Discovery Ruins Star Trek’s Greatest Mystery 

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery effectively ruined this mystery by showing us that the Breen look a bit like you ordered Skrulls from Wish.com.

The Breen were first mentioned in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Loss,” and the series mentioned them on other occasions without showing them.

Eventually, these mysterious aliens showed up in the Deep Space Nine episode “Indiscretion,” and producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe revealed this was an episode where the writers could finally stop teasing fans.

In previous eps, the Breen “were these people who were out there who were dangerous but were never really responsible for any of the trouble going on,” but these former red herrings served as indisputable villains in an episode where they use prisoners as slave labor.

Long before Star Trek: Discovery revisited the Breen, Deep Space Nine ended up making them major franchise antagonists.

Though these aliens had previously remained politically neutral in most matters, they ended up joining the Dominion and fighting the Federation during the Dominion War. Their ability to quickly drain enemy shields helped establish them as a major foe (heck, the Breen managed to destroy Sisko’s USS Defiant), and these aliens even destroyed parts of San Francisco in a bold attack on Earth.

However, even with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine going all-in on the Breen, we never saw what they looked like under their masks. That decision goes back to their onscreen debut in “Indiscretion:” as showrunner Ira Steven Behr later admitted, “I wasn’t really in the mood to come up with a new alien race,” so he decided “Let’s just put them in costume because they normally live in the cold.”

Perhaps because of Behr’s idea, characters frequently speculated that the Breen had a very cold homeworld, with Captain Sisko once definitively stating, “If anyone knows how to keep things cold, it’s the Breen.” Later, however, the Vorta villain Weyoun claimed that the aliens’ homeworld is very temperate. The fifth season of Star Trek: Discovery seemingly verifies Weyoun’s assertion about the Breen because we see the human courier Moll and the Breen L’ak comfortably walking around without masks or temperature-regulating gear on a Breen station.

Speaking of masks, Star Trek: Discovery revealed via flashback that L’ak is a Breen, and I can’t help but feel that seeing these guys without masks is one of the most disappointing franchise reveals.

The aliens technically have two faces (more on this in a minute), but the one that L’ak wears most of the time looks like a knockoff version of Marvel’s Skrulls. After waiting decades to see what these guys look like, it’s sad to find out they just look like crappier versions of another franchise’s villains.

I thought the Star Trek: Discovery face reveal of the Breen couldn’t get any worse, but the show then revealed these aliens have a second face (what they consider their true face) that is deeper green and appears as a translucent fluid.

This helps to give L’ak some character development (keeping his solid face is a form of rebellion) and might retroactively explain why the Breen later sided with the Dominion, a group led by shapeshifters who hate “solids.” At the same time, the “true” face of these guys has the consistency and coloration of lime Jell-O) and I just cannot take any of this seriously.

At the end of the day, Star Trek: Discovery may have ruined the Breen, but we should have known better than to expect anything more.

After all, these were aliens who had a disappointing design (basically ripping off Leia’s Boushh disguise from Star Wars) from the very beginning. Now, the only way for the franchise to redeem these villains is to give someone like the Primarch a cool tagline while his true face is out.

Fingers crossed he says something like “there’s always room for Jell-O” after he sneaks aboard the Discovery.