Star Trek’s Up The Long Ladder Brought A Famous Star Wars Planet Into Federation Space
Colloquially among Trekkies, the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “Up the Long Ladder” (May 22, 1989) is known as “The one with the Space Irish.” Or maybe I’m the only one who refers to it that way. Regardless, “Up the Long Ladder” features the Space Irish. In the episode, the U.S.S. Enterprise has to evacuate a colony on the planet Bringloid V, as their sun is experiencing solar flares. Long ago, the Bringloidians adopted an Irish agrarian lifestyle, and they bring along their livestock, hay, and twee Irish accents. The colony’s patriarch, Danielo O’Dell (Barrie Ingham), is a caricature Irish drunk, and his daughter Breanna (Rosalyn Landor) is a typically haughty Irish lass.
It’s later revealed that the Bringloidians represent only half of a century-old transport ship, and that the rest of the settlers formed their own colony on a nearby planet. The second colony, called Mariposa, is technologically advanced, but the colonists have lost their ability to naturally reproduce. They have resorted to cloning to keep their population robust, but even that is failing; they need new genetic stock. By the end of the episode, the Bringloidians and the Mariposans are reunited, and — in a twist the notoriously horny Gene Roddenberry would have approved of — asked to begin mating immediately.
A fun piece of trivia about “Up the Long Ladder,” though, is that it features a tiny background detail that, if viewers are to accept it as canon, incorporates a noted “Star Wars” world into “Star Trek” universe. In a background starship manifest, a sharp-eyed viewer might note that the HMS New Zealand was sent to the planet Alderaan, the planet exploded by Darth Vader in the original 1977 “Star Wars.”
Many such tiny background details are discussed in Larry Nemecek’s indispensable book “The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion.”