By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 36 seconds ago
Even the most casual fans of Star Trek know that Klingons are all about honor, fighting, and dying in the most glorious way possible. Of course, once you watch enough episodes, you learn that these aliens don’t reserve their violence for the battlefield. They are also into violently kinky sex, the kind that regularly sent Dax and Worf to the infirmary on Deep Space Nine.
As you might imagine, the Klingons weren’t always envisioned as being total freaks in bed; that concept wasn’t introduced until Star Trek: The Next Generation. Interestingly, we owe this weird bit of alien trivia to one man: Cliff Bole, the prolific director whom the Bolians were named after. He helmed the episode “The Emissary,” and when Worf hooked up with his future baby mama, K’Ehleyr, the director improvised by having the two draw blood because he thought that Klingons would be just as violent in bed as they are in battle.
Ridges, For Her Pleasure
For context, “The Emissary” (not to be confused with the DS9 episode of the same name) is an episode where the Enterprise encounters a group of Klingons who have been in suspended animation for the past 75 years. In an effort to make a diplomatic solution work, Captain Picard works with K’Ehler, a Federation ambassador. She is also a Klingon who has a history with Worf, and these two end up hooking up; she will later give birth to Alexander, a son Worf will have to raise on his own (until he doesn’t) after K’Ehleyr is brutally murdered.
When Star Trek: The Next Generation first started, the writers were a little iffy on Klingon society, including whether or not the Empire had become part of the Federation. Later, the show would benefit from Ronald Moore, The Original Series superfan who helped create some of the best Klingon episodes in the franchise. But Moore wouldn’t be hired until Season 3, so it was up to Season 2 director Cliff Bole to create several Klingon customs on the fly.
Blood, Bodies, And Bat’leths
According to Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, this included Klingon mating rituals. “I came up with that thing where [K’Ehleyr] digs into [Worf’s] hand and there’s all that blood,” Bole said. “I did that on the set. I was wondering what these people do, and I had the image of bones breaking and felt that’s what they do when they get it on.”
This quick improvisation became one of the key elements of Klingon lore, one that would be referenced in several other episodes. Previously, all Worf had really said about sex was that he wouldn’t be trying it on the ship because he thought Earth women were too fragile. This implied that he was worried about humans simply thinking he was too rough in bed. Thanks to “The Emissary,” we know that Worf is worried about fragile partners because Klingon mating is rougher than rough, regularly involving breaking bones and making your partner bleed.
50 Blades Of Grey
Just how rough Worf likes it is evidenced in Deep Space Nine once he begins a romantic relationship with Dax, and they hook up for the first time in “Looking For par’Mach in All the Wrong Places.” After getting injured during a bat’leth fight, they then haul their banged-up bodies to the infirmary, where a blushing Bashir quickly ascertains exactly how these two got their injuries. DS9 would frequently make allusions to their rough bedroom life, and Discovery eventually showed us just how violent Klingon coupling could be with a flashback scene where Ash Tyler/Voq may or may not have been assaulted by a very unclothed L’Rell.
Discovery was also the show that all but confirmed male Klingons have two genitals, which raised more than a few questions about Worf’s relationship with Troi and Dax. Obviously, the NuTrek show’s emphasis on Klingon hyper-aggressive mating builds on decades of lore for these angry aliens. But their well-earned reputation as the biggest freaks in the Quadrant all started with Cliff Bole, whose improvisation on the set of “The Emissary” left an unmistakable mark (kind of like what Worf does to women on the holodeck!) on Klingon society.
