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

[cooleddie74]

When it comes to the minor details I just look at it as J.J. saying: "These are Star Trek fans. A lot of them have been engrossed in this stuff their whole lives. They know Khan's details for the most part, so why go into a five-minute soliloquy about the Eugenics Wars and where he's supposed to be from? We have to keep the film's pacing going, and besides - if the folks in the audience want to know more about Khan there are tons of websites, books and DVDs that talk about the guy."

At least we have 46 years' worth of backstory on Khan to inform us whether J.J. went into detail or not. Want a rant about something that should have been explained better onscreen? Picard being cloned in Nemesis. It's almost as if the screenwriters realized they were just leaving a ton of gaping plotholes and timeline inconsistencies wide open for the nitpicking and took the Seinfeld route, going "The Romulans wanted to infiltrate Starfleet, so....there's this kinda famous captain they've heard about named Picard....and yadda-yadda-yadda....bald clone who's slowly dying and loves black leather and capes."

 

[Greg Cox]

The way I see it, one line of dialogue from forty-six years ago is no big deal. As the saying goes, sometimes an ounce of inaccuracy saves a ton of explanation.

Why do the audiences today need "a ton of explanation" what a Sikh is, but the audiences in the 60s didn't?
Khan was a genetically engineered tyrant over all eurasia hundreds of years ago, got overthrown and escaped/exiled into space. One line of monologue.

I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't suggesting that Sikhs were too hard to explain these days. It was addressing the continuity issue and that it probably made more sense just to ignore one old line of dialogue than to try to explain it away--or let it determine the casting of the character. "An ounce of inaccuracy" being better than a finicky adherence to What They Did Before.

In other words: cast whoever you want and don't fret about the Sikh thing--which was only mentioned once to begin with.

It's funny. I remember when people first started talking about recasting Khan, people kept suggesting Hispanic actors like Antonio Banderas, Benecio del Toro, etc. Which suggests that people cared less about staying true to Khan's Indian backstory--and more about finding another Ricardo Montalban!

 

[cooleddie74]

Besides, for all we know Admiral Marcus and Section 31 had Khan submit to a form of cosmetic surgery to mask his appearance, which might have given away his true historical identity to somebody along the way. When awakened from his cryogenic canister he looked like Montalban in "Space Seed" but Marcus and others didn't want to take chances that somebody in Starfleet or elsewhere on Earth would recognize that a 300-year-old former genetic tyrant and war criminal was roaming around the 23rd century. So they had him go under the scalpel and....there you have it. Montalban becomes Cumberbatch.


Who knows, really. All we can do is speculate and come up with our own theories because I don't think even the novelization of the new film explains what happened after the Botany Bay was located other than Khan alone was revived and the other Augments were left in cryofreeze.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Just his race.

What race would that be?

Indian.

Indian isn't a race, it's a nationality. Using "classical" racial classifications Khan would be a Caucasian and might have spoken an Indo-Aryan language.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

That way J.J. honors continuity but doesn't step in a huge nerd minefield by changing some detail about Khan's age, the wars or his ship.

Just his race.

Yeah, makes him British instead of Latino. What's up with that?

 

[Captain Nebula]

Re: Klingons in STID--why do they look like a burned Kryten?

He looks more like Darth Maul than a Klingon. The head has a cube-like shape, that thing running down the head doesn't resemble a ridge, the whole head looks like it was dunked in BBQ sauce and put on the grill and he doesn't have any hair.

Now that's just racist.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Here's my answer to the Khan race thing, spread it around if you like it.

Genetics. What a random chance they are! Every birth, every person, is the result of complete chance. Look at your own family - the same parents, yet you and your siblings look different, act different, have different genders. And it's quite conceivable (no pun intended) that in alternate universes, even with your same parents and your same moment of conception, that other you is different.

Okay. Now, consider people that were setting themselves up to be genetic supermen. They are fiddling with genes and eggs and sperm, to improve the human species far beyond anything it currently is. Now combine the chances of conception with full on human intervention, and keeping the mind they are blending the bext genes of humanity... he could have been anything. In the prime universe he was uh, Mexican of Indian descent. In the JJverse, he's Caucasian of Indian descent. In the next universe over, he's he's Khan Inayat Singh, an Eskimo of Indian descent.

You're welcome.

Here's the problem: the Abramsverse was supposed to be the same as the Prime timeline before Nero's arrival in 2233. This would include Khan's genetic makeup.

