Klingons appearance - history repeats itself

[Damian]

A lot of people did.

Or do you mean in-universe?

I know I asked. My first Star Trek exposure was actually the movies so it was sort of reverse for me when I saw Klingons in the original series. My reaction was like Bashir and O'Brien's--"Those are Klingons???". By first original series Klingon was in Friday's Child, so not only no ridges but he was going bald too. I was like "That's not a Klingon".

So I always wondered about the Klingon appearance change. Some novels back in the day gave some suggestions--most usually revolving around genetics. I was one of the ones that was thrilled when Enterprise finally gave a canon reason for the change. It seems fans are pretty divided on the question. Some could care less about a reason and choose to ignore any differences. I'm in the other camp.

 

[Kor]

The augment virus is the "midi-chlorians" of the Trek franchise.

Kor

 

[eschaton]

Did anybody ask why TOS Klingons morphed into TMP and beyond Klingons? And yet we got an answer (one that I'm perfectly happy without, especially since they retconned Koloth, Kor, and Kang's appearance. Why did that happen?)

The outside-show reason is Blood Oath was in Season 2 of DS9. Trials and Tribble-ations was in Season 5. They didn't realize they were going to have to depict Klingons in the TOS-style at that point.

Of course, Trials and Tribble-ations was just meant to be a jokey comedy episode - a love letter to TOS. The writers missed the obvious thing to do when the DS9 crew went back in time - just have Worf be shown as looking like a TOS Klingon and have no one remark upon it. Instead the writers (apparently basically Moore) came up with the idea of not having an answer at all - in part to lampshade through Miles and Julian's discussion all of the idiotic fan theories which had developed.

 

[CaptGrumpy]

^Sorry, it was meant as a facetious question.
I lived through that time and don't recall the furor or angst that this has brought on for DSC. Yes, they asked why, and for the most part, the answer "because we can make them look more alien" was accepted. Right down to where Kor, Koloth, and Kang were retconned to look like the TNG Klingons. I surely didn't need an explanation.

In fact the explanation given was, IMHO, crap and unnecessary.

 

[Greg Cox]

^Sorry, it was meant as a facetious question.
I lived through that time and don't recall the furor or angst that this has brought on for DSC. Yes, they asked why, and for the most part, the answer "because we can make them look more alien" was accepted. Right down to where Kor, Koloth, and Kang were retconned to look like the TNG Klingons. I surely didn't need an explanation.
.

That's pretty much my memory, too. Sure, people had fun coming up with fan theories to "explain" the change, as fans do. It was something to gab about over pizza after seeing the movie and in the years to come. But, personally, I don't recall folks getting all that bent out of shape about it, let alone fretting about whether the new movie was "really" in the same timeline as the TV show. The real-world explanation--"Oh, they've upgraded the Klingon makeup because it's not 1966 anymore and this is a big-budget movie."--was good enough for most of us.

At least in my little corner of fandom, back before the internet, nobody rejected or denounced the movie just because the Klingons had gotten a makeover.

 

[The Mighty Monkey of Mim]

Worf had hair. According to the designers, Disco Klingon ridges are sensory thingies that go all down their heads and spines and they don't grow hair.

Behind the scenes, designers and actors hold all sorts of internal theories and conceptions and inspirations regarding their designs and characters, but whether any of it actually becomes an element of the story depends on the writers and editors (under the supervision and approval of the producers). Unless and/or until we hear this "naturally evolutionarily bald because of the sensory pits" bit actually referred to on the show, it's no different than this was until "Genesis" (TNG) more or less confirmed it:

"In my mind, all the bumps on the forehead and so forth are vestigial remains of a people that evolved like crustaceans, like lobsters, who have their skeleton on the outside of their bodies...and over the millions of years, they've lost that complete outside skeleton, but now retain only vestiges of it."
-Robert Fletcher on TMP Klingon redesign

And FWIW, it seems that at some point in the development of DSC, the baldness was intended to be a feature specific to T'Kuvma's "25th Klingon house that we hadn’t previously heard of" and linked to their "puritan" practices:

"It’s a 200-year-old ship. This is a group of Klingons who’ve gone back to a puritan way of life. They look very different: they wear armour that’s 200 years old and they don’t have any hair..."
-Ted Sullivan, via SFX, via TrekMovie

That particular angle obviously didn't carry over into the final product (where all depicted Klingons are bald, with no indication of why). It needn't be the only one that doesn't. It's all totally open to further interpretation and revision. It will be interesting to see what direction they choose going forward. (Should they decide they have to choose at all, that is.)

