There was also a Cadet in the first episode.
Seriously, where are the Klingons??
- Thread starter Roald
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The era has nothing to do with it. That's just an excuse for artistic license and innovation. ST:TMP didn't redesign everything because it was set a few years later, it redesigned everything because it was a big-budget blockbuster and the creators wanted it to look more impressive.
There are plenty of cases where different designers create different looks for things that have been shown before -- for instance, every new Batman movie continuity redesigns the costume, and the various Godzilla movies over the years have continually altered Godzilla's design even when multiple different designs were meant to represent the same individual creature. Art doesn't have to work the same way as reality. Often things change because of creative considerations rather than in-story factors.
I'm not anti-continuity. I love continuity. But I hate the way so many fans today have become obsessed with it to the point that they think it's the one and only thing that matters in fiction. Continuity is valuable, but it's one of many things that are, and they're all just means toward the end of telling the story. It's not about throwing it out the window, it's simply about having a sense of perspective about it, and understanding that there can be valid reasons to make exceptions to it.
Plus it's about understanding that narrative continuity is about story and characters and events, not makeup or technology designs.
I love continuity...
...of characters.
...of characters.
Very likely, though I myself do care about continuity. Just only up to a certain point.
I have a litmus test: "Will this make me sound like that guy at the Star Trek Convention? You know the one."
It's perfectly simple and logical:
If the new thing is set in an established time and place, continuity can be broken (if only entertainment matters) or maintained (if it's supposed to match and fit with what's established), and therefore natural, realistic, and plausible in-universe.
If the new thing is set before established eras and in similar places, a natural and realistic approach will show it as older, simpler, or at least different enough depending on how far before it is set.
If the new thing is set after established eras, everything can look different, most things even should look newer, improved, or simply indicative of a more futuristic time than the older things preceding it.
All that matters is the era.
Sure but would you call Earth of today a place of peace and love?
As I said, continuity is not about visual designs. Those can be changed at the discretion of the interpreter, because it's art, not a literal documentary. The Enterprise crew didn't literally turn into cartoons during TAS; they were the same flesh-and-blood people, but the visual interpretation of them was different in different works. Same with Saavik or Ziyal being recast -- the in-story character doesn't change, merely the real-world artistic interpretation thereof. There are two different levels here, the diegetic and the extradiegetic, and they shouldn't be confused (unless a storyteller deliberately acknowledges an extradiegetic change diegetically, as "Trials and Tribble-ations" and "Affliction"/"Divergence" did with the Klingon redesign).
That's forgetting that this is art. It's a creation of human imagination, and individual style and choice is intrinsic to that. If you get a dozen artists to paint the same subject in their own styles, you'll get a dozen different versions of it, even if they're all being "realistic." Even reality itself is subjective; ask a dozen people to describe a crime they witnessed and you'll get a dozen different accounts. Individual interpretation is always a factor. Is it "unrealistic" that Robin Curtis played Saavik differently than Kirstie Alley did? Or did they and their respective directors merely have different ideas of what a realistic performance would be like?
That is reductive and superficial. There is never only one thing that matters in art or fiction. Setting or period is only one consideration, one ingredient in the mix.
Sorry, what does that have to do with anything? I'm talking about the likelihood that people or nations in a given time would be influenced by something from 800 years earlier rather than something more recent. Whether that influence is positive or negative is beside the point. It's true that things can have lasting influence over that span of time -- for instance, the Magna Carta's legacy has continued to resonate ever since. But there are plenty of other steps between then and now that are important too, and that the general public would be more likely to pay attention to. A historian would be aware that the US Constitution is something of a descendant of the Magna Carta, but it would rarely come up in your typical present-day debate over Constitutional amendments or interpretations.
As much as I like the idea of jumping DSC into the far future, so far the execution has fallen short. Eight centuries is a very long time, enough for history and society to go through dozens of generational shifts, upheavals, transformations, etc. But so far DSC is showing us cultures that remained pretty much unchanged between the time of Picard and the time of the Burn seven centuries later. Ni'Var is something of an exception, but it's not enough. Even with the effort to find Gray a body, what they settle on is the same technique used in Picard, with apparently no other breakthroughs in that field in the ensuing eight centuries.
It would work better if they weren't quite so far in the future -- maybe the 26th century. Unfortunately, they're stuck with the 32nd, because ENT already established that the UFP was still going strong in the 31st.
My point is that yes cultures can advance to become peaceful and more enlightened.
They can also stagnate as you seem to hint is happening in Dis...(I must resist the old STD joke
).
But societies can also regress.There are real-world regimes trying to impose 15th century ideals on their countries as we speak.
Point is we won’t know until we know and being honest I personally don’t mind not seeing the Klingons again for a while.There may be quite enough of that to come in SNW.
They can also stagnate as you seem to hint is happening in Dis...(I must resist the old STD joke
).But societies can also regress.There are real-world regimes trying to impose 15th century ideals on their countries as we speak.
Point is we won’t know until we know and being honest I personally don’t mind not seeing the Klingons again for a while.There may be quite enough of that to come in SNW.
Of course they can, but that's a totally different topic than what I was saying in the post you responded to, so it's a non sequitur.
"Stagnation" is a negative, racially loaded value judgment that historians and scholars prefer to avoid. It's an ethnocentric myth in the West that a culture is only healthy if it's advancing and is otherwise "stagnant." A society can be stable, having only gradual progress and change if there's no compelling need for more rapid change, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. And even a stable culture does have some degree of progress and innovation.
Besides, we're not talking about a single culture, but a whole galaxy of numerous cultures in interaction, which should prompt a great deal of societal change and evolution. Long-term cultural stability is a reponse to consistent, stable circumstances, a state of affairs where the society is already well-adapted to its status quo and has no incentive for drastic change. When numerous cultures are interacting, that's very unlikely.
Yes, and that is a change. That's just what I'm saying -- that there should have been centuries worth of transformation, multiple rises and falls, reforms and regressions, a whole messy roller coaster of historical cycles, in that interim period. But so far the show is treating it as if very little happened one way or the other.
As I said elsewhere, the answer to the Klingons appearance in Discovery is right there at the end of their final appearance on Enterprise. The Klingon doctor played by John Schuck said that he imagined that cranial reconstructive surgery would be a big thing moving forward. I mean, there's no way the Klingons would allow themselves to be looking like weak puny humans, correct? What we see a century later is simply the Klingons as a culture going to an extreme with these reconstructive surgeries. Just like we see modern humans who go to an extreme with tattoos or facial piercings. It's body art. And it was a fad that ended a decade later when the augment virus reared its ugly head once again.
The writers/art designers backed themselves into a corner by redesigning the species in season 1 considering we now have multiple new shows taking place in the 24th-century where Klingons have a very specific and familiar appearance. To have a Disco Klingon show up now would conflict with having Worf show up in Picard, should they decide to do that.
Multiple kinds of Klingons can exist at once.
Lower Decks gave us tellarite with abd without DSC style tusks.
Picard had Romulans with and workout the TNG ridge. Flat faced Andorians while Discovery is still using their design.
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There's no conflict, because they're just different artistic interpretations of the same thing, like the different Klingon designs used at the same time in the movies and TNG. Klingons have been redesigned