It was SUPPOSED to do no such thing. It was IMPLIED primarily as charity to canon thumpers.

OTOH, the lack of other time travel events that can no longer occur in the Abrams universe -- particularly, the lack of Starfleet intervention against the Devidians, Kirk never crossing paths with Gary 7 and the Enterprise never triggering a continent-wide panic by suddenly showing up on NORAD's air defense radars. Likewise: transparent aluminum now won't be invented until the 2030s and not by Dr. Nichols; Gillian Taylor will still be in Frisco when the Eugenics Wars kick off, and there will be no record of a retarded Russian inexplicably appearing in the reactor room of the USS Enterprise and being subsequently captured, only to be extracted by a group of armed men who get cornered in an elevator only to literally vanish into thin air.

IOW, when Narada destroyed the Kelvin, it didn't just affect the future of that timeline, it also affected anything that has ever been done by time travelers.

 

[cooleddie74]

OTOH, the lack of other time travel events that can no longer occur in the Abrams universe -- particularly, the lack of Starfleet intervention against the Devidians, Kirk never crossing paths with Gary 7 and the Enterprise never triggering a continent-wide panic by suddenly showing up on NORAD's air defense radars. Likewise: transparent aluminum now won't be invented until the 2030s and not by Dr. Nichols; Gillian Taylor will still be in Frisco when the Eugenics Wars kick off, and there will be no record of a retarded Russian inexplicably appearing in the reactor room of the USS Enterprise and being subsequently captured, only to be extracted by a group of armed men who get cornered in an elevator only to literally vanish into thin air.

IOW, when Narada destroyed the Kelvin, it didn't just affect the future of that timeline, it also affected anything that has ever been done by time travelers.

Your opinion. I disagree with just about every single word in your post, but if thinking that none of the time travel we've seen in Trek since TOS has "now" happened thanks to Nero's arrival in 2233 is something that floats your boat and helps you make sense of things, then more power to you.

If time travel in the Prime reality has been changed and none of the visitations by TOS and other series' and films' characters to the past even happened, then shouldn't Nero's and Spock's travel into the past from Prime 2387 (the post-Nemesis Picard era) have also, you know....not happened? Should the Abramsverse even exist at all?

It's Trek time travel. It rarely makes sense and is full of contradictions and paradoxes, but as far as this lifelong fan is concerned Kirk and crew were on Earth in 1930, 1968, 1969 and 1986. Quark and the gang crashed near Roswell in 1947. Picard and his people visited 1893. Sisko, Bashir and Dax materialized in 2024. The 1701-E crew helped Cochrane make his first warp flight and defeated the Borg in 2063.

Etc., etc., etc.

 

[Sisko_is_my_captain]

What race would that be?

Indian.

Indian isn't a race, it's a nationality. Using "classical" racial classifications Khan would be a Caucasian and might have spoken an Indo-Aryan language.

I don't recall all the race hoopla when they cast Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury in the Marvel movies.

 

[Australis]

Here's my answer to the Khan race thing, spread it around if you like it.

Genetics. What a random chance they are! Every birth, every person, is the result of complete chance. Look at your own family - the same parents, yet you and your siblings look different, act different, have different genders. And it's quite conceivable (no pun intended) that in alternate universes, even with your same parents and your same moment of conception, that other you is different.

Okay. Now, consider people that were setting themselves up to be genetic supermen. They are fiddling with genes and eggs and sperm, to improve the human species far beyond anything it currently is. Now combine the chances of conception with full on human intervention, and keeping the mind they are blending the bext genes of humanity... he could have been anything. In the prime universe he was uh, Mexican of Indian descent. In the JJverse, he's Caucasian of Indian descent. In the next universe over, he's he's Khan Inayat Singh, an Eskimo of Indian descent.

You're welcome.

Here's the problem: the Abramsverse was supposed to be the same as the Prime timeline before Nero's arrival in 2233. This would include Khan's genetic makeup.

Hmm. Valid point, up to a point. I agree that when the Nerada appeared was when things were supposed to change, but I contend changes were in place anyway, some little things that I thought must have been different before the Nerada arrived. So I go with that. Also what I said above I think still stands too. YMMV.

EDIT: And what eddie said.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I don't recall all the race hoopla when they cast Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury in the Marvel movies.

That's because Samual L. Jackson would have gone to their house and fucked them up.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If time travel in the Prime reality has been changed...

