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 |  | Andromeda: Meet the Perseids
By Don Lipper
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 12:19 pm ET
07 July 2000
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PERSEIDS
In this exclusive Dispatch from Andromeda, Don Lipper speaks with Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda co-executive producer and head writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who talks about the fine art of alien creation and reveals that nobody quite knows what the Perseids -- the administrators of the Systems Commonwealth -- look like yet.
| Background | | According to the Andromeda web site, "despite their black, featurelesseyes and long bony chins, Perseids resemble humans so closely that many believehumans are an offshoot of their race." | 
Gender roles among Perseids are nonexistent. They are "bisexual by nature, with each individual capable of both fertilizing another and gestating young itself. When wishing to reproduce, two Perseids typically form a temporary pair bond in which each individual impregnates the other. The pair stays together until the birth of the offspring, who are then turned over to the Perseid government for rearing, and retain only a cursory connection to their biological parents." |
Am I a Perseid? Dubious -- but Wolfe is still cagey about just what species Rev Bem (played by Brent Strait) belongs to. |
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SPACE.com: When you’re designing a new race, what sort of analogs did you have?
Robert Hewitt Wolfe: Well we haven’t quite nailed down the look of the Perseids yet, but we have gone through the obvious limitations that these all need to be very comfortable costumes or puppeteered, etc., so we have that. That also means they have to be of a certain size. Ideally you want to put a face behind whatever’s going on in most cases, so we have that as a basic starting point. The reality of the situation is, in 15 years that may not be true.
SC: What do you mean?
RHW: Well, someday you’ll be able to do a fully realized CG character. But we’re not there yet. And if you look at Farscape, even those characters have two eyes, two nostrils and a mouth, a lot of them anyway. Even the blue chick. I’ve seen the ["Sexiest blue chick since Smurfette"] posters, those are pretty hilarious.
So you’ve got two basic starting points. You just play with different animal forms, and you play with different kinds of mythological creatures (goblins, ghouls, etc.) .
Then there are the animals. If you looked, there’s a lot of pretty freaky creatures on the earth, a lot of them a lot freakier than, say for example, a Bajoran. So you look at nature and try to find a cool example of a neat looking face, modify it, combine it with a couple of other things.
My wife did an exercise once, she was in an animation class, and one of her assignments was to cross two earth creatures and create an alien creature. She crossed a platypus with a hammerhead shark and made a clay sculpture of it, and it looked great. It looked totally alien and totally freaky. But essentially what she had done was she had gotten references from two different earth animals. So that’s a good starting point for a lot of these creatures.
Our crazed prosthetics guys at Flesh and Fantasy have come up with all sorts of wonderful designs. Ryan Nicholson comes up with all sorts of crazy stuff, and we say, "yes, no, maybe."
SC: For Babylon 5, Straczynski used the analog of the Post-Renaissance Italian Court for the Centauri, Ambassador Mollari’s race. Is there an historical or emotional model that you’re using for the Perseids?
RHW: Perseids would be somewhere in the high Ming Dynasty imperial bureaucrat range. You know those guys who administered the empire? With a little bit of Orwell, and a little bit of Brazil.
SC: So they see themselves as born bureaucrats?
RHW: Basically. They’re a meritocracy. You take a test, the test tells you what to do with your life, you do it. The better you are at it, the higher you rise in society. Their titles are much longer than their names. They have names like "Assistant Sub Supervisor to District Headquarters 8571, Smith."
SC: So your name is your title, or your title is your name?
RHW: Well, they have very simple names and very complex titles. They put much more value on the titles.
SC: Not unlike one or two TV executives I’ve met. [Laughs.]
What do you think? Send your comments to the editor.
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