“Yes. Normal.”
“Lonely Among Us” is batshit crazy and generally godawful, a long, meandering joke without a punchline – so I’m gonna talk about the action figures instead.
The B-plot of “Lonely Among Us” involves the Enterprise stewarding two groups of delegates, the Anticans and the Selay, to peace talks on a planet called Parliament. By dint of their appearance in one of the earliest episodes of the series and largely due to their otherworldly designs as high-production-value aliens, the Selay and the Anticans both saw plastic as action figures in spite of never popping up in any Star Trek ever again.
The action figure licensee of choice when Star Trek: The Next Generation went on the air was Galoob, who hit the streets with a relatively complete line of 3¾” action figures including the majority of the bridge crew (the Crushers, and Counselor Troi, were the holdouts – though Wesley was produced, but never released), a shuttlecraft for our heroes to ride around in (and a Ferengi fighter, ugly and exotic), some die-cast starships, and a small cadre of alien/villain types for the crew of the Enterprise to fight. The alien series included Q (in what I presume to be the under-robe of his judge’s cloak from “Encounter at Farpoint”), a Ferengi (identical in design to that Playmates figure I waxed philosophical about last week), and an Antican and a Selay. The entire Star Trek: The Next Generation Galoob line never went beyond the first season of the show and this initial offering of figures, but as they were the figures at hand at the first and only Star Trek conventions I ever attended (age 14, I think?) they’ve retained a kind of compulsive allure for me. I still have the Picard, Data, Worf and Yar figures I bought on clearance back in 1988, and I suppose someday I should fill out the crew with Geordi and Riker.
But the aliens were underpacked at the time, which made them significantly more valuable than the Starfleet officers. I remember seeing Q retailing for a lunatic $100 fee at one convention. This is the whimsical nature of toy collecting: the Anticans and the Selay weren’t anybody’s idea of significant characters in the history of Star Trek, nor were they even the most desired among the 4 alien figures produced in the eighties… but they were rare(ish), and unusual(ish), and so, for a little while, they were legendarily attractive, difficult to find action figures for the burgeoning collector.
As an aside: at around the exact same time, I walked into a mom-and-pop toy store on Avenue Road and found all four of Ertl’s Star Trek III: The Search For Spock action figures, which were also 3¾” scale (as was everything back then – this was the decade of Star Wars and G.I. Joe, after all). They were all on mint condition cards, still sealed, and stickered at fifty cents apiece. For two dollars, I walked out of that toy store with four action figures that I kept in their packages under my bed and, ten years later, sold on the nascent eBay.com for $90 USD plus shipping and handling. The one, and only, “coup” of my entire toy collecting career.
I digress. The Galoob line was eventually replaced by Playmates’ far more successful, and far more expansive, Star Trek series, which kicked off with characters from The Next Generation in 1992 and eventually ranged through Deep Space Nine, Voyager, the Original Series, and the movies. Nowadays you can pick up Galoob Next Generation action figures for far more reasonable prices on eBay, and even my lusted-after Selay and Anticans can be had for under $30 apiece. If only they weren’t such dumb toys from such a dumb episode.
Update: As low as you can go. “Lonely Among Us” gets half an Enterprise out of five.
