DEATH SHIP
Inside the House of T'Kuvma's space-Faring cathedral
The highlight of our tour of the set of Discovery is the interior of a Klingon “sarcophagus ship” – an enormous vessel (three times the size of its Federation counterparts) belonging to a 25th Klingon house that we hadn’t previously heard of.
Stunningly intricate, from the sculptural walls, which resemble something designed by Spanish architect Antoni gaudí, to the Klingon script written into the copper and bronze floors, it may be the most beautiful set ever to grace a Trek production. As we stroll round its stepped control deck – devoid of the usual consoles, because these Klingons interface with their computers directly, via ornate silver masks – and step into a circular antechamber in which torchbearers carry out religious ceremonies, the reverent silence you adopt while visiting a cathedral seems appropriate.
“It’s a 200-year-old ship,” explains our guide, co-executive producer ted Sullivan. “this is a group of Klingons who’ve gone back to a puritan way of life. they look very different: they wear armour that’s 200 years old and they don’t have any hair. their commander runs his Klingon house – the house of t’Kuvma – by the rules of Kahless, the Klingon messiah. And he calls himself the second coming of the Klingon messiah.”
As you can see from the concept art below, the exterior is every bit as distinctive as the interior, because the term “sarcophagus ship” is creepily literal.
“In the past, Klingons have not really cared about their dead – they’re not like marines,” Sullivan explains. “But these Klingons are. the outside of the ship is covered in thousands of coffins. Some are 300 years old, some are just two days old. Downstairs is the death room, where they prepare their dead; then the coffins get raised up and put on the outside.”
Quite unlike the U-boat-style Klingon craft we’re familiar with, the sarcophagus ship is emblematic of how the writers are trying to correct something that was seen as a failing of Trek’s previous depictions of alien races.
“If I have a complaint about how the Klingons have been presented before, it’s that they were so monochromatic,” Sullivan says. “Now when you see the different Klingon houses you see different political ideologies, religious ideologies, and that there’s internal conflict within the houses. each house has a different clothing style: some wear robes made of animals, some leather, others metal armour. And they all believe and feel different things – because they’re not a monochromatic species, they’re a fully developed culture.”