It hasn't. It's a parallel universe, remember? When you factor in time travel events, Nero's arrival didn't just change the future, it also changed the past. In addition to lacking a common destiny after that point, they also lack a common history BEFORE that point.

shouldn't Nero's and Spock's travel into the past from Prime 2387 (the post-Nemesis Picard era) have also, you know....not happened?

You're forgetting the Yar Effect: time travelers can trigger events that change history without themselves being affected by those changes.

The archetypical example is Tasha Yar: in the Prime universe, Tasha gets slapped to death by a malevolent grease stain on some random planet nobody's ever heard of before. In the War Timeline, she survives for several years as Enterprise's tactical officer. Tasha Two travels back in time with the Enterprise-C thereby preventing a war with the Klingon Empire, in effect negating the universe that created her in the first place. Tasha Prime never actually makes that trip (grease stain, remember?) so Tasha Two should have ceased to exist the moment Enterprise-C went back through the void. Not only does she NOT cease to exist, she gets prison-raped by Romulans and has a half-Romulan daughter, whose exact background is accordingly difficult to explain.

The same thing happens to the Defiant in "Past Prologue" and to both the Enterprise-E and the Borg in "First Contact" (or did you wonder how the Borg managed to go back in time to stop the Phoenix's warp flight, thus preventing Starfleet from ever existing and subsequently preventing Picard from ever making the Borg aware of their existence in the first place?)

It's Trek time travel. It rarely makes sense and is full of contradictions and paradoxes, but as far as this lifelong fan is concerned Kirk and crew were on Earth in 1930, 1968, 1969 and 1986. Quark and the gang crashed near Roswell in 1947. Picard and his people visited 1893. Sisko, Bashir and Dax materialized in 2024. The 1701-E crew helped Cochrane make his first warp flight and defeated the Borg in 2063.

Etc., etc., etc.

Sure they were, just not in the alternate universe where STID takes place.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The film directly references Star Trek: First Contact with the Phoenix, Star Trek: Enterprise with the Enterprise NX-01 model, and the episodes "First Flight" with the NX-alpha/beta model and "Home" with the offshore stadium.

I go with what the film writers say - that it was one timeline which branched in 2233 and events prior to that are shared. The excellent novel Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock explains it and other Trek time travels in detail, and the author most definitely did his homework.

That said, it's all fiction and open to interpretation. I can see how it may have changed the past, although as a fan of ENT and the novelverse, I like to go with their version of events. It's cool to think that if Pine's Kirk went back to 1986 he may bump into Shatner's Kirk, or that any number of versions of people from possible futures could come back (like we saw with Admiral Janeway in Voyager's finale)

 

[Set Harth]

It was SUPPOSED to do no such thing. It was IMPLIED primarily as charity to canon thumpers.

It was STATED OUTRIGHT by the writers. Imputations of motive may feel emotionally pleasing to you but never rise above pure speculation. You may not choose to accept the intent behind the plot, but that's a separate issue.

I don't recall all the race hoopla when they cast Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury in the Marvel movies.

That's because the Marvel movieverse was always intended to be completely separate from the comicverse or the universe of any other depiction of Fury such as the Hasslehoff one. It's not a comparable situation.

Indian isn't a race, it's a nationality. Using "classical" racial classifications Khan would be a Caucasian and might have spoken an Indo-Aryan language.

Whatever it is technically called, you know as well as I do that the Caucasoid race of northern India and what we refer to when we use the term "Caucasian" or "white" are different races.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The film directly references Star Trek: First Contact with the Phoenix, Star Trek: Enterprise with the Enterprise NX-01 model, and the episodes "First Flight" with the NX-alpha/beta model and "Home" with the offshore stadium.

Which merely confirms that the Narada arrived in the alternate timeline created by the Borg incursion in First Contact. The jury is still out as to what extent that timeline actually resembles the Primeline (or at least, the timeline of which TOS was originally a part).

That said, it's all fiction and open to interpretation. I can see how it may have changed the past, although as a fan of ENT and the novelverse, I like to go with their version of events. It's cool to think that if Pine's Kirk went back to 1986 he may bump into Shatner's Kirk, or that any number of versions of people from possible futures could come back (like we saw with Admiral Janeway in Voyager's finale)

But that's the thing: if Pinekirk runs into Shatnerkirk in 1986, then they are in effect entering the same timeline together. As a consequence they must both return to future of that timeline -- the SAME timeline -- which means one of them is going to be a timeline orphan.

