Star Trek Writer Deep Dives Into Discovery Season 5’s Villains
Star Trek Writer Deep Dives Into Discovery Season 5’s Villains
It ain't easy being Breen.
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Our thinking was the Breen as sort of a natural species were bifurcated in the sense that they can be both gelatinous and solid in that sense. But the solid state takes an intense amount of focus and concentration in order to maintain. [...] And then as they developed the refrigeration suits, they lost the need for that both evolutionarily and culturally, and it became a sort of cultural anathema. You don’t show people your solid face because that means you’re weak. It means you’re stupid. It means you’re slow.
I still don't get it. It doesn't really make sense to me. If it takes a lot of focus and concentration to maintain the solid form, why is one considered weak for doing so?
Breen ship! We’ve never seen the inside
Technically we've seen a holding cell inside a Breen ship in DS9.
I still don’t get it. It doesn’t really make sense to me. If it takes a lot of focus and concentration to maintain the solid form, why is one considered weak for doing so?
They seem to be saying that the solid form is a sort of defense mechanism, like a snail shell or an opossum playing dead (or maybe an environmental one, like that it prevents the jelly form from losing too much moisture in a warm environment). It's difficult to maintain, and implies you're in a position of retreat or weakness. Now that the Breen presumably have no predators and no environmental necessity for the solid form, it's seen as a cultural taboo.
While I'm a little bummed the Breen aren't the space-arctic-wolves I imagined them as during DS9, I think it's an interesting idea. I do always like when they describe how cultural practices in a particular species comes from how they exist in the ecosystem of their home planet, like the Kelpiens (Saru and the Kelpiens being for me, Disco's most successful addition to Trek canon).