"Heart of Glory" Questions

[Nardpuncher]

It's been year since I've watched thsi season 1 ep, but there were two things I wonder if anyone can tell me.
When one of the Klingons orders food, it sounds like he says (funny that I still remember it to a degree) " oh-ma Kree Tee and piviots"
Also, when they escape, one of the security guards hits his combadge and I seem to remember him using his fullname with no rank, like " This is Ron Willis, force field six has been broken!"
So does anyone know the stuff they said?

 

[FalTorPan]

I haven't watched this episode in years, but I do know that the "Klingon" spoken in the episode was not consistent with the language that had been defined by Marc Okrand. It was gibberish instead of gibberish with fictional meaning. :-D

 

[Timo]

The transcripts at www.chakoteya.net have the security guy line as

"This is Ramos: the forcefield in Security Three has been broken."

I can understand how the latino name might sound like Ray Moss or Roy Moss or something like that...

Many other characters use just their surnames in formal communication, but some do it very seldom. In that same scene, Yar takes the time to say "Lieutenant Yar to bridge" - whereas we usually hear "Riker to bridge" and not "Commander Riker to bridge".

As for the "gibberish Klingon", there isn't much of that in this episode. Proper names such as the names of the foods and beverages Konmel orders from the replicator cannot be "wrong". They are merely missing from Okrand's dictionary, due to a lamentable lapse... Apart from proper names, the two lines of Klingon we hear in the episode are when Worf addresses Captain K'Nera and he responds. These words open some sort of a pleading ritual - and I think ritual words can never be "wrong", either. They are likely to be "old Klingon", after all, and a modern dictionary wouldn't recognize them, any more than today's English dictionaries acknowledge the language of Christian services (except when they are exceptionally comprehensive, which the Okrand dictionary clearly is not).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

When one of the Klingons orders food, it sounds like he says (funny that I still remember it to a degree) " oh-ma Kree Tee and piviots"
...
So does anyone know the stuff they said?

You're close. The transcript says "O'Mat gri tea and piviots."

 

[swaaye]

What I thought was curious about early TNG and the Klingons was how the alliance wasn't really mentioned at first. They weren't at war, but there wasn't talk of how they were buddy-buddy yet.

And I thought they were saying "Green Tea". I wonder what Klingons would do to green tea.....

Other quirks:

-they didn't really bother to look for or inquire about the crew of the freighter at any point, even after Riker had called it out as Telarian and the Klingons mention the captain.
-Picard gets all absorbed into Geordi's rainbow halo vision even though the freighter is going to blow in <5 minutes and his senior officers are on it. lol!
-the funky lego disruptor prop looks like it's ready to fall apart most of the time.
-one of a zillion appearances by Dennis Madalone!!! How many times does this guy get killed violently on Star Trek?
-Glass flooring around the reactor in engineering. Break through one level and you might just keep on going right to the bottom!!

Wow I remember a lot about this one!!

 

[Timo]

-they didn't really bother to look for or inquire about the crew of the freighter at any point, even after Riker had called it out as Telarian and the Klingons mention the captain.

Well, nowhere to look now that the freighter was space dust. And they probably didn't WANT to ask questions, because they had suspicions about the Klingons and knew that they wouldn't give honest answers anyway.

-Picard gets all absorbed into Geordi's rainbow halo vision even though the freighter is going to blow in <5 minutes and his senior officers are on it. lol!

He's probably used to (literal!) last-second rescues already...

-the funky lego disruptor prop looks like it's ready to fall apart most of the time.

Sort of fun that our villains would trust their lives on a device that indeed looks extremely unreliable. It wouldn't have been half that plausible if they had screwed together a good, solid man-with-the-golden-gun weapon; something like that would have shown up in the scanners.

-Glass flooring around the reactor in engineering. Break through one level and you might just keep on going right to the bottom!!

And the weird thing is that you can break through one level without as much as jumping up for extra speed. Just fall over, and it will crack.

I wonder if Korris managed to fire his toy gun after all, but at a low setting that only created a halo of glass-shattering radiation around the gun...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

It's also a little sad that after Korris and Konmel admitted their deception to Worf, he just agreed to show them around the ship rather than mentioning that to the command staff. I always liked the holdout disruptor myself, and it's kind of a pity we never saw it again.

 

[Timo]

In retrospect, it seems like Korris and Konmel's little movement won. Klingons in the following years carry on their usual Viking-style pillaging and blustering, but increasingly often with the addition of "and we do this because it's the honorable thing to do" or "Kahless himself said so".

