What Has Discovery Added To Star Trek Lore?

As we approach Season 2 and meet the TOS Enterprise....sort of, it's a good time to look back at Discovery S1 and consider what it has added to Star Trek lore.

The additions I've noted from Discovery S1 are;

- Giving Spock an adopted human sister

- The Mushroom Spore Drive, which is public knowledge. Harry Mudd even knows about it.

- The magic Mycelial Network aka the force

- Making Section 31 into a more well-known organization within Starfleet

- The Klingon War with massive human casualties

- Klingons eating their enemies

- Mirror Universe Terrans eating their enemies

- Confirming Klingons have two penises



Anything else?


Have these new additions been positive or negative? Have they enhanced Star Trek lore and canon, or weakened/cheapened it?

Discuss.

 

The fact that Discovery has the drive is not really public knowledge.
Harry only knows about the Spore Drive because of his interaction with Lorca.
(and even then he didn't find out about it till he snuck aboard the Discovery with his Alien Time Dilator)

Among the Klingons only L'Rell and Tyler know of its existence and approximately how it works.

Other folks know about a strange StarFleet ship with some extraordinary WARP drive, but how it works is still a mystery to most of the galaxy.

We've seen Klingons talk about eating the Heart of their enemies before, so that's not really new.
And Klingons having backup organs was intro'd back in TNG.
The Discovery writers just took it to a bit of a strange level with a background character.
And it clearly was meant to be a humorous moment, done for a chuckle.

I don't remember anybody eating an enemy in the Mirror Universe.
I do remember a particular species being used as cattle, but the Kelpians could hardly be classified as an "Enemy" to the Emperor and her ilk.

Your opening post is skewed heavily with a negative tone.
How about dialing back the snark if you really want folks to join in your discussion, instead of creating a thread with obvious contempt for the show which may likely lead to its closure?

 

+ The Mycelial network. Having read Mycelium Running by Dr. Paul Stamets, I can see where they're going with it and like that they've rooted the show in what seems like such a fantastic theory for us in the 21st century, but is considered rock solid science in the 24th (or at least it's testable with their technology).

+ In that same vein, new technology! We're really getting to see new ideas expressed in new ways, a ship that sits on the bleeding edge of the most dangerous, and experimental technology the Federation has ever tested.

+ They gave us a new ship class, one that is rather unique in how it functions. I love new ships.

+ They took us to some truly strange (and wonderful) new worlds, such as the planet Pahvo, and the unique life found there.

+ We've been introduced to several new species, including the Kelpiens, through Commander Saru.

+ For a brief moment, we had a Captain and Commander being played by two women. Whether or not this has happened in the universe of Star Trek, that it has now happened in one of the franchises is pretty awesome, I think.

+ Tilly. No explanation necessary.


I consider all of these things to be valid and valuable additions to the Star Trek universe.

 

MU Terrans have only been shown to eat Kelpians, and Kelpians hardly count as an enemy species. More like dinner with benefits.

Starfleet has been fleshed out in a way it hasn't been since Deep Space 9. There are many different ship classes and multi-species crews. It's a window into period after the Einstein and Daedalus classes at the early part of the TOS era.

We know more about Vulcan internal political problems post-Enterprise. Stuff is still going on there.

Got to see an Orion-y ghetto on Kronos.

Visiting a planet of energy beings who for once are not all knowing. They actually kind of get ham-fisted and mess everything up though they meant well.

We meet Tilly. Where has Tilly been all my Star Trek?

Paris. The city, for once, not the last name.

Disco era mess hall food dispensaries are smug and annoying. Kirk might have punched them. I suspect one day Tilly will.

A Klingon "Shushed" somebody. They do that.

There aint no party like a NCC-1031 party cause a Disco party don't stop. Unless it's a time loop.

There are STILL Beatles cover bands.

We know what future toothbrushes look like.

First long term relationship gay couple in Trek.

the fact that serving on a Connie could be critical or at least favorable to getting a captain's career path

 

^ Yes! I can't believe I forgot the first same sex relationship shown on-screen in any Trek TV series. That is a great addition to the lore.

 

Not even similar

 

My only issue with Discovery's new lore is that the Powers-That-Be insist it's the same world as TOS, and thus it's overwriting and contradicting stuff from the original show instead of blazing it's own path like Gotham, Smallville or any similar pseudo-prequel out there.

