By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek is the kind of franchise that fans love to revisit time and again, and that has led to a steady stream of fan theories. Ever since the premiere episode of The Next Generation featured a cameo from a very elderly Dr. McCoy, there has been a fan theory that humans simply live much, much longer. And what most Star Trek fans don’t realize is that this theory was seemingly proven by guest actors playing much older characters in the TNG episode “The Survivors.”
The Survivors
For Star Trek: The Next Generation fans, “The Survivors” is a memorable episode in which Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew encounter an elderly couple who are seemingly the only survivors of a devastating attack. Eventually, the male is revealed to be a god-like creature who settled down on this planet with a human, but she died defending the planet from aliens he refused to fight due to his culture’s pacifism. He reacted by lashing out and destroying every member of the attacking alien race, and while this morality play story is fascinating, we’re here today to focus more on how it proves a longstanding fan theory.
Star Trek: The Next Generation began with the two-part episode “Encounter At Farpoint,” one that laid the groundwork for the theory that “The Survivors” would later confirm. Original Series icon Dr. McCoy makes a cameo in TNG’s premiere episode as an elderly human, one who (as Data tells us with android precision) is 137 years old. Relatively speaking, he seems physically and mentally spry in this cameo, and this led to a long-running fan theory that humans just naturally live longer in the 24th century thanks to various advances in science and medicine.
Outside of the later Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Survivors,” though, it can be difficult to find a confirmation of this theory. For example, in Picard, our title character actually dies at the age of 94 but keeps on trucking because his consciousness is transferred into a robot body. There were some extenuating circumstances involved (he was already dying of irumodic syndrome, for example), but this later Trek spinoff seems to imply that most elderly humans aren’t likely to make it pay 100 without a convenient mind transfer into an equally convenient robot body.
So, enough Star Trek history. How does “The Survivors” seemingly confirm that humans naturally live much longer in this fictional future? Our two guest actors play characters much older than they are. Kevin Uxbridge is supposed to be 85 years old but is played by an actor (John Anderson) who was only 67; his wife Rishon is an 82-year-old character who is played by an actor (Anne Haney) who is only 55 years old.
Now, neither of these characters is actually human…we discover that Kevin is a god-like being and his wife is someone that he used his powers to recreate. But as far as the Enterprise crew initially knows, these characters are completely human. And nobody batted an eye (or VISOR, in Geordi’s case) at the fact that these characters look much younger than they actually are.
While most Star Trek fans have overlooked the significance, this casting for “The Survivors” seems to confirm that humans naturally live longer because it implies many of the human characters we see in this franchise may be older than they appear. And we do see elderly-looking humans who, in turn, must logically be older than they appear. As it turns out, most humans in the 24th century live a long time, and Picard’s death at the tender age of 94 was, contrary to popular belief, the exception and not the rule.