The Typhon Pact series revealed that the Breen are four different species (at least) with the Fenrisal, Paclu, Amoniri, and Silwan being identified. With the fact that at least twice in the DS9 series the main characters had commandeered Breen armor (presumably either stealing suits left lying around or killing their owners - i.e. Kira and Dukat in Indiscretions and Kira in What You Leave Behind) I wonder how it could be conceivable that the fact that the Breen are at least four different species remained unknown till Bashir's undercover mission in the Typhon Pact. I'm thinking one of two theories came about. Either the two they killed were Amoniri (the sort that evaporate when exposed to natural air) or the latter theory: Given the Breen are secretive I'm certain that bodies of their soldiers are fitted with some form of disintegration mechanism (minus the aforementioned Amoniri who evaporate if exposed to normal air anyway) to destroy their bodies to prevent hostile forces from learning anything about their physiology.
All of the Breen bodies could have been from just one of the Breen species. Other Breen could have been kill in such a fashion as to leave no bodies, disintegrated, aboard a destroyed ship, etc..
With so few Breen suits being used by other characters, I don't think it's much of a stretch to say they all happened to be from the same species...and not one that would evaporate, as that would certainly be worthy of note.
First of all, the Breen being four different races isn't canon and is also an idea created for the novels. It wasn't on anyone's mind at all thoughout DS9. On DS9 the Breen were meant to be so mysterious that even their dialogue went untranslated. I've always assumed the suits had some sort of self disintegration inside as a means of avoiding capture. But if you want to assume they evaporate, than why not?
The Breen were a mysterious and enigmatic race who always went around in outfits which looked similar to Princess Leia's bounty hunter disguise in ROTJ and they communicated through some weird noise which was never translated for the audience. The Breen were first mentioned in TNG's Hero Worship, as one of the races which could have potentially attacked SS Vico. Strangely enough, when the kid said his attackers wore helmets, the Breen were scratched off the list. I don't think there was any intentional to that guy. Most likely, whoever wrote Hero Worship might have had a friend named Breen, tossed the name in there as an alien species for fun, then later DS9 decided to give these aliens a name which had been mentioned previously but not actually seen on screen.
I thought the novelverse Breen were a fantastic way to reconcile the highly contradictory Breen tidbits in TV Trek. Remember, the Breen weren't that well known during TV/film Trek. It was only during the Dominion war that we we viewers saw them for the first time. They were a big unknown. Remember also that Picard's crew knew the Ferengi only by rumour in "The Last Outpost", even though Starfleet and the Vulcans were explicitly warned about them after the events of "Aquisition" 200 years prior. Space is HUGE, and the sheer size of it and volume there is to learn and know about everything, not everyone can have all the answers at their fingertips at all times. By the time of the Cold Equations novels, the Enterprise-E crew are well aware of the Breen's true nature - as a result of the intelligence gathered in Zero Sum Game and similar missions.
Actually, it goes more like this: Little Tim tells Picard that there were rifle-armed attackers with purple helmets coming aboard the ship. Picard relays this testimony to LaForge. And LaForge says that this is very unlikely, because there's no evidence that the ship was boarded at all. Whether the helmet thing counts in Breen favor or disfavor, it's difficult to tell. If we want to argue the nuances, here's the dialogue: So cloaks count in favor of Klingons or Romulans, but location both rules them out and sort of suggests the Breen. Tactics and tech don't rule out the Breen. This leaves Picard musing - and he has both doubts that the Breen would go into the Cluster, and and urge to point out that the boarders had helmets and phasers. The latter might be simply because Picard thinks this is the only real piece of physical evidence they have, everything else being circumstantial, not because he thinks it points in one direction or another. In retrospect, we can argue that Picard is indecisive because going into nebulae is not a Breen thing but the helmet evidence fits like a glove... But only to the audience. The heroes knew next to nothing about the Ferengi, but they did know the Breen lived on a cold planet, had no blood, and commonly engaged in teen pregnancies! The latter bit specifically sounds like the Breen were a big known in the 2360s already... Timo Saloniemi
First of all, nobody here needs to be lectured on what's canon and what isn't. This isn't a discussion about canon, it's a discussion about possibilities that canon didn't address. When what's onscreen is limited, fandom and tie-in authors speculate beyond it, just as they've been doing for 45 years. Sure, it won't be confirmed by any onscreen source, but there's no new 24th-century Trek being made anyway, so what possible difference does that make? Even if some new canon eventually did come along to contradict it, that doesn't make it wrong for us to conjecture about the possibilities. Fiction is an exercise in imagination, after all.
Actually, no. The Breen were first seen in Indiscretion, a fourth season DS9 episode. That's nearly two years before the Dominion War began. Of course, in that episode where hear the Breen making normal sounding grunts moans as opposed to later on when all noises made by the Breen were rendered in that strange noise that was apparentally their language.
Well, the original poster is worried that there is an improbability in the material, what with there being onscreen exposure of the Breen and offscreen existence of four species - namely, that the onscreen characters don't seem to realize that four species exist. But the worry becomes sort of meaningless if one acknowledges that the on- and offscreen materials are distinct things: onscreen, there aren't four species to be exposed, and offscreen, there is no "lack of knowledge" because the onscreen statements on the Breen are only a tiny fraction of all statements made. Or then we may acknowledge that the offscreen writers didn't do a very good job when they created things that don't mesh well with the preceding onscreen material. But that's sort of unnecessary, because their creation of four species included the creation of the idea that the heroes indeed are aware of the four, and steered clear of contradictions. Timo Saloniemi
I find it extremely likely that Breen suits have a destruct mechanism to eliminate all traces of the body inside it if the suit is opened. If the four species wear those suits to disguise their identities, it stands to reason they wouldn't want outsiders to know about it.
