I haven't quite been able to keep or catch up with this thread (or others) today, but here's what I could manage before sleep...
Lorca beams around his ship like it's not a big deal, despite TOS saying it is.
A
paranoid Spock and Scotty make a big deal out of it—despite acknowledging that it
can and
has been done—when trying to convince Kirk
not to do it in "Day Of The Dove" (TOS)...but then they pull it off without a hitch, despite Spock having to perform the necessary computations and programming hastily, and under the duress of the mind-addling entity no less! It's the equivalent of Scotty making a similarly big deal about how his wee bairns "cannae take any more" all the time...which of course they pretty much always can. In contrast, the first thing we ever learned about Lorca was that he was
"a man who does not fear the things normal people fear"—in which he was probably perfectly justified, since he came from the Mirror Universe, where they've had a hundred year jump on us ever since getting their backstabbing mits on the
Defiant—and expected his officers to follow his example.
Obviously, the reverse is true as well. As pro-
Discovery folks are all about author intent until you show them what TOS authors thought about certain things. Or point out certain things said by the
Discovery showrunner.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
All things being equal, Mister J, I would agree. However, things are
not equal. As with all non-canon information, there is an important difference between trying to use it as
barrier against something being depicted in the show, versus as a
gateway to that end. In my estimation, the latter is a perfectly valid approach; the former is not.
Bryan Fuller was
never actually "the showrunner" of DSC
as produced. He departed during the pre-production phase, and was
not involved beyond that. He
did instigate the redesign of the Klingons, but we do
not fully know what his intentions were in that. He
did mandate that they be bald, but we do
not fully know what his intentions were in that either. Designer Neville Page, working from that initial mandate, had to decide what their heads would look like without hair and devised an evolutionary rationale (as is his usual practice) for the features that would be revealed in its absence, namely that they were sensory pits, and this was passed on to at least some of the actors, such as Mary Chieffo. (It should be noted that Robert Fletcher too conceived his own equivalent explanation for the features of
his redesign for TMP: he decided they were descended from lobsters and the ridges were the vestiges of an exoskeleton that once covered their whole bodies!) One thing they have consistently maintained throughout, though, is that it
all ties in
somehow with canon. They have also consistently held that there is diversity to Klingon appearance and that we only see
certain varieties of Klingon in DSC. (Roddenberry also suggested this of the movie Klingons at times, as well.)
The idea that any of this is in direct and intentional contradiction to the various depictions of Klingons elsewhere is not something found in the actual statements of these so-called "authors"—none of whom actually
wrote any of DSC except Fuller, who himself only had a hand in the first three episodes, and those in conjunction with others who went on to take over as
actual "showrunners"—but rather is every bit as much something being
read into them by those who want such to be the case as any interpretation I have offered here might be. (And this is equally true of the dubious notion that they have suddenly decided to pull a hasty about face for Season Two in response to criticism from some corners of fandom.)
More seriously, I had a big issue with the shushing Klingon in the third episode, which no one else on the forum did. Basically considering it's not even a universal sign in anglophone countries (Brits put a finger to the side of the nose) it is inexplicable that a Klingon - part of an empire who had not been in contact with the Federation for a century - would also do that.
Other people seemed to believe I was overthinking it.
I certainly can't claim any authority of having interacted with every culture on Earth, but my impression is that the finger-to-lips gesture is indeed pretty much universally recognized by humans as meaning "be quiet." Likewise, I am not a Brit, but here again, my impression is that the finger-to-nose gesture you describe there is
not directly equivalent, meaning instead something rather more along the lines of "mark my words" or "I know something you don't" or "I have an intuition about what's going on here." ("The nose knows" would be a common way of idiomatically verbalizing it, AFAIK.)
As for the Klingon, I would not find it unreasonable to think a species so physiologically similar to humans in the relevant aspects (
i.e. fingers and mouths) would have a similar gesture, personally. But it's also possible that he had observed humans using it and picked up on its meaning. The war had been going on for months at that point, and I'm sure Klingons like to know their enemy—plus, this one had been hiding aboard a human vessel for an unknown length of time. For all we know, he could have initially interacted with other survivors who only later fell victim to the tardigrade.
(But yes, I'd say this is
all overthinking things a bit. Ultimately, the most important thing is that the
audience understand.)
-
MMoM
[P.S. to
@jaime,
et al. -- Having re-watched TOS a matter of months ago, and now being in the process of re-watching TNG, I have to say that I find them both wayyyy more "New Age-y" and full of "crazy hippie shit" overall than DSC has been thus far...no complaints about the mycelial network as a concept here, I'm afraid...
but I will say in fairness that I found the scene where it was explained in "Choose Your Pain" awkwardly and perfunctorily staged...and the "fucking cool" bit was eyeroll-inducing. Oh yes, we're allowed to swear now...so let's do it as gratuitously and pointlessly as possible, shall we? Of course, maybe that's actually what they were aiming at with that scene? As in, does anyone out there actually feel
Trek needs
more technobabble and pointless swearing...
like this? No? Oh, in that case carry on, then, nevermind...]
