"Tell me, do they still sing songs of the Great Tribble Hunt?" - Odo to Worf
TOS s2e15 "The Trouble with Tribbles"
It's any wonder there wasn't a second Klingon/Federation major conflict prior to the Dominion's presence after Scotty transported the mass of tribbles from the Enterprise onto the outgoing Bird of Prey right before warping away. But hey, gotta end it on a light-hearted moment.
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There was a fan theory that the reason the Klingons look so different between TOS and TNG is that the wide spread infestation of tribbles caused massive mutations on the Klingon home world.
I thought that was canon.
It wouldn't be the first time the creators adopted a fan theory and made it canon.
A fan told Arthur C. Clarke that the ratio of the sides of the 2001 monolith was 1 : 4 : 9, the squares of the first three numbers. Clarke liked it so much he added it to his next book.
Furthermore. Originally the monolith was supposed to be a glowing gem. They'd drawn dozens of storyboards with the gem, but they couldn't make it look right. The covered all the gems in the storyboards with black tape, a visual TBD. Someone looked at the black rectangles and had an idea...
First time I ever saw that put forward was in this fun follow up to Trials and Tribble-Ations:
Never saw that. Thanks.
Well, it certainly explains why they don't talk about it with outsiders.
Although I personally think the idea that the TOS klingon were actually human/klingon hybrids stationed in places that would interact with humans in order to have a force of "disposable" hybrids you don't consider fully klingon and therefore not worth worrying about, as well as obfuscate their true looks to the humans they interact with.
I also like the thought that they just really like genome modification and have done so multiple times over the centuries on a species-wide level to make themselves harder to kill, and they aren't concerned much with appearance.
So maybe they modified themselves in order to deal with tribbles!
It was the Tribble of Caerbannog. A foul, cruel and bad tempered floofball! It killed six ships with its big and pointy teeth! GRrrrrr!
Obviously the canon explanation is now that it was all caused by the Augment Virus. However, what they SHOULD have done for the explanation was say that the Klingon Empire is an EMPIRE, composed of many planets across vast regions of space, and that the Empire therefore included many conquered species, all of whom shared the demonym "Klingon" in the interests of imperial unity. TOS Klingons could then have been explained as one of the conquered species who embraced their new Klingon culture wholeheartedly, and the redesigned Kelvin Timeline Klingons could have shared that same explanation.
Acceptance of diversity could then be said to be why Klingons and the Federation get along so well, since they both share the same vision of galactic harmony, but the Klingons simply believe this can only be achieved through conquest.
I love it.
Back in the day, Ho Chi Minh was legally a Frenchman, not a citizen of Vietnam.
The old Roman Empire, just like the new Klingon Empire. I like it.