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)
“My list of things I never pictured myself saying when I pictured myself as a parent has grown over the years.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“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)
“We sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up to our knees, and the trail was almost obliterated, being no more than that a musquash leaves in similar places, where he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it probably was a musquash trail in some places.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied, if only for the excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst of so many masters. There is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man’s tread, and a breathing space between the sentences, which the best of modern writing does not furnish. His chapters are like English parks, or say rather like a Western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the underwood, and one may ride on horseback through the openings.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life—the first twenty years of it—had about them something semi-fictitious.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)