Klingon Scientists Get No Respect / Star Trek

Despite being the Trope Namers, Klingons are rarely portrayed this way. While they're a Proud Warrior Race, they recognize the value of different types of work to their society. Some Klingons make an effort to further avert this, or simply to incorporate the concepts that underlie Klingon society, by describing what they do in battle-like terms:

• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Day of the Dove", Kang introduces Mara as his "Science Officer" and it's clear that it's a respected position. Alas, she doesn't get to do much Science Officering during that episode.
• In one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, we heard a snippet of a Klingon science vessel's log where the captain spoke of winning battles against ignorance, and bringing home vast spoils in the form of new knowledge.
• In the DS9 episode "By Inferno's Light", Worf is forced to fight several Jem'Hadar in a row, all brutal hand-to-hand fights to the death. Bashir treats his injuries between each fight as best as he can, and Martok vows to write songs about both Worf's combat prowess and Bashir, "the healer who bound the warrior's wounds so he could fight again!"
• Worf's grandfather (also named Worf), seen in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, was a lawyer. Given the Common Law system of trials is known as the adversarial system, this parallels combat quite well. According to the Expanded Universe he gained numerous ranks and honors through his legal acumen. (He's a colonel in the film; novels mention he attained the rank of General through his legal kickassery.) The DS9 episode "Rules of Engagement" features another Klingon lawyer, Ch'Pok, who explicitly compares the court to a battlefield.
• Membership in the staff of a Klingon Great House also seems to convey a certain measure of prestige and respect; Worf's childhood nurse once reflects sadly, but a bit boastfully, on how she was a servant of a proud and strong family, and a Klingon woman vying for control over her house seems to take the advice of her majordomo seriously (he in turn being a social intermediary between her and others, and a general face for the House's standing).
• In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "The Augments", a Klingon doctor and medical researcher finds a cure for a bioweapon that is being used dishonorably by his superior. He considers himself being executed for delivering the cure to be equivalent to a warrior sacrificing himself to win a great battle. The idea seems to make him very happy.
• The video game Birth of the Federation indicates that Klingon blacksmiths are held in high regard, as without weapons, there is no war.
• DS9 features a Klingon restaurant. The owner appreciates a patron who'll fight him (verbally) to get the freshest ingredients. He'll also play the concertina at patrons. Aggressively.
• In John M. Ford's pre-TNG Star Trek novel The Final Reflection, the main character, a Klingon captain called Krenn, obviously respects his scientist first officer and describes Sciences as "an honourable career" to a young Spock while on a diplomatic mission to Earth. This is influenced by the Original Series Klingons' portrayal as a hostile authoritarian culture somewhat resembling the old USSR — and the USSR had its own successes in science.
• The Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch has a Klingon doctor who manages to avoid this by virtue of being big and scary even by Klingon standards. And it helps his husband is the Fleet Admiral.

In fact, it's common for humans in Star Trek to expect Klingons to act this way — often getting disabused of the notion:

• Deep Space Nine gave us a (villainous) Klingon Lawyer, who saw the court as his battlefield, and was apparently well regarded for it, as he tells Sisko when Sisko attempts to invoke the trope to rile him up.
• B'Elanna Torres, the half-Klingon main character on Star Trek: Voyager, is portrayed as being torn between her two cultures. As a Starfleet engineer, she is quite respected. Problem is that she is half-Klingon, and her focus as a Starfleet officer leads her to being dishonored for not being a Klingon ANYTHING. By not embracing her Klingon heritage and bloodline, she risks sending both herself and her mother to Gre'Thor (Klingon Hell). Sins of the Child, as they put it. So while she gets respect for being a Klingon Engineer by Starfleet, she gets no respect by Klingons for not being Klingon. But late in the series a Klingon captain tells her that as the ship's engineer she keeps it in battle ready condition, so every battle the ship has ever won is her victory.
• In the Day of Honour novel Treaty's Law, a farming planet was disputed between Klingon and human colonists. As part of the Organian Peace Treaty, it was agreed that the two groups would compete and whoever got the best harvest would win the planet. The humans were complacent because of this trope, assuming war-obsessed Klingons would be poor farmers, but it turns out that farmers are actually highly respected in Klingon society and they ended up winning.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Suspicions" has the Klingon scientist Kurak, mentioned in the page quote. Dr. Crusher theorizes that her status as "not a people person" is due to being mistreated and disrespected by her own people, though she admits that this is just a guess.
• In the first Captain's Table novel, Kirk says that the phrase "Klingon Research Facility" causes him to have the mental image of a Klingon warrior trying to split the atom with a bat'leth.

