What if Klingons had been a one-shot?

[Irishman]

The original D7 was indeed a spectacular and inspired piece of design in its own right. MJ completely avoided something that could have looked throwaway. It's amazing really considering the ship appeared but three times and all in TOS' third season ("Elaan Of Troyius," "Day Of The Dove" and "The Enterprise Incident."). It would reappear again a few times in TAS.

It was something that managed to look menacing as well as beautiful all at the same time. I think the D7 and the TMP K'tinga version are far superior designs to the movie and TNG era Klingon BoP as well as the subsequent TNG era Klingon designs.

The original Romulan warship from "Balance Of Terror" is also a nice design, but it doesn't resonate the same way. Mind you it serves its purpose in being something that definitely looks less adanced than the Enterprise design. But it wouldn't be until TNG that the Romulans would get an inspired design of their own.

MJ was able to in one design, capture and evoke the style of an alien race in a way that few inspired designers have been able to do since. When you look at his sketches for it, it was clear from the get-go that he had a really solid idea for what KDF warships would look like. The budget afforded TMP allowed them to flesh this out in a way that made them feel even more real. I agree that the future TNG/VOY/DS9 Klingon designs felt tepid in comparison. They weren't intimidating like the D7/K'Tinga was, and they certainly got away from what made the D7 feel alien.

Except for the BoP. For me, this TSFS design is right behind the D7/K'Tinga. Despite its small size, it's every bit as intimidating and dangerous as the D7. Its morphology and details feel right, to me.

And you're also right about the lackluster Romulan design for TOS. It looks like a design made to resemble a UFP/SF design for some clandestine mission. Too bad we never saw THAT mission.

Not to bring up "Enterprise" again, but they did kind of get the Romulan BoP right, if only with the benefit of hindsight, taking the best elements from the TNG-era D'Deridex (which is the inspired starship the Romulans deserved all along), coupling them with the morphology of the TOS BoP. Is it retconning? Absolutely. Does it work? Seamlessly well.

 

[Warped9]

The Romulan warships shown in ENT were really nice, but they totally didn't belong in the 22nd century. They looked like TMP era ships and would have fit seamlessly there. The problem with the ENT designs is they look far too advanced for the era and more advanced than the TOS Bop. A truly flawed and ill conceived creative choice on ENT's part.

 

[Christopher]

Well, it was TUC which gave us a Klingon (Chang) quoting Shakespeare back at us "in the original Klingon", kind of pulling a Chekov from the Original Series (TM). I've always wondered if that was the choice of the writers, director, or Christopher Plummer? Does anyone know? It certainly added some depth to the characterization of Klingons. It made me wonder if that was the sort of in-joke that Klingons made at humans' expense when there were none around. That kind of sounds like a cold-war type artifact, doesn't it? Making fun of the "other" side's art?

I think it probably came from Nicholas Meyer. He also had Khan attribute the proverb "Revenge is a dish best served cold" to the Klingons even though it's actually from a variety of Earth cultures and is probably best known from the book Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It seems to have been a running gag of Meyer's to have people attribute human sayings and literature to alien cultures.

The Romulan warships shown in ENT were really nice, but they totally didn't belong in the 22nd century. They looked like TMP era ships and would have fit seamlessly there. The problem with the ENT designs is they look far too advanced for the era and more advanced than the TOS Bop. A truly flawed and ill conceived creative choice on ENT's part.

There you're making the common mistake of confusing the difference in advancement of the filmmakers and their available special-effects techniques to a difference of advancement of "actual" future technology. Roddenberry himself would've been the first to approve of updating the look of TOS technology, because it wasn't his ideal of what future tech should look like, it was just the closest approximation he could manage with the limited technology and budget at his disposal at the time.

We know for a fact that Roddenberry wanted the update of the Klingons' makeup in TMP to be interpreted by fandom as how the Klingons had really looked all along. I'm sure he had the same intent where the Klingon ships were concerned -- that they'd always looked like this but they hadn't been seen with sufficient resolution in TOS. So he wouldn't have had a problem with 23rd- or 22nd-century Romulan designs being updated compared to what Wah Chang was able to come up with on a limited budget in 1966.

