Klingon forehead problem - Romulan forehead problem

Of course, the reuse of TOS footage could have contained Klingons with forehead ridges, but, since time is money, it would have cost too much of both to paste CGI forehead ridges on all the Klingons. Thus, the TOS Klingons had no ridges.

 

I can't answer for Mike Westmore as to his reasoning for the ridges, but the ridges do make the Klingons look tougher. Plus, it's a small, cheap appliance that affixes to the face...which is the most photographed part of the actor...and makes him/her look, well, more alien.

 

Umm, it was Fred Phillips on ST:TMP who created the Klingons' ridged design, which was then refined by Rob and Barney Burman in ST III into the individualized forehead-plate design that inspired Westmore's TNG approach to the Klingons. It was the Romulan forehead ridges that began with Westmore.

 

Pretty sure Star Trek is a documentary about space travel.

 

The problem with that is that it just doesn't make sense with the way the series were set up.

The way I see it, there are two basic ways to look at the franchise:

1) They're just shows, they're imperfect, budget constraints, etc. That's fine, but it undermines the ability of the fandom to read between the lines and fill in the larger universe of ST, which is a major part of what fandom is about.

2) They're a 'window' into the world of Star Trek. They may make mistakes, continuity errors, etc, but everything you actually see did happen (in that world) the way you see it.

To me, Roddenberry's proposal boils down to saying that fans should treat TOS as just a show (#1), but TNG onward as 'real' Star Trek (#2). This would've been fine if TNG onward had been an actual reboot (like BSG vs NuBSG - nobody needs an explanation for why Starbuck's a woman now, it's a reboot anyway). But time and again the studios and the writers established a pattern of wanting to tie all the shows together into the same direct continuity, not just informationally, but visually as well. George Takei guest stars on Voyager, DeForrest Kelley, Jimmy Doohan, Mark Leonard and Leonard Nimoy guest star on TNG. We see models of the original enterprise, etc.

Its saying that TOS just 'didn't represent things properly', you know, except for all this other stuff that we liked, so that stuff was represented 'right'. It's just nonsense.

 

Why are those the only options? I mean, point 2) acknowledges that there are mistakes and inconsistencies, so therefore it can't be exactly what we see. Even if what we see is as close as feasible to the conjectural reality, it still has problems of interpretation.

Besides, there have always been things in Trek that can't literally have been the way they looked onscreen -- like the 23rd-century technology being made with 1960s switches and bulbs and wood, or the technology on totally different planets being redresses of the same props,, or different characters being played by the same actor, or the same character being played by different actors, or the Enterprise's nacelles blinking out because there was an error with the bluescreen shot. Tons of stuff in the special effects have to be taken figuratively. Every time you see the TOS Enterprise following a visibly curving path as it orbits a planet, that's ridiculous, because the the planet would have to be only a few hundred meters in diameter for the ship's turn radius to be that tight. And it makes no sense when they show phasers as visible beams of light in a vacuum. Or when the stars are visibly moving past when the ship is at sublight. Or when two ships or objects are clearly out of proportion relative to each other (e.g. how the buoy in "The Corbomite Maneuever" is far too small to fit the dialogue and the Fesarius is far too large to fit the dialogue, or how Decker's shuttle in "The Doomsday Machine" looks the same size going into the planet-killer's maw that the Constellation did). Or the kind of thing often done in TNG, where two ships were shown to be really close together when the dialogue clearly stated that they were tens of thousands of kilometers apart.

So it has always been impossible to take the visuals in Star Trek as absolutely literal representations of the underlying reality. What we're seeing is just an interpretation, even if the events and dialogue are assumed to be accurate. So I don't see the problem with the idea that Kirk's encounters with Kor, Kras, Krell, Koloth, Kang, etc. happened the way we were shown, but with the Klingons looking different from what we were shown.

Except that plenty of TV and movie series in the past have done the same thing, pretending that they represented a continuous whole while retconning huge portions of their universes. After all, most audiences don't pay that close attention to the details of continuity, and in the past, before the Internet made it easy, it took a much more dedicated effort to keep abreast of continuity details enough to be concerned about inconsistencies. So tons of fictional series have had major retcons. Heck, all four Planet of the Apes sequels in the '70s deliberately contradicted or retconned elements from their predecessors, because those films weren't made with sequels in mind. (For instance, the simple 2000-year hibernation in the first film was retconned into a time warp in the second so that another ship could follow.) The pilot of The Six Million Dollar Man showed Steve Austin as a civilian astronaut and the bionics program as the brainchild of Oliver Spencer, but the series retconned Steve into an Air Force colonel and said that Oscar Goldman ran the bionics program. Heck, M*A*S*H was an 11-year series about a 3-year war, and about midway through the series it retconned its own chronology, jumping back from a purported early-1953 date to a 1951 date even while still featuring the later cast of characters with all their personal history and growth intact. Not to mention all the comics that have done the same thing, like the way Marvel has pretended to represent a single consistent universe even while constantly moving the dates of past events forward (so that, e.g. Tony Stark was originally injured in the Vietnam War but it's now been retconned to Afghanistan).

No, it's simply the understanding that what we're seeing is a story, and stories are always matters of interpretation. Heck, even a historian studying actual events must remain aware that any texts or articles reporting on those events are filtered through the interpretation of their chroniclers -- that even video footage is an intepretation that filters events by what it chooses to include in or exclude from the frame. Thus, history students are trained not to blindly believe that everything they're told is unquestionable fact; any text, any source, must be viewed critically with an awareness that it is imperfect due to human error, bias, and the like. So even in real life, we never get an absolutely exact, perfect representation of what really happened, and thus we need to apply our own critical judgment to what we see rather than just slavishly trusting its every detail. So why should fiction be any different?

