JJ Abrams Says Yes to Klingons in New Star Trek, No to Telling You a Damn Thing About Khan

While shootin' the shit with MTV, JJ Abrams confirmed that one of the more complex villains in the Star Trek canon, the Klingons, would be making an adversarial appearance in Star Trek into Darkness. You remember Star Trek into Darkness, don't you? It's that movie that everyone was excited about and will clearly be overshadowed by Star Wars related questions in every interview Abrams gives surrounding the film's release. For those who watch DVD extras, you'll know that there's a deleted scene featuring a Klingon prison planet (most likely Rura Penthe) and a masked Klingon guard in 2009's Star Trek. And again, any image featuring Klingons that has been released from the Abrams-verse has only shown the warrior race with their faces covered.

Which begs the question: Which version of the Klingon will be featured? In TOS, due to lack of budget and creativity, Klingons were depicted by white actors in shoe polish blackface and orientalized features making them twice as racist as any other Star Trek villain (but still not quite as racist as most aliens from the Star Wars prequels). The race was retconned in the feature films and given prominent forehead ridges, a change that was given a shoe-horned explanation in Enterprise by having the Klingons experimenting with the same serum that turned Khan and his followers into super humans during the Eugenics Wars and accidentally creating a virus that altered their features and their DNA to pass on the malformed foreheads. 

But since Abrams' Star Trek still exists during the run of the TOS (albeit a separate timeline), it would seem... logical...that his Klingons might resemble the earlier incarnation more so than the more well known image of them from the films and all the TV series that have followed suit. But like most anything else dealing with Into Darkness we'll probably have no choice but to wait until the film actually comes out to know anything about what's going on.

But isn't that kind of great too? Remember when you didn't know every single itty bitty detail about a movie before it came out? When there was some actual surprise and awe when you watched a movie for the first time. Especially a blockbuster of this size? ButstillIjustwanttoknowifit'sKhangoddamnit!!