Not my OC
- 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. 
- I thought it was because they all like spaghetti 
 
 
- 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. 
- A black sheriff? - It worked in blazing saddles! 
 
- Fun fact: Star Trek has lasted longer than the wild west did. 58 years versus 47 years 
- you would do well to stay away from firefly. 
- 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?” - In case of TOS, they literally pitched it as a kind of Western but in space to the studios due to the popularity of the genre on TV (both DeForest Kelly and Shatner had also already appeared in Western serials). 
 
 
- 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. 
 





