The look on the face of the guy holding the beer is priceless. I won’t even mention his pants…
I’d have to review it myself, but it seems to me a natural progression - forty, four hundred, four thousand. The key element is running, apparently.
This site has the exchange as:
KANG: No, they wish to question us, learn our strength, our plans. They never will.
MARA: We are forty against four hundred.
KLINGON: Four thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man.
I assume the site author’s nerdly credentials are self-evident.
Interesting…
However, if you go to Season Two’s “Journey to Babel,” you will also see that whoever wrote the transcript changed Spock’s (or rather, Nimoy’s) glaringly obvious “cyrogenic” to the correct “cryogenic.”
In other words, I have reason to believe that the transcripts are not 100% accurate. Since Space has suspended showing TOS for the moment, perhaps someone with the third season’s DVD can settle the matter here?
There does seem to be a natural progression, but it’s hardly relevant to the correctness of the quote.
Memory Alpha has it as “four thousand throats,” but it’s funny - I remember it as “a thousand throats”: Kang's battle cruiser personnel | Memory Alpha | Fandom
In “Samaritan snare” Picard tells the story of how he got his artificial heart. He was stabbed through the heart during a bar fight he started. In the story he tells that after he was stabbed he, strangely, started laughing.
In the sixth season episode “Tapestry” Picard’s artificial heart is about to cause his death. Q appears and gives Picard a choice to avoid his faith. Picard chooses to never have been stabbed. Q send him into his younger self in that moment, and Picard stands down from the fight.
The results are bad. Without his brush with death, Picard never becomes the man he is. He begs Q for another chance. Q, again, sends Picard back to that moment. Picard initiates the fight and gets stabbed through the heart. He looks down at knife through his chest, and starts laughing. His life back on track.
Also, the stress wasn’t on “four thousand.” The line was delivered like this: “A thousand throats can be cut in a single night … by a running man.”
Sounds like a classic case of a piece of misinformation being printed once and then becoming a sacred cow. I want to hear it verified off the original soundtrack before I accept it as correct.
100 quatloos on the nerd in black!
I feel that way about the “Vulcans never lie” misconception.
I tried but failed to find that scene on YouTube.
It’s there … but translated into Klingon with English subtitles. :rolleyes:
The subtitles also say 4,000, but that doesn’t mean anything. They could have been written using the same piece of misinformation.
Your agonizer, Mister Heir.
Vulcans do lie, when it suits them. For instance, whenever they say “Vulcans don’t lie”. But it’s in their genuine best interest to not lie very often, because it’s really great for them if the rest of the galaxy believes they never lie, and lying too much would give up the game.
“Day of the Dove” is a strange episode, for a couple of reasons:
(a) Mara is a member of the Klingon crew, even though it was established in “The Trouble with Tribbles” that Klingons did not bother themselves with “nonessentials,” i.e., women on board ship (Koloth traced a female figure in the air as he said this, making his meaning pretty clear).*
(b) Mara is appalled at the thought of Federation “atrocities” and “death camps,” things the Klingons almost certainly had in abundance and undoubtedly would have been proud of.
*Though I suppose they could have made an exception for the captain’s wife.
That is, when it’s the logical thing to do. The same holds true for killing, even though Vulcans “prize peace” above all else.
Sometimes the quickest way to peace is to kill, it is only logical.
Ah, thanks. Nice catch.
Wouldn’t you know it? I left it back in my quarters. Sorry.