First look at Klingons in 'Star Trek: Discovery'?

I'm a guy, so I'm dead anyway. Only plucky young heroines survive.

 

Except, funnily enough, in the first and last Candyman movies.

Your odds are 2/3. Good luck, hope you job regularly.

 

Only after running around in little more than their panties, having endured a 'fate worse than death' for exploitative purposes...

 

I have it on good authority that the concept design for the Klingon Sarcophagus ship was, in fact, real, but that production designer is now gone and the ship no longer looks that way. FYI.

 

Feel free to name specific examples from this list of Nova episodes. None of the episode descriptions have anything to do with future military suits. Moreover, do you have confirmation that their concepts came from real militaries? If you don't, then your example is invalid.

Rule of Cool:

You only get to invoke the Rule of Cool if the end product is, in fact, cool.​

Scary Impractical Armor:

Armor with loads of flashy things that look intimidating, but it often looks more useful than it actually is. It has loads of Spikes of Villainy, Shoulders of Doom, and often some skulls. Expect any headgear to to be a Rage Helm, unless the bearer is a main character.​

Majority of the feedback on the internet about the leaked spiked armor is that it is ridiculous, not cool. Moreover, Star Trek was pitched as science fiction and the majority of spiked armor is found in various fantasy genres instead. Science fiction is primarily about science and technology of the future. There is nothing futuristic about the leaked spiked armor.

Technologically advanced alien species who walk on two legs, have two arms and are capable of warp.

Never to the point where it makes an armor impractical as a whole. If you look at all the great human warriors throughout history, they did not cover themselves in spikes.

In short: no.

Not if you pitch your franchise as science fiction but deliver medieval fantasy. Then you have a bad science fiction.

You can ignore the TV tropes. There are still examples from the real military research.

Memory Alpha: Star Trek is . . .

A one-hour dramatic television series.
Action-Adventure-Science Fiction.
The first such concept with strong
central lead characters plus other
continuing regulars.​

You've seen it for Star Trek.

It has more to do with identifying them as Hur'q.

It has more to do with common impression than difficulty.

Your counterarguments have been debunked:

1. This is a franchise that was pitched as science fiction, not medieval fantasy.
2. Even as "ceremonial armor", the spiked armor is dangerous to the wearers and their group mates.
3. These alien species walk on two legs, have two arms, and are a technologically advanced warp-capable faction.

This wasn't about Starfleet officers but Klingons or Hur'q. Furthermore, the examples were based on real military concepts, not video games.

 

Who cares? The folks in the photo are Klingons and they're wearing what Klingons will be wearing - which makes about as much sense as the outfits they've been wearing since 1979.

 

Trying to apply "real-world" principles to make-believe stuff seems to be the provenance of Star Trek fans.
Maybe that's why we are so unhappy all the time....

 

They could be wearing ancient or ceremonial armor like many modern royal/presidential honor guards who still wear dated cuirass armors and impractical helmets.

British Life Guard

Italian Cuirassiers' Regiment

Turkish Haradrim Easterlings

 

Not really. Just personal opinions bantered about.

Alien species not human. Also, an alien species that has more in common with space fantasy warrior species than most.

Klingons are tougher than humans.

And have different values than humans do. They are often behind on medical technology, do not consider safety to be a priority and have plenty of traditions that involve pain, risky behavior and possible death.

Star Trek is not based upon real world concepts, beyond basic outlines. If one looks at Star Trek from a scientific or practical standpoint, then you have to dismiss the Klingons wholly as a fantasy warrior species, because the evolutionary odds of them being like humans is unlikely, among other species.

Yup.

 

Mirror Uhura's bare-midriff uniform and Mirror Kirk's sleeveless vest look ridiculous for a futuristic society.
For that matter, so is Spock's bathrobe from Trek III and IV and Seven-of-Nine's catsuit.

It's also ridiculous and not very futuristic-seeming for a vessel equipped for battle to have its command and control center in one of the more externally vulnerable parts of the vessel...

...BUT, it's Star Trek, and Star Trek is what Star Trek is.

What Star Trek isn't (and isn't supposed to be) is a scientifically accurate depiction of efficient future technology and design --i.e., it's just a sci-fi drama, emphasis on the drama; the sci-fi aspect is simply the setting (or maybe even just the window dressing). If you want hard science fiction, then you are better off reading Asimov or Ben Bova or Kim Stanley Robinson or Heinlein.

That "literary science fiction" is great stuff, but so is the entertainment value provided by Star Trek great stuff.

 

I would just like to address this one point, which we hear often.

I do not make any claim to the validity of this "Klingon armor", for now let's set that aside.

But I abjectly disagree that aliens would not share the same logic as everyone else, and believe this to be incorrect.