It's a schizophrenic production.

I don't think it's all that uncommon for a great many mutually-exclusive ideas to get thrown around by various people during the course of a production, and for bits and pieces of many of them to get cherry-picked and incorporated along the way, but for other parts to be left on both the figurative and literal cutting room floor. Why are all the Romulans in ST'09 bald and tattooed? The Countdown tie-in comic, supposedly drawing upon material written and approved by the filmmakers, suggested the tattoos are a group mourning ritual, but the film itself shows Nero's wife wearing the same tattoos in life!

The Daleks rarely change appearance actually, and never that dramatically. The first real change in Daleks doesn’t happen until the late eighties, and it’s very minor, and is because of story reasons.

Are you talking about the outside or the inside? The reptilian claw in The Daleks (1963) didn't really look like it would feel at home on the foamy blobs in The Power Of The Daleks (1966), and so on. The idea that the casings were occupied by living creatures remained consistent, but the look of those creatures themselves wasn't at all standardized until the 2005 revival.

Again, there's a difference between just changing something visually, and doing something which conflicts with prior continuity. The issue isn't that Klingons look different - the issue is there were numerous within-continuity references to the Klingons having hair. Therefore, saying all Klingons everywhere are bald, and have always been bald, sort of invalidates all the stories told before, from the asides in TNG and DS9 episodes all the way to an entire two-part story arc in ENT.

I agree, but again, that hasn't been said in the show. It's one interpretation of something that was said behind the scenes by a makeup designer.

I can see that. But the whole "augment virus" thing is canonical, which means that even if we can presume that "normal" TNG-era Klingons really look like they do in DIS, there should be human-looking Klingons out there as well.

Which is one reason why the whole weird surgical procedure to make Ash into Voq was so insane. There was something within canon which would allow Voq to get to within 90% of passing for a human. Why they chose to ignore it I will never understand.

I'm not sure they did ignore it. It always seemed to me it was alluded to when L'Rell spoke of House MóKai "exposing" Voq to things he never dreamed possible in "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For The Lamb's Cry" (DSC). How do we know they didn't start by infecting him with the virus, and then the surgery was just to replace/condense/rearrange all the internal stuff that wasn't affected by that step?

But a real-world explanation is never really a substitute for an in-story explanation.

In the first Trill appearance, they were a one-off species that looked basically human with a minor forehead appliance (basically TNG's standard-issue approach). When Dax was made a regular on DS9, the look was changed to make her basically human with facial spots. In both cases, the dominant look remains "basically human."

These two statements seem rather at odds with each other, no?

And the inevitable reality is, like DW and other long-running popular franchises that seek to sustain themselves by catering both to fervently dedicated fanbases and casual general audiences, Trek is at this point as much a meta-fiction as it is a pure fiction. Best to just accept and embrace that, IMO. It's only natural.

Oh, c'mon, you can't be serious. How are bald egg-shaped heads and an extra set of nostrils in any sense a logical extrapolation of previous Klingon designs?

Seriously, how are they not? All of these features were already present by 2013 in Into Darkness, and were simply further elaborated upon and refined in DSC:

The double nostrils are an extrapolation of the ever-increasingly intricate nose prosthetics of DS9-era Klingons like Martok and Gowron:

Females having particularly elongated heads compared to males is an extrapolation of the upswept hairstyles of Mara, Vixis, Azetbur, et al...

And really, Klingons of both sexes have given the impression of having somewhat enlarged/elongated skulls compared to humans ever since the 1979 makeup update. Why? Because in addition to building up the forehead area, there is also a bald cap over the whole head to cover the actor's real hair. Then the fake hair goes on top of that, set far enough back to frame and show off the forehead piece. I can without any major difficulty imagine that if Worf's head were shaven, it would resemble T'Kuvma's in shape and size:

-MMoM

 

[fireproof78]

At least in my little corner of fandom, back before the internet, nobody rejected or denounced the movie just because the Klingons had gotten a makeover.

