Pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on previous threads, but the old FASA Star Trek Role Playing game had the bone-in Klingons as Imperial Klingons, and the boneless Klingons were a result of genetic engineering–the Klingons had a tactic when they ran into other starfaring races to engineer half-Klingon, half-the other race, to help with infiltration, helping to “think like the enemy,” etc.
And since they didn’t understand the concept of “Federation” initially and just saw it as a “Human Empire,” they made human fusions.
I think somewhere in the supplements covering the movies, they mentioned that the human fusions started to become politically powerful enough that they became a serious threat to the Imperial Klingons, and so they were eventually suppressed.
I don’t know that the timelines really can support genetic engineering and breeding on that kind of scale, but it would put a sinister turn on Worf’s statement–they don’t speak of it, because it would be the creation and then genocide of an entire sub-race.
The fourth season of *Enterprise *is unreliable, given that it canonically is a fictionalization Will Riker was reading on his Kindle. And I say that as an Enterprise fan.
If it was FMV (full motion video), it sounds like the creatively named Star Trek: Klingon. I got it from an abandonware site a while back, but haven’t ever played it beyond the beginning. (It came with Star Trek: Borg, a game my college roommate gave me, but I had scratched the disks.)
It also came with an encyclopedia meant to teach you about Klingon culture, as well as give you some basic Klingon language lessons.
Yeah, I get that they lampshaded it for a joke, but that’s really where the trouble began, because certain fans took that literally.
All TV portrayals of rubber-forehead aliens are makeup jobs, and serve a storytelling function; they are not actual literal portrayals of historical events. They entirely recast a character on DS9, too; do fans have an “explanation” for that?
Yeah… It’s called “natural selection.” The meanest and most ruthless members rise to the top, while the weak and meek are either enslaved or transformed into willing drones only too happy to further their leaders’ plans.
“Where does the one go when he can no longer be a Klingon?”
-----------------------------------The Final Reflection, John M. Ford. One of the few *Star Trek *novels I have bothered to keep around over the years. Still well worth reading.
I was under the impression it was more of a cultural thing; if you weren’t Chinese, you eventually BECAME Chinese. Or was there more ethnic cleansing involved?
Well, reading about it, there is not much about ancient practices of ethnic cleansing, though there is a listing about an ancient Chinese ruler wiping out a minority called the Wu Hu people. Currently there are many accounts of the current Chinese government committing genocide against the people of Tibet and also a minority called the Uygar people. Mass murder, forced resettlement, and breaking up families and relocating the women to distant areas so that they are forced to marry Han Chinese are all cited as methods currently being employed. I would say that the intermarrying thing would be a case of integrating people into the Han Chinese, however, the violence and force of it makes it disagreeable, if not as disagreeable as mass murder and forcible relocations.
But there is not enough information from a cursory Google search for me to say it’s the only technique the Han have used historically.
C’mon, you know fandom has an explanation for everything.
Mind you, not always any more sensible, but if the show team eventually does cough one up, sometimes the fanon looks pretty good by comparison.
Of course, there is no reason the official production team HAS to throw something in to explain stuff that was beside the point. Part of the charm in the earlier years, to me, was that we were left to fill in the blanks whenever some Noodle Incident or another in the characters’ or the universe’s past was mentioned. Or could just move on with the plot at hand and not get hung up on it.
What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter. One actor was unavailable, and they used another. Or they recast and went a different direction. Or they redesigned anything from the uniforms to an entire alien species between seasons, let alone series!
It doesn’t matter, because it’s imperfect storytelling, not a documentary. You may as well fanwank about supposed “in-universe” existence of incidental music.
Quark’s mother Ishka was played by Andrea Martin in her first appearance and by Cecily Adams thereafter. IIRC this was because Martin couldn’t tolerate the prosthetic makeup.