I love Lorca and his "win at all costs" attitude. I have a feeling that will bit him before the end of the season but an interesting stance for a captain.
I am 99% sure at this point that Lorca is working for Section 31 or something very similar to it. Everything about his attitude and the way he runs this ship hints at his command and his mission being not entirely kosher.
That argument fails with The Undiscovered Country.
They're Space Fascists, not Orcs.
Eating people feels like the Federation version of blood libel.
I remember this interesting quote from Malcolm Reed: "Apparently they sharpen their teeth before going into battle." It may not be blood libel at all, it could entirely be cultural: Klingons are apex predators on their planet, and through most of their antiquity probably didn't have a concept of "war" at all; fighting over the dominant position in a tribe is just part of a social landscape, while fighting over territory against a rival tribe would probably result in the looser being eaten by the winners.
Most Klingon houses (basically equivalent to nations at this point) would have moved away from this kind of behavior, but T'Kuvma's clan are fundamentalists and fanatics, so of course they're going back to the old traditional ways.
In any case, I feel like the writers are writing about an entirely different species than the Klingons. We get mention of the Great Houses and their complicated politics but they've really made them DUMB.
Which the Klingons have never been.
1. Refuse to fix their ship with enemy parts.
2. Cannibalism designed to make them more villainous.
3. The weird love moment between the two lead Klingons that would be romantic if they weren't a pair of psychotic cannibals.
4. The fact T'Kuvma's fanatics abandon their new leader because of a bucket of fried chicken.
I mean, the villains of the show aren't even in the frigging war!
5. Apparently, they have instantaneous communication in the Federation but a distress call is impossible.
T'Kuvma's not a soldier or an admiral. He's technically not even part of the Empire. He's a religious fanatic who pulled off a remarkably well-timed publicity stunt only to have the whole thing totally blow up in his face. The rest of the great houses don't give two shits about him OR about his goofy little cult (which is actually kind of interesting, IMO) which is why when the battle was over and T'Kumva was dead, they pretty much rolled their eyes and left him and his fellow cult members drifting in space.
I actually think Kol didn't expect them to even still be alive at this point and had assumed they'd all starved to death in that busted up thousand-year-old jalopy they laughably call a starship. This band of lunatics isn't particularly impressive or even important, and the only reason anyone still cares about them is because T'Kuvma bought stock in Cloaks r Us before he got killed.
All in all, it's a different way of doing The Klingons. TOS and the movies gave them as space fascists with an inferiority complex. TNG turned them into hyper-masculine samurai bikers. Discovery seems to be showing us that you can't actually reduce the Klingons to ANYTHING AT ALL; they're space fascists, they're samurai bikers, they're ISIL jihadists, they're Klingon nationalists, they're warriors, they're cowards, they're geniuses, they're idiots, they're schemers, they're goons, and they haven't figured out what the hell they're really supposed to really be anyway, which is exactly why this war started in the first place.
The scene on the Glenn, interestingly enough, illustrates this point in a lot of ways. The one Klingon survivor they find on the ship is standing in the hallway, probably a little bit in shock; where TNG would have him shout a bunch of threatening-sounding Klingon nonsense like a warrior and TOS would put some weird "I knew it! Federation treachery! I bet this whole thing was a trap to lure us into your clutches so you can interrogate me!" But what does this Klingon do? He shushes them. Because he doesn't speak English, he doesn't what the ripper is, he doesn't know what the hell is going on; the only thing he knows is that he doesn't want to get eaten,
and he's fucking scared.
That may be a small thing to you, but as with the above, what it all boils down to is a concerted attempt to portray Klingons as
genuine characters with something approaching emotional depth and internal existence. So it isn't that the Klingons are eating their foes or cannibalizing their ships, it's that they're CONFLICTED about eating their foes and/or cannibalizing their ships. It isn't that the Klingons default to the violent warrior path because that's just the way they are; it's that the Klingons WANT to default to the violent warrior path because that's the way they've always been and they're scared of what they'll become if they don't. And yes, the Klingons are kind of stupid for not being able to fix their busted up ancient jalopy of a starship... and yeah, OTHER Klingons think that's pretty stupid too, and are probably mocking T'kuvma's legacy for his followers being so amazingly incompetent.
