continuing the watching-sci-fi-shows-on-Netflix tradition by going through Star Trek: The Next Generation in my unemployed free time.

Star Trek is much more airy. Their guns shoot orange lasers. Large windows are a part of every room and show the Windows screensaver. People dissolve into light in one place to reappear in another.

Despite these differences, the pilot episodes confront the same question.

The very powerful and ornery being, Q, challenges the newly-minted Enterprise. He stops them mid sub-space voyage and says that due to humanity's history he can no longer let them exist. In this and subsequent episodes, Captain Picard and other crew members prove their good natures to Q. Picard insists that though humans have a sordid past, they have changed for the better.

Humanity's evolution to a peaceful morally-viable race is a condition of the Next Generation series. They explore vast areas with no move to conquer or control. They work and live without prejudice among lifeforms and cultures very different from their own. Their power does not corrupt them. Humanity is worth saving because humanity has become worthy.

I found a remarkable tie-in between Star Trek and Galactica a couple of episodes ago (season 2, episode 9). Lieutenant Commander Data, an android, refuses to undergo dismantling (research, in hopes of being able to duplicate Data) by a unqualified scientist. Starfleet will not allow him to refuse because he is a machine. This is taken to court.

Whoopi Goldberg, as Ginan, warns the captain (who is Data's advocate) of a whole race of Datas in subjugation to humanity if the court rules Data as Federation property. In court, the JAG officer even calls Data a toaster -- a slur against Cylons in BSG.

Cylons were created by humans and given artificial intelligence; they evolved into a mechanized race and rebelled. (Slavery, it seems, doesn't go over well with robots either.) One of the central conflicts in BSG is whether or not Cylons should have the same rights as humans. Certain models of cylons look and move exactly like people; they build relationships, are self aware and have emotions. Data, while short on emotions, also looks like a person and he is a distinct character to the viewer. No one watching episode 9 of season 2 is saying, "Yeah, he's just some fancy box of bolts."

And while BSG takes 75 episodes to work it out, Star Trek takes care of it in one. The court grants Data's right to choose, and in doing so, protects the rights of sentient lifeforms everywhere. (Q smiles upon them.) While the folks in BSG struggle to get people to stop rioting.

And in the end of Battlestar, the narrative strand the writers emphasize is the "humans v robots" one. They seem to be cautioning viewers against the mistreatment of automatons in the hopes of preventing a future cylon war. They abandoned their themes of justice and human identity to briefly touch on the possibility that increases in technology are not always good.

I'm borderline obsessed with the way these shows treat the justification of humanity. Star Trek acknowledges that we, in the twenty first century, were pretty bad, but it can get away with imposing only vague judgment upon us because in the twenty fourth century, the answer to Adama's question is an easy yes.

And BSG lets the question slide.

Maybe Q is in the wrong televisional universe.

Fit to be Packed by the Gross

For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness. -George Eliot, Middlemarch

I watched a lot of the TV show, Battlestar Galactica, yesterday. John, Christa, Mitch, and I cruised through the second half of season two on Netflix. Lots of couch time and Christa was mostly napping. The premise of the show is one which should hardly lend itself towards wish fulfillment. It's set sometime in the future with just under 50,000 humans left in existence. They have escaped the destruction of their home worlds by automatons called Cylons that seek to wipe out humanity. The remaining humans live furtively on a colony of spaceships.

The Galactica is the military ship with them, and the show follows the members of its crew. A small crew of "Viper" pilots are the fleet's defense against Cylon raiders. They constantly face death, hardly sleep, have lost most of the people they know, and don't believe in the legendary planet, Earth, that the president is searching for. And in addition to their military troubles, the people in the fleet still have civilian conflicts: lack of supplies, political unrest, dealings with the black market. Even though so few humans are left, people still occasionally shoot each other.

It shouldn't be a scenario I would want for my life, and yet sometime in the five-ish hours I watched it yesterday I got a little jealous. These characters got to be heroes. The Viper pilots live together and drink together and get pissed at each other and know each other. And then they go out and die or live in the service of saving humanity.

And what do we, American college graduates entering adulthood, have to look forward to? As far as I've seen, the giant norm is to work about 40 hours a week in order to watch the number on your online bank account go up. A race for property to sit down in and a retirement package to be dripped intravenously. A successful life is to gain security after security and to keep an opaqueness that, if you're lucky, comes across as serenity.

And it seems to me that childhood has prepared us for something better than that. I used to sit in our towel closet for hours with the light on imagining one thing after another. We had fairy tales and dinosaurs and myth. And then we had pirates and Peter Pan. Narnia. Tolkien. And then we had dreams of travel after we were done with school and that constant struggle to buck the yoke of authority imposed on us by parents and teachers. College, Whitworth, at least, allowed us to indulge in subjects that were interesting and expansive instead of simply technical or job-related.

And now we're out. There is no more parental authority and yet I don't know what I can do except to tie my cravat and go to work with the rest of them.