It's a win-win in the end: the "old" cloak is a relatively weak weapon, while the dialogue of "Incident" establishes a "new" cloak that is frighteningly potent, which is exactly what the plot requires, intentional or not.
DSC makes the further point of showing how Starfleet is familiar with invisibility and other visual trickery as a thing (as established in pretty much every show), and merely surprised at seeing specific technologies find their way to the hand of specific villains - and how the Klingons in the mid-2250s get the exact same sort of crappy cloaks the Romulans in the mid-2260s gained, the ones that only fool the naked eye and complicate the job of the targeting scanner but can't keep the other sensors from telling the heroes where the enemy goes.
No he isn't. He practically says the exact same thing Geordi, Picard, Riker and Data are saying. He even apes Data's comment almost word for word.
Umm, Worf
is specifically speaking about how the House of Duras working in cahoots with Romulans has caused him and his crewmates personal grief. Whether his subsequent musing about a "new alliance" should be considered more general is quite open to debate, then - especially as such a putative alliance would once again be a Duras thing specifically and exclusively (only with Empire-wide consequences now if Duras gets to lead).
The later Observation Lounge discussion is on the more general level from the get-go. It can be conflated with what Worf says. But it need not be.
Which is why I said seventy-six-plus years.
Which still doesn't help, since the Romulan-Klingon enmity is an on-off thing by the TUC token (unless the senile Kor was misremembering his dates when referring to hot pre-TUC animosity). If LaForge wanted to refer to an alliance during TOS, why round out to 75 years when the even rounder 100 years is more accurate and more appropriate for both the earliest and latest possible date for such an alliance?
Of course, LaForge is implying something odd anyway. Klingons and Romulans have indeed been blood enemies for the past 75 years, from what one can tell. Despite this, they have worked together to sinister goals, as LaForge very well knows. So why bring up the fact that these repeat offenders hate each other's guts, as if that somehow mattered? Conversely, back in the pre-75-yrs days, did the Klingons and Romulans
not hate each other when alternately fighting and (allegedly) helping out each other? Why not? How not?
Timo Saloniemi
