Klingons in STID--why do they look like [SPOILERS]?

You hit the nail on the head. People will insist that this doesn't matter because they're all "white," which simply underscores the problem with how people - and certainly trekkies in particular - see "race."

If one can't accept Cumberbatch as the fictitious Khan in a story, one has a problem - the filmmakers don't.

 

It gets worse. Zoe Saldana -- who is Dominican and Puerto Rican and in real life speaks English and Spanish -- is supposed to be playing a character who's native language is Swahili.

On the one hand, you can excuse it in the Abramsverse by explaining that Uhura actually speaks EVERY language, including Swahili. OTOH, Uhura Prime doesn't even speak Klingon fluently...

 

^^^ I thought that odd as well. Then it occurred to me that, in this timeline, the Klingons may have become a greater threat to the Federation than they were in the prime timeline (based on some of Admiral Marcus' anti-Klingon dialog), which might have changed NuUhura's language curriculum by the time she got to the Academy.

 

The same reason Klingons went from looking like Mexicans to looking like they had a caterpillar glued to their forehead to looking like they had turtle shells glued to their foreheads.

$$$

 

Meh. By the time that 2259 rolls around in the altered timeline maybe the Empire had developed the cure for the Augment mutation virus and the effects it had on Klingons. It happened in the Prime history sometime before ST:TMP happened (2273) and that's just a fourteen-year difference.

If those were supposed to have been the shattered remnants of Praxis and the moon was overmined a full 34 earlier than it was in the Prime timeline then the Klingons curing the Augment virus a little bit sooner isn't out of the question. Pretty simple, really.

 

^^^ Yep. Makes sense.

 

Years ago, when I was a bit more of an anal-retentive fanboy, I made a map of the Klingon Homeworld and assigned each make up variation to a different geographic location.

 

That makes a lot more sense than anything else, IMO. It's also a much more elegant solution; surely Klingons have different racial subgroups just like humans do, with some having very prominent ridges and some having ridges partially submerged in the skull bones.

Wasn't in Rodenberry who once half-jokingly suggested, when asked about the difference in appearance, that the Klingons in TOS were "southern Klingons" or something like that?

 

Nope.

Khan changed from non-European to European.

One of these things is not like the others.

 

The actor playing him was European. So he must be European. That's why nuKhan is European, right?

 

Not many Brits I've met like to consider themselves European. Irish and Scots too. The Welsh...well...I think they're just happy nobody has conquered them again lately.

 

And I'm sure Canadians and Mexicans would be confused if someone called them Americans, even though technically they are.

 

^^^ Occam's sitting on your shoulder again, isn't he?

 

Damn straight.

 

I always thought of Khan as being beyond national origins- his genes were mixed in a blender and he was engineered to have certain attributes. While not as extreme as Dagwood (the prototype G.E.L.F. in SeaQuest), he was more of an exotic mix instead of having parents from a certain region.

 

Just a geographic generalization.

 

It's like McCoy not knowing Klingon anatomy when he tries to save Gorkon's life, when we now know that Starfleet had at least somewhat detailed scans and information about Klingon physiology as far back as the crash landing of Klaang in Oklahoma in 2151 and it's possible that the Vulcans provided additional knowledge about the Empire as they saw fit. McCoy and the 1701 and 1701-A crews had frequent run-ins with Klingons over the course of the decades and were often within tricorder scanning range of them.

McCoy not knowing how to save Gorkon in TUC is along the lines of Uhura not knowing how to speak any Klingon - it works in the context of that one film and its assassination and prison break storyline, but beyond that it falls into pretty silly territory and would be dismissed otherwise.

 

Good points, but that was M'Sharak, not me.

 

Fixed the quote for ya.

Yeah, TUC is one of the great Trek films but it has some silly and contradictory scenes and dialogue. When McCoy fails to save Gorkon's life it's in large part because he doesn't know enough about Klingon anatomy to rescue the Chancellor. Later in the film Spock tells Scotty and Valeris that Klingons do not have tear ducts. Apparently somebody somewhere aboard the Enterprise-A has detailed enough knowledge of Klingon physiology that they can tell fellow officers that the species lacks tear ducts (which in and of itself makes no sense given all the times over the course of the franchise we've seen Klingon eyes well up with moisture or even tears, but that's another story).

McCoy could have used Spock's help, or if it was something that Spock had to look up in the Enterprise databanks after the assassination then that computer data would have come in mighty handy when McCoy and Kirk beamed over to Gorkon's cruiser. No matter how you slice it something doesn't add up - but it all seems to work in that film and make for a very entertaining and thrilling story, which is what really matters most.