You missed Star Trek - Enterprise right? They did not just change the bridge, but the whole ship went through a refit of some sort. Take Engineering for example, when Riker walks of after he discussed the Romulan Tricorder with Worf, he turns into a hallway, which was never seen in the series. The corridors on the ship look much darker. Even Picard's readyroom got a redress.
He's referencing what Gene Roddenberry said about the Klingons' appearance when ST:TMP came out in 1979: that viewers should pretend the Klingons had always looked that way and we just hadn't seen them "clearly" before. For the following 17 years, the franchise was agnostic on the question of what 23rd-century Klingons had looked like. But when DS9 did "Trials and Tribble-ations," that kind of necessitated taking the old Klingon appearance literally and making it canonical that there had been a change. That led in turn to ENT coming up with an explanation for that change.
Between TOS and TAS it also had an overhaul, which introduced the second bridge elevator that remains in place for TMP and beyond. The Timeliners' Timeline places the novel "Prime Directive" between TOS and TAS, giving added reason for the overhaul back in Spacedock.
Well, at least a second bridge exit. The Franz Joseph blueprints depict the second door not as a turbolift entrance, but as the entrance to a gangway that circles the bridge. Which makes sense, since there's still only the one turbolift "nub" on the outside of the bridge module.
I haven't bought a Trek novel new off the shelf in years, but I might make an exception for this one. I'm of two minds. It should have been either this /\, or ENT should have used the old fanon explanation that the Klingon Empire was made of various races/species and different ones were in power in different eras of Trek. While I somewhat enjoyed the ENT story, it seemed a waste of that perfectly good explanation that had been around for a while.
Well, there were many explanations that had been around in fandom for a while, with no single consensus. The ENT theory wasn't too different from the one used in The Final Reflection, namely that smooth-headed Klingons were genetic fusions of Klingon and human -- the difference being that in TFR, the Klingons created their fusions with various species on purpose. That was quite a popular fan theory back in the day. For a while, after "Blood Oath" came out, I had a theory that there were two Klingon races, one that was born with ridges, one that was born smooth-headed and slowly grew ridges starting around age 50 or so. That would not only explain Kor, Kang, and Koloth, but General Chang as well. I figured maybe the latter race was a hybrid of native Klingons and some humanlike colonist race, maybe Sargon's people.
I always liked Chris Claremont's explanation in the graphic novel Debt of Honor. Kor's entire smooth-headed Klingon race was discommoded following a humiliating defeat. This was before "Blood Oath" came out showing Kor & other TOS Klingons as bumpy-headed, of course. And then there was Michael Jan Friedman's explanation from the third My Brother's Keeper book. The smooth headed Klingons were the "real" ones, and the bumpy-headed Klingons were a genetically-altered super-race that eventually took over the Empire. Now that I think of it, I suppose those two explanations are not incompatible with each other.
Except there's no such word as "discommoded." The word was "discommendation," but Michael Dorn mispronounced it as "discommodation" in "Sins of the Father," and some people, such as Claremont, didn't bother to check the dictionary. Sorry, but that always bugged me. For a while, I reconciled Debt of Honor with "Blood Oath" by figuring that Kor et al. had won their honor back somehow, and that perhaps it had been part of the reforms Gorkon had instituted when he took over.
Can't we just say it's another Klingon word that the Universal Translator doesn't translate into English? Or maybe "discommodation" in Klingon means that you're deprived of a commode. That would explain why Klingons always seem to be so crabby.
I always liked the explanation that the Klingons in TMP had spinal columns over their skulls because Starfleet had been kicking up the ass so much.
Why would we need to? In every subsequent onscreen use, it was pronounced correctly as "discommendation/discommendated." But Debt of Honor came out before any of its subsequent uses onscreen, I believe. It seems far simpler to "just say" it's a typo.