Subject: What is the Greenman?
Author:
Posted on: 2014-03-01 20:19:00 UTC
I was rereading some of the Original Series recently to refresh myself on a few things, and discovered something odd in the Discworld crossover mission. The story begins with Jay picking Acacia up from the lightsaber training course mentioned at the end of the Star Wars crossover two stories earlier, and the instructor there is a character that to my knowledge has never been shown or referenced anywhere else, referred to as the Greenman. I thought it was a Flower at first, since it oversees a specific Department-mandated function, namely weapons training and/or distribution of instructional material(presumably within the DO) and is described as having "fronds". Greenman would be a bit of a silly name for a plant, but a bit of research dug up three possible candidates, the most likely being Greenman's Desert Parsley.
However, it speaks out loud, rather than telepathically, and even in the Original Series, the Flowers' telepathy is represented by speaking in italics without quotation marks. That could be written off as Jay or Acacia having forgotten about that quirk if not for the fact that later description shows that it has a face and at least one limb. I did a little more research to try and figure out if this was the name of some species that I didn't know about, but I couldn't come up with anything. The closest I could find was a Germanic mythological creature referred to as the Green Man. There's a space between "Green" and "man", so it's not a perfect match, but that's not too much of a concern. The PPC's Greenman had its name uncapitalized one of the times it was mentioned, so it's possible that there were just a few typographical errors. Or, perhaps the source that Jay or Acacia found out about the original folklore from didn't use the space. This interpretation has another problem, though: the Green Man is a disembodied head with several plants growing from its face and out of its nose and mouth. It doesn't have any limbs, yet the Greenman in the TOS mission is said to have "pointed with a shaking limb towards the Box". It could have been a tree branch, I suppose, since those are occasionally referred to as "limbs", but that's not indicated, and if it did have branches, why would the word "frond" have been used earlier?
So, does anyone know what's going on here? Does anyone remember authorial intent for this character, or have a good guess regarding what species it might be? There could easily be some obscure canonical creature that I was never aware of that Jay and Acacia could be referencing, but I can't determine anything one way or the other with the information that I have.
And if nobody else has any idea what to make of this, does anyone have some suggestions of what we can do regarding the Greenman? Since the "instructor" and the "Greenman" are never explicitly identified as being the same, I suppose that if pressed, it could be retroactively established that there were two instructors, one being a Flower and another being some green-skinned alien, but the original material doesn't say anything to support that there was a second instructor present. It doesn't say anything against it, true, but that option still strikes me as problematic.