The Single Line Of Dialogue Star Trek Spent Over 50 Years Explaining

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 16 seconds ago

The strength of Star Trek has never been its ambitious special effects or its bevy of exotic aliens. No, the strength of this franchise has always been in its dialogue. Many fans memorize lines like Kirk’s “risk is our business” and turn them into personal mantras, which is no surprise.

These episodes offer such unique insights into the human condition that even a simple line can inspire you to change your life. In the very first Star Trek episode, though, the show’s most popular character had a line of dialogue that has inspired nothing but arguments among fans.

In The Original Series broadcast premiere “The Man Trap,” Spock makes a straightforward statement about his home planet: “Vulcan has no moon.” On paper, it’s a pretty simple statement because nobody really expected a fictional alien planet to have the exact same features as our own.

Unfortunately, since Star Trek: The Animated Series, the franchise has often portrayed Spock’s home planet as having a huge moon that is very visible from the planet below. Audiences have been trying to resolve this discrepancy for over half a century, and an episode of Strange New Worlds quietly made the most popular fan theory into canon.

When Pillow Talk Goes Wrong

When Spock mentions his home planet in “The Man Trap,” he is effectively shutting down some flirtation from Uhura. She playfully tells him to “tell me how your planet Vulcan looks on a lazy evening when the moon is full.” Without missing a beat or taking the bait, Spock tells his fellow officer that “Vulcan has no moon, Miss Uhura.” There was no need to question his assertion until the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode “Yesteryear.” In that episode, a large moon was very obviously visible from the surface of the planet Vulcan in multiple shots.

After this, it became weirdly common for Star Trek films and TV shows to feature a moon and other celestial bodies near Vulcan. The theatrical cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for example, originally portrayed four oversized orbs in Vulcan’s sky. It wasn’t clear if these were meant to be moons or planets, but it eventually became a moot point. When the Director’s Edition of that movie came out on DVD, those objects had been removed, and the night sky (distracting since this was a daytime scene) was replaced with an orange one.

Fly Me To The Moon

The “does Vulcan have a moon?” debate calmed down until Star Trek: Discovery. The episodes “Lethe,” “If Memory Serves,” and “Such Sweet Sorrow” showed celestial bodies that were visible from the surface of the planet Vulcan.

Once again, it wasn’t clear if we were looking at moons, planets, or something else entirely. Moreover, fans once more had to wonder why Spock so confidently declared that Vulcan had no moon when so much cosmic crap is clearly visible from the surface of his planet.

However, veteran Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana provided a possible explanation for this conundrum, which was published in a fanzine way back in 1975. She proposed that Vulcan had a sister planet, T’Khut, that had a co-orbital relationship.

This elegantly justified Spock’s statement that Vulcan has no moon by explaining that what we saw in the sky in “Yesteryear” and later episodes wasn’t a lunar body. Instead, it was T’Khut, which was orbiting closely enough to be visible to the naked eye. While this remained only a fan theory for over half a century, it was eventually canonized by Strange New Worlds, which showed T’Khut orbiting Vulcan on a computer console.

There you have it, Trekkers: a simple throwaway line from Spock in the first episode of Star Trek to ever hit the airwaves ignited decades of fan debates. Everyone wanted to explain this seeming discrepancy, but nobody could top the one offered by franchise scribe D.C. Fontana. Paramount agreed, eventually making her popular theory official canon. As a side effect of all this, there’s now one line of dialogue Star Trek and Star Wars fans can quote for completely different reasons: “that’s no moon!”