Which in practice probably means return to the rule of powerful Chancellors, with the associated emphasis on propaganda and religion, as opposed to the more pragmatic rule of noble or otherwise powerful Houses under a weak Chancellor.

Since Worf has always been a "by the book" Klingon (after all, he learned being Klingon through a correspondence course!), one can see why he'd be all for Korris and Konmel and Kahless and wouldn't even dream of putting his Starfleet oath or the security of his vessel first. The episode would probably be the first time he had to confront the fact that the Empire wasn't really ruled by Kahlessian principles, and that the Kahlessians weren't all they were reputed to be, either...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[FormerLurker]

How do you explain K'mPec being Chancellor longer than anyone in history* then? The impression regarding K'mPec was that he had seized power long ago, and had held it by ruling with an iron fist, and a little luck.



*Presumably long enough that the TOS crew would have heard of him.

 

[Timo]

K'Mpec "ruling with an iron fist"? In his two appearances, he was described as a fat slob who allowed the Noble Houses to dictate (dishonorable) policy for him, and then to assassinate him. He was a successful ruler all right (although I haven't yet heard that the TOS heroes would have been familiar with him?), but apparently by virtue of being a relatively weak and harmless one...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Hober Mallow]

I never got the impression that a guy who was too slovenly to bother stopping himself from being slowly poisoned to death was all that active a leader.

 

[FormerLurker]

Two responses saying I'm wrong, without considering that fact that If he's ruled longer than anyone, maybe his ruling style has changed from when he started out. To refer to my previous post, the longer K'mPec ruled, the more luck he needed to do so. It was policy to challenge weak leaders, and remove them, yet no one had ever tried to remove K'mPec until Duras had him poisoned. Perhaps he had been ruling with an iron fist in the beginning, but had become more accomodating as time went on.

My primary question to you, Timo, is that you give the impression that many chancellors had been ruling between the two depicted eras, yet the only one ever mentioned is K'mPec. He isn't even called a chancellor. That title originated with Gorkon, and was then attributed to Gowron. K'mPec was the 'Supreme Commander.' If there are so many different rulers, how is K'mPec so distinctive that Picard knows the distinction? Can't it be that K'mPec was the young, brash Supreme Commander that Azetbur brought in to lead the Empire through the troubled times of the recovery from the destruction of Praxis? And he then took over to make certain the Empire continued to receive assistance from the Federation?

 

[Timo]

My argument here was that Kahlessian honor code was the one thing that was conspicuously absent from all of the known doings of K'Mpec, and conspicuously present in the propaganda of Gowron, his challenger and likely killer. K'Mpec specifically allowed the honor code to be trampled in the case of Mogh and Worf for political convenience, as he was portrayed as being too weak to dictate policy without the support or against the goals of major Houses.

..you give the impression that many chancellors had been ruling between the two depicted eras, yet the only one ever mentioned is K'mPec.

I'm not quite sure where I give that impression, but yes, I'm quite convinced that many other Chancellors ruled between Gorkon and K'Mpec. It doesn't take much to be the longest-ruling Chancellor in the Klingon Empire (a record K'Mpec explicitly holds); most probably rule for just a few years before their term in office is terminated. And while TNG originally spoke of Council Leaders and the Klingon Homeworld instead of Chancellors and Qo'noS, I'm also sure that the terms are fully interchangeable. Indeed, ENT establishes that Chancellor and Qo'noS were terms in use a hundred years before TOS already.

If there are so many different rulers, how is K'mPec so distinctive that Picard knows the distinction?

I don't understand the question. If there's only one leader, how can there ever be a "distinction"?

Absolutely nothing in the plots requires K'Mpec to be the only Chancellor in the time period where Picard has been alive, or in any other period for that matter. Nothing much requires him to even be particularly distinctive. It suffices that he's the one guy our heroes have to deal with; any Klingon leader would be surrounded with a foul cloud of superlatives during his reign.

It's a bit much to assume that K'Mpec would have ruled ever since Azetbuhr was thrown out of the Council Chambers for possessing too few testicles. Gorkon seemed like a strong leader, not compromised much by strong Houses, or else he couldn't have been talking peace all by himself. A series of "transitional" leaders might have led to the sort of reign K'Mpec seemed to be infamous for: honorless survival for survival's sake...

Timo Saloniemi