What would be the purpose of such a suit? It doesn't provide much anonymity: Cardassians know where these folks live, and could throw a cosmic Molotov cocktail at their home any time, regardless of whether they wear masks in public or not. It doesn't provide deniability, either, as it would appear to be unique to the Breen and would directly establish them as the culprits even if the bodies of the perpetrators disappeared. It would make sense for some completely unrelated species to wear the suits to implicate the Breen. But that would depend on the Breen cooperating by choosing to have such suits in the first place... Timo Saloniemi
I thought so as well. I was noticeably impressed (I was 'ohing and ahing' out loud as I was reading this book and my wife commented to me that I must be reading 'a good one') at how well the Breen were fleshed out as a race. There was obviously a lot of though put into this and it showed. It all made perfect sense and cleared up so many questions. This also makes sense to me. A race so secretive would surely put a mechanism in place to prevent other races from discovering who they really are. As for being canon - canon shmanon - just enjoy the damned story. Mack was able to come up with some pretty ingenious solutions to all those nagging questions that DS9 left behind.
The only really logical explanation is the one given in the novels: the suits are an effort to cut down on prejudice and discrimination between the Breen races, they all wear the one suit to make everyone equal.
Oh, clever! And alien. School uniforms for everybody? Ones you really can't take off. (Or roll the skirt up to waterline.) What is the rationale for the UT-incompatible voices there? Timo Saloniemi
They really don't want others to hear what they're saying. In the Cold Equations novels the Breen switch back and forth between turning their translators on and off depending on whether they want/need the outsiders to hear what they're saying. It doesn't quite fit with what we saw on the show, since Weyoun and Damar were able to make sense of the Breen noise, but whatever.
Right. Canon purism is a philosophy that doesn't make sense during an era when there's no new onscreen Trek adding to the universe (which is pretty much the case now, since the occasional movies we get are developing an alternate continuity). For the first couple of decades of fandom, the only regular source of new Trek material was the tie-ins; canon (if the word had been used back then, which it wasn't as far as I recall) consisted only of the original 79 episodes, an animated series that not everyone accepted as real or had even gotten to see, and eventually a smattering of movies. So fans who wanted to explore the universe more fully and see more adventures of their beloved characters had essentially nowhere to turn except tie-ins. It was through tie-ins that Trek was kept alive and active as something more than just a bunch of old reruns. Rather than being marginalized and dismissed, the tie-ins were very important to the fan community. It's understandable why that changed in the TNG era, when there was onscreen Trek in large quantities on a continuing basis. It was natural then that the canon material would take the lead in defining and expanding ST, with the tie-ins taking more of a back seat. But now things are back to the way they were before TNG. Most of the new Trek material coming out these days -- and all of the new Prime-Universe material -- is in the tie-ins. So clinging to TNG-era canon elitism is self-defeating. It's a failure to adapt to the times.
That is one of the primary reasons I enjoy the novelverse as much as I do. There isn't any other media that is going to further 'the adventures', so I read. I don't really care if everything meshes with everything else - at this point it is virtually impossible to do. It is a magnificent ride when the books move the whole universe along (so to speak) but I have no issues with 'one ofs' either. In my case the reason is probably more pragmatic then anything else. Being in the service for 35 years, I have been deployed a lot. When away, a library was usually always provided for the men and women overseas- and more often than not kept supplied by people across Canada who would donate their books to their local nearby base. They would eventually make their way overseas to be distributed to the troops. There would always be huge tri-walls (massive shipping boxes) of books to rummage through. I would do my best grabbing ANYTHING Trek that I could. Never in order, I would gobble up whatever story crossed my path. It didn't matter from which series or when the book was published. I have ended up reading many books over and over because that was all that was available, periodically a current book but more often than not something years old. While I was away, my family would be buying up everything they could from the period I was away and I would always come home to stacks of books and other paraphernalia that they had collected for me. To be honest, I still don't read everything in order. I still have a pile my family bought me (I got back from a year long tour from Afghanistan last year); I have been buying over the past year as well; and within all those I haven't read everything - meaning that there are a bunch of books I should have read before others. I have made my way through all the Typhon Pact series - and those in order, too - probably because of this BBS more than anything else. Everything else will be read as I have time and as the blurb on the back of the book grabs me. In the end, as long as I have a good story in my hands (and the last few years have been terrific) I am satisfied. I "don't pay no never mind" to the canon issue - it's all canon to me - just with different shelves in my brain.
As a military man myself I remember I got various TNG, VOY novels in much that same haphazard manner in Iraq many years ago. As far as the original topic of this thread is concerned: I found it interesting, also, to see how such a society functioned with such compartmentalized secrecy that makes the Cardassians with the Obsidian Order still active look like a hippie commune. With subterfuge and the like the Breen of David Mack's creation have a vaguely Soviet feel to them. I can see their Intel community has very KGB-esque ruthlessness to it. It stated only an individual's family or the Breen Intelligence Directorate are the only ones who know the true species of each individual. I wonder if that could produce conflict with Breen physicians (I mean what medical procedures can assist a Fenrisal might kill an Amoniri or vice versa) attempting to treat wounded. Or perhaps medicine amongst the Breen is an unevolved science (given Breen lack of compassion it wouldn't surprise me if seriously wounded were left to die) or maybe physicians amongst the Breen are permitted the rare privilege of knowing what species each individual under their care. Personally I imagine Breen tend to just euthanize the seriously injured or ill and allow the lesser ill or lesser wounded to heal by themselves or with minimal assistance from the group.