35 Years Ago, Star Trek Flipped The Script On Alien First Contact

Are aliens living among us? Would we ever even know if they were? Although the Star Trek franchise claims to be all about seeking out new life and new civilizations, there are very few stories in which the various Starfleet crews make first contact with people that remind us of ourselves. Over the years, Star Trek has doubled down on the idea that most aliens are humanoid in shape, and has even provided a big, overarching canonical reason for that fact. On top of that, most aliens appear to speak English, which we can hand-wave away because the Universal Translator exists. But, since the days of The Original Series, one obvious question existed: If people from the Star Trek universe were to beam down to our planet, how would we react?

Thirty-five years ago, with an episode called “First Contact,” The Next Generation flipped the script on most Trek stories about alien cultures. Though the title “First Contact” is most famously associated with the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact, the Season 4 episode with that title told a smaller, more philosophically complex story. During the week of February 19, 1991, TNG aired this unique episode and gave us a great story in the tradition of classic science fiction.

The episode begins with a cold open, in which aliens called Malcorians have discovered that Riker (Jonathan Frakes) was living among them, surgically disguised as a Malcorian. What makes this episode unique, though, is that at first, we’re getting the story from the perspective of the “aliens,” meaning that our friendly Starfleet crew is perceived as the extraterrestrials, in ways that parallel alien abduction and Roswell obsessions of the late 1990s. In other words, this was the most X-Files episode of Star Trek, ever, at least up until that point. TOS had toyed with the idea of the Enterprise being a UFO in “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” in 1967, while Strange New Worlds duplicated aspects of the theme of this TNG episode in the 2022 series premiere of that show.

But at the time, imagining something that should be commonplace in the Star Trek universe, actually hadn’t been depicted all that much in the canon, making this episode significant insofar as it established the sneaky ways that Starfleet sends people onto alien planets before first contact, as well as giving us a retroactive history of how first contact with the Klingons went horribly wrong in the distant past.

That said, the heart and soul of the episode succeeds because it’s actually not steeped in deep-cut Trekkie lore, but instead is a smart, introspective science fiction story. The actual teleplay was written by several regular TNG contributors, including Dennis Russell Bailey, David Bischoff, Joe Menosky, Ronald D. Moore, and script editor Michael Piller. However, the basic story pitch itself comes from Marc Scott Zicree, a writer who would later create the story for the beloved DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars.” This means there’s a deeply humanist, grounded tone to “First Contact” that feels like it could work even in a different context, outside of the Trek canon. If you like short stories from Ursula K. Le Guin or novels from James White, this feels in line with that kind of old-school SF sensibility.

If one can get over the idea that everyone is speaking English (the Universal Translator seems to work even when the Malcorians are in private), the allegorical nature of “First Contact” works in almost every single scene, because the episode doesn’t even try to disguise the idea that the Malcorian society is similar to our own. A prominent space pioneer named Mirasta (Carolyn Seymour) notes that she is slightly horrified that Starfleet is gathering data by observing her planet’s collective culture. “I hate to think how you would judge us based on our popular music and entertainment,” she says. This is a nice inside joke, in a way, since in 1991, when this episode aired, The Next Generation itself was very much a part of mainstream popular culture in a way that no space-centric sci-fi TV series had been before. (Or arguably, since.) This metatextual concept is echoed again when the Chancellor of the planet, Durken (George Coe), says that rumors of the real aliens (i.e., Riker) will be overshadowed by the various entertainment — presumably science fiction — that exists on the “daily broadcasts.”

In essence, “First Contact” smartly references the idea of TV shows about aliens among us, while also being an episode of a TV show about aliens among us. This layering is smart and does help ease some of the implausibility of the episode more generally. In the end, this take on “First Contact” made the audience think more about the hope for friendly aliens, and less about the paranoia about bodysnatchers or hidden flying saucers. Instead, the episode gently imagined that someday, we might be perceived as little green men, and maybe that would be nice.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 4 streams on Paramount+.