Star Trek Confirms The Craziest Theory About Klingon Sex?
Star Trek: Discovery has confirmed that Klingon males do have two penises.
Star Trek has often pondered deep thoughts on the nature of reality, ethics, causality, and basically every branch of philosophy. However, fans of the franchise have only wanted to know one thing: does a male Klingon have two penises (and also, if Data and the Borg Queen had sex)? Fortunately, the season 1 finale of the recently canceled Star Trek: Discovery definitively answered that in a surprisingly graphic way, by briefly showing a Klingon urinating against a wall and producing two streams.
It is now established as canon that in Star Trek, the warlike species known as the Klingon do indeed have two male reproductive organs per individual. However, in answering one question, Star Trek actually just raises further, perhaps more troubling questions about the nature of sex in the Klingon race, involving fertilization, positioning, and childbirth, but we shall leave those for another time and bolder spirits.
According to Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippold, two writers on Star Trek: Discovery, the brief image of a urinating Klingon in the episode “Will You Take My Hand” was indeed a confirmation of the long-held fan theory (per The Alpha Quadrant Podcast). Kim specifically said “According to canon, Klingons have two organs, they have two of everything, right…so we had this debate. When we say two of everything, does that include the penis?” Apparently, the writers’ room managed to come to a firm agreement on this particular knotty subject.
While Star Trek has made this particular aspect of Klingon physiology canonical, it is actually not quite as clear-cut as Bo Yeon Kim makes it out to be. The idea of Klingons having two organs was first introduced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Ethics” (season 5, episode 16); Worf (Michael Dorn) is severely injured in a workplace accident, which leads to the explanation that the combative, conflict-oriented species has an “over-designed” anatomy, with physical redundancies to compensate for injuries. The Star Trek episode also delves into the controversial subject of ritual suicide and voluntary euthanasia, but more importantly, led to the idea of a two-penis Klingon.
However, Star Trek has addressed this Klingon issue in multiple contradictory ways over the years and in various series. For example, it sometimes seems to be stated that Klingons have two hearts and at other times, that they have one heart with eight chambers (compared to a human’s four). Similarly, the redundant Klingon physiology known as brak’lul apparently has a backup nervous system, which allows for recovery from severe injury, but also, three lungs, extra stomachs, and so forth.
One might posit that a system evolved for efficient recovery would develop methods of sustainability within a single organ rather than multiple ones doing the same thing, but we’ll leave that to the Beverly Crushers of the world to research.
As it is, Star Trek has defined yet another tricky issue about the Klingon race, much as it has had to do with the question of why exactly they look so different from decade to decade. No doubt, Star Trek fans will be completely satisfied with this discovery and have no future debates about it.
