A practical joke on the real-world scientific community became Star Trek canon in an episode of the second season of Star Trek: Lower Decks. The episode “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris” featured the return of the beloved Voyager cast member, voiced by Robert Duncan McNeill. In this episode, when Boimler mentions Paris is coming to the ship, Mariner asks, “Is he still a salamander?” Boimler replies, “It was a celerity-induced accelerated somatic mutation rate, and he’s fine now.” While this dialogue is easy to dismiss as more Trek technobabble, it has specific real-world roots. Sort of.
Practical Joke Becomes Star Trek Canon
Dr. Mohamed Noor • September 28, 2021
A Practical Joke becomes Star Trek Canon
A practical joke on the real-world scientific community became Star Trek canon in an episode of the second season of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Jumping back to 2018, an anonymous biologist (who, in one interview, called themself “BioTrekkie”) published a scientific paper in a predatory journal that, rather than presenting real results, essentially outlined the events of the infamous Voyager episode “Threshold” as though they were done in a scientific study. The title was “Rapid Genetic and Developmental Morphological Change Following Extreme Celerity”-- where “celerity” simply means swiftness of movement. The purported authors of the study were Thomas Paris, Harry Kim, B’Elanna Torres, Kes Ocampa, Kathryn Janeway, and Lewis Zimmerman, and their affiliation was noted as Starfleet Academy in Sausalito, California. The paper describes how subjects “were exposed to the theoretical maximum celerity (warp 10) and examined.” The results section reports exfoliation of skin cells, an increase in heart number, and even that three living offspring were produced by the subjects. Many other Trek- or episode-related Easter eggs are found throughout the purported scientific paper. Predatory journals are essentially counterfeit journals that publish scientific results without rigorous peer review, and it’s clear that these results were not reviewed carefully despite the technobabble in the paper concealing just how outlandish they are. The fake paper was a practical joke highlighting the problems with such predatory journals and made a bit of a media splash at the time (just Google “fake Voyager paper”), but it was taken down by the journal and is only visible here.
Returning to 2021, Boimler uses the word “celerity” as the cause of Paris’s amphibian transformation, harkening to this fake paper. Further, the abstract of the paper notes that the subjects had an “elevated somatic mutation rate”, consistent with the rest of Boimler’s comment. While the dialogue in “Threshold” noted Paris’s body was mutating, the words “celerity” and “somatic” were never uttered there. Nonetheless, as described in the fake paper, the mutations would be indeed “somatic” since they are happening within Paris’s body rather than only appearing in his gametes and descendants. One has to appreciate the writer’s room’s sense of humor in adopting the verbiage from this real-world practical joke on the scientific community and incorporating it into Trek canon.
Dr. Mohamed Noor is a Professor of Biology at Duke University, occasional Star Trek science consultant, and Virtual Trek Con staff.
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