 

[Albertese]

...
The original outline for "Mirror, Mirror," in which the alternate timeline wasn't an evil-twin universe but just a different and less advanced one in some ways, introduced a new bad-guy race called the Tharn (a name ultimately used in the episode for the leader of a race of pacifists, ironically).
...

That was an interesting read! But I don't recall the term "Tharn" (which sounds suspiciously like 'Thern" from the E.R. Burrows John Carter books) being used in "Mirror, Mirror"... weren't the pacifist aliens in that show called the Halkins?

--Alex

 

[Warped9]

The Romulan warships shown in ENT were really nice, but they totally didn't belong in the 22nd century. They looked like TMP era ships and would have fit seamlessly there. The problem with the ENT designs is they look far too advanced for the era and more advanced than the TOS Bop. A truly flawed and ill conceived creative choice on ENT's part.

There you're making the common mistake of confusing the difference in advancement of the filmmakers and their available special-effects techniques to a difference of advancement of "actual" future technology. Roddenberry himself would've been the first to approve of updating the look of TOS technology, because it wasn't his ideal of what future tech should look like, it was just the closest approximation he could manage with the limited technology and budget at his disposal at the time.

We know for a fact that Roddenberry wanted the update of the Klingons' makeup in TMP to be interpreted by fandom as how the Klingons had really looked all along. I'm sure he had the same intent where the Klingon ships were concerned -- that they'd always looked like this but they hadn't been seen with sufficient resolution in TOS. So he wouldn't have had a problem with 23rd- or 22nd-century Romulan designs being updated compared to what Wah Chang was able to come up with on a limited budget in 1966.

I can understand intent, but that doesn't always translate to what is perceived by the audience. If they wanted to honour GR's intent with the TMP Klingons then years down the road they should never have tried to address the issue with their stupid virus (or whatever) explanation. The fan assumption that there were simply more than one race of Klingon was actually simpler, more elegant and more interesting.

The reason the ENT BoP looks the way it does is the same reason the NX-01 looks the way it does: cheap and lazy thinking. Rather than try to be more creative about the pre TOS era they simply chose to be derivative. But then, of course, that was perfectly in keeping with the ENT series as a whole. This has nothing to do with differences in production standards. It comes down to conceptual thinking, or in this case lack thereof.

And here's the stupid thing. Even if you keep the NX-01 design it could have served as a logical influence for the Romulans to later change their designs that would eventually be the TOS BoP. But I guess that just never occured to them.

 

[Irishman]

The Romulan warships shown in ENT were really nice, but they totally didn't belong in the 22nd century. They looked like TMP era ships and would have fit seamlessly there. The problem with the ENT designs is they look far too advanced for the era and more advanced than the TOS Bop. A truly flawed and ill conceived creative choice on ENT's part.

Or, taking a missed opportunity from TOS and fleshing it out to make it truly alien.

 

[Warped9]

The Romulan warships shown in ENT were really nice, but they totally didn't belong in the 22nd century. They looked like TMP era ships and would have fit seamlessly there. The problem with the ENT designs is they look far too advanced for the era and more advanced than the TOS Bop. A truly flawed and ill conceived creative choice on ENT's part.

Or, taking a missed opportunity from TOS and fleshing it out to make it truly alien.

There is subtext in "Balance Of Terror" (more fleshed out in the original story development) suggesting the BoP design was a design that "borrowed" heavily from Earth/Federation technology. Stiles even suggests possible spies aboard ship (or even in Starfleet). Wah Chang's BoP design does evoke this feeling. Of course, there's no reason an alien race couldn't come up with nacelles even though humans do as well. But that subtext is there in the episode, and that episode came first. It wasn't a failing of the TOS creators because they got what they set out to do.

