As a teenager, whenever I looked at the TV guide and saw that a Star Trek episode was about the Klingons, I would roll my eyes because those were some of my least favorite stories at the time. Finally, I turned on my favorite show to watch freaky space anomalies, not to listen to long ramblings about fame and glory.
I also found it nice whenever Captain Picard or Mister Spock clarified things in their scientific and calmly diplomatic manner – who wanted to see rowdy bullies? At least there were enough of them in the school yard. I also liked mysterious espionage stories about the devious, ambiguous Romulans better than anecdotes from the what-you-see-is-what-you-get planet Qo'noS (pronounced Kronos).
Yes, Klingon episodes were second series episodes for me. Despite this – and although the Romulans were introduced in Star Trek two and a half months before the Klingons – my cultural history of the antagonistic races in Star Trek must begin with Worf's brothers, because they are simply the most important, the most unavoidable. And who knows, I might end up liking them better these days than I did back in the 90s.
Source: Paramount
John Colicos as Kor – the very first Klingon in Star Trek
The year: 1967. The West and the Eastern Bloc had been fighting each other in the Cold War for over two decades. The USA has been involved in the anti-communist proxy war in Vietnam for about three years, the second such war after Korea in the 1950s. And this progressive science fiction television series called Star Trek, with which its creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to speak allegorically yet blatantly about the real world, was coming to the end of its first season.
The Klingons appeared for the first time in the episode Errand of Mercy (Battle for Organia). Their main representative here was Kor, played by John Colicos. Incidentally, it was he who ultimately influenced the look of the new antagonists, because while Gene Coon's script only said that they should look “oriental and hard-faced”, Colicos suggested the look with bronze skin and a mustache, which meant makeup. Mann Fred Phillips further developed the Genghis Khan style of the original series. (It definitely had traces of Fu Manchu-esque yellowfacing.)
The major powers, the Federation and the Klingon Empire, were on the brink of a major war, think the Cuban Missile Crisis, and shortly before the outbreak of hostilities both wanted to quickly seize control of the planet Organia, strategically very conveniently located and inhabited by a supposedly primitive farming people. In fact, the Klingons were a bit faster and got ahead of the Enterprise, so Kirk and Spock went on a secret mission to end the occupation.
The bottom line is a balanced story in which both sides did not cover each other with glory, because both Kirk and Kor had to rightly be accused of practicing flawless colonialism here, even if the Federation was perhaps more benign, because Kor was prone to supposed mass executions .
At the end of the story, both adversaries were the bad guys, because the Organians were actually disguised, highly developed energy beings who stopped all fighting and thus prevented the great war, turning it into a cold one. Not even Kirk could argue as the thwarted Kor thought of the great battle he would now miss: “Wouldn't that have been glorious?”
Source: Paramount
Captain Koloth (William Campbell, left) is not a fan of tribbles.
The ambivalence of Jim Kirk and the mischievousness of Kor made the Klingons more antagonists in the first episode than mustache-twirling villains who basically wanted the same thing as our heroes, only in a more nefarious way. Unusual food for thought for US television viewers, to whom anything similar to the Eastern Bloc was usually shown as pure horror.
In season 2, the Cold War was fought even more strategically. The comedy classic The Trouble with Tribbles (Do you know Tribbles?) was basically about which superpower developed the strategically important Sherman's Planet agriculturally and thus got a foot in the door there – and in Friday's Child (In the Name of Young Tiru) Both sides once again interfered in the fate of a people in the Bronze Age in order to claim the planet Capella IV.
There is no need for endless expanses as described in the opening credits – in the political structure of the original series, the confrontation between power blocs was often about scarcity of territory and resources. But while the Tribbles episode once again featured the mischievous Klingon Koloth, the Klingons in the original series were, with one exception, flat-out meanies.
This was also the case with their next appearance in the crisis-stricken year of 1968. A Private Little War (The First War) was about Neural, another Stone Age planet that was supposed to be given one color or another, like the board game Risk. Even though Neural's inhabitants were centuries, if not millennia, away from warp drive and the Prime Directive dictated non-interference and secrecy, Jim Kirk was well known among the Neurals because he had been stationed there many years before.
The pre-existing animosity between villagers and hill dwellers was a blatant parallel to Vietnam's internal conflict – as a result, the Federation and Klingons were engaged in a proxy war. Because after the Klingons first equipped their side with relatively advanced firearms, Kirk ultimately had no choice but to also deliver what he called “serpents to the Garden of Eden.”
Source: Paramount
Michael Ansara as Kang, the last serious Klingon in the original series
Anything but a happy ending, but rather the beginning of an arms race. Unnecessarily long fights and a spiral of violence awaited Neural. Such a direct criticism of “our own” war on the other side of the world actually made it surprising that nationally loyal decision-makers at the broadcaster and advertisers did not work against it, as they openly tried to do on other occasions.
The Season 3 episode The Enterprise Incident saw the first of many intermingling of Klingons and Romulans. Here, it was for simple production cost reasons that led to the models of Klingon ships being shown in an episode that was actually about Romulans.
When Scotty asked what was going on, he got the terse answer: “They're using Klingon designs now.” An ominous hint of a possible alliance between two antagonistic superpowers, the scope of which apparently didn't bother Jim Kirk much.
In Day of the Dove (Balance of Power), things were also somewhat succinct, because after the planets Capella IV and Neural had been hotly contested in season 2, the Enterprise received an emergency call from a colony triggered by a Klingon attack there never was. How could Kirk and Spock not know where their own colonies were and where they weren't?
In view of this, the previously important territories suddenly seemed completely unimportant – but this episode was anyway about a nasty energy being that incited hostilities between the Federation and the Klingons in order to feed on their brutal thought energy. In order to put the vampires to flight, a temporary peace was made at the end for the first time and Michael Ansara's Kang was the third and last truly charismatic Klingon to appear in the series.