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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?

The End of Star Trek

I've watched through "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in the past year and a half (seven-season's worth!), having watched many many episodes live or recorded on VHS when I was younger.

I re-watched the very last episode recently, a two-parter and probably the most excellent stuff the show has to offer (beautiful performances by Patrick Stewart, well-crafted story, heart-wrenching imagination-prying outcomes, etc.).

Captain Picard has become unstuck in time (a la Billy Pilgrim) and is deliriously jumping between three different time periods. In one time, he's just received his assignment as captain of the Enterprise (scenes taking place just before the pilot episode), the second is pretty much present-day as far as the show's arc goes, and in the last one, he's an old man, retired, working in a vineyard, and suffering from an advancing neurological disease. In due course, Q (more on him in a later blog post) shows up and tells the captain that he will be responsible for destroying HUMAN EXISTENCE. (Q even takes the captain to the dawn of life on earth and dips his hand in the primordial soup!) Captain Picard has to convince the crews in all three periods that he's not crazy and to trust him with their lives.

What I think is brilliant about this episode is that it showcases what's undying in that franchise - the reason episodes are still played in movie theaters and that people my age dress up as Deanna Troi for Halloween - the relationships between the characters and the lives they make for themselves on the Enterprise.

[And, really, this is what brings anybody back to a particular TV show. Sure, the situation is necessary: the Jeffersonian must join the FBI to solve murders, there must be an appointed Slayer, the Bluth family must run out of money and have made deals with Sadam Hussein. (There must be a serial killer on the Miami police force.) But without Brennan's and Booth's slow-burning romance, Buffy having her high school buddies and their tweed-clad British librarian, and, well, the family belief that once you open the vodka you have to finish it or else it'll go bad - without those things, without the relationships, nobody would watch.]

The Captain and his crew manage to pull together in all three time periods - overcoming their unfamiliarity in one and the eroding effect of age in another - to save humanity. Q says to Captain Picard, once they've succeeded, "That is the exploration that awaits you -- not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting unknown possibilities of existence." It's a wonderful line, for sure, breaking open the imagination as to what future, well, enterprises the Enterprise could pursue, what new adventures...

But my favorite thing, the master stroke, happens after this. Some of the crew (the senior staff) are in Commander Riker's quarters playing poker. Many episodes have featured similar scenes for their cold opens - the weekly poker game that the crew have made a tradition. The episode and the season and the whole of The Next Generation ends with Beverly losing and Riker raking in all her chips; Deanna joining the group to play; Worf, Geordi, and Data already there; and finally Captain Picard entering to the group's momentary silence. It turns out he's just there to join them, and he sits down at the table. Data gives him the cards to deal, and in the last seconds of the episode he stops and looks up (in a wonderful Patrick Stewart-ian way) and says that this - this playing, this gathering, the hanging out with them - is something he should have done a long time ago.

Because maybe the charting of the most important unknown possibilities of existence is finding out that you don't need to be alone.

Groundskeeper

A while back, my dad supported something he was telling me by relating what happened in a Star Trek episode. (Mom has said that when she was dating dad, he used to talk to her for hours about Star Trek over the phone. She's a little surprised she married him after that. My mom does not watch TV.) I remember the sun coming in behind him through the sliding glass door. Dad sitting at our beat-up wood table, his eyes a little bit wider and more intense, like they get when he has something to tell you, which is... maybe more often than not.

Yesterday, I saw the episode he was referencing for the first time. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Ensign Wesley Crusher are shipwrecked on an inhospitable moon, and they are dying of thirst, Picard especially so because he's been hit in the head by some rocks. As he's gasping breaths which may be his last, he gives Wesley some advice about the ensign's soon-coming entrance into Star Fleet Academy.

Picard: Make sure you get in touch which Mr. Boombi. He's been there, oh, forever. I gained a great deal of wisdom from him when I was in the Academy. He helped me tremendously.

Wesley: I will, sir. (Captain, you're not going to die!) What subject does he teach?

Picard: He's the groundskeeper.

(And out of a British Picard-admiring woman's mind Hagrid was born.)

I got a little choked up over this scene. What with the provoked memories of my father and his love of Star Trek and of watching recordings of early episodes on VHS tapes and of the unlikely circumstances surrounding my birth, how could I not get emotional? But even aside from that, something in the wise groundskeeper archetype appeals to me.

It might be the comfort and excitement in believing that a person's station in life is not indicative of his character. That the locations of good and interesting people are unknown and unguessed.

It's also a welcome counterpoint to the emphasis on Networking that I've experienced since graduating college. I think everyone seeks personal gain and rewards in friendships--in the case of the big N, career advancement--but I like that sometimes the most rewarding friendships can be the ones who offer no material advantage. My starship captain tells me so.

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.

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