Not true fans then

 

[jaime]

Behind the scenes, designers and actors hold all sorts of internal theories and conceptions and inspirations regarding their designs and characters, but whether any of it actually becomes an element of the story depends on the writers and editors (under the supervision and approval of the producers). Unless and/or until we hear this "naturally evolutionarily bald because of the sensory pits" bit actually referred to on the show, it's no different than this was until "Genesis" (TNG) more or less confirmed it:

"In my mind, all the bumps on the forehead and so forth are vestigial remains of a people that evolved like crustaceans, like lobsters, who have their skeleton on the outside of their bodies...and over the millions of years, they've lost that complete outside skeleton, but now retain only vestiges of it."
-Robert Fletcher on TMP Klingon redesign

And FWIW, it seems that at some point in the development of DSC, the baldness was intended to be a feature specific to T'Kuvma's "25th Klingon house that we hadn’t previously heard of" and linked to their "puritan" practices:

"It’s a 200-year-old ship. This is a group of Klingons who’ve gone back to a puritan way of life. They look very different: they wear armour that’s 200 years old and they don’t have any hair..."
-Ted Sullivan, via SFX, via TrekMovie

That particular angle obviously didn't carry over into the final product (where all depicted Klingons are bald, with no indication of why). It needn't be the only one that doesn't. It's all totally open to further interpretation and revision. It will be interesting to see what direction they choose going forward. (Should they decide they have to choose at all, that is.)


I don't think it's all that uncommon for a great many mutually-exclusive ideas to get thrown around by various people during the course of a production, and for bits and pieces of many of them to get cherry-picked and incorporated along the way, but for other parts to be left on both the figurative and literal cutting room floor. Why are all the Romulans in ST'09 bald and tattooed? The Countdown tie-in comic, supposedly drawing upon material written and approved by the filmmakers, suggested the tattoos are a group mourning ritual, but the film itself shows Nero's wife wearing the same tattoos in life!


Are you talking about the outside or the inside? The reptilian claw in The Daleks (1963) didn't really look like it would feel at home on the foamy blobs in The Power Of The Daleks (1966), and so on. The idea that the casings were occupied by living creatures remained consistent, but the look of those creatures themselves wasn't at all standardized until the 2005 revival.


I agree, but again, that hasn't been said in the show. It's one interpretation of something that was said behind the scenes by a makeup designer.


I'm not sure they did ignore it. It always seemed to me it was alluded to when L'Rell spoke of House MóKai "exposing" Voq to things he never dreamed possible in "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For The Lamb's Cry" (DSC). How do we know they didn't start by infecting him with the virus, and then the surgery was just to replace/condense/rearrange all the internal stuff that wasn't affected by that step?



These two statements seem rather at odds with each other, no?

And the inevitable reality is, like DW and other long-running popular franchises that seek to sustain themselves by catering both to fervently dedicated fanbases and casual general audiences, Trek is at this point as much a meta-fiction as it is a pure fiction. Best to just accept and embrace that, IMO. It's only natural.


Seriously, how are they not? All of these features were already present by 2013 in Into Darkness, and were simply further elaborated upon and refined in DSC:

The double nostrils are an extrapolation of the ever-increasingly intricate nose prosthetics of DS9-era Klingons like Martok and Gowron:

Females having particularly elongated heads compared to males is an extrapolation of the upswept hairstyles of Mara, Vixis, Azetbur, et al...

