The Klingon commander is sitting at his desk, hands over his face. According to Coon’s script, as quoted in Marc Cushman’s These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One, When he orders the deaths of thousands of Organians, he has some regrets. Kor, it seems, has similar feelings, although he’s not exactly two-dimensional, either. His hatred of the Klingons has blinded him to every other consideration. Through the course of the Star Trek episode, it becomes obvious that Kirk, despite his protestations to the contrary, wants the war to continue. While public support for the offensive was overwhelmingly positive, many felt that there was a better alternative to war: peace. The United States was in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviets and the Americans had recently been drawn into a ground war in North Vietnam. Gene Coon’s idea when writing the script was to create an alien race that was analogous to the Communist Party. As with so many episodes of Trek, the story was a thinly-veiled attempt to comment on the state of the real world. “Errand of Mercy” involves a struggle between the Federation, represented by Captain Kirk (William Shatner), and the Klingons, represented by Captain Kor (John Colicos), over the cooperation of a neutral alien race, Organians. It is an errand of mercy that brings me here. “Blessed opportunities of exercising, if they will, mercy. “There is one quality which all men have, in common with the angels,” opines the philanthropic Charles Cheeryble in Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Star Trek has a long history of quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, but the title of the first episode to feature the Klingons was taken from neither of those sources, instead borrowing from Charles Dickens. But when did the idea for the race first take root, and how has their relationship with the Federation evolved over the course of 55 years? “Errand of Mercy” and the History That Inspired It The latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds examines the fallout from the Klingons’ war with the Federation.
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