Trills - from bumpy foreheads to spots?

Maybe accidentally introduced to the Trill by Curzon. He liked to hang out with Klingons and after all he knew Kor, Kang and Koloth when they weren't bumpy.

 

Interesting hypothesis, and one that might just make it into my Star Trek "headcanon" (along with the idea of the 'ridged Trill' having been 'relegated' to the southern hemisphere of Trill - intentionally or otherwise - in order to try and keep the spread of the virus contained).

 

Actually after I made my other post. I was wondering, did Klingons still have smooth foreheads when Curzon knew them? The only specific things I recall about the Dax timeline at the moment is that the third host (a gymnast named Emony) was on Earth when McCoy was a medical student. And that Torias was injured in a shuttle accident, Dax was put in Joran (I'm assuming as an emergency resort). And then into Curzon who was host for many decades.

 

We don't know exactly when the Augment Virus petered out, only that it had happened by the 24th Century. We can assume that the Augment 'genome' remained prevalent in Klingon society throughout the 23rd Century, though, because we saw both Augments and non-Augments at different points during that period of time, which also leads one to the conclusion that, based on what we saw, there was some type of shift in the societal and military hierarchy of the Klingon Empire that led to the Augments losing their prominence to the non-Augments.

 

Well, the bumpy headed look for Klingon's started returning in 23rd century (movie era). But the ridges were IMO, much less prominent than the ones for the Klingons of the 24th century.

 

I remember now, it was a Sulu novel called Forged in Fire, I was reading about it on Memory Alpha.

 

Didn't we see their great-great-X-grandkids in Children of Time? OK they would have diluted features due to the parents marrying offspring of other crewmembers, but how did they look?

 

It seems this has been discussed previously... http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/worf-dax’s-descendants-in-the-episode-children-of-time.208774/

 

"It was because of the closely held secret of Trill symbiosis that the Trill people had sought neither apologies nor reparations from the Klingons when a strain of the Klingon-engineered Levodian flu retrovirus had mysteriously infected a Trill colony. Although the infection had not proven lethal, it had caused a mutation not only among the Trill who were exposed to it but also among their descendants. Although the high, rippled forehead manifested by the few who carried the mutated genes differed from the classic features of the Klingons, there were those, sadly, who considered it a dangerous oddity, a prejudice that had driven many with the trait into hiding on their own homeworld. Only now that a second generation of this small minority was beginning to come of age were the Trill with rippled foreheads being seen again, and accepted, in public."​

- Excelsior: Forged in Fire, Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels, 2007

 

That's why Humans are so awesome, they're like the white paint in art, compatible with everything.

 

Whatever the production reasons and fictional explanations, I think the spots were a good change. A funny forehead is the most common way to make a human actor look alien in Generation-era Trek, which is fine for the alien of the week, but a member of the main cast should stand out better. With the exception of the Klingons, all the funny forehead aliens just meld in my mind.

 

I've been head-canoning that the majority of Trill are spotted, and the forehead-Trill are a subspecies from one smaller, Australia-sized continent. Us Humans used to have different subspecies, such as the Neandertals, but we homosapiens are the only ones alive right now (unless Neandertals bread into us, but anyway).

I'm actually working on a fanfiction that will touch on the Trill makeup change, using my above stated head-canon. I'm calling them the Horvati Trill, after Michael Horvat, writer of the TNG episode "the Host." When Beverly met Odan, the Horvati Trill were in charge of the Trill government, and had different views on joining than the rest. The Horvati believed that the host should be subservient to the symbiont, and deliberately chose weaker-minded people to be hosts.

After blowing the secret of joining to the Enterprise, the Horvati lost control of the Trill government, and the Spotted now rule the Symbiossis Commission, with the values and priorities shown on "Deep Space Nine" ("host and symbiont must find a balance so one doesn't overpower the other...")

Horvati Trill still exist, but many non-Trill mistake them for another bumpy-forhead race, and don't realize that they're a subspecies of Trill. I don't know if this will ever come up in my story, but I do also head-canon that Verad's girlfriend Mareel (DS9 "Invasive Procedures") is a Horvati Trill. Her forehead isn't exactly like Odan's, but it's close enough, and Klingons have plenty of forehead variety.

On the subject of makeup changes, my past fanfics have also used the idea that Ktarian foreheads vary even more than Klingons', which is why Naomi Wildman is blessed with cute horns and spared the unfortunate facial features that Etanna Jol on TNG's "the Game" had.

 

Do they ever explain why in The Host, the humanoid was a slave and in DS9 the humanoid is an equal part in the blending?

 

It was suggested several times that the symbiont might overwhelm the host to some extent, as in Rejoined.

 

In Invasive Procedures it was the other way around. And differences between Ezri and Jadzia were pretty clear, Ezri didn’t buy into Klingon honor. Also it was well explored how you kept the strong emotions of the symbionts but not the personality.

 

I thought Seska’s child was proven to be 1/2 Kazon, not 1/2 human. The claim that it was Chakotay’s was just Seska mind f*cking Chakotay because reasons.

 

I recall in Invasive Procedures that the Trill bad guy wanted Jadzia's symbiont. But I can't remember what happened apart from seeing her laying on the bed and it about to be removed! Did he get it and if so does the creature now retain something of him as well after being returned and then rejoined with Jadzia?
JB