A post in another thread that mentioned By Any Other name got me thinking: How would the stories be different if Star Trek was told from the perspective of the Klingons?
This is how I imagine a bunch of episodes. Feel free to “interpret” existing episodes and add to the list.
At the end of By Any Other Name, they hack the Kelvans to death with Bat’leths. Because they deserved it for killing T’Ompson. Then maybe they send an advanced fleet to Andromeda.
Friday’s Child The Klingons successfully defeat the federation and control the planet.
Court Martial. K’Spock challenges Karrghk for his gross incompetence and kills him and assumes command. It’s a very short episode. There is no faked F’nny death because no Klingon would do that. There is no honor.
The Changeling. The ship is destroyed by Nomad.
The Doomsday Machine The ship is destroyed by the planet killer (It has no HONOR!)
The Deadly Years The Klingons die of old age (a virus has no HONOR!)
The Lights of Zetar The crew is killed because you can’t hack sparkly energy beings to death with Bat’leths.
The Galileo Seven has the giant natives slaughtered but the shuttle doesn’t make it back and the dead Klingons had honorable deaths.
Mirror Mirror The parallel universe peaceful Klingons are invaded and conquered by our universe Klingons.
The Mark of Gideon The crew bombs cities to get their captain back, temporarily solving the planet’s overpopulation problem.
Balance of Terror is about the same, except there’s no racist Vulcan subplot. Even the wedding can stay in the story.
A Piece of the Action. The Klingons go back to a planet that was originally visited by a King scout ship 100 years ago. They find that the culture still has not recovered from the attack of the first visit, and they have essentially nothing to offer the Empire. They leave, but not before killing a few of the Iotians, who made the mistake of attacking the landing party.
For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky. The Klingon scout ship that discovers that Daran V is about to get clobbered by an asteroid calls all the available ships in the quadrant. They start a betting pool, wagering on how much destruction the collision will cause, and filming it for distribution across the Empire. It goes down in Klingon history as one of the most entertaining events in the modern age.
This list makes me think it would be funny to have a Trek series where, at the end of the first episode, the ship is destroyed and the crew dies … and then in the second episode, they’re back, with no explanation, until they die again at the end of the hour.
Basically it would be a show where the whole cast is Kenny from South Park.
Day of the Dove The Klingons honorably respect their alliance with the Enterprise to drive the alien presence away. As soon as it departs, that slaughter Kirk and the Enterprise crew because Klingons are a lot better with medieval weapons.
Charlie X Captain Karrghk blows up Charlie
The Squire of Gothos Since the atmosphere of Trelayne’s planet is poisonous, it’s of no value to the Klingons, so they simply blow it up
Dagger of the Mind Dr. Adams is proclaimed a hero of the Empire for inventing the neural neutralizer
That would be the Next Generation episode Cause and Effect, where the Enterprise blew up at the end of each act, then magically reappeared after the commercial. IIRC the prevailing fan consensus after the third destruction was “JUST DIE ALREADY!”
Encounter at Farpoint: Q calls the Klingons a dangerous, savage child race. Not one of the Klingons disagrees with him. They fire upon the space jelly that attacks Farpoint.
The Naked Now: Non-stop sex orgy; no different from any other episode in the series.
Code of Honor: The Klingons don’t bother reviving Yareena after her honorable death at the hands of Lieutenant Yar.
Then Trelane remakes it, and invites the Klingons down for dinner. They get along fabulously. He kills them all in sword fights, then gets called in for supper.
In the alternate version of The Trouble With Tribbles, Klingon scientists manage to infect harmless tribbles with a variant of the Klingon augment virus, turning them into ferocious predators with prominent forehead ridges. They infiltrate the Enterprise, breeding prolifically and eating crew members, until the lifeless ship careens into the void of space.
I’d like this as a tragedy. The ship and crew are destroyed at the end of every episode, and the next episode is a whole new ship and crew. Over the course of the season (it’s got to be an old school 25 to 30 episodes!) we see Starfleet gradually decimated by all the shit they’ve seen. Each new crew is more depressed, fearful, fatalistic, desperate than the last.
Season 2 involves an actual war. It turns out that Season 1 was just run-of-the-mill attrition from the usual slate of monsters, space anomalies, alien encounters and the like.
I ate his brain with a nice bloodwine and some gagh.
While I think the klingon mindset would prevent them from defeating the Zetarians or dealing with Sargon, and they’d just all happily fight to death in Arena, Spectre of the Gun, Bread and Circuses, and The Gamesters of Triskelion (and those would be good episodes from their perspective) I’m going to revisit the lonely Squire of Go’thoS.
If ST: The Klingons were really a show by and for Klingon audiences, I can see them having a similar ending. Instead of what we get in our TOS, the Klingon captain willingly battles T’relane. He gets killed several times, and brought back to life. T’relane is loving it. It’s everything he hoped for and more. He’s takes on the persona of Kathless and battles the entire ship, killing everyone over and over. He’s so thrilled he plans to go directly to Q’onoS and have loads of fun with his pets. It is at this point that T’relane’s parents show up, like in our episode, and take him in. They apologize to the Klingons which makes the Captain furious! He DEMANDS the right to battle T’relane. But his parents, wiser than mere mortals, prohibit it. They admonish the captain and note that he could never win, and there is no HONOR in suicide for no gain. It would be the death of the Empire, and no one would remember them. Their slave worlds would rejoice. The captain contemplates this, and realizes they are correct. For now, he accepts their decision, but vows that someday, they will return. The parents’ final word is, “we’ll be ready”.
There was a box set for star Trek the RPG that let you do that.
We had a Klingon game going, in the 80s.
I was Captain.
We dealt with the Planet Killer.
Arena.
The Klingons are tooling along when they encounter Kirk and the Gorn fighting. They make some Klingon pop-corn and settle back to watch the melee, placing bets willy-nilly. The Gorn wins but the Klingons torpedo the whole area and take off before the Metrons catch wind of it.