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Comment on Anyone else out there who actually really loved Discovery's S1 style of Klingons?

williams_482@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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 back 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 buddies 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.

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Corgana@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Absolutely, well said. To quote Kirk “People can be very frightened of change.”

because I would have loved to see these monsters chumming it up with Spock

Augh I didn’t know I wanted this until now. Now I’m upset all over again!

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Trekman10@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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.

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- echo@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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 the fact that designs will change over time in a 60 year old sci fi franchise.
  
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  - Trekman10@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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- williams_482@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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  - USSBurritoTruck@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Not to mention the augment virus does not account for why the Excalbian recreation of Kahless in “The Savage Curtain” was still a TOS era Klingon.
    
    It really is the most flimsy plot and, as you say, completely unnecessary.
    
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  - Trekman10@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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 only 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).
    
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    williams_482@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
    How many other Science Fiction properties out there sprung out of a low budget TV show from the 60s but are still producing content without some kind of explicit reboot?
    
    Star Wars is the classic comparison in all sorts of ways, and for better or worse Star Wars avoids this problem entirely by 1) having a much higher budget relative to the number of sets and costumes required for it’s initial installment, 2) having picked an aesthetic that is crude, gritty, and seemingly practical which escapes looking dated many years after the fact, and 3) not being set in our future where the advances of modern tech make obviously retro elements look ridiculous.
    
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