“Jelly Breens”: Star Trek Writer Deep Dives Into Discovery Season 5’s Breen Villains

Warning: This Article Contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, Episode 5 - "Mirrors"

Star Trek: Discovery writer Carlos Cisco delivers a deep dive into the series' season 5 reinvention of the Breen. Cisco co-wrote Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, "Mirrors", with Johanna Lee, which revealed that L'ak (Elias Toufexis) is a Breen who has rebelled from the Breen Imperium. The Breen have placed an Erigah, or blood bounty, on L'ak and his lover, Moll's (Eve Harlow), heads. "Mirrors" is Star Trek's most revelatory look at the Breen, who became cult favorite villains from their appearances in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Appearing as a guest on The 7th Rule podcast to discuss Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, Carlos Cisco took hosts Cirroc Lofton and Ryan T. Husk on a fascinating deep dive into Star Trek: Discovery's reinvention of the Breen for the 32nd century. Read Cisco's quote and watch The 7th Rule video below:

We had gone back and forth on the Breen a lot, and we also had the little sticky part of L’ak having the solid face. We wanted him to be Breen but somewhere down the line… we started seeing from production design pictures of transparent deep sea fishes. In particular, one that had a basically transparent head and just eyes, and you can see its brain and stuff. So we started seeing that, and we all really liked that, we already had these things with L’ak where his face is solid… Michelle tasked Johanna and I with coming up with the explanation.

Rewatching the episode, it’s a little muddy in there in terms of how we explained it, but the thinking was that the Breen always had these refrigeration suits, at least as far as we’d seen them. Our thinking was the Breen as sort of a natural species were bifurcated in the sense that they can be both gelatinous and solid in that sense. But the solid state takes an intense amount of focus and concentration in order to maintain. And it was basically there as this is your protective shell. This is how you stay safe. This is how you protect your soft, gelatinous innards from a hostile, outside world.

And then as they developed the refrigeration suits, they lost the need for that both evolutionarily and culturally, and it became a sort of cultural anathema. You don’t show people your solid face because that means you’re weak. It means you’re stupid. It means you’re slow. And for the Breen… the way we talked about them was sort of like a meritocracy of warriors, but more structured than how we’ve seen Klingons. It’s not necessarily about how good you are at killing but it’s all about what your placement in the world is based on your performance. And the suits sort of erase any unique signifier about a person, making them hone in on what your actions and deeds are.

There was talk along the season [of] are the multiple species under the mask? I think it’s not solidified either way… But we’re focused on these guys, these Jelly Breens, if you will. And getting to explore the insides of one of their ships. That’s something we’ve never seen in Star Trek before. When were talking about what can we do in Discovery that we’ve never seen before, I was like, ‘Breen ship! We’ve never seen the inside. Let’s do it!’ Going into the massive Breen carrier… Design-wise, I think we took a pretty big departure from the Breen ships we’ve seen in the past, but I pitched based on some of the Star Trek Online Breen ship designs these colossal city ships. Ships that carry entire armadas in them… I was really pleased we got this big, behemoth ship, and then get to see inside, which is, again, not something we’ve seen before in Star Trek.