And really, Klingons of both sexes have given the impression of having somewhat enlarged/elongated skulls compared to humans ever since the 1979 makeup update. Why? Because in addition to building up the forehead area, there is also a bald cap over the whole head to cover the actor's real hair. Then the fake hair goes on top of that, set far enough back to frame and show off the forehead piece. I can without any major difficulty imagine that if Worf's head were shaven, it would resemble T'Kuvma's in shape and size:

-MMoM

The Kaled mutant was always established to be continually mutating...sometimes ‘natural’ sometimes through manipulation, sometimes because it was a ‘grown’ slave race pilot, and is thus explained in lore. It’s the dichotomy at the heart of the Daleks...they are all about racial purity, but hate themselves because none of them are pure. They even start a civil (race) war between factions because the Imperial Daleks ‘aren’t pure in their blobbiness’ and the eighties aside from that story point have a pretty much set mutant from The Five Doctors onwards. This is aside from the fact that each and every Kaled may have mutated in different ways after the Thal/Dalek war, and it seems like it was a planet with two radically different phenotypes converging in a basically human form anyway...that’s why the Thals aren’t heavily mutated, and mutate in a different way. But I was talking about the outside (since the inside isn’t seen very often anyway.) which doesn’t really get much of a change until the Imperial faction turns up....everything prior to then is basically color palette, with minor structural additions in some stories. Your basic Dalek is your basic Dalek until pretty much Remembrance of the Daleks tbh, though maybe Revelation. And every change...even the Bronzed chaps...is pretty much covered by story explanation either explicitly or implicitly. Then Asylum shows all of them together, and makes it obvious in exactly the way people want of the Klingons in Discovery.

 

[fireproof78]

Then Asylum shows all of them together, and makes it obvious in exactly the way people want of the Klingons in Discovery.

So, if all the Klingons that ever Klingoned appeared together then there would be no complaints?

 

[Nerys Myk]

So, if all the Klingons that ever Klingoned appeared together then there would be no complaints?

In my younger days I would take that as a photoshop challenge.

 

[fireproof78]

In my younger days I would take that as a photoshop challenge.

It's ok. Let the young kids accept the challenge

 

[Dukhat]

So, if all the Klingons that ever Klingoned appeared together then there would be no complaints?

I'd probably complain, because I'd then want to know why in every single Klingon appearance for the last 50 years, there was never any intermingling with the other types.

 

[jaime]

So, if all the Klingons that ever Klingoned appeared together then there would be no complaints?

That’s more or less literally what people are asking for, and why the hopes pinned on the fleeting ponytail in the comic happened.
Personally, I think the real place it should have happened was when they showed the Klingon High Council. Would have done the job..one augment, one westmore era, one Page...job done.

 

[jaime]

I'd probably complain, because I'd then want to know why in every single Klingon appearance for the last 50 years, there was never any intermingling with the other types.

Baldies died out, and it was an interim augment side effect. Or they are just like the...damnit...pale andorians. Them. Of the Klingon species. Job done.

 

[Nerys Myk]

That’s more or less literally what people are asking for, and why the hopes pinned on the fleeting ponytail in the comic happened.
Personally, I think the real place it should have happened was when they showed the Klingon High Council. Would have done the job..one augment, one westmore era, one Page...job done.

The gotta have a TMP Klingon with their single ridge/spine.

 

[jaime]

The gotta have a TMP Klingon with their single ridge/spine.

I guess, but they blur with the westmore. Even so, a council made up of these solves every problem at a swoop, and they get to have a ‘death of the bald Klingon sub species’ plot for a bottle show in their hand whenever they need it.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I guess, but they blur with the westmore. Even so, a council made up of these solves every problem at a swoop, and they get to have a ‘death of the bald Klingon sub species’ plot for a bottle show in their hand whenever they need it.

To my eye the Westmore Klingons are distinct from the TOS movie Klingons. They tend to be cleaner than Westmore

 

[fireproof78]

That’s more or less literally what people are asking for, and why the hopes pinned on the fleeting ponytail in the comic happened.
Personally, I think the real place it should have happened was when they showed the Klingon High Council. Would have done the job..one augment, one westmore era, one Page...job done.

The general impression I've been taking from this discussion is that the redesign is unnecessary and should not have been done at all.

 

[Nerys Myk]

 

[jaime]

The general impression I've been taking from this discussion is that the redesign is unnecessary and should not have been done at all.

Yes, but since time travel is off the table as an option, this is the hope people have.
That or we can go all waterworld/alien res and they can spend millions cgi-ing in some hair or something before the home media release, and Re-up to the streams.