Don’t forget the eldritch horror.

Any day now, Elon will announce that the real reason they need Greenland Ultima Thule is so he can perform a ritual to awaken Azathoth and end the simulation.

I remember reading an article in the early 90s where they opined that ‘the thing that would really date TNG was the presence of a therapist on the ship’.

Mental health - a total 80s fad, right?

The problem with knowing any amount of history is that any time anything happens you’re just like:

‘Oh. This again’.

It’s somehow both tedious and horrifying.

Parents would find their baby child had been replaced by odd beings who were almost but not quite human.

However strange appearances aside it was their behaviour that marked them out - changelings were said to be either extremely badly behaved - constantly crying and prone to violence, or at the other end of the spectrum strangely docile, often mute and seemingly unable to comprehend anything about the human world they had been left in.

https://www.hypnogoria.com/folklore_changelings.html

Yep, totally a brand new thing that hasn’t appeared throughout human history.

“The mudbloods are stealing our magic!”