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I would like to say that I am pleased that we are going to see the first contact between these two species in the new series. I think that we may see the friendship, or at least, the attempt by both cultures to be friendly with each other and the strain that has come often in their relationship.
I was thinking about this after watching "Errand of Mercy". Even this early in the franchise, the Klingons are depicted as a warrior culture that has honor and is willing to make peace with the Federation. Before the episode, the Federation and the Klingon Empire were working on a treaty to resolve disputes over regions of space, trading routes, and other galactic issues.
posted
Really? I was always under the impression that the TOS Klingons had no sense of honor whatsoever, and that they were just sort of the "galactic troublemakers" (i.e. the Snively Whiplash of alien races). IIRC, this was exactly why GR never liked the Klingons, and wanted to show them in a more favorable light in the Phase II series.
After reading the Final Frontier books, something that Calhoun said exemplified this: he stated that during the TOS era, the Klingons were the scheming troublemakers while the Romulans were the noble, honorable people. However, during the TNG era, the opposite was actually true. And he's right.
-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
posted
Thats an intresting fact. Perhaps the 'change' i Klingon appearance/behavior isnt chronological. GR's intentions were to have Klngons always be the post-TOS type...
Registered: Aug 1999
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WERUreo
Ex-Member
posted
I have two questions regarding the Klingons that may seem very, well, "newbie-ish". As I recall, in TOS, the Klingons appeared a lot more like humans than they do post-TOS.
My first question is this: why such a drastic change in the physical appearance of Klingons? Is it ever explained in detail? I am very out of the loop when it comes to the Star Trek universe. After TNG, I stopped watching, not because I didn't like it anymore, but because I had other things going on in my life. This is my attempt at getting back into the swing of things before Enterprise premieres. Also, where there an episode of DS9 that poked fun at the way Klingons were depicted in TOS?
My second question is, how will the Klingons appear in "Enterprise"? Will they look human or more like the Klingons we are used to in post-TOS days?
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In regards to your first question, there has never been an explanation on-screen about the change in the Klingon physique. In the real world, Gene Roddenberry had a lot more money to revamp the Klingon makeup in The Motion Picture. The Klingons have looked that way ever since. As for a DS9 episode making fun of the original Klingon look, not quite. There was an episode called "Trials and Tribble-ations" where the DS9 crew went back in time to the TOS episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." Here, O'Brien and Bashir are shocked at the Klingon's original appearance. When they press Worf for the details, he simply says that "it's not something we talk about." Essentially, the writers blew a chance to explain the change.
As for your second question, the Klingons will appear as they did in The Motion Picture onwards. Rick Berman says that he made this decision in part because Gene Roddenberry would have made this the real Klingon make-up if he had been given a large enough budget to do it. So the Klingons will be of the bumpy variety.
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Thank you, Siegfried. That episode you mentioned is the one I had heard about. It was mentioned in a humanities class I had dealing with science fiction, and I thought it was pretty funny how Worf just blew the question off the way he did.
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