This week’s Major Spoilers Podcast, aside from incoherence on my part, focuses on several instances of strange visitors from outer space, notably ROM: Spaceknight and some movie about that one red-caped guy from DC Comics who totally ripped off ROM by also crashing to Earth from space. When you think about it, there are an awful lot of human-looking aliens in the various imaginary universes, and a great many of them are indistinguishable from humans in any meaningful way, going so far in some cases as to be capable of cross-species reproduction. While we all know why this happens (limited budgets, audience identification, simplicity of design, blah blah blah fishcakes) the best part is the various in-universe explanations of WHY this happens, from the ‘Star Trek: TNG’ common ancestor explanation (notably, one of the series’ weakest episodes) to the Doctor’s rather cheeky response of “I don’t look human, you look Time Lord.”
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) sometimes doesn’t mind this trope in practice, especially when the aliens look like this, asking: Who’s your favorite not-so-alien alien?










