I am the kind of person who enjoys “big weird” scifi like Stanisław Lem. Stories about trying to relate to and find common ground with something so alien that the prospect of even understanding is basically hopeless. Star Trek usually doesn’t do stories that, which makes sense as it often uses alien races as allegories or stand-ins for real-world human relations.
That said- I thought those early Klingons were super weird and scary because they were just so alien. It really made sense thinking about how it took a century before they could get to the events of Star Trek VI, and it made the Khittomer accords feel like so much more of an accomplishment. Like- you made a treaty with WHAT?
And just aesthetically their ships and armor looked like something out of HP Lovecraft or HR Geiger:
This is not to say I dislike how Klingons were portrayed previously, kinda like Mongols in TOS or Vikings in DS9, just that they never felt scary to me. They never felt like warriors. I was never afraid for the gallant crew of the Enterprise D (a science and exploration vessel) going into battle against Klingons. But I really enjoyed the alien-ness Disco tried to go with. Anyone else with me?
EDIT: PEOPLE I SAID WHO’S WITH ME NOT WHO ISN’T CM’ON
I feel like it was too much. It 💯 fits Klingon style, but they’re almost too foreign.
I thought those early Klingons were super weird and scary because they were just so alien.
Absolutely. And the costuming choices they made, and the different aesthetic approaches to each Great House, show an amazing amount of thought and care. They’re one big, scary, alien, fractured family.
I thought it was all a bit confusing - it was introduced with no explanation, which felt like it was setting up some big reveal that never came.
I like the, as you say, Giger-esque design but felt it was such a departure that they may as well have introduced a new species.
I’ll never understand why it’s treated by some people as some ridiculous expectation that things that couldn’t change so drastically over the course of 5-10 years (the entire biology of a species, for example) shouldn’t do so, and that we’re the odd ones for saying “but wait how is this supposed to take place in the same timeline?”
we’re the odd ones for saying “but wait how is this supposed to take place in the same timeline?”
I just think it points to a failure of imagination more than anything else.
On the viewer’s part or the creator’s?
If the former, how far do you take it? Instead of Picard’s complicated, diplomatic solutions to complex problems, what if he just used mind control to resolve every conflict? What if they just made the Enterprise’s shields invincible to damage so there’s never a risk of the ship getting damaged? The show has to exist within a framework of rules and ‘truths,’ for lack of a better word, or everything becomes meaningless because nothing matters and there are no stakes.
If the latter, I’d have to agree. It has to be difficult to jump into a franchise with so much history, but it feels like they changed the Klingons just so they could put their own “stamp” on the show. What reason is there to change them in the first place? Humans and Vulcans still look the same.
I mean, I can IMAGINE plenty of workarounds, the problem is that even the most practical way to explain them is illogical. It made far more sense that the NCC-1701 looked like how it did in the Cage (2254) up until sometime after Where No Man Has Gone Before (2265), before getting a refit for how it looks the rest of TOS (and again for the movies). Now, if I’m supposed to take the show at it’s word, the ship went through a massive, complete refit by 3 years later in Will You Take My Hand? (2257), only to revert one time to it’s 2254 appearance for 2265, and go through another refit by the Corbomite Maneuver (2266)? Is it really a lack of imagination here or is it actually that my imagination thinks about these things and fictional implications?
I remain amazed that many people insist that T’Kuvma and company are irreconcilably different from the TNG era portrayals. These are big, carnivorous-looking aliens with prominent forehead ridges and significant individual variation in appearance. They’re different in some small details, like the extra nostrils, but outside of the most extreme visually literalist stance, is it really that hard to square these guys against Chang, Martok, and Worf? Replace the shine and detail with a classic rubber mask, silicon makeup, and matte brown body paint in exactly the same head and body shape, stick them at a side table in Quarks circa S6 of DS9, and I challenge you to notice anything amiss.
What this rework did do was make them feel so much more alien, and so much more dangerous. They outright eat people, which was occasionally hinted at but is noted far more literally in Discovery, and very, very easy to believe looking at these guys. I wish they hadn’t backpedalled so hard with a return to the 1980s makeup in SNW 2x01, because I would have loved to see these monsters chumming it up with Spock: that scene would immediately have been slightly more unsettling, bringing the audience closer to what Spock and his crew are likely feeling about their momentary drinking buddies, instead of the much more casual feel we got from Klingons who look just like our old friends from DS9. These guys are still dangerous aliens whose friendliness is tenuous and temporary; they would literally eat Spock if circumstances were slightly different. We shouldn’t forget that.
Replace the shine and detail with a classic rubber mask, silicon makeup, and matte brown body paint in exactly the same head and body shape, stick them at a side table in Quarks circa S6 of DS9, and I challenge you to notice anything amiss. I think that is true for how they looked s2 Discovery with the hair and normal skulls I stead of the elongated Crystal Skull shaped look we got in s1.
For me, having them look like TNG Klingons doesn’t even solve the problem because ENT had implied that shouldn’t happen until the TOS movie era. They could have rendered explicit the implication that not every Klingon was infected by the virus, but that still doesn’t support making the Klingons look how they did in s1 DIS.
For me, having them look like TNG Klingons doesn’t even solve the problem because ENT had implied that shouldn’t happen until the TOS movie era.
