stunt double: Leonard Nimoy (uncredited) / stunt double: Robert Brown (uncredited) (3 episodes, 1967) Not getting nearly as much screen time was the cat Chester, who appeared in only one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but he’s worth mentioning because he was a rescue. It’s reassuring to know that even in the 24th century, people are still fighting the good fight. stunt double: Michael Pataki (uncredited) / stunt double: William Shatner (uncredited) (2 episodes, 1967) Spot was Lt. Cmdr. Data’s pet cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and much like Jonesy in Alien, Spot managed to pull of the remarkable feat of surviving — not only making it from the television series to the movie Star Trek Generations, but surviving the destruction of the Enterprise itself. By his own account, actor Brent Spiner did not like working with the cat who played Spot, but you can’t tell from Spiner’s performance.

In 2267, the alien Sylvia demonstrated the power to assume the form of a cat. She accomplished this feat with the aid of a device called the transmuter, which was the one element of her wardrobe that did not change shape. ( TOS: " Catspaw") In 2257, after surviving falling debris aboard the USS Discovery, Jett Reno compared herself to a cat having nine lives, with " five more lives, at least." ( DIS: " Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2")

Some animal training manuals claimed that cats, by nature, could not be trained. ( TNG: " Force of Nature") Unlike canines, they did not respond to verbal commands. ( TNG: " Force of Nature", " Phantasms") Upon describing how Jahn was to steal a bunch of communicators, the final draft script of TOS: " Miri" likewise repeatedly likened him to a cat; the script's stage directions stated that he "slips catlike" into a room where those devices were being kept, and had "a cat-eating-the- canary look on his face" as he made his getaway. stunt double: DeForest Kelley (uncredited) / stunt double: Leonard Nimoy (uncredited) / stunts (uncredited) (3 episodes, 1966-1968) The animated Star Trek could do things that the not-animated Star Trek couldn’t, like have a crewmember who was a sentient, bipedal cat by the name of Lt. M’Ress. She was from the planet Cait, because ÔǪ well, of course she was, and she had a tendency to purr/ululate between sentences.

In the anti-time future seen by Jean-Luc Picard, Data had amassed a diverse collection of cats while a professor at Cambridge University. ( TNG: " All Good Things...")

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But Star Trek brought the focus to cats, where it belonged. Here are my favorites. 1. Sylvia, Star Trek, "Catspaw" They’re not in outer space space — they’re on a Convair C-131, and they didn’t go higher than 12,000 feet — but they’re real cats from 1947, and they’re floating in zero gravity! It was part of cruelty-free experiment in weightlessness by the U.S. Air Force’s Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories in 1947. (Here’s the full video, of which the cats are just a minute and a half.) stunt double: Leonard Nimoy (uncredited) / stunt double (uncredited) / stunt double: DeForest Kelley (uncredited) (3 episodes, 1967)

I remember getting dragged to see this as a 5-year-old, and even though I was the film’s target audience, it left me cold. (Maybe I was just bitter because I didn’t get to see Star Wars.) 6. Jonesy, Alienstunt double: DeForest Kelley (uncredited) / stunt double: Tige Andrews (uncredited) (2 episodes, 1967)