They can say whatever they want. It's still a discontinuity.
They don't just
say it. They
make it! We're talking about the people who create the show and define what its official canon status is, what subsequent creators will need to acknowledge and respect. What they say actually does go.
It would be better if, like other properties, they simply allowed different continuities.
Sure, I've been saying for a long time that it'd be nice if they did that.. But in this case,
they aren't. The fact is that DSC is meant to be in the Prime universe, and you can't change that fact just because you dislike it.
Without the bushy eyebrows and goatees though, they're hardly recognizable as Klingons. These are features that nearly every Klingon has had throughout Star Trek's history, yet both STID and Discovery seem to have done away with them.
Take a closer look at TOS. The only Klingons who actually had beards there were the speaking males -- Kor, his lieutenant, Kras, Koloth, Korax, Krell, the "Elaan of Troyius" captain, Kang, one or two of his junior officers, and Kahless. All the background Klingon extras in "Errand of Mercy," "The Trouble with Tribbles," and "Day of the Dove" were clean-shaven, although a couple in "Dove" had a small mustache or soul patch or something. There's also Chang in TUC, who had no hair aside from a very small Fu Manchu mustache.
Besides, why should an entire species have the same hairstyle? That really makes no sense if you think about it. It's the kind of simplistic racial stereotyping that Trek does far too often, that would be hideously racist if it were done with real ethnic groups. Okay, given that most of the Klingons we've seen have been in the military, it makes sense that they'd have a standardized look (although surely the TOS look is more plausibly military than the flowing locks of later Klingons), but there's no reason whatsoever that there couldn't be other subsets of Klingon culture with different tonsorial standards.
And sorry, but there were PLENTY of fans in 1979 who hated the Klingon look remake. They also wondered:
- Why the refit 1701 nacelles looked like they came off of a Klingon D-7 Battlecruiser?
- Why was Security now wearing Body Armor and basketball like helmets?
My question was the opposite -- why did they abandon the body armor in TNG? Not to mention the engineering radiation suits and the seat restraints on the bridge. All of those make perfect sense as safety features, so it's silly that TNG abandoned them.
At the same time, some of the more controversial changes in TMP were abandoned in Wrath of Khan.
They got rid of the jammies, for one, and they switched from wrist back to handheld communicators.
They didn't entirely get rid of the TMP jumpsuit uniforms, since they didn't have the budget to replace all of them. They just dyed them different colors and used them for background crew.
Moral of the story is that yes, you can change things, but the most egregious changes should be rolled back in response to feedback.
I hate it when people use the word "should" when talking about art, as if there were some rigid, mandatory rule that needed to be imposed on everyone. Creativity is not about imposing rigid limits, it's about trying the new and unexpected. The only "should" is that creators should have absolute freedom to experiment with whatever feels right to them. Sure, it won't always work, but that doesn't mean it should never even be tried.
I consider TMP to be sort of a soft reboot. It seems that Roddenberry intended it somewhat that way. His novelization treats the adventures depicted in the series as exaggerated, colorful depictions of events that "really" happened. It's as if he was kind of putting the series away and presenting TMP as the new standard and "true" depiction of the Star Trek universe.
That's right. What people often don't realize is that TOS did not represent the perfect execution of his vision -- it represented the end result of constant compromises. Battling with the censors, having to abandon ideas they couldn't afford or didn't have the technology to achieve, trying things that just didn't work and turned out badly, etc. It was only natural that he'd want to make improvements when given the chance to try again.
