Star Trek’s Biggest Mystery Was Answered By One Forgotten Episode

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

One of the coolest things about Star Trek is that this franchise has had plenty of world-building from the very beginning. Some concepts, such as faster-than-light travel, are grounded in real-world scientific theories, but the writers and producers had to figure out how those scientific ideas would advance within the next few centuries. For example, how would these future explorers classify the different worlds they have discovered? The Original Series gave us a partial answer, revealing that Earth-like worlds are referred to as M-class planets.

This designation was still used in The Next Generation by Captain Picard and his crew, and the term was repeated in spinoffs like Deep Space Nine and Voyager. However, after decades of hearing this term, fans began to ask the obvious questions: what does “M-class” even mean? Where does the term come from, and when did Starfleet begin using it? Eventually, these mysteries were answered by “Strange New World,” a forgotten episode from the much-maligned spinoff Star Trek: Enterprise.

A Not-So-Strange New World

In the Enterprise episode “Strange New World,” the crew has only recently begun their trek through the stars. They encounter a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere and decide to check it out. When a nasty storm approaches, some of the crew (including Tucker and Mayweather) suggest taking shelter in a cave. But things go from bad to worse when they start seeing creepy creatures inside the cave and become paranoid that T’Pol is hiding things from them. In a weird twist, it turns out there were no hostile aliens on the planet: just some wacky pollen that made everyone hallucinate. We get a relatively happy ending, and everyone gets an antidote and lives to trek another day.

So, what does this weird tale of trippy space pollen have to do with Star Trek history? It’s actually the very first episode in the franchise to spell out that the “M” in “Class M” stands for “Minshara Class.” Where did this exotic name come from, though? The Vulcans, of course. “Strange New World” reveals that “Minshara-Class” was the term used for Earth-like planets by Vulcan explorers who (at the time) gathered info from probes rather than planetary scans. Captain Archer’s Enterprise became the first Starfleet vessel to adopt the terminology, which became standard fleetwide within three years.

Setting A New Starfleet Standard

Thanks to Archer’s early adventures in episodes like “Strange New World,” Starfleet had a handy way to classify Earth-like planets. This was important because, according to the Original Series episode “Balance of Terror,” there are likely around three million such planets in the Milky Way galaxy. While Enterprise helped fans learn what M-class actually means, we are still left with a few questions. For example, the Next Generation established that there were four levels of M-class planets. While this is likely used to differentiate different planetary environments (like the arid Vulcan, the rainy Ferenginar, and the downright tropical Risa), this has never been confirmed by the franchise.

Enterprise is a much better show than fans think, and it’s definitely worth watching for these deep dives into franchise lore. Thanks to this show, we know just how much early Starfleet was indebted to the Vulcans, adopting those aliens’ planetary classification schema and using it for centuries. Honestly, that was probably a better choice than letting a space cowboy like Kirk pick the planetary designations. If Star Trek (2009) is any indicator, he’d probably call them “BB-class planets,” and we’d have to wait four decades to learn that the “BB” stands for “Beastie Boys.” Then again, who knows more than Kirk about how to fight for your right to (landing) party?