Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone except me for the longest time, but after reading a list over at McSweeney’s I had a revelation. Although I’ve never much cared for the original Star Trek series — or any Trek for that matter — I was always aware of its barely clothed subtext regarding racial harmony and peace among the people of Earth.

Something that never clicked in my mind though was the purpose of the Klingons. Now, suddenly, I get it. The Klingons are animalistic and brutal-seeming in their glorification of battle, to the exclusion of most other personality traits. Duh, Chris. They are the id, the bestial nature of humanity’s war-like tendencies personified in a race against whom we constantly struggle. We must fight against our own ferocious natures to progress “where no man has gone before.”

And all this time I thought they were humanoid to save on costuming. I don’t watch enough of any Trek show to see similar man-vs.-himself struggles in the canon, though I do see a sort of opposite struggle going on in the Vulcan attitude toward logic.

I won’t mentally disagree next time I hear someone say that Gene Roddenberry was a genius.