this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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I think the problem is the writers clearly had a show that they wanted and for some bizarre reason they decided that it was also going to be a Star Trek show even though they clearly didn't actually want it to be Star Trek.
If they just made it its own thing it would have been fine, but all this Star Trek lore kept popping up and then they had to come up with some hand wavy explanation for why their particular vision doesn't fit established canon, and the whole thing just didn't work as a result.
I would have been totally down for a "magic exists alongside the sci-fi technology" show. There's a lot they could have done with that concept, but then for some reason they kept trying to introduce Klingons into it.
I'm so sick of Klingons.
I'd argue that it was hurt by specifically trying to fit TNG-era Star Trek, or people expecting that of it.
It would have worked perfectly fine as a TOS/TAS show, since they never really shied away from there being unexplainable magic with the science out in the universe. Witches, wizards, and the devil are all real, and one universe away, so too is actual magic.
Whereas TNG and post-TNG would always try and hammer that into the work of a godlike entity such as a Q, or some grounded science. Q abilities are the work of highly sophisticated subspace interactions that have yet to be technologically replicated. There are particular neurotransmitters, psychology, and brain structures involved in telepathy, and it's not simple ESP/psionics.
And people wanted the latter. This is most notable with the cause of the Burn. People hated it because the idea of a child being able to psionically disrupt dilithium galaxy-wide would have been silly in TNG, without them being a child Q, or something like that.
But as a TOS/TAS plot, it fits in fine. Lazarus briefly caused the entire universe to blink out of existence, and Charlie X, due to the powers bestowed upon him needed to keep him alive, could explode ships either his mind, and would have destroyed the Federation if left unchecked.
TL;DR: It worked as Trek, but people basically wanted TNG and got TOS.
I find that's a fairly reasonable assesment of 'science' versus 'magic' sensibility, but the main thing for me is that the arc concept due to the modern "binge" sensibilities is rough.
When Babylon 5 and DS9 did arcs, they did so carefully embedded in generally episodic series (people couldn't "binge", maybe you would tape it if you felt like it, but people weren't always that engaged, so you catered to people that may miss some of your airings). So you had nice, digestable pieces and the underlying big thing plays out a bit at a time sometimes taking over for 2 or 3 episodes, but generally letting other smaller stories take the foreground for the episode.
But with "binge mentality", there's an inclination for showrunners to go nuts. Picard and Discovery produce a season that is pretty much just one story. The story doesn't have enough meat to really drive that much runtime, but they make the pacing pretty torturous to fill the time. Also, with episodic, if you don't like a particular story/execution, you kind of forget it because there's a whole new story with new execution the next week. When you have a season you don't like, well that's harder to overlook.
Ones with a third different head shape, no less!
And long drawn out subtitled scenes for some reason.
In TNG when Klingons are talking on a Klingon ship I don't think they're actually speaking English. I understand they are speaking their native language and it is being translated for me. I don't know why Discovery thought this was the place to go for "realism".
Fourth. You forgot about the "Kelvin timeline" Star Trek films.
I remember right before Discovery aired they showed a few behind the scenes pictures and one of them included the Klingon uniforms.
Me and a lot of other people started saying “Did they steal those from the Abrams movies?”
Wouldn’t that be 5 then?
Interesting point! Had to look up some screenshots, but it does look like they were maybe trying to "bridge the gap" between the TOS and TNG-era Klingon look in that film, which I am going to be watching again after this meeting in order to verify.
Even if it's an intentional transitory look, I'll agree that it's still unique, and therefore counts. Great call.
I'd say there are up to 8 designs, depending on how much you want to nitpick:
Enterprise also had slightly different looking Klingons and IIRC addressed why (a genetic disorder or disease IIRC)
In Enterprise, they made an augment virus that went wrong, and to avoid going the way of the Illyrians, they made a cure, that basically turned them human/into the TOS Klingons.
This is starting to feel a bit too nuanced.
Yeah, like I say, it's pretty nitpicky. I'd probably collapse everything from TSFS to Kelvin into one, if I were being more lax. I don't find the Kelvin design to be all that different from what came before, but I do find TMP to be really distinct in comparison. But I know some people who seem to be the exact opposite on that, so 🤷
Yeah, how dare those artists do their jobs! I can’t stand this sentiment. Times and technology change, and so designs can change because of that. Yes they ham fisted an explanation witht the ENT arc. But like, should we go back to the racist Asian caricature based look? People who can’t separate the stories from the fact that their real productions that have to actually exist in reality don’t deserve Star Trek.
You can change costumes and makeup without completely changing unnecessary parts.
Klingons went from being established as clearly mammalian and very hairy to a completely different reptilian-in-appearance species (also with an entirely different culture but let's ignore that), then back to mammalian.
They also made significant changes to Andorians. The hair, facial structure, skin tones, and antennae changed, but they were still clearly Andorians, so nobody cared. If they made them red with yellow hair and a rhino horn instead of antennae then it would be rightly ridiculed.
The assertion that if you're against what early DIS did to Klingons then you're a racist who wants Asian caricatures is absolutely insane. What are you smoking?
The designs chosen for alien characters are based on the limitations and of the technology of their time, not just creative wants. You know why Klingons were so hairy up till disco? Because wigs were cheaper and look better on camera than full body prosthetics did. Remember the fish heads?
But now they have a lot better prosthetic technology so let’s reinterpret the designs for this new show. We can maintain the characteristics from the text but we can also change the things we did because they were more practical then.
But then we get to your last paragraph and you completely lose me. How you made that jump from what I said is just, bravo. 👏🏻 that’s some fancy gymnastics right there. Again, people who can’t understand that stories produced in live action actually have to exist in reality and make choices for practical and not just creative reasons are absolutely insufferable.
Maybe it was when you said:
That's less of a jump and more of a.... What's smaller than as step?
That is complete bullshit. Klingons were never designed to be reptilian. There have been reptilian races shown in Trek long before DIS.
Klingon design settled on how they look throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s because that's what they wanted them to look like. They're a hairy, mammalian species.
You can reinterpret without throwing away everything and making a clearly entirely different species. Like going from mammals to reptilians. And again don't try to bullshit is into thinking making a reptilian species was impossible until 2017.
That's exactly what you said. Your mental gymnastics is insane.
Jfc, there's an insufferable person here and it's certainly not me. You are the one who doesn't understand.
Stop with this stupidity and mental gymnastics. It's not impossible to make Klingons mammalian, because we've already done it for decades, and we again do it now.
Why are you lying by saying that the change was done for a "practical" reasons and that mammalian costume design "doesn't exist in reality"?
We’re clearly experiencing two different realities here and this just isn’t gonna work. Sorry, have a good one.
Agreed. It's a decent action scifi show that is hurt by trying to fit the IP. It did do some interesting things with the mirror universe, and some of the latter season parts where it takes nonsensical one off TOS concepts and completely seriously says "that's canon, let's build a plot point on it" were entertaining, if not good.
But it just doesn't get Star Trek and it says something that I tell people getting in to the shows not to watch it.