Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?

So, Star Trek vilians, with slightly different clothes. Got it.

I also enjoyed the religious fantatic Klingon. Could use more of that.

 

I don't know what Star Trek shows you've been watching, but the ones I'm familiar with have very seldom been about "villains," especially not clichéd tropey ones. Trek stories usually involve much more interesting kinds of challenges.

 

TWOK Khan is as one dimensional as they come and set an unfortunate precedence culminating in Nemesis with its aping.

Respectfully, Star Trek is always a mixed bag when it comes to villains. So, DISCO feels no different to me.

 

It has always confused me how Trek fans seem to think Khan from TWoK is such a well written villain.

 

Indeed. It is quite frustrating to me that he is held up as the gold standard that must be met.

 

I like TWOK more for Kirk, Spock, Saavik, Carol, and David. Khan is more there to drive things forward. "Space Seed" Khan is my favorite.

For the movies, Kruge is my favorite villain. He's black-hatted, they don't pretend he's anything more than what he is, Christopher Lloyd's fun to watch in anything I've ever seen him in, and he doesn't try to be Khan.

Kruge's a pure '80s sci-fi movie bad guy. Though Khan, in TWOK, looks kind of like Jareth in Labyrinth.

 

He is such a bar minimum one dim villian. Now, you can't fault the avfor as he was magnificent with what he had to work with. But he was not a great villian.

 

I will never fault Ricardo Montalbán. I loved his performance even in "Spy Kids 2 and 3D" and "From the Files of Police Squad." That man was a consummate professional.

 

That he was, his performance alone saved that character.

 

Indeed, Star Trek has a long, noble tradition of one-note villains, thick-headed antagonists, and complicated characters who go EVVILLLLL right at the end. Sometimes I'm baffled and surprised by how impeccable and illustrious past-Trek is held to be.

 

Details?

 

The dumbest and most reliable story goal in mass entertainment is: beat an adversary.

As television, over the years, Trek managed to be more interesting and ambitious than that a good deal of the time...and in that respect, at least somewhat novel.

STD has abandoned that. It is no better and no more distinctive than NCIS: Some Other City.

So...the defense that the show's fans have to resort to is "Trek hasn't really always been all that great?" Very well, have it your way: the bar, then, has been set fairly low for Discovery, and the show has utterly failed to clear it.

 

I was referring to the Klingon ships in The Motion Picture; the claim was that they were basically the same as the Klingon ships in the original series.

 

Yeah, I will concede that the TMP Klingons broke continuity with the franchise like DSC Klingons seem to be doing now (complete with the intent that the new look was what they had "always" been). However, the discrepancy was addressed in the DS9 tribbles episode (with the joke the Klingons refuse to explain it) and ultimately fixed in the ENT Augments trilogy which unified the two versions into one internally consistent model.

I think that before DSC is done, they need to do an Augment trilogy. Not literally, but they need to explain or show how the DSC Klingons fit with the rest of the Klingons in the franchise, even if it's just as simple as having old Klingons in the same room on occasion. It might not explain every question (I think the fact that DSC has had zero regular Klingons and that that DSC Klingons cannot be seen in other shows doesn't make that much sense in terms of population percentages), but would go a long way in making sense of the puzzle.

I've had trouble verifying the original quotes, but I did find a sample here (http://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/702610) that cited someone as noting that Gene Roddenberry wanted none of the printed books to be considered canonical.

(Incidentally, Roddenberry apparently was extremely revisionist in terms of canon and didn't really worry about fidelity to previous materials -- apparently he only counted TNG and parts of TOS as canon in his mind -- although he also expressed the wish the others would continue doing Star Trek when he was done; ironically, he may have been one of the people least bothered by the DSC team remaking the Klingons.)

 

I'm willing to bet he meant the original novels and not his own adaptation of TMP.

There's a quote by GR where he basically says he hopes people take Star Trek and do their own thing with it.

 

The explanation "they changed the makeup" is nothing but a handwave; it explains nothing at all. A morphogenic virus allows reasonable inferences that explain any and all "ridge" variations in later Klingons in in-story terms.

 

While Klingon appearance is topical here, can I point out that Dicovery does have a Klingon with a smooth forehead and hair, much like the ones in TOS. And that species reassignment procedures are common.

 

It's much simpler to think the Klingons always had those ridges and that how they look in TOS was exclusive to that show. For all I cared, Kang, Koloth, and Kor always had forehead ridges even during TOS. The DS9 gag was exactly what it was at the time: a gag. It was never meant to be taken seriously, as the whole show is a fun lark. In a lot of ways I was relieved when a Klingon appeared on Enterprise looking like how they have in the last 20 years of Trek. The show later introducing that augment virus was simply unnecessary and only made things more convoluted.

 

I sincerely cannot fathom how anyone thinks that was "simpler," whereas a credible in-story explanation for an otherwise glaring difference was "more convoluted." But that's what makes horse races, I guess.