After watching the latest episode of Star Trek Discovery this morning, I had to pop to the shop for a few bits. I’m still in two minds about Discovery, although I think I’m slowly warming to it. This week’s episode featured the Klingons quite heavily, and going around co-op I began to wonder: What would a Klingon shop look like? If you think about it, even a warrior culture must have basic commerce. Klingons need food, and how else do you distribute food than through shops? To become a warp capable, space-faring civilisation, they presumably must at some point have been an advanced society, with cities, commerce and shops. That would mean that their society would have needed builders, technicians and shop-keepers. Therefore, not every Klingon could have been a warrior.

Of course, such things are never addressed in Trek: Klingons are a warrior race, and that’s it. Yet the second you start to think about how such a quazi-feudal, militaristic society could have come about, questions like this crop up. I assume Klingons would see no honour in shop keeping; no fighting is involved. But how could they have ever built ships capable of flying faster than light if they did not at some point have their own version of our local Co-op? And if they did, were there Klingon versions of me tootling around them, buying their lunch? What would a Klingon supermarket look like? Would it have a newspaper stand? Magazines? The same flower rack? Oh, the weird things I ponder when I go to buy milk.