There are a couple of genuine examples, though, Depending on the Writer:

• The Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Judgment" has a Klingon Lawyer represent Captain Archer, and he laments how the Warrior Caste is bullying the rest of the population. He claims that this is a fairly recent trend. How recent exactly is unknown though, as his father was a teacher and his mother a biologist, and both were seemingly respected for it, but Klingons are long-lived. An implication given is that Klingon society goes through phases where they start leaning towards the easiest claim to fame; kill anything, strong or weak, and go brag about it at the bar. The lawyer resolves to be a voice to pull society back from that mindset at the end of the episode.
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Blood Oath", Kor, the first-ever Klingon from TOS's "Errand of Mercy", complains about how the old ways are dying, using the aforementioned Klingon restaurant serving aliens as a specific example.
• In one novel, a Klingon refugee mentions that he had served a tour of duty in the Klingon Navy as a drafted engineer, but all battle glory earned on his ship (against pirates, not the Federation) tended to be assigned to the officers and those who worked directly with the weapons systems. And G'Dath was a really good engineer — the book is about him inventing a drive system the size of a basketball so powerful that if it had been in use at the time of Star Trek: Voyager, they would have gotten back from the Delta Quadrant in a matter of hours. He was eventually forced to turn over the device and all the plans to the Organians to keep his drive from destabilizing the balance of power.
• In The IDIC Epidemic, a Klingon engineer is in a weird mix of "working for the Empire" and "exiled for being a mere nerd." He is naturally part of the cure for said epidemic.
• This comes up all the time in the Star Trek: Klingon Empire novel series. Among the crew of the IKS Gorkon, we find a doctor who is reviled by much of their society for recognizing that warriors without missing limbs and debilitating scars are more effective than those with them. Her suggestion of an artificial limb for her captain is outright refused (he's not a Borg, after all) and the compromise of an arm transplant from his dead father, while accepted by the captain, is looked at with horror by others. We also have the chief engineer (Kurak, referenced in the page quote), forced into the military by her family over her objections that designing better ships and weapons for the military is a better use of her talents. She's told that if she refuses to serve, she will be discommendated, which would ban her from working on those designs anyway. One novel also features another Klingon engineer, who's absolutely terrible at being a warrior (or tough in any way). However, he's a capable engineer, although the others sneer at his constant attempts at treating every engineering problem as a foe to be defeated.
• Star Trek Online:
  • There's a DOFF mission you can choose as part of the KDF where a medical member of your crew wants to get better medical equipment. Getting a Critical Success on it lets to having another officer wrestle him and put him out of action to shut him up.
  • In game, the chief engineer of the Bortasqu', Tarol, gripes that engineers and the like do all the hard work and the warriors get the credit. This is exemplified in "House Pegh" when B'Eler, a member of said house, is able to figure out a way to turn Omega molecules against the Iconian T'Ket, allowing Kahless to wound it. However, Kahless gets all of the credit, despite the fact that he spent the entire battle at that point not even scratching the Iconian and ended up getting needlessly killed.
• Invoked in Star Trek: Lower Decks where the main four play a Ferengi knockoff of Bat'leths & BiHnuchs where the goal is to die with honor. Boimler's character gets ambushed but doesn't die, instead being doomed to live out the rest of his life in shame as a dentist.