The failing (as with a lot of other stuff in ENT) was basically ignoring what TOS did or at least tried to establish. Of course it has to be said that what was done on TOS wasn't done with the idea of how this might all fit in with some possible series decades in the future---how could any of them possibly know? But Star Trek wasn't forgotten after production ended and went on to further and ever greater popularity along with eventual spinoff films and series.

Now if someone wants to claim that their series (whether it be sequel or prequel) ties into the original source materiel then they should damn well look at and respect said materiel. And if they choose not to then it's fair game to call them on their lazy thinking.

I do not fault those who designed and built the ENT BoP models because they were only following someone else's direction and they did a fine job of it. But I do fault those who conceived of the 22nd century Romulan ships as we saw them because they chose to ignore a lot of subtext and actual stated references in TOS and particularly "Balance Of Terror" regarding the period a century before the Kirk era.

It's an old argument and there's no point to re-ignite it anew, but this is part of a huge conceptual failing on the part of ENT's creators and producers.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

If I'm going to get right down to the source of the problem I had with ENT Romulans, it was in the decision to encounter the Romulans at all, especially in the manner in which they did.

The whole treatment, of which the look was only one aspect, seemed geared for people who expected the Romulans to be as they were in TNG and DS9 and who had only a limited to non-existent knowledge of "Balance of Terror". Which is fine in a series with ever-dwindling ratings, if that's what floated their boat.

But it wasn't what I was looking for. Just the few nods here and there to TOS in the look and premise were hardly sufficient, and I found the ENT Romulan episodes really boring, to boot.

Which was part of the problem: the boredom, I mean, and not that being more faithful to TOS in my eyes could have improved the ratings, of course, though it would have piqued my interest more. The fact that the show was failing in its mission to maintain the TNG audience was simply evidence that them trying to appeal to TNG fans simply wasn't working.

The treatment in ENT of both the Klingons and Romulans was much too small-time. Goodness, after a brief fanboy moment of model building, the whole show opened with Old MacDonald's son shooting a Klingon with his space-age shotgun as he might a fox in his henhouse. And then, after that pie in our faces, we were off!

So, getting back on target, if the Klingons had been a one-shot, we would have been spared the utter lameness of the opening of "Broken Bow".

 

[Warped9]

If I'm going to get right down to the source of the problem I had with ENT Romulans, it was in the decision to encounter the Romulans at all, especially in the manner in which they did.

The whole treatment, of which the look was only one aspect, seemed geared for people who expected the Romulans to be as they were in TNG and DS9 and who had only a limited to non-existent knowledge of "Balance of Terror". Which is fine in a series with ever-dwindling ratings, if that's what floated their boat.

But it wasn't what I was looking for. Just the few nods here and there to TOS in the look and premise were hardly sufficient, and I found the ENT Romulan episodes really boring, to boot.

Which was part of the problem: the boredom, I mean, and not that being more faithful to TOS in my eyes could have improved the ratings, of course, though it would have piqued my interest more. The fact that the show was failing in its mission to maintain the TNG audience was simply evidence that them trying to appeal to TNG fans simply wasn't working.

The treatment in ENT of both the Klingons and Romulans was much too small-time. Goodness, after a brief fanboy moment of model building, the whole show opened with Old MacDonald's son shooting a Klingon with his space-age shotgun as he might a fox in his henhouse. And then, after that pie in our faces, we were off!

So, getting back on target, if the Klingons had been a one-shot, we would have been spared the utter lameness of the opening of "Broken Bow".

Fair point.

 

[Darkwing]

Regarding the "original Klingon", I thought that was a deliberate riff on Vonda McIntyre's "Enterprise, the first advneture" novel, where a hack actor who 'reimagines' Shakespeare in modern language is generally reviled by the humans, but when he puts on his act for the Klingons, they find it inspiring.

 

[Christopher]

It was certainly not deliberate. It's very rare for any Trek film or TV producers to have any awareness of what happens in the novels. Making TV or film is incredibly time-consuming and leaves little time for reading, and when they do get the time, they'd probably prefer to read anything but more Star Trek.

