Morn is played by Mark Allen Shepherd. He is a Lurian male and the only member of his species seen in Star Trek. According to make-up designer Michael Westmore, on the first day of filming the series the director chose Morn randomly from among several prosthetic characters.
Although Westmore went to great lengths to ensure that Morn could talk in case the character ever had a line, he never spoke on camera (though he did laugh); this became a running gag, with other characters commenting several times how talkative he was. Morn is credited with knowing the funniest joke in the universe, and in several episodes an incidental character is seen to start laughing as they leave his side. Quark sometimes breaks down laughing when he tries to retell the joke, and always gives up by saying that no one can tell it like Morn. Despite this, Morn rarely seems to get Quark's jokes, and when he does, it takes him a while.
Morn's existence as a fixture at Quark's bar is mocked in the episode "Who Mourns for Morn?" when Quark sets up a holo-imager to project an image of Morn on his regular stool, quietly drinking. No one realizes that it isn't real (to the point of patrons greeting the image as they enter the bar) until Sisko and Dax ran into the bar with exuberance to let people know that Morn died. It's later revealed that he had not died but was, in fact, part of a scam.
Often, other characters refer to something Morn has done that, to the viewer, would seem very uncharacteristic for Morn. For example, when it became clear that war with the Dominion was inevitable, Morn allegedly threw a chair at Quark, then ran naked across the promenade screaming "We're all doomed!" Following that, he supposedly rushed into a Bajoran temple and threw himself at the feet of a priestess, begging for forgiveness. Vic Fontaine, the holographic singer who is a recurring character in seasons 6 and 7, has stated that Morn's rendition of "New York, New York" has to be seen to be believed. Lieutenant Commander Worf claimed that Morn was a formidable sparring partner, and the pair fought in the holosuites on a weekly basis. Jadzia Dax also stated having nearly been romantic with Morn, except that Morn turned her down.
Very little is revealed about Morn or his species on the show. Quark establishes in "Through the Looking Glass" that Morn has more than one heart. In "The Way of the Warrior," it was implied Lurians are usually found near the Hyundite Nebula; a hostile Klingon suggested it was suspicious to find Morn so far from there. It was revealed in the episode "Who Mourns for Morn?" that he had been previously involved in some criminal activities, the most notable being a robbery in which his crew stole 1,000 bricks of gold-pressed latinum. Like all Lurians, Morn has two stomachs; Quark realized that he had extracted the liquid latinum from the bricks and was storing it in one stomach, causing his hair to fall out. Morn regurgitated 100 bricks' worth and gave it to Quark as a reward for helping to get the other thieves arrested.
Morn also appeared in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Birthright, Part I" and made a cameo in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Caretaker."
- External links
- Morn at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, recurring, deep, space and/or characters:
“Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, and yet recurring inevitably, without a finale in nothingness—”eternal recurrence.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,—
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)