Non-Klingon alien species in the Star Trek universe, however, tend to play this trope straight much more often:

• The Ferengi:
  • Nog notes that "good" Ferengi go into business.
  • Ferengi scientist Dr. Reyga, from Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Suspicions", wished to be taken seriously by the scientific community and had to fight against his own people's mindset. He invents "Metaphasic shielding" and is then murdered. Initially, only Dr. Crusher and a small team of visiting alien scientists realize just how valuable his discovery was. Later, Dr. Crusher uses the same metaphasic shields to escape and later defeat the Borg... by hiding in the corona of a star.
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, another Ferengi, Rom, is horrible at business but a skilled engineer and handyman. Nog cites this as part of the reason he wants to join Starfleet. Seeing the scorn his father went through for not making a profit, despite his skill with machinery, gives Nog the inspiration to sacrifice some of his Ferengi beliefs as he strives towards, and succeeds at, becoming the first Ferengi in Starfleet. He may not make much profit for himself, but he learns to adapt his cultural upbringing (trying to get people what they want, by whatever means available) to the Federation's more open-minded ideology, becoming a talented quartermaster and creating unofficial channels when the official ones aren't fast enough to keep the ship he's serving aboard fully supplied and combat-ready. He does this so well that it suggests that had he chosen a more conventional career for a Ferengi, he would have been able to do that quite well. However, Starfleet is clearly his destiny: In one potential future, he's shown to be a respected captain. Nog's decision to pursue a Starfleet career also helps Rom realize his full potential; over the course of the series Rom grows a spine (he seems to be inspired by his son's example), and he eventually quits his job at the bar and becomes a station engineer, where he quickly gains respect from both the Bajorans and Starfleet for his skill. This eventually culminates in Rom succeeding Zek as the Grand Nagus of the Ferengi Alliance in the Grand Finale.
  • In Star Trek Online, Nog's example inspired a lot more Ferengi to join Starfleet. It almost got Ferenginar into the Federation, but certain groups didn't like that idea.
  • Averted with Leck from the DS9 episode "The Magnificent Ferengi", a Ferengi "Eliminator" (read: assassin-for-hire, he "eliminates competition") who's in it for the killing and combat, not the profit. Other Ferengi are too afraid of him to show any disrespect.
  • In a way, any Ferengi in military service, either in Starfleet, their own forces, or otherwise, would seem to be this. Almost by definition, money invested in a military is a profitless endeavor, a necessary sunk cost with little to no expected return. However, in the 19th century, the British Empire rose to prominence because they had the world's largest fleet ready and able to protect merchant ships and be used as a show of force for other nations to toe the line as far as trade was concerned. Commodore Perry's famous visit to Japan convinced a reclusive nation to open their markets to American trade. It would make sense for the Ferengi to have a strong military force on hand to make sure their own merchants were not harassed unduly. Plus if worse came to worst, it's helpful to remember that amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics, and who would know more about logistics than the Ferengi?
• Star Trek: Voyager has the Hirogen. In their culture, if you're not a hunter, you're nobody. In this case it's partially deconstructed by showing that it's directly detrimental to their society. The Hirogen used to be far more technologically advanced than they are now and are steadily devolving as a result of their nomadic, hunter-focused lifestyle. This zig-zags into partial reconstruction/justification when a later episode introduces a Hirogen holodeck technician, denounced by the others as "cowardly", who says he would've been a warrior had Voyager not given them holodeck technology three years ago, and strongly implies there was no such thing as a Hirogen technician before that.
