Has the Augment Virus actually been referred to in Discovery and we didn't notice?

[cooleddie74]

My headcanon is that the Disco Klingons are augmented augments. They're descended from victims of the Klingon augment virus, but DNA from another species was used to overwrite the human DNA in the augment virus, perhaps an archaic Klingon species (like Earth's Neanderthals or Homo erectus), or even another living species on Qo'nos that's a close genetic match to the Klingons (like how a chimpanzee is a close match to a human). Or maybe a little bit of both.

Again, that's just my headcanon. I'm NOT trying to suggest that that's what actually happened, or was the writers' intent.

A failed attempt to correct the Augment Virus, even, that went too far in some cases. Overkill. In the attempt to regain their Klingon heritage they overshot their goals.

 

[Timo]

Or then they just love to play with themselves. Losing the forehead ridges was embarrassing, but gaining a few nostrils was an acceptable price to pay for an experiment otherwise gone horribly right. And we (fortunately) missed the early 24th century experiments with all those green hues and the whole horns thing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ralphis]

A failed attempt to correct the Augment Virus, even, that went too far in some cases. Overkill. In the attempt to regain their Klingon heritage they overshot their goals.

That's what I mean. The human augment DNA was too strong for the regular Klingon DNA, so they looked at DNA from other species with a close match to Klingon DNA to try to rid the augment DNA, and the Disco Klingons were the result.

But it's all just my stupid headcanon.

If any show or movie does the Klingons again, it might just be best to take the Picard/Romulan approach by blending the aesthetics of the various eras and keeping the explanation vague.

 

[cooleddie74]

It would have been fantastic to have a couple of lines of dialogue along those lines.

Kol: "My grandfather was branded by the Earther genes. It took two generations for my House to begin to regain its pride and erase the mark of our enemies. Painful genetic treatments. Wounded honor."

Voq: "And we are still trying to erase it."

 

[Timo]

DSC is now cursed with the inability to go back and fix such things, though. Even if we meet a Klingon now, he's unlikely to be that bitter about his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Although with Klingons, you never know.

But the first two seasons were dream assignments for somebody intent on inserting meaningful, fanwanking or just plain cutesy stuff outside the main plot material: the jarring course changes turned a hefty percentage of the episodes and plot arcs into filler. I can so hear just about any random Klingon character speaking those lines.

Timo Saloniemi