Starfleet Academy Just Dropped The Weirdest Alien Easter Egg Ever
Showing the Lapling some love.
Although the new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy doesn’t require viewers to know a lot about Star Trek lore, it’s still deeply rooted in franchise canon. The 32nd Century and brand-new Starfleet Academy setting serve as a fresh start for Earth and its characters, but the foundation of all this is connected to the complex timeline of Star Trek: Discovery, and the legacy of Starfleet in general. And how all that translates in the third episode of Starfleet Academy, “Vitus Reflux,” is via the appearance of weird alien monsters that represent very deep cuts from Trekkie history.
“Vitus Reflux” is about many things. We learn that there’s a competition between Starfleet Academy and its rival, the War College, that manifests in a prank battle and a physical game called Calica. This game is new, but it is kind of like the Trek answer to Quidditch crossed with laser tag. Teams can be stopped from scoring by a kind of goalkeeper, who takes the form of the team’s mascot, complete with a wild costume. And it’s here, with the Calica mascots, that Starfleet Academy is getting wacky.
Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta) dressed in a Mugato costume while frenemy Darem (George Hawkins) eggs him on.
The War College’s mascot will be familiar to some fans. The horned white ape monster known as the Mugato first appeared in The Original Series episode “A Private Little War,” where it bit Captain Kirk (William Shatner), and it showed up again in Lower Decks. In “Vitus Reflux”, Caleb (Sandro Rosta) disguises himself as the War College’s Mugato mascot, which is probably the first instance of someone in Star Trek wearing a fake Star Trek monster costume.
But the zany, deeper cut is the Starfleet Academy mascot, Lappy the Lapling. By the end of the episode, Ocam Sadal (Romeo Carere) becomes the mascot for the Starfleet Calica team, which means he has to don a strange bug-like costume. Earlier in the episode, Jett Reno (Tig Notaro), who, as one of a handful of characters imported from Discovery, is originally from the 23rd Century, describes the Lapling like this: “Way back, Starfleet’s [mascot] was a Lapling, fuzzy mean like a Koala, cute like a Targ.”
A Targ is a vicious Klingon pet resembling a warthog, and you know what a koala is. But what does that make a Lapling?
The Mugato attacks in "A Private Little War."
The Lapling, Explained
The Lapling is a small bug-like creature first seen — and only seen, until now — in the 1990 Next Generation episode “The Most Toys.” In it, Data (Brent Spiner) had been kidnapped by the unethical Kivas Fajo (Saul Rubinek), who collects rare items from around the galaxy, including a specimen of the nearly extinct Lapling.
A closer look at the Lapling in The Next Generation episode “The Most Toys.”
In the real world, the Lapling was a small puppet. But in the 24th Century, the critter was very scarce. Yet apparently, in Jett Reno’s 23rd Century, the Lapling was well-known enough to be a Starfleet mascot. So, chronologically, both of this episode’s alien mascots come from the timeframe of The Original Series, which turned out be a very bad century for the critter.
A caged Lapling in The Next Generation.
Seeing as 2026 is the 60th anniversary of the Star Trek franchise, we should expect to see plenty of deep cuts in Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds Season 4. But as Easter eggs go, the creature mascots of Starfleet Academy are certainly the weirdest and most unexpected.
