Thursday, August 24, 2017

Explaining Klingons

I love Star Trek. I've been watching since the very first episode appeared (and to a young'un like myself, the "Salt Vampire" was pretty damned scary). But let's be clear... it's fantasy, not science fiction, and when they try to do "science" the writers suddenly become so stupid it sometimes makes me want to slap someone.

Let's take cross-breeds as an example. There was an album (Inside Star Trek (1976)) where Gene Roddenberry explains Spock's birth. It wasn't a natural birth. His parents were of completely different species. So Spock was the deliberate result of a concerted effort to create a cross-breed child. Spock was the product of extensive gene splicing. Such things are hard. But in later series, cross-breeds were a dime a dozen. Sneeze and you'll impregnate someone. Stick your hand in a bucket of rock salt with an alien girl and you may just get pregnant yourself. Yes, In Enterprise they paid lip-service to the difficulty of having a half-Human, half-Vulcan offspring, but that's after they ruined it with ham-fisted storytelling.

And then there are the Klingons. Over the years, we've seen that Klingons have very different physiologies. And the new series, Discovery, gives them yet another face. Up to now, rather than go with the definitive indisputable explanation, the writers, producers and apologists for the show have punted and given idiot answers like the "augment virus". This is their poor attempt to explain how a single race changes their morphology from show to show. The better answer is much easier, and quite obvious. I'll give you the historical analog first.

When the Roman Empire conquered nation after nation, the inhabitants of those nations became Romans. It did not matter what they were; they became Romans. To a Roman, being Roman wasn't a matter of race or ethnicity: it was a matter of culture and law. The Western capital of the Roman Empire was Constantinople, and it was populated by Romans, born of the Roman Empire but with deep roots in that locality. And to this day, the people of Romania are Romans. It's in the very name.

It's the same with the Klingons. Klingons are not inhabitants of a single planet. They conquered planet after planet, and they didn't just subjugate them... they assimilated them. Just as the Borg are Borg no matter whether they were assimilated or born into the collective, a Klingon is Klingon no matter his genetics. And that is the definitive answer to all of those physiological differences.

The Klingon Empire conquers a world body and soul. To be Klingon is a statement of culture. So when Worf is pressed for an explanation of the original series Klingons on Space Station K7, instead of that weak-assed, "We do not speak of it," his answer should have been, "They are Klingons. You're not of one race... what makes you think we should be?", and all those attempts at retconning the differences are simply misguided, half-thought-out mistakes by writers with too little respect for the "science" of science fiction.

And that's all the explanation you will ever need.

Klingons. Different races, one Empire.


  1. Read The Final Reflection by John M. Ford for one of the best explanations of the Klingons and the Klingon Empire that you will ever find.

  2. The counter-argument to this is that if it were the case, you'd see mixed crews of the different genetic groups of ethnic Klingons.

    1. Not necessarily. Starship crews are fairly large, and we only saw a few at a time. Using the same logic, we would have seen more aliens and fewer humans in the Federation crews.

    2. Regionally based units, anyone?