 

There are 'mistakes' and inconsistencies in real life, too. The point is that they all have a real life explanation. If one is concerned with the 'reality' of Star Trek, then I see only those two options: either the reality doesn't really exist, or it exists in the way that it has been shown and all those inconsistencies have some sort of 'real life' explanation in universe.

You didn't name a single thing on that list which, imo, could not possibly have an in universe explanation, so, no, I don't see any reason why they can't be taken literally as they were shown.

As for it just being a story, of course it is. If that's the only way we want to engage with it, that's fine. But saying it's just a story removes that element of 'reality' that is the basis of all these sorts of discussions.

 

Dude... A starship that's supposedly orbiting hundreds or thousands of kilometers above the surface of a planet that's itself thousands of kilometers in diameter would not have a clearly visible turn radius as shown, not unless it were itself thousands of kilometers long. What we were shown was impossible to take literally and it's foolish to try.

It makes no sense to insist that every niggling detail in a work of fiction must be taken with absolute slavish literalism. That's misunderstanding what fiction is on a fundamental level. You're allowed to interpret it. You're supposed to interpret it. Fiction is supposed to stimulate us to exercise our critical and creative faculties, to dig beneath the surface of the text and engage with it actively. The insistence that we must be nothing but mindless slaves who worship every tiny detail as immutable gospel... it's deeply sad to me to see that anyone would think that way, would believe that the experience of viewing fiction requires them to turn off their brains and their ability to question and challenge information. That's just the complete opposite of what the creators of fiction want from you as an audience member.

 

I read a funny story many years ago that said that the Carthaginian general Hannibal got a permanent crease in his brow from hating the Romans so much!

Fortunately, we Vulcans have smoother brows, from thinking calmer thoughts.

 

From a production point of view, I've always suspected that the Romulan forehead prosthetic was introduced to avoid having to shave of half the eyebrows of the actor who guest starred that week.

Nimoy put up with it for three years but he was a trooper. Other actors I imagine, not so much

 

They need to suck it up and sacrifice for the art!

 

Your comment made me slap my own (unridged) brow, because I actually came to the same conclusion a quarter-century or so ago, but I'd forgotten it.

 

Glad to share a neuron with you

TBH, I'm a little surprised to have never seen it mentioned elsewhere as a reason - or even a pleasant by-product of using the prosthetics. Maybe TPTB felt it would just weaken their already tenuous argument for introducing the brow-ridges

"These are the southern Romulans, y'see?"

 

That's the best description of what fiction is supposed to be that I've ever read, and also of what is wrong with a big section of fandom.

 

I agree to a great part, but cannot forget the restrictive definition of "canon" (note the word was imported from religion) was felt needed so fans can have a common ground on which to debate.

Also, I believe some CGI guy determined that if the Enterprise existed and followed a certain plausible orbit and was photographed with the correspondent lens it (and the curvy path) coincidentally would look just like the scenes we have (ALAS I don't have the link to the work. I wish I had it. It'd be awesome now).

 

^^If I were so inclined, I would argue that a large portion of fandom that invokes "canon" has no idea what it means, and cannot spell it correctly.

If I were so inclined.

 

Indeed. "Canon" is simply descriptive, not proscriptive. It means the core body of work as distinct from derivative or pastiche works from other sources. It doesn't mean absolute gospel truth, because any long-running fictional canon will have internal inconsistencies and errors, often because its creators rethink their initial ideas or seek to gloss over their early shortcomings. Canonical "reality" is more about the broad strokes than the tiny details.

 

I know a show dealing with space has to 'adjust' what is seen on screen to help most viewers understand what is happening. The ship orbiting a planet is expected to be traveling in a circle, showing it moving in a straight line would make it appear to be leaving to most. When yo are traveling superfast in warp the stars move around you in streaks, it they just drifted very slowly (if at all) the ship would appear stationary. I did have a bit of trouble when the Phoenix did it's historic warp flight and the stars streaked by even when they were remaining in the solar system though.

BTW, back to foreheads, I think the Motion Picture version was the very best- it looked like the spine in a Klingon went up the back of the skull and wrapped over the top. Much better for a warrior race than having the skull bounce around on top of a flexible stick like we have. Turning the marvelous spinal thing into a bunch of wrinkles was disappointing in TNG.

 

Actually it's more of a thick bony plate, which makes more sense as protection for the skull. That and the elaborate, individualized ridges -- which clearly evolved for display purposes -- imply a species that engages in mating competition by head-butting, something that's reinforced by the carousing of the Klingons in the tavern in TNG: "Redemption."

Anyway, as I believe I mentioned above, the individualized bone-plate design was introduced by the Burman Studio in The Search for Spock; Westmore simply followed their example for TNG, albeit adding a ridged nose drawn from the TMP design, and eventually giving full-sized ridges to female Klingons as well. (TSFS had given Valkris a very subtle ridge, just as Richard Snell did for female Klingons in The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country, and TNG: "Hide and Q" showed an illusory female Klingon with a weird partial ridge, something I'm glad Westmore didn't stick with.)

 

Only the principals in SFS have distinctively different ridges ... Richard Snell, who worked on most of the TOS films (not always credited I think, but don't hold me to that) told me in 1991 (during an interview about TUC) that Nimoy didn't want to bother spending on a whole lot of different ridges and so most of the klingons have just a generic appliance, and that it wasn't till TFF that he got the go-ahead from Shatner to go crazy with making each klingon unique.