In fact, I thought the TUC version interpreted things in rather the opposite way from McIntyre's. Her version was a joke at the Klingons' expense, basically portraying them as uncultured hicks who found doggerel brilliant. Meyer's Klingons were more intelligent and literate and had a more genuine appreciation for Shakespeare.

 

[Commishsleer]

The Klingon Shakespeare statement in TUC is a joke.
It wasn't meant to be taken seriously and fed into Star Trek canon.
In fact I think it was a test to see how nerdy Star Trek fans are and it looks like we failed

 

[Christopher]

I don't think it was a joke, not on the character's part, anyway. It seemed more like a depiction of the way some cultures and governments consciously rewrite history to take credit for things that came from other cultures. Like the way Renaissance artists rendered Jesus Christ as European rather than Middle Eastern. Or the way many European history texts have attributed movable type to Gutenberg rather than the Koreans who invented it first. And I bet the North Korean regime has rewritten history to give the members of the Kim dynasty credit for any number of things created by other cultures.

 

[E-DUB]

Movable Type-I thought it was "inwented in Russia"!

If the Klingons had just been a one-shot, we might have seen other races fill the gap, the Orions for one were quite underused. Two appearances in TOS, and not seen again until ENT.

 

[Warped9]

Reading the book These Are The Voyages and the development of "Errand Of Mercy." The Klingons (created by Gene Coon) proved to be popular after that episode. So perhaps it was inevitable that they'd be used again in 2nd and 3rd season. On that note everyone was very happy with John Colicos' performance as Kor and wanted to have him back in subsequent episodes such as "The Trouble With Tribbles" and "A Private Little War" and "Friday's Child," but sadly Colicos was unavailable each time.

 

[Christopher]

The Orions for one were quite underused. Two appearances in TOS, and not seen again until ENT.

You're forgetting that they appeared twice in the animated series, in "The Time Trap" and "The Pirates of Orion" (although for some reason it was pronounced "oar-ee-awn" there, and they were colored blue instead of green). Not to mention "Yesteryear"'s reference to the dawn of Orion civilization. And DS9 frequently mentioned the Orion Syndicate and Orion slave girls, even if no actual Orions were seen.

 

[Darkwing]

Yes, TUC put the opposite spin on the Shakespeare gag, but ISTR some mention somewhere that there was a suggestion of the idea from the novel, and it got seized upon for the movie. Of course, with the internet, all kinds of junk appears, so it might have been a fanwank recreation of events as they didn't transpire.

 

[Christopher]

Yes, TUC put the opposite spin on the Shakespeare gag, but ISTR some mention somewhere that there was a suggestion of the idea from the novel, and it got seized upon for the movie. Of course, with the internet, all kinds of junk appears, so it might have been a fanwank recreation of events as they didn't transpire.

People mistake online speculation for fact all the time, as we saw just a couple of days ago with the latest Wonder Woman movie "rumor" (which was just one guy's overt conjecture that got misread).

 

[The Old Mixer]

The Klingons taking credit for Shakespeare might go back to a space/time anomaly that resulted in an infinite number of Klingons pounding away on typewriters....

 

[Greg Cox]

Well, it was TUC which gave us a Klingon (Chang) quoting Shakespeare back at us "in the original Klingon", kind of pulling a Chekov from the Original Series (TM). I've always wondered if that was the choice of the writers, director, or Christopher Plummer? Does anyone know? It certainly added some depth to the characterization of Klingons. It made me wonder if that was the sort of in-joke that Klingons made at humans' expense when there were none around. That kind of sounds like a cold-war type artifact, doesn't it? Making fun of the "other" side's art?

I think it probably came from Nicholas Meyer. He also had Khan attribute the proverb "Revenge is a dish best served cold" to the Klingons even though it's actually from a variety of Earth cultures and is probably best known from the book Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It seems to have been a running gag of Meyer's to have people attribute human sayings and literature to alien cultures.

Wait. You mean "Only Nixon could go to China" isn't really an old Vulcan proverb?