One Of Star Trek’s Biggest Mysteries Was Just Solved And It Explains The Dominion War
One of Star Trek’s biggest question marks has always been the Breen. This mysterious race has been one of the franchise’s biggest and most deadly antagonists, and we’ve known almost nothing about them. Not even what they look like. At least until now.
That changed in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5. In it, a Breen takes his helmet off for the first time, and we all find out not only what’s behind the strange cooling suit they wear but also why they wear it.
Here’s what Discovery’s version of the Breen looks like with their masks on…
Breen Faces Revealed!
As the Breen take their masks off, their faces are revealed. However, they look strangely gelatinous. This is what they look like when they first take their masks off…
Once the masks have been off for a while, their faces seem to adjust to the air, and they eventually look like this…
The episode explains the reason we’ve never seen behind a Breen mask before is cultural. The Breen culture seems to work a lot like the Mandalorians on Star Wars. They view themselves as having two faces. One face is their mask; the other is their skin underneath.
They believe the only face that matters is their mask, and as such, they only show that face to the world. In Star Trek: Discovery, one of the Breen bucks this trend when he falls in love with a human. The consequences for him, as you might imagine, are extreme.
Unbeknownst to the Star Trek: Discovery audience until Episode 5 of this season, there’s been a Breen running around on the show all along. His name is Locke, but without his mask on, no one had any reason to suspect he might be a Breen, at least not until now.
Why Their Suits Are Refrigerated
Star Trek: Discovery didn’t stop by showing us what the Breen looks like; the series also gave us an explanation for why Breen suits contain cooling mechanisms. It’s to keep them flexible.
When Locke is confronted by one of his elders, he’s accused of making himself weak and inflexible by not wearing his mask. This fits with what we see when Locke first takes off his mask, and we see his skin in a gelatinous state.
It seems that by keeping themselves cold, the Breen are able to exist in a sort of flexible, gelatinous form. When they warm up, they lose that elasticity and become just like everyone else.
This could also partly explain why the Breen allied themselves with The Dominion in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The Dominion is run by a race of gelatinous shape-shifters called The Founders. While the Breen aren’t shapeshifters, clearly, they aspire to exist in a state similar to the one The Founders exist in.
Who Are Star Trek’s Breen?
The Breen were first referenced on a fourth season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but they weren’t actually seen on screen until Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was on Deep Space Nine that they partnered up with the Dominion in an effort to destroy the Federation.
The Breen proved so deadly and so powerful that they launched a successful attack on Earth, causing massive damage. They even destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
The Breen also made a noteworthy appearance on Star Trek: Lower Decks. Unlike Discovery, which likes to modify traditional Star Trek designs since it’s set so much further in the future, Lower Decks stuck with the Breen look we were used to.
Throughout all of it, we never saw behind the Breens’ masks. Their faces always remained covered, and what’s more, they always spoke only in strange, garbled mechanical sounds. Even the Breen’s allies, the Dominion, professed to have no idea what the Breen looked like or why they wore refrigerated full-body suits.
A mystery Star Trek introduced in 1990 has now been solved. It took 34 years, but we now know what the Breen look like under those masks and why they wear them.