• The Talarians in the Star Trek: Typhon Pact series have genders with very different social roles, and each is prone to underplaying the importance of the other gender's work. Given that politics and leadership is a male role, this is most notable and extreme when the male government neglects their people's feminine sphere, leading to unrest in one novella. The Gorn seem to have shades of the same problem; emphasizing the warrior component of their culture and disregarding the equally important non-military aspects. In their case, rather than a gender division it's a matter of caste; the Technologist caste appears to be looked down on by the warriors. As an interesting extension of the idea, the Political caste seems to have such fear of the warriors' tendency to promote themselves above other Gorn that they've deliberately undercut their power by giving them only a single breeding world.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • Starfleet itself is shown to have a bitter rivalry with unaffiliated or "Outpost" scientists as Starfleet calls them. The reason for this is that outpost scientists have a tendency to get killed by whatever they're researching, leading to Starfleet being called in to investigate, which Starfleet considers a thankless chore. The outpost scientists for their part consider Starfleet to be self-righteous hypocrites because their members die in droves a lot more often and because Starfleet picks fights with alien species despite claiming to be only interested in science and exploration. Several examples include:
    • in "Envoys" Boimler has a breakdown and goes on a tangent about becoming an outpost scientist. Mariner reacts as though Boimler is talking about committing suicide and tries to get him to come to his senses.
      Boimler: "I should just study bugs on a far-off planet, and then eventually get eaten, and no one will even know until they stumble upon my distress call, but it'll be way too late, and then they'll have to spend a bunch of time deciphering how things went wrong based on my final shaky video logs."
    • in "Mining the Mind's Mines", Commander Ransom voices his hatred for outpost scientists and the one that appears in the episode turns out to be trying to scam Starfleet into taking a listening device so he can sell Starfleet secrets and get funding for more research.
      Ransom: "Once again we're cleaning up a mess for a bunch of outpost scientists. You know why these guys are always getting eaten, dissapearing or getting eggs layed in their chests? Cause they're weirdos! You wanna explore space? Join Starfleet, go to the academy, but no, that's too much effort. They just gotta get their degrees in studying spores or whatever, then head out to the Quadrant and get devoured by a plant!
  • in "Reflections" Boimler and Mariner are harassed by two outpost scientists (as well as an Adventurer Archaeologist in the next booth over) while they're manning a Starfleet recruitment booth, leading to Boimler reaching his Rage Breaking Point and wreaking havoc. When Commander Ransom sees this, he lets Boimler know that while he's legally obligated to punish him for his outburst, he's also proud of him.
    Boimler: "Without Starfleet, none of you would exist! We don't want to protect you from the Klingons and the Borg; we just want to explore and study fucking quasars! But you know what? It's the right thing to do!"
• In the original series episode "Elaan of Troyius", Elaan (a member of an alien race not much seen elsewhere) contemptuously dismisses engineering as a "menial" occupation, much to Scotty's irritation.
• In the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Those Old Scientists", the Enterprise encounters an Orion ship and the crew automatically assume that they must be pirates. The Orion captain mutters that the pirates give his species a bad name, and although he does then appropriate an important discovery, he eventually proves to be a genuine scientific researcher who just wanted to secure academic credit for the find, and is willing to negotiate fairly. Ensign Brad Boimler, visiting from the future of Star Trek: Lower Decks, tells the Enterprise crew that stereotyping Orions as pirates is considered rude in his time, and indeed one of his best friends is a rather geeky Orion science specialist. (Though in truth, she has previously been shown as suffering a degree of prejudice from a fellow Orion, who considers the old piratical ways to be the right ways.)
• Humans can also suffer this sort of discrimination from other humans thanks to cultural shift. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone" has a group of humans who were frozen get thawed out, one of them being a financier. He has an especially hard time adjusting to his new life compared to the others, reason being that with Earth moving from a capitalistic to post-scarcity society means that his profession is of little interest to people outside of historians. One of the novels has him find a niche as an ambassador to the Ferengi: as a businessman, he's able to relate to and earn the respect of the Ferengi in a way that humans native to the post-scarcity Federation aren't able to, and his ability to open diplomatic channels with a difficult race in turn earns him the respect of the Federation.