Klingons: Biology, Honor Code and Home World Explained

The Klingons were named after a policeman. Gene Roddenberry took the word from Lieutenant Wilbur Clingan, a colleague from his years in the Los Angeles Police Department, and the writer Gene L. Coon introduced the species in "Errand of Mercy," broadcast on March 23, 1967, as a militarist empire fighting the Federation over border worlds; the episode ends with a race of energy beings imposing a peace treaty on both sides, and the Klingons spent the rest of the original series as the Soviet Union with better boots. The films made them an empire with a home. The Undiscovered Country (1991), written as the Berlin Wall came down, blew up the moon Praxis, poisoned the atmosphere of Qo'noS, and forced the Klingons to a peace conference; the Khitomer Accords it produced are the Klingon-Federation alliance of every series since.

The Empire is a feudal monarchy that the later series drew in detail. A Chancellor rules from the High Council; the great houses, Mogh and Duras and Martok among them, feud over honour and succession; the Emperor's throne was empty for three centuries until a clone of the founder Kahless was placed on it as a figurehead in a Next Generation episode of 1993. Worf, played by Michael Dorn across two series and four films, is the franchise's longest-serving Klingon and its guide to what the Empire expects of a warrior, most of which he learned from books after being raised by humans.

A Klingon is built with spares. The species has redundant organs, a design the writers called brak'lul: two livers, an eight-chambered heart, a third lung, twenty-three ribs and a nervous system with backup pathways, all of which make a Klingon hard to kill and, as a Next Generation episode showed, hard to treat, since Federation medicine had never had to study one. The skin ranges from pale to dark brown, the hair is long and worn loose, the teeth are sharp, and the forehead carries a crest of bony ridges that runs back over the skull, different for each family. Klingon blood is red in the series and, in one film, pink, which the production chose to keep a battle scene's rating down.

The ridges are the franchise's most argued-about continuity problem. The 1967 Klingons had none, because the makeup budget did not run to them; The Motion Picture (1979) added them and the series that followed simply showed ridged Klingons as if they had always existed. A 1996 Deep Space Nine episode that visited the 1967 era had Worf refuse to explain the difference, and Enterprise finally did in 2005, in a two-part story where Klingon scientists trying to build their own genetically augmented warriors release a virus that flattens the foreheads of millions. Discovery (2017) gave the species hairless, elongated skulls and was met with enough complaint that its second season grew the hair back.

Honour is the species' operating system. A Klingon warrior seeks a good death in battle, since death in bed is a disgrace and Sto-vo-kor, the afterlife, admits only the honoured dead; a family's honour can be lost through one member's act and restored through another's, which is the engine of Worf's whole arc; and the ritual howl over a corpse, warning the dead that a warrior is coming, is the culture's one gentle gesture. Kahless the Unforgettable, who united the Empire fifteen centuries before the series and forged the first bat'leth from a lock of his hair dipped in lava, is its prophet, and his sayings are quoted the way Vulcans quote Surak. The culture drinks bloodwine, eats live gagh, sings opera and settles disputes with knives, and the series is aware that all of this is Viking saga and samurai film run through a starship.

The language is the part that escaped the screen. Marc Okrand, a linguist hired in 1984 to make the Klingon dialogue of Star Trek III consistent, built a full grammar around the words James Doohan had improvised for the 1979 film, choosing sounds and a word order rare in human languages so that it would seem alien; his 1985 Klingon Dictionary sold more than 300,000 copies, the Klingon Language Institute publishes a journal, and Okrand has since written an opera libretto and supervised translations of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and the Tao Te Ching. A language invented for a species that values fighting over speech is now the most successful constructed language since Esperanto.

The Klingon Bird of Prey carries the two technologies ufology most wants to be real. The cloaking device, which renders a ship invisible to eyes and sensors alike, entered the franchise with the Romulans in "Balance of Terror" (1966), reached the Klingons through a Romulan deal in 1968, and became their signature with the de-cloaking reveal of Star Trek III (1984); the Navy pilots of the 2004 Nimitz encounter described an object that vanished from radar and reappeared sixty miles away in seconds, and the UFO propulsion article covers what such reports claim and what the physics would require. Warp drive, the franchise's other gift, has a real cousin in the Alcubierre metric of 1994, which the warp drive science article explains along with the exotic matter it would need; NASA engineers have used the word "warp" in serious proposals, which no other television show can claim.

The Klingons also answer the Fermi paradox in the pessimistic direction. If the galaxy holds expansionist warrior empires, a young civilization that broadcasts its position is a target, and the silence of the sky is the sound of everyone else keeping quiet; the dark forest hypothesis makes this argument formally, and the Klingon Empire is what it fears. Star Trek's optimism is that the Klingons can be made allies, but it took a moon exploding to do it, and the Vulcans in the same universe are the reminder that the franchise had to invent both neighbours to make its point.