That Enterprise arc was clearly intended to apply a (totally unnecessary) in-universe explanation for why Kirk’s adversaries were just guys in vaguely asian facial makeup, but there’s no reason we have to extrapolate that the Augment virus was a widespread and incurable until the late 23rd century. It could easily have been a relative blip on the radar; aggressively quarantined and/or cured much earlier than anticipated.
The idea that they also needed to make an explicit reference to the augment virus being cured, or explicitly point out “hey, these guys would look less different if they weren’t shaving their heads!” strikes me as absurd. These are not difficult conclusions to reach for someone motivated to find them, and there were people mentioning those possibilities pretty much immediately after the first Discovery trailer dropped.
All that needed to be maintained was that the Klingons we see Kirk face in TOS were all afflicted by the virus - while it’s still reasonable to assume that, the presence of these hitherto unseen 3rd variant of Klingon complicates instead of simplifies, which is what ENT’s arc did. Now what, it’s ANOTHER coincidence that THESE klingons are even ridgier than we’ve seen before, but the other ones are still out there? To borrow your parlance, the Discovery redesign was intended to overwrite and replace what came before, because apparently Star Trek, unlike every other fantasy and science fiction thing I like, is Forbidden from being treated like a secondary world that should have its own internal consistency.
I was completely content to accept it was a coincidence that Kirk only saw augment virus-impacted Klingons in TOS, just like how ST Picard ended up establishing for Romulans (northern vs southern to explain the v shape bone ridge they had through TNG-ENT).
The augment virus was a really dumb idea and I’m perfectly happy for them to ignore it and never feel the need to write a plot to explain the fact that designs will change over time in a 60 year old sci fi franchise.
change over time in a 60 year old sci fi franchise.
This common refrain is so condescending, as if we’re being ridiculous expecting consistency in a piece of narrative media! It doesn’t matter if the Klingons, at the time of TMP, were intended to be a total retcon, because DS9 made lines of dialog that make that impossible. I understand that there isn’t a cohesive narrative across all of Star Trek, and I don’t expect writers of an episode of 1990s television to be cognizant that maybe a prequel will come along and show anachronistic Klingons, but what I do expect is the producers of Enterprise to make better decisions than “but da klingons have ridges, how will people recognise the klingons if they look like how they did in TOS?” (IDK Berman, guess you should have thought of that before doing a prequel series).
And today, in this day and age where everyone at least knows about secondary worlds (IE, a setting distinct/irreconcilable from the real world) if not in name than be experience, I absolutely do expect a level of consistency above what we got in the 80s and 90s.
Obviously, advances in real world technology will impact how TV and movies are made, but we’re not talking about Matte Paintings vs CGI. It’s not like when the shows in the 90s made the switch from physical models to CGI, they randomly decided “hey, lets make the Romulan warbird a completely different looking ship”, they recreated the physical model. When they started to be able to show more activity or detail in establishing shots of the ship or station, they didn’t then also decide to give DS9 an extra pylon, or make it yellow and act like it always was like that.
For me, having them look like TNG Klingons doesn’t even solve the problem because ENT had implied that shouldn’t happen until the TOS movie era. They could have rendered explicit the implication that not every Klingon was infected by the virus, but that still doesn’t support making the Klingons look how they did in s1 DIS.
Folks forget the klingon’s made that Augment virus which then got loose in a lab breach. If they could do that to themselves on accident imagine what they’d do to themselves on purpose to try and compensate as the implications of the augment virus turn thier society upside down. There’s much I don’t like about Disco Klingons but the face redesign intrigued me as a potential reaction and over correction to the augment arc in ENT, and how past exchanges like that ultimately lead to federation vs klingon hostilities. Unfortunately Disco didn’t capitalize on this probably cause if they start explaining things they’d ultimately have to admit they can’t get away with haveing the longest heroship in canon…
Perhaps it implied that.
But it only ever implied that, and meanwhile we had other evidence that implied a separate conclusion, in the form of Kor, Kang, and Koloth.
Which is more likely-- that every Klingon Kirk encountered during his five-year mission was a survivor of the augment virus (edit: Including Kahless, who lived and died centuries before Archer!) and no Klingon encountered outside of that time period was; or that the Klingons ruthlessly quarantined or even executed carriers of the augment virus and wiped it out before it got too far, and TOS’s visuals aren’t literal?
Well that’s the thing that I don’t like - we got 40+ years of TOS looking like TOS across three examples in three shows, and when it was done it was fun as heck on all three, and all managed to include modern sfx for their time alongside authentic TOS visuals. That’s all I wanted from Discovery when it was announced to be between The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before.
Discovery was my “gateway” Trek which led to me watching everything else (except TOS yet) so I had no expectations or anything for what Klingons should look like.
So I didn’t think they looked “off” until I started watching the TNG era shows. Even then, I just attributed it to artistic differences.
All that said, I do like how they refined what they did in DSC for SNW. Those look more like TNG but upgraded
I’m just hoping for a Kang/Kor/Koloth cameo in SNW where they have flat foreheads.
The nice thing about snw is that they aren’t afraid of callbacks and they do them well, so I’d like to see curzon tooling around too.
It’s a early for Curzon Dax.
The recent Georgiou tie-in novel paired her up with Emory. Not sure which host Jadzia mentioned had paired up with the young McCoy…