We got some new info on the Klingon characters in Discovery: http://www.startrek.com/article/qapla-discovery-introduces-the-klingons
I don't care what their heads look like so long as they don't look like any of the Into Darkness concepts. I also hope they stop all of that stupid TNG growling nonsense!
And in fact, all cultures hold up ideals and supposedly "correct" ways of behavior while accepting ranges of real behavior among their members which both fall short of and actively contradict those ideal values.
I'm most interested by this description: So she's not the commanding officer, and if she was the XO they would have just said that so like a second officer position like Data? In charge of more than a station but less than the whole ship?
I concur. We always seem to get way too much of the Klingons. I don't know what the fascination is with them myself. They shout. They scream. They wave their swords. That and every other sentence out of them seems to contain the word "honour." Couldn't they have come up with something a bit more interesting for Discovery?
I'd like to see both smooth & bumpy headed Klingons with one being a minority race of Klingons who are not thought of as the "true" Klingons. Maybe that can be a source of contention & why the new Klingon captain wants to unite the the houses.
Why are people saying there could be both ridged and smooth foreheads? Was it stated in canon that the augment virus didn't spread to every Klingon or that in several generations only some would be born without ridges? I think all Klingons in the mid 2200s didn't have ridges until they started to come back into the gene pool in the 2270s.
It is open territory. Nothing was definitively stated, but I think the assumption is that there are both bumpy heads and smooth heads thereafter. Certainly non canon works run under this idea.
The augment virus is one of Star Trek's biggest mistakes. I hope we wont see TOS like Klingons in this show.
I think they've been portrayed pretty poorly outside of TOS. I mean DS9 had great Klingon characters that worked well, but once you got into the Klingon culture and Empire it began to fall apart a bit, the whole honour thing really strangles them at times. Romulans are just way better and more interesting.
I liked the scheming Klingons from early TNG that were willing to sacrifice their personal codes of ethics for the greater good in a vain attempt to hold a fragmented empire together by projecting an honorable public facade. There was markedly less than that during the Gowon era and beyond. Though, they straight up said Gowon was whitewashing history (and likely purging rivals). Which would explain subsequent personalities and actions later on. TNG Klingons, generally, had a couple of subtle threads going on all under the cover of honor and swordfighting. Can't speak on DS9, I just started rewatching it for the first time in about a decade and I'm only in season 2. Although, yeah, a bit too much growling some times. I think Klingons would be better served with emphasizing some of the more complex politics (smart villains are good villains) and ruthlessness. They still have to be distinct from Romulans though. Some scheming, but more brutality, as opposed to mind games and cold calculation.
There is some canon evidence of how Klingons treat subject races. "Errand of Mercy": "A Private Little War": "The Day of the Dove": In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country the Klingon Prison Rura Pente contains people of many different species, most of them probably Klingon subjects.
I want to see more of this though, rather then have it mentioned. The Klingons seemed to be getting a bit soft in the TNG era. Lets see a more brutal Klingon Empire with enslavement and massacres, an actual empire with several slave species in it.
Didn't we see the Kriosians, a subjugated people, revolt against their Klingon masters in TNG's "The Mind's Eye"? The suppliers of the insurrection were the Romulans, who were attempting to drive a wedge between the Klingon Empire and the Federation. (Of course, in reality, after the Treaty of Alliance, the Federation must have turned a blind eye to such uncomfortable cries for freedom and the subsequent Klingon crashes of rebellion).