Where did the idea of Changelings come from?
- Thread starter indolover
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^Right. Stories are driven by character, so it made it more potent to have the big bad be a race that had a connection to one or more of the main characters. So they wanted a big bad from the Gamma Quadrant (since the GQ and the wormhole were defining aspects of the series), and they already had Odo looking for his mysterious people from the Gamma Quadrant, and the two ideas naturally meshed.
to me it felt very natural... once you get a sense of the individual traits that Odo has - his desire for order and his ability to work within a less than perfect system to achieve his own goals - it makes total sense that a whole race of Odo's would do to their quadrant of space what he's attempting to do on a smaller scale on the space station.
I don't recall exactly, but there was a TNG episode where a "metamorph" turned up. She shifted into some monster so her and Worf could paw at each other. Star Trek VI had one as well, as you all know, and I always thought that character was meant to be the foundation of the "founder" species.
That was "The Dauphin," and the species were actually referred to as "allasomorphs", which is Greek for "changed/exchanged form."
Oh, there were shapeshifters far earlier than that in Trek. TOS had the "Catspaw" aliens (though their shape changes were technological) and Garth of Izar (and the Antosian species who taught him their methods), and the animated series had the Vendorians. And of course the concept goes back much farther in science fiction, notably to John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" in 1938 (the basis of the movies The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter's The Thing). Heck, it goes back to ancient mythology, where many gods and supernatural beings could change their shape at will, like Zeus turning into various animals to have his way with mortal women.
There have been other shapesifting species on Trek, but the Founders were meant to be a separate species. Just because two groups of people share an ability, like changing their shape at will, doesn't mean they are the same species. For example, Vulcans and Betazoids are clearly not the same species, even though they both share the telepathy trait.
When DS9 was in development was around the same time that techniques for depicting "shapeshifting" or liquid characters was being developed and used in some high-profile movies.
T2 debuted a couple years before DS9, and The Abyss was just a couple years before that. Iman's shapeshifting character was in Star Trek VI the same year as T2. This could just be an example of technology opening up new visualization possibilities for a character idea already present in Star Trek.
T2 debuted a couple years before DS9, and The Abyss was just a couple years before that. Iman's shapeshifting character was in Star Trek VI the same year as T2. This could just be an example of technology opening up new visualization possibilities for a character idea already present in Star Trek.
Ira Behr said something about how casting Salome Jens as the Female Founder came from her performance as the Ancient Progenitor in "The Chase".
Jens playing both characters actually still managed to tie the Founders into that story: The Founders said that they used to be solids until they evolved into Changlings, so we can assume that they were one of the first species to develop from the genetic seeding the Progenitors did to the Trek Galaxy. Jens playing both characters can be a tie-in/hint to that.
Jens playing both characters actually still managed to tie the Founders into that story: The Founders said that they used to be solids until they evolved into Changlings, so we can assume that they were one of the first species to develop from the genetic seeding the Progenitors did to the Trek Galaxy. Jens playing both characters can be a tie-in/hint to that.
There is an interview early on where Rene Auberjonois said that Odo probably wouldn't find his people until the series finale. So to me that shows it was not planned.
From Memory Apha:
From Memory Apha:
Changlings? Are those the descendents of General Chang?
At one point turning into "a shower of gold" to get into an enclosed room. Sounds like the transporter effect to me!
Indeed... The Founders were good for Odo, as previously mentioned, because of their representation of the dark side of his own qualities. One thing Star Trek is generally pretty good about handling is the idea of dark dichotomies, most blatantly in the Mirror Universe, but also in many things which are the same, but different, like the Federation and the Borg, Data and Lore, Odo and the Founders, Vulcans and Romulans, etc...
The Founders did share a lot of qualities with Odo as far as a desire for order, an early existence rife with misunderstanding and mistreatment by solids, and a drive to mold their environments from an authoritarian distance.
One difference that wasn't really touched upon much, but seemed rather heavily implied by the series was Odo's relative youth and idealism compared to the Link. It was suggested that it's not necessarily the Changelings' namesake abilities that distanced them so much from solids, but their relative immortality... after all, when we saw Laas (the only other non-Link changeling I can recall seeing in the series), he seemed well on the way to agreeing with the Link's overall perspective on solids, as he too, had been around long enough (possibly a couple of centuries according to Memory Alpha) to experience a lot of the bigotry and mistreatment by solids that drove the Changelings of the Gamma Quadrant to the lengths they had gone through... the Link has a very long memory of many such slights and mistreatments over time, which somewhat justifies their atrocious behavior. One wonders if Odo will remain the voice of reason to Changeling society once he gets a few more years on mingling with solids...
A few years of minggling with the solids wouldn't do him any harm, I guess. Thank goodness he ended up with Bajorans. They are forgiving, kind and spiritual people. Some thing I think shape shifters find peaceful and fullfilling because they often find the universe chaotic and so desire order... Faith base culture did provide a kind of order, stability and tranquility of Odo. He seems to prefer Bajorans over humans as shown on DS9. Thank goodness for the people of Bajor!
Odo will always have a special place in the hearts of the Bajoran people and the Founders.
Odo will always have a special place in the hearts of the Bajoran people and the Founders.
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I think you're forgetting that the only Bajoran Odo had regular contact with for his formative years was Dr. Mora, and Odo hated him. Not to mention that he spent much of his early life surrounded by Cardassians, even working for them on Terok Nor, and got plenty of exposure to their cruelty and violence. The Bajorans that Odo did interact with once he left Mora were an oppressed, impoverished people struggling to live in the hellish conditions the Cardassian occupation created for them, and often prone to inflict great violence on others in the name of resistance or simple survival. "Order, stability, and tranquility" were not things he experienced much as he grew up. If anything, it's probably the nearly complete absence of those things in the world around him that made him crave them so much.
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