That is fair.
So then why dedicate any production time to “fixing” the Eugenics Wars time placement, if that’s not supposed to be the point? I do know WHY they did it, they answered that themselves in interviews. I get it, they wanna keep things in “our future” and think it’s silly to refer to the Eugenics Wars as taking place in the 1990s… but why would that matter in a show set in the 2250s when the Eugenics Wars is something long ago in the past? When Enterprise got into the topic, and even Into Darkness, they simply avoided mentioning the 90s and kept the idea of that event as something in their past.
I mean, that's a legitimate creative choice too. But they saw an opportunity to sprinkle a little continuity nod that would preserve their sense of verisimilitude, of "Star Trek is our future," onto a story about La'an falling in love with a ghost. So they took it. That's also a completely legitimate creative choice.
There are some storytelling choices that are objectively stronger than others, but there are some choices that are just subjective preferences of equally strong choices. Your preference is not to acknowledge that the Eugenics Wars were in the 1990s going forward but not to contradict; their preference is to sprinkle in an in-universe retcon. It's all good either way.
I like the La’an character, but I don’t think the show has ever really made a strong enough justification for making her Khan’s several times great grand daughter. It’s a weird creative tangent on their part that seems pointless beyond “hey, remember Khan?”. I was weary of her character announcement during pre-release, but Christina Chong really stepped up.
I agree, actually. The relevant things about La'an don't require her to have been a descendant of Khan.
To be fair, the original conceit for why the Klingons looked the way they did in Disco didn’t have anything to do with canon, but was simply a creative decision to make that look the show’s standard for Klingons, much like how Pike’s Enterprise looks the way it does rather than being a recreation of the 60s set. It was the same thing with TMP saying “this is what they look like in our production, there’s no canon explanation”. The filmmakers wanted to present their own take and didn’t expect fans to be so vocal about it, or at least underestimated how vocal they would be. And I think that’s fine. It’s their show. They aren’t obligated to take Okuda’s documentarian approach from the Rick Berman era of “if it looked like that, then it is like that”.
So far I'm with you and I agree.
But then Kurtzman pivots and makes up a lie about “oh, they’re bald because they shave their heads during a time of war, I totally forgot to mention that in S1, my bad.”
"Makes up a lie?" C'mon, they changed their minds about the Klingons having hair and they came up with an in-universe explanation for the discrepancy. That's no more a "lie" than, say,
Star Trek: First Contact revealing that there had been a Borg Queen aboard the cube seen in "The Best of Both Worlds, Parts I & II."
So, how do I resolve these canon discrepancies? Simple, I just don’t. They’re not really that important to me. I never even needed that Enterprise two-parter. I always felt that was a waste of time there done for the Ex Astris Scientia folks who want to treat the Trek world as if it’s as tangible and consistent as our own reality.
Fair.
I only say Kurtzman lied because his “it was always planned” line during S2 doesn’t align with what we see in S1 where ALL Klingons seem to be naturally bald, rather than shaved.
Well, first off, I don't remember him saying that. But okay, maybe he did. Doesn't mean it's a lie. Why?
Well, remember, the original showrunner was Bryan Fuller. And it was Fuller's decision that the Klingons have no hair and look radically more alien.
But then Fuller got fired shortly into production on S1. So by that point, budgets had been set, Klingons had been designed, makeup had been created and costumes built. The train was moving and there probably wasn't the budget to re-design the Klingons with hair.
But it's entirely within the realm of possibility that after Fuller left, but long before S1 was done and aired, that Kurtzman had already decided that for S2 he would have them redesigned with hair.
It is interesting that after S2, for a few years live action productions of Trek decidedly avoided featuring Klingons at all. None featured in the first two years in PIC, none in S3 and 4 of DISCO, and none in SNW S1. It’s like an embargo was placed until Worf returned.
Yeah, I suspect that's what happened. More than likely the thought process was that they had not anticipated the idea of bringing back Worf when the Klingons were redesigned for DIS, but they knew that they couldn't redesign Worf. So they probably decided to lay off the Klingons for a few years so as to ease the audience's suspension of disbelief when Worf comes back with an updated Berman-type design instead of the Fuller-type design, and then to use a variation on the updated Berman-type design going forward for all Klingons.
Makes me wonder if we’ll see them in S5 of DISCO finally. I’m curious of what the state of the Klingons is in the 32nd century.
Me too!
23rd century NuTrek? It's just ST09 2.0.
Oh no, not more of one of the most popular and successful
Star Trek productions ever released! Perish the thought!
