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In one of the Star Trek nitpickers guides, Phil Farrand notes that there was a planet which was on the Federation side of a border with a hostile alien species. After a cease fire and neutral zone was established, the planet was on the wrong side of the border so the colonists were ordered to move, which they did unhappily.

A generation later in a subsequent Star Trek TV show, a planet with the exact same name was on the wrong side of a different border. Rather than the most likely explanation that the script writers were lazy and made a mistake, Farrand notes that its more fun to imagine the colonists re-settled a new planet and named it after the old, only to have the Federation come in and yet again forcibly relocate them, giving good justification for their dissatisfaction and anger.

What planet was this?

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  • I’m guessing that you don’t have a quote? It would be good to make sure that you aren’t misremembering.
    – Thunderforge
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 13:10
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    I find it more fun to imagine that the Federation re-colonized the same planet after political borders shifted in between the two time periods, only to find out a different alien species had laid claim to the area and they needed to pull out again.
    – Steve-O
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 13:41
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    The planet that immediately comes to mind is Dorvan V ( memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Dorvan_V ), colonized by Native Americans, and given up to the Cardassians during negotiations. To my knowledge though, it wasn't literally a redo of a TOS episode, though it may have had similarities with other episodes.
    – Vanguard3000
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 14:28
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    @Vanguard3000 - The wiki listing only shows it in the TNG episode.
    – JohnP
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 14:34
  • @JohnP I qualified that in my comment. It's also why I left it as a comment only; it bore some similarities to the question, but was not a full answer.
    – Vanguard3000
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 14:46

1 Answer 1

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I believe you're slightly mis-remembering what Farrand was talking about. It wasn't the name of the planet, rather it was a visual effect / matte painting.

Here is the paragraph from the DS9 Nitpickers Guide page 34 (OCR'd for Thunderforge)

  1. The Colonists of Eternal Doom. Some legends are almost too sorrowfully strange to tell. The creators give us the briefest hint of one such legend in “The Maquis, Part I.” During this episode, we see an exterior shot of a colony. In the background, an aqueduct snakes up a mountain. It just so happens that this exterior shot is a reuse from the episode “Ensigns of Command” (TNG). Since nitpickers don’t deal in reality, we must conclude that these poor colonists first crashed on a planet bathed in hyperonic radiation. Many died, but they finally adapted, only to have the Enterprise come and evacuate them because their world was deeded to the Sheliak. (We know this from “Ensigns of Command”) Then ...these poor people moved to another world, started all over, built an exact replica of their old colony...only to have the Federation deed their planet to the Cardassians!

I believe this is the exterior shot in question (this is from the DS9 episode mentioned above).

enter image description here

And here is the same background from the Next Generation episode

enter image description here

Other than the moon in the DS9 episode and a slight difference in color shading, they look the same.

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    The author tries to make it sound like a unique find, but that is far from the only reused matte painting on Star Trek [1, 2].
    – O. R. Mapper
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 17:05
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    @O.R.Mapper: Yes, but this case is the most ironic given the twice forced relocation. (or whatever the best adjective is here -- it's on the TOMT)
    – ThePopMachine
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 19:55
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    Why does the dark side of the moon also darken the sky? It's emitting negative light?!?
    – CJ Dennis
    Commented Mar 15, 2018 at 0:21
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    Finding an identical-looking mountain on the new planet must have been particularly tricky.
    – T.E.D.
    Commented Mar 15, 2018 at 4:16
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    @CJDennis Maybe the system is in a really well-lit nebula or something?
    – gandalf3
    Commented Mar 15, 2018 at 7:45

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