The Star Trek Secrets All Over Starfield

Fans of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series often joke about how inevitable it is to completely forget about the game’s main story in favor of the multitude of side quests. If you’re on that particular windy path while playing Starfield, then a distress call might attract you to Charybdis III. There you’ll find a town filled with clones, including genetic copies of Genghis Khan, Amelia Earhart, FDR, and more historical figures. Longtime fans of Star Trek will know immediately how much fun the writers of Starfield were having with this quest.

The clones of Charybdis III are imprisoned in the town Crucible, and most have chosen a side in the three-way conflict between Khan, FDR, and Amanirenas, Queen of Kush (modern day Sudan). Star Trek fans will no doubt feel echoes in this Starfield story of the classic Original Series episode “The Savage Curtain” that pitted both real life and fictional historical figures against each other, with Genghis Khan helping the forces of evil and Abraham Lincoln recruiting the Enterprise crew on the side of good.

Regardless of which side — if any — the player chooses to support, the neutral Amelia Earhart clone wants off the rock. Of course, the Star Trek: Voyager episode “The 37’s” revealed that the famous pilot’s disappearance was due to alien abduction. Starfield allows the pilot to continue to be part of the game after the quest, giving you the option to add her to your crew.

“First Contact” is perhaps the single most Star Trek-inspired quest in Starfield, including the name which reflects the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact. But when you make that contact, it isn’t Picard’s crew you’re reminded of, but those from Voyager.

The crew of the ECS Constant has been traveling for centuries on the way to what they thought was their new home, just as the crew from Star Trek: Voyager anticipated becoming a “generational ship;” and in fact that’s a term you hear used in this Starfield quest.

You see, unlike in Star Trek, in Starfield‘s backstory interstellar travel was incentivized by Earth being rendered uninhabitable. Grav Drive tech was developed, allowing for faster-than-light travel (this isn’t the whole truth, but set that aside for now). However, the crew of the ECS Constant left Earth before the creation of Grav Drive, and so it takes them centuries to travel the distance it takes you a matter of seconds, and so the planet they’d hoped to settle is already populated.

Not only is Constant much like Star Trek’s Voyager, but you may noticed the crew dresses in colors similar to those of the TNG era. If you play the quest to its conclusion, you’ll be forced to make some tough decisions, and some of your options are decidedly dark.

Bethesda recruited plenty of Star Trek talent for Starfield and in most likelihood the first Trek alum you’ll hear in the game is Armin Shimerman, known best in the franchise as the shady Ferengi bartender Quark on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Fittingly, in Starfield Shimerman voices Walter Stroud — the corporate mogul who finances the explorers’ group Constellation.

If you choose the Kids Stuff perk for your player, you’ll get to visit your character’s parents. Your mother is voiced by another DS9 alum, Nana Visitor, who played the titular station’s second-in-command Kira Nerys. Meanwhile your extremely proud father (who is quite possibly a gambling addict) is voiced by Tim Russ, aka the Vulcan security officer Tuvok from Voyager.

Robert Picardo of Star Trek: Voyager — who played the holographic doctor known simply as The Doctor — is not part of Starfield‘s voice cast, but nevertheless the game pays tribute to his character through Dr. Joseph Manning. You can find him in the Reliant Medical office in the lawless city of Neon. Manning uses The Doctor’s trademark greeting — “Please state the nature of the medical emergency” — and there may even be a deeper cut to the tribute.

In the Voyager series finale, we’re presented with an alternate future in which the crew of the eponymous ship makes it home. At a party reunited with most of the ship’s crew, Picardo’s character reveals he’s finally chosen himself a proper name: Joe.

Speaking of Reliant Medical, the chain business you find all over the Settled Systems is another tribute to Trek. The name of the ship commandeered by the villain in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the USS Reliant. It doesn’t seem like anyone in Reliant Medical is out to kill Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, but in Starfield you never really can tell.