With respect, the difference between fact and fiction is that fact remains true whether people believe it or not. A fact can be independently discovered time and time again across history by people with no knowledge of each others work by independently testing it. A fiction disappears when all sources of the fiction are eliminated.

The reason I bring this up, is that natural physical laws, and also sociological-biological laws, apply across history, no matter what the cultural context is. They would therefore always lead to certain commonalities between all societies - i.e.:

1. ). all forms of material intending to stop a blade increase their resistance to the blade proportionally to their utility
2. ). all forms of armor in existence seek to protect the user by definition, there are none that actively seek to harm them, by, for example, loading hollow bamboo with smallpox pus, so that an arrow wound would be more fatal.
3. ). all societies that employ armor seek to preserve the life of the occupant for some reason, usually so their utility to that society isn't ended

.....and so on.

You can have relativism in personal values - you cannot have relativism in physical reality.

Thus alien societies would not just be illogical flights of fancy, like something out of a medieval fairy tale, where people inexplicably have dog's heads and carry swords made out of giant tulips - they would share similar circumstances, regardless of their alien status, and will develop common solutions - because 2 inches of Titanium stops projectiles better than 1 mm of Aluminum anywhere in the universe. A society that is, like the Klingons/Romulans/Cardassians, humanoid, and at the same level of material advancement - share even more commonailities. A society that has all that, and also exists in a galaxy with trade and communication, share yet more.

A genre can choose to recognize material facts to a greater or lesser extent depending on it's intent. Not all genres and sub-genres of entertainment are alike.

But to argue that an alien society renders logic invalid is contrary to Star Trek's basic premise that logic is universal.

Justifying an artistic decision with "all TV is make believe" - it's akin to saying "all insects are the same" - they may have multiple sets of legs, but a millipede and fly possess rather different phenotype - being able to recognize the difference is nuance - and nuance and context are all-important.

Example:

It might be that society X is at a different level of technological and material capability to our own, and thus can make a spacecraft look entirely unpractical (because it's hull's tensile strength is absurdly high).



But this isn't what Star Trek proposes in regards to the famous humanoids of it's galaxy - they are on a material par with the Federation - or else the entire political dynamic of Star Trek breaks down.

Other, more advanced, more isolated races, may have different material circumstances - but still are bound by logic - at some point their culture did value utility over art, before achieving this apotheosis - and if ever pushed by a greater force again, would be forced by circumstance to revert to utility or perish.

The Klingon Empire is not imperishable. It must therefore make many decisions out of real need, not artistic idealism.

The Star Trek setting additionally makes the thematic artistic choice of deliberately grounding it's design choices in real world analogies, so that audiences have a frame of reference - the Federation flies around in ships that resemble submarines, because flying around in a cloud of sentient goo would alienate audiences.

Ergo: to reflect the thing that Star Trek is aiming for: i.e. a world informed by the universal applicability of logic, an artistic choice would seek to convey logical values - for example being suggestive of practicality, even if not practical in actuality.

Now, in regards to the Klingon armor.... ....whether it is belivable within the setting will depend on context (is it an antique? is it a standard issue duty uniform?), which we know nothing about right now - I would hope that it isn't a duty uniform - but it wouldn't be a game breaker for me if it was, because as much as it appears to be another example of "fantasy creep" in pop culture, it's not entirely outside the bounds of possibility - it's just I would have preferred something perhaps more suggestive of a practical army.

But I never cared much about that - my point is that "aliens" is not a way to close down critical thinking, the way that say "fairies" would be - they would still be products of natural selection, and socio-biological realities. @Baxten was correct in the point he was making, even if I don't agree that the armor is game breaking.

 

Let is dispense with the notion that Klingons wear armor at all. They just wear uniforms with shoulder pads.

The Klingon garments we have seen in all previous Trek cannot accurately be described as "armor," since they don't stop bladed weapons, and they don't stop energy weapons, and they don't even soften a punch to the solar plexus by weaker species like humans and Bajorans.

Perhaps these new outfits will be similar; made of a practical softer material, but shaped in the manner we see for stylistic reasons. Or maybe it's a futuristic material that has high strength yet is soft and pliable, so that Klingon "armor" will finally, at long long last, actually serve a defensive purpose for the first time in the entire history of Trek!

Kor

 

Also, just want to add, that all life shares the same imperatives - the application of violence is suprisingly uniform in it's nature - i.e. it is always done for strategic reasons, and not for any impractical reason - so the idea of a "race without fear", or "a race that is violent for the sake of violence" is indeed fantasy:

Why should organisms ever evolve to seek to harm other organisms? ... In his book The Selfish Gene, which explained the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology with genetics and game theory, Richard Dawkins tried to pull readers out of their unreflective familiarity with the living world. He asked them to imagine animals as 'survival machines' designed by their genes (the only entities that are faithfully propagated over the course of evolution), and then consider how those survival machines would evolve.