That is the consequence of the Yar Effect. If something you do creates an alternate timeline, you can no longer return to the ORIGINAL timeline from which you started. In essence, the only way Shatnerkirk and Pinekirk could actually meet each other is if George and Gracie sent off the whale probe by telling it to go and blow up Hobus for some reason and it simply took a hundred years to make the trip; in that case, Shatnerkirk would return to his own future in a Klingon Bird of Prey, turn himself in to stand trial only to have the President ask "Stand trial for what? By the way, your son called, he wants to know when you'll be testing the upgraded Genesis device on Ceti-Alpha Five."

 

[Mad Jack Wolfe]

I really liked how they portrayed the Klingons in this film. They looked fearsome and very alien, not like 80's hair band rejects in rubber armour and turtle shells glued to their foreheads.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It was SUPPOSED to do no such thing. It was IMPLIED primarily as charity to canon thumpers.

It was STATED OUTRIGHT by the writers.

On the contrary, the writers cited "many worlds theory" and suggested that the act of traveling through time is identical to jumping to a new timeline whether you change anything or not. The new universe you've entered is otherwise identical to your own -- which is why, if you hang around long enough you'll encounter the alternate version of yourself -- but if you start changing things, the universe you've arrived in starts to diverge dramatically from the one you left and they cease to be similar.

Their exact words:

To summarize above on the time travel issue, going back in time is the equivalent of stepping into a parallel universe, according to current speculations based on Quantum Mechanics.

Starfleet and Spock, basing their decisions on this theory, would see that their is NO SUCH THING as “rectifying” the situation in a MULTIVERSE.

IOW, the Abrams timeline is not the prime timeline and it never was. It is assumed to be otherwise identical to the prime timeline up to the point that Narada arrived, but that assumption is actually baseless; Spock and Nero could very well have arrived in a universe that had ALREADY diverged from the Primeline before they got there, either by the influence of other time travelers (see "First Contact" and/or "Temporal Cold War") or by the disruption of in-universe time travel due to their own actions.

Either way, it is FAR from certain that history prior to the Kelvin Incident would be identical in both universes. Considering that the past of TOS is already markedly different from the past of the First Contact universe, this is already a foregone conclusion.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I really liked how they portrayed the Klingons in this film. They looked fearsome and very alien, not like 80's hair band rejects in rubber armour and turtle shells glued to their foreheads.

Hell, these Klingons had gold rings glued to their foreheads.

Actually, from looking at the side view it seems to me they were going for the TMP look with the cranial features that wrap from the bridge of the nose all the way down the back of the neck, like a spine that covers most of the skull until it connects to the brain at a point right between the eyes. Which is just so Klingon in a way: their one vulnerable spot is positioned where you can't even reach it unless you're directly in front of them.

 

[Set Harth]

It is assumed to be otherwise identical to the prime timeline up to the point that Narada arrived, but that assumption is actually baseless

Wrong. It is implicit in the situation presented by the writers.

Their exact words:

the act of time travel itself creates a new universe that exists in PARALLEL to the one left by the time traveler.

They didn't go into a preexisting parallel universe, so to that extent the parallel universe analogy may be giving you the wrong idea. The so-called parallel universe, which we might call the Abramsverse timeline, is created by the time travel. By definition, then, in this creation it has only the past of the Prime timeline to work with.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It is assumed to be otherwise identical to the prime timeline up to the point that Narada arrived, but that assumption is actually baseless

Wrong. It is implicit in the situation presented by the writers.

Which is what I said earlier: it was IMPLIED, but not firmly established.

They didn't go into a preexisting parallel universe

No, they merely created one that -- due to their presence -- was instantly slightly different from the one they originated from. Every second they remained in that universe and every action they took caused that divergence to widen. That would, incidentally, result in the absence of temporal incursions that would no longer take place in the alternate universe the same way they did in the original one.

By definition, then, in this creation it has only the past of the Prime timeline to work with.

Except the past of the prime timeline includes elements from its own future displaced in time (IOW it's not a straight line, there are all kinds of kinky twists and turns where parts of it loop back on itself in a complicated causal geometry). Removing some of those elements or altering them changes the relationship of causation, so that some of those loopback events never take place and others take place in a dramatically different way.

And I'll again remind you that we have suspected for years that the Enterprise timeline is subtly (or maybe even grossly) different from the Prime timeline that includes TOS. That could be for any number of reasons, but it's entirely likely that the ENT timeline is one in which none of the TOS timetravel events ever took place (and is, in fact, pretty likely since the overt references to Neil Armstrong in Enterprise suggest that Gary 7 never visited Earth in this timeline).