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.
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.
Trekman10@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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.