When you create a new alien, do you write a whole cultural background before you write them into the script?

The only time I ever sat down and really wrote a treatise on a culture was early in third season Next Generation. Michael Piller asked me to just sort of write a couple of pages on the Klingons and the Romulans because Mike was still getting to know the show and I was the old Trekker who knew the original series really well. We were going to do a show about going to Worf�s home planet and he wanted me to define the Klingons.

I wrote a couple of pages of my take on the Klingons and it was an interesting exercise because I decided to think of the Klingons as a cross between 15th Century samurai and Vikings. Or, at least, our popular conception of Vikings. They�re samurai in that they�re very honour-bound and they have an intense code, all these little rituals and then they�re Vikings who party and drink hard and bash heads together and they�re crazy. That became sort of the paradigm of the Klingons.