Not my OC
A black sheriff?
These are literally paid advertisements for the animal agriculture lobby.
Don’t underestimate the power of “We need a cheap episode, where’s the literal decades of western props we keep in storage?”
I always thought the glaring western motifs were a tribute to the original concept of Star Trek being “A wagon train to the stars.”
Nah, it’s for the same reason they never went to a jungle world.
Back in the day they just shot everything in the desert outside of LA. It’s the whole reason westerns were a thing in the first place, free setting.
So there was a bunch of props and sets from the studio, and Star Trek could do it for free.
I mean, wasn’t even MASH in the desert for some reason?
The Original Series straight-up used the Downtown Mayberry set from The Andy Griffith Show twice.
Star Trek used a LOT of stuff from other properties due to money. But I still feel like the western sets were used by choice. Especially in Enterprise, which was meta at that point.
To be fair, I’d say cowboy appearances would be relatively proportional to the population, maybe 1 or 2% of each series… Except DS9, which has a bit of an Alamo obsession.
Should come as no surprise the folks stationed on DS9 were obsessed with the defense of a lone fortress against impossible odds.
I think TOS had as many mobster episodes as it did cowboy episodes.
It had an oddly large amount of episodes involving ancient Mediterranean civilizations, though… Those darn Greeks/Romans taking over our Trek!
I mean, there’s Romulans
If you want to be like that about, what we think of as American “cowboy” culture only lasted 25-years or so, Civil War-ish to 1880-ish. Yet we treat it like it was a 100-year block of Western history.
you would do well to stay away from firefly.
Did Voyager or Discovery ever have cowboys?
Maybe not literally, but the season 3 episode where Discovery arrived in the future went hard on the western vibes. I think they even included swinging saloon doors at one point.
In cowboy times they went to Fairhaven, Ireland instead.
Guess Tom Paris prefers horseless carriages.
