Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Pays Off 35-Year-Old Klingon Shakespeare Joke

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Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1, Episode 8 – “The Life of the Stars”

The series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy cleverly revisited a running gag from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a 1991 film directed by Nicholas Meyer. This film, the last to feature the original Star Trek cast, introduced General Chang (played by Christopher Plummer), a memorable Klingon villain known for constantly quoting Shakespeare.

Episode 8 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, titled “The Life of the Stars” and directed by Andi Armaganian, featured a unique approach to healing. Written by Gaia Violo & Jane Maggs, the episode showed Lieutenant Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) leading a theater class, where she used Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town to help cadets deal with difficult experiences and shared trauma.

Jörg Hillebrand, a researcher on Star Trek: Picard season 3, found three pages of the Klingon translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that appeared in the Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 8. This is a callback to a famous line from Star Trek VI, spoken by Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner), who said, “You have never experienced Shakespeare until you’ve read him in the original Klingon.” You can view the pages below.

Thanks to three pages from the Klingon translation of Hamlet, seen ever so briefly in #StarfleetAcademy’s “The Life of the Stars”➡️↙️↘️, we can now finally experience Shakespeare in the original Klingon (“Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”⬆️⬅️). Or we can just buy the book. 😜 — Jörg Hillebrand (@gaghyogi49.bsky.social) 2026-02-26T20:02:02.419Z

The title of episode 6 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, “Come, Let’s Away,” comes from William Shakespeare’s King Lear. The phrase is a quote from Act 5, Scene 3 of the play: “Come, let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.”

Jörg Hillebrand recently shared the cover art for the comic book Tales from the Frontier, which is featured in episode 6 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. The phrase “Come, let’s away” is the signature line of Captain Chi, who commands the USS Miyazaki. You can see the covers below.

I’m happy I finally have time time to feature the “Tales from the Frontier” comic, seen in #StarfleetAcademy’s “Come, Let’s Away”.😊 I have assembled all the pages seen in the episode but as a special gift, here’s the cover and back page of the comic, provided to me by its designer: Stu Pearce! 🧵 1/4 — Jörg Hillebrand (@gaghyogi49.bsky.social) 2026-02-19T21:00:15.034Z

William Shakespeare’s plays have frequently inspired stories in the various Star Trek series and movies. This began with performances of Macbeth and Hamlet by the Karidian Company in the first season Star Trek: The Original Series episode, “The Conscience of the King.”

A joke made by Chancellor Gorkon about Shakespeare – specifically, performing it ‘in the original Klingon’ – led the Klingon Language Institute to actually publish The Klingon Hamlet in 1996. This playful idea of Shakespeare ‘in the original Klingon’ has been a running gag for over thirty years, and Star Trek VI is probably the most famous example of Star Trek and Shakespeare coming together.

It was expected that Jay-Den Kraag, the Klingon cadet in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, would choose a Klingon opera for their theater class assignment with Lt. Tilly. However, it was a pleasant surprise to see Klingon Shakespeare mentioned, finally connecting back to a storyline hinted at in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

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2026-03-03 05:18