An Alien Race Just Returned To Star Trek For The First Time In Nearly 40 Years

Spoilers for "Star Trek: Lower Decks" follow.

Season 4 of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" has featured a mysterious ship destroying ships belonging to every alien race in the Alpha Quadrant, from Klingons to Romulans — or has it? The latest episode, "A Few Badgeys More," revealed the ships are actually being disabled and towed away (while also clearing our suspect list). However, the episode's cold opening gave us yet another scene of a ship ambush. This one belonged to an alien race we haven't seen in "Star Trek" since "The Next Generation" — the Bynars.

They're a demure, purple-skinned, and genderless race. Their name is also a reference to "binary code." The Bynars operate in pairs, finishing each others' sentences when they speak English. Their preferred mode of communication, though, is an unintelligible (to human ears) high-pitched cooing that sounds like words being filtered through a fast-forward button.

Why do the Bynars function this way? Technology, of course. The Bynars use neuro-computers (their parietal lobe is replaced with a processor shortly after birth) to process information at lightning-fast speeds while carrying "buffers" (think an external hard drive) to store that information. As a sign of their cyborg augmentation, small chips visibly protrude from the side of their hairless heads.

A quartet of Bynars are the antagonists of a "Next Generation" season 1 episode, "11001001." They're brought on board the Enterprise to upgrade the ship's computers, but turn around and hijack it. It turns out that a star recently went supernova near their homeworld, Bynaus. The Bynars' complete dependence on computers means that the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would be an extinction-level event for them. They wanted to use the Enterprise only to back up their planet's main computer and would've relinquished it once their crisis was over. The irony, of course, is that if the Bynars had asked for help, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) would've granted it.

The Bynars ultimately turned out to be a one-off alien race; they never showed up again on "TNG" and "11001001" (aired in 1987) was their last appearance before "A Few Badgeys More." However, "11001001" co-writer Maurice Hurley would go on to pen "Q Who" in season 2. That episode introduced a much more famous "Star Trek" race: the Borg. Were the Bynars on Hurley's mind when he wrote that episode? The Borg share a similar hive mind and cybernetic enhancements but to much more sinister ends than the Bynars. Indeed, in "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode "Regeneration," Dr. Phlox (John Billingsley) compares the Bynar to the Borg.

In the context of "The Next Generation," the Bynars were an early experiment that didn't quite pan out (see also: the Ferengi). However, on "Lower Decks," there's no corner of "Star Trek" history too obscure to acknowledge.

"Star Trek: Lower Decks" is streaming on Paramount+.