Star Trek (ENT): Affliction

[clearspira]

To everybody arguing about STD and their Klingons: didn't someone from the show announce recently that next season of STD will bring changes to the Klingon prosthetics?

If it comes with a valid reasoning then great. But as I have said before, if they did this huge canon break in a sequel or separate universe as opposed to a prequel then few would have cared. As it is, this stinks of producers and writers that just did not care about continuity and then choked into their morning coffee with surprise once viewing figures began to drop.

[Calzaki]

Surprised there wasn't greater criticism of a a viral outbreak causing extreme genetic changes in its victims included but not limited to the dissolving of bone.

[Zoinksberg]

Dissolving bone due to a genetic change caused by a virus isn't even in the top 10 strangest medical things in Trek. The amount of things that have happened to various crew members that they have recovered completely from, this one barely registered to me. And welcome to the forum Calzaki!

[Madner Kami]

May I introduce you to Osteaclasts? These are cells produced by your body whose only job it is, to dissolve bone. A genetic alteration could easily put them into overdrive. Conversely, there are actually degenerative diseases which are caused by genetic flaws, which can and do result in changes to the skeletal structure of the body. You are probably making the error of assuming, that a skeleton is a never changing part of your organism.

[PerrySimm]

Sure, it's possible... maybe just at the outer edge of possible. In most cases, a virus that will cause CGI effects to break out on your forehead is going to be fatal.

Just think for a second how much energy that would take! It would cook the brain! Of course, if they were putting engine coolant into the patient's bloodstream, maybe they really were thinking ahead!

[Robovski]

These episodes with the Augments I think were some of the best episodes, exploring a section of Trekdom that really wasn't given alot of love except on DS9. I like that the Klingon bits too though I also find it funny they are pretty much based on a make-up change.

Though I do wonder how this meshes with STD. This is a Prequel that show the Klingons looking like....well Klingons before turning into damn dirty humans that the Klingons from TOS look like. But STD has Klingons that look like generic ugly nasty nosed aliens. How does that work with canon?

I bet 20 years from now we are going to get another series that has a retcon for that, maybe the STD Klingons developed another augment virus (maybe code named Discovery) to fix the last one but wound up using too much Klingon and it spread throughout the Empire by sexual contact. Essentially the virus made them more like the damn dirty mutant Worf from Genesis, certainly look more similar to that version of a Klingon then any other.

Given how Discovery doesn't mesh with cannon at all, this being only one minor example. I prefer to believe it takes place in another universe.

Considering the show is deep into Mirror universe stuff, it's way more palatable and plausible as alternate reality Trek.

[cloudkitt]

I was always a fan of the Augment storyline, my favorite stuff Enterprise ever did. As retcons go, it's a fairly innocuous one that's more fun than Earth-shattering. And it does fit with Worf's evasion in DS9, after all. (and it means O'brien's and Bashir's guesses were dead on, haha)


Off-topic question: is there a story behind the way ships are referred to over the series. TOS, TNG, and DS9 all use the definite article: The Enterprise, The Defiant. VOY and ENT drop this, "Contact Voyager," "Back on Enterprise."
I guess "The Voyager" does sound a little awkward, but I can't tell if it really does, or if it's just because they never say it. But why does ENT stay with this convention? I always found in interesting that Chuck seems to favor this style as well.

[Zoinksberg]

I can't say why Voyager does it, though Tom does refer to it as "The Voyager" once in Parallax. Yes, it sounds super awkward. A lot of reasons they might have done it but if I were to pick one I think it sounds too much like "The Voyage", which is a bit close to ST:IV's title.

Enterprise, however, was very intentionally done to differentiate itself. "The" Enterprise comes with a registry of NCC-1701. This was just "An" Enterprise and not part of the lineage. Continuity totally preserved

[SuccubusYuri]

Well, there isn't exactly a hard and fast rule, even in the British Navy, about when to use definite articles for ships.

My guess is that, the more we need to impart something is a ship, the more often we put the definite article in front of it (Han Solo's frequent use of "the Falcon" being a good example). It's also easier on the ear when a ship is named for a literal person (like it is still grammatically correct to say "Ronald Reagan is taking on water" but it might take a second without context to figure out what the fuck someone is talking about). My guess is that Berman just didn't like how it sounded, really, and felt it unnecessary.

My own head canon would be, it feels natural to various characters because it might be a contraction of "the Federation starship X" which is the more common, colloquial way they identify the ships, which wouldn't apply to the NX Enterprise, meaning only Voyager is the outlier here (of course half the crew is, theoretically, not Starfleet as well). And it's easy to write Voyager off as not having happened at all xD

[Linkara]

Actually, those ideas people were suggesting concerning Discovery COULD fit into canon.

Think about it - this Augment virus was started because of human DNA mixing with Klingon DNA, resulting not just in a potential change in behavior, but of full-on appearance. Given how T'Kuvma and his branch were all about genetic purity and trying to be the most Klingon of Klingon, I could totally see the Empire fragmenting as a result of the virus spreading and enough Klingons going to war with one another over how pure or not pure they are, with the leadership of all the houses trying to keep themselves pure and even overcompensating for it in their appearances.

However, many Klingons still look the way they do and after what L'Ress pulls, more human-looking Klingons come out of the woodwork to take the Empire for themselves thanks to the chaos her little blackmail causes - or that the human-looking Klingons, to prove they're still Klingon, become the frontline soldiers of the war and expansion effort while the leadership in all their "purity" remain hidden.