"To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not it's own child or another close relative) is part of the environment, like a rock or river or lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or river in one important respect: it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and too will stop at nothing to preserve them. Natural selection favors genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species."

Anyone who has ever seen a hawk tear apart a starling, a swarm of biting insects torment a horse, or the AIDS virus slowly kill a man has firsthand acquaintance with the ways that survival machines exploit other survival machines. In much of the living world, violence is simply the default, something that needs no further explanation. When the victims are members of other species, we call the aggressors predators or parasites. But the victims can also be members of the same species. Infanticide, sibilicide, cannibalism, rape, and lethal combat have been documented in many kinds of animals.

Dawkin's carefully worded passage also explains why nature does not consist of one big bloody melee. For one thing, animals are less inclined to harm their close relatives, because any gene that would nudge an animal to harm a relative would have a good chance of harming a copy of itself sitting inside that relative, and natural selection would tend to weed it out. More important, Dawkins points out that another organism differs from a rock or a river because it is inclined to hit back. Any organism that has evolved to be violent is a member of a species whose other members, on average, have evolved to be just as violent. If you attack one of your own kind, your adversary may be as strong and pugnacious as you are, and armed with the same weapons and defenses. The likelihood that, in attacking a member of your own species, you will get hurt is a powerful selection pressure that disfavors indiscriminate pouncing or lashing out. It also rules out the hydraulic metaphor and most folk theories of violence such as a thirst for blood, a death wish, a killer instinct, and other destructive itches, urges, and impulses. When a tendency toward violence evolves, it is always strategic. Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. The discernment is especially true of intelligent species, whose large brains make them sensitive to the expected benefits and costs in a particular situation, rather than just to the odds averaged over evolutionary time.

The logic of violence as it applies to members of an intelligent species facing other members of that species brings us to Hobbes. In a remarkable passage in Leviathan (1651), he used fewer than a hundred words to lay out an analysis of the incentive for violence than is as good as any today:

...in the nature of man, we fine three principle causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence, thirdly, glory. The first makes men invade for gain; the second, for safety, and the third, for reputation. The first use of violence is to make themselves masters of other men's lives, wives, children and cattle; the second to defend them; the third for reputation, as a word, smile, different opinion, or any other sign of undervalue...

The second cause of quarrel is diffidience, a word that in Hobbes's time meant 'fear' rather than 'shyness'. The second cause is a consequence of the first; competition breeds fear. If you have reason to suspect that your neighbor is inclined to eliminate you from the competition by, say, killing you, then you will be inclined to protect yourself by eliminating him first in a preemptive strike. You might have this temptation even if you otherwise wouldn't hurt a fly, as long as you are not willing to lie down and be killed. The tragedy is that your competitor has every reason to crank through the same calculation, even if he is the kind of person who wouldn't hurt a fly. In fact, even if he knew that you started out with no aggressive designs on him, he might legitimately worry that you are tempted to neutralize him out of fear that he will neutralize you first, which gives you an incentive to neutralize him before than, ad infinitum. ... This paradox is known as the Hobbesian trap, or in the arena of international relations, the security dilemma.

How can intelligent agents extricate themselves from a Hobbesian trap? The most obvious way is through a policy of deterrence: Don't strike first; be strong strong enough to survive a first strike; and retaliate against any aggressor in kind. A credible deterrence policy can remove a competitor's incentive to invade for gain, since the cost imposed on him by retaliation would cancel out the anticipated spoils. And it removes the his incentive to invade from fear, because your commitment not to strike first and, most importantly, because of your reduced incentive to strike first , since deterrence reduces the need for preemption. The key to deterrence policy, though, is the credibility of the threat that you will retaliate. If your adversary thinks that you're vulnerable to being wiped out in a first strike, he has no reason to fear retaliation. And if he thinks that once attacked you may rationally hold back from retaliation, because at that point it's too late to do any good, he might exploit that rationality and attack you with impunity. Only if you are committed to disprove any suspicion of weakness, to avenge all trespasses and settle all scores, will your policy of deterrence be credible. Thus we have an explanation of the incentive to invade for reputation: a word, smile, and other other sign of undervalue. Hobbes called it 'glory'; more commonly it is called 'honor'; the most accurate descriptor is 'credibility'. ​

The Klingon Empire is not a fantasy "army of doom". As we have seen many times, it is intended to be a real nation state, within Star Trek's setting which imagines nation states in space. It's policies must therefore always be, on some level, practical from this perspective - even the blow-hard posturing that Klingons are famous for has a Hobbsian reason within evolutionary biology - fear and credibility.

As I have argued in the past, no empire in history is impractical - the moment it stopped being practical - i.e. a horse nomad empire who's advantage is suddenly rendered obsolete - it is dead. This is why the Klingon Empire can never be too impractical an entity - and the suggestion of practicality is important in a show that is trying to argue that knowledge and science are superior to ignorance:

Rationality wins wars. Armies are some of the most 'hard rationalist' of organizations. They will make their soldiers do things that might not be glamorous, if it improves the chances of winning and survival. A soldier might have to eat local insect wildlife, in order to survive in conditions where supply lines are poor. Religious dietary requirements and other romantic notions fly right out of the window. They wear practical fabrics, carry practical weapons, and don't do things for glamour. If a Klingon commander tells troops to 'cook' their gagh in order to release more useful protein for digestion, they will have to do it. If they are issued standard bars of field rations, that contain some unpalatable formula, they must eat them.



Roman troops were able to construct an 18 kilometer long 4 meter high double-wall around Alesia in three weeks, in order to starve the Gauls out. But that is why they were the greatest fighting force of their age - the ability to dig a latrine is more important than yelling loud and looking fashionable in empire building.
​

Star Trek IS a show about how logic is universal, and science is superior to ignorance. So it cannot stray too far from suggestions of practicality, less it turns into something it isn't.

 

Except that people do violence for the fun of it.

As far as can be determined, we do lots of things for no good, strategic reason. Behavior which is not actively problematic for the transmission of genes is neither "good' nor "bad" in that it represents no definite evolutionary advantages or disadvantages.

So, anthropologists and sociologists get to argue a lot about whether a particular behavior or tendency represents a survival strategy and there's rarely enough evidence to do more than construct a hypothesis.

 

Save for all the times it strayed from practicality. As much as I appreciate the logic dissertation, and the fact the Klingons would have similar needs to human beings, I also will argue that in TV production logic is not the first on the list for designers. It isn't always first on the list for fashion either. It's designed to be visual dynamic, setting the Klingons (or other alien races) apart from the humans, the same way human fashion sets humans apart from contemporary humans.

As much as I would like to explore a Star Trek world that unfolds from pure logic, that's not the way the original Klingon species unfolded and has been informed since TMP. As with anything, their design is not purely logical, or purely practical any more than it is purely fantastical. It is a combination of both the fantasy warrior species, with proud traditions, feudal organization, bladed weaponry and unusual armor/apparel.

The idea that Klingons must conform to evolutionary logic is at best simplistic, and at worst, a misunderstanding of how Star Trek was produced.

 

Well, that was definitely an interesting read.

Related back to the discussion earlier...it's quite obvious the suits can be worn safely by humanoids. The extras aren't in an emergency room, they are on a dinner break.

So...they are perfectly safe spikes, decorative even. If you like that sort of thing. They are meant to look intimidating probably.

 

It might be used to make them look a little bit bigger than they are as well.

 

One cannot deny that Steven Pinker's thesis is a social theory, and therefore less solid than a physical science, but if you look at what he is suggesting, and the evidence that backs it up, it makes sense - even a person that seems to commit violence for fun, is either 1). over-riding their biology with their rational mind for some reason, 2). an unfit example of a human, or 3). seeking either the first or third Hobbsian reason for violence - but putting on a front of enjoying it for it's own sake. The Klingon Empire in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country is explicitly in a Hobbsian trap with the United Federation of Planets, with the Genesis Device serving a similar role to the atom bomb in the other films.

But most importantly I think, a race that was just biologically predestined to great violence would be less interesting as a source of drama and characterization - there is a reason people write most Warhammer 40,000 books from the perspective of the Imperium and not the Orks or Tyranids - an enemy that has motives we can understand is far more interesting than a faceless horde.

 

P.S. just to elucidate - studying murders in a sample from the USA he found that the vast majority were crimes of passion by someone the victim knew well, a minority were in robberies gone wrong and the like - if pure sadism was a motive it must have made up an extremely small portion - with the chances of violent death already being very low. TV of course presents artisan murderers everywhere, but they probably hardly ever occur. From casualty rates of like 60% in the paleolithic, there are like 1.5 murders per 100,000 people in western Europe and like 70% of those are close relatives in arguments.

 

I'm not saying that the Klingons are predestined to great violence, only that they are more like the honor bound warrior society, and involve several traditions that would be considered dangerous, though not outside the realm of the human experience (Tea party, painstick right of passage, among others).

Again, it isn't that Klingon society doesn't operate within some logic, but some of it is internal, based upon the fictional history as well as the writers perspectives. So, I appreciate the societal evolution constructs, but not all of it will follow that logical path.