Star Trek Needed the Iconians

In this short essay, I argue that the fictional universe of Star Trek needed the Iconians. The essay assumes a fair amount of familiarity with Star Trek and their Iconians.

When producing a fiction in reality, you've got two choices when you have to decide something in the fiction based on reality (in this case, because actors, being human are bipedal humanoids.)

1. Leave it unaddressed
2. Add it to the canon

Because most of our cultural criticism now focuses on the production of a story, rather than stories themselves (what with all of those being unoriginal), leaving it unaddressed leaves you open to easy criticism.

You can distract people from the opportunity for criticism by giving them other parts of the production to gush over (look how much people love The Good Place, even though it has a million production flaws caused by its reality (tight filming schedule)

Or you can address it and incorporate the "discrepancy" into the canon, making anyone who witnesses it, and looks for a reason, and finds your incorporation, a part of a clique.

Making consumers of a product into members of that product's clique is an incredibly powerful thing, and helps to encourage a lot of things that would otherwise be out of the product creator's hands. Things like word-of-mouth marketing and inter-fan debates. While those might not mean much always, for productions like Star Trek that ultimately, are made to make money, that's so tremendously valuable, writing discrepancies into the canon is pretty much the only choice

So, with that background:

I think the Iconians are a great way fix. It really neatly wraps a bow on the issue, but gives you room to be picky about their implication - or even just reject it outright as "fixing a discrepancy," not "real storytelling"

And they've also established a super-super-super-super race, that is able to serve as a bogeyman in the series (for a bit), a plot device in the books (for a while), and a bad guy in the MMO (as needed)