Mirror universe humans are sensitive to bright light? Definitely not in TOS, where the Mirror crew comfortably worked on the bright ISS Enterprise bridge.

 

That ships can spin.
I suppose the Jellyfish brought that.

Ugly starship designs?

 

Plus establishing Sarek as a more serial humansploiter than we could have guessed. So further human experiments wouldn't be out of place, either, if introduced in later seasons.

Well, not public according to Starfleet. They also think the Mirror Universe is secret, safe from the public for now. Perhaps they thought Mudd's father-in-law would be a man of sufficient means to contain the guy?

What casualties? The Battle of the Binaries seemed to cost about 8,000 Fed lives, but as far as Burnham's fellow prisoners knew, nothing had upped that ante in the following months. Add a few more months and Tyler mentions 10,000 dead. And then add nine months and Cornwell still seems to think it worth agonizing over that 11,000 civilians die in a Klingon attack, in a recent campaign that ups the ante.

Basically nobody from the civilian sector seemed to die in the war, then. But suicide attacks against starbases destroyed a third of the Fleet's ships, and the one final attack against Starbase 1 cost 80,000 further Starfleet lives.

That's not new to DSC - it was established in DS9 "Blood Oath".

That's the new bit.

"Confirming?" Previously there was no suggestion of such. All the talk was only about non-Klingon women being "too fragile" for male Klingon affectations.

The "actual" penis jokes were about the Ferengi organ and its size, with some suggestive gestures made in the background in TNG.

Trek is Trek - more is better. 'Nuff said.

Timo Saloniemi

 

That there are still Beatles cover bands in the 23rd century

 

The sort of robot lady on the bridge whose name I keep forgetting and know isn't suppose to be a robot but I keep thinking of her as a robot.

New Starfleet uniforms to the mix.

New class of Federation and Klingon ships. Including one that spins.


Jason

 

According to the novels she’s from an offshoot of the Bolian race who Augment parts of their body with technology.

 

It's kind of weird they went down that path. That sounds way to much like the Borg maybe even the Binars. Still it does seem like something that you could build on and explore. Maybe we will see her home planet at some point and frankly knowing more about the Bolians would be good as well. I mean other than being blue what do we know about them?


Jason

 

In the Enterprise episode, Regeneration, Phlox also mentions another race that does it so it isn’t that uncommon in their universe.

 

We have people with ocular and optical implants now. Hell, I have a thing wired to my heart to jump start it and regulate it as necessary that I can check on via bluetooth with my phone if I'm curious about battery level, etc. I think Discovery just had to acknowledge cybernetics should have been a thing in trek from the get to, and not just Borg (who've been in a technological dead end for a long time)

 

It's not as if Trek ever was particularly averse. Pike had his chair, Jones had her sensor dress, Picard had his heart, LaForge had his eyes; Bashir did brain prosthetics on his patients. We just never learned what the others had because their surgeons did better jobs or gossiped less.

But it was particularly nice to see how Georgiou's original weapons officer aboard her antiquated ship wore a clumsy VR helmet while those coming after him have had no need for such primitive things. Cybernetics by all rights ought to get less noticeable with time, unless there's a jump in capacity that cannot be accommodated in the compact size quite yet.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Talking about eating the heart of an enemy once or twice (Jadzia was "squeamish" about eating the heart of an enemy in Image In The Sand) is a ways from actually doing it. The Klingons are as much talk as they are action. Then to go even further and eat your entire enemy? It's not out of the blue, but definitely adds to the Klingon lore.

 

I think they do eat the heart though. Plus we have seen some of their food. Not exactly stuff that looks very sanitary. I mean they have pies made out of blood along with liquor. Plus wasn't the cannibalism more of them running out of food supplies? I know Kor came by and bribed the crew with food in essence to work for him. Also lets not forget humans have been known to eat humans. We have had cannibals on earth of course.

Jason

 

Technically, the Klingon double penis still hasn't been confirmed. Lorca made a snarky comment and wasn't corrected on it, but until we see the bioscans it could still be a human (or Terran) misconception, right?

The blue guy on the Shenzhou bridge crew is a Bolian offshoot. He and Airiam (robot girl) both use augments but I don't think they've ever been said to be the same species.

 

They showed two streams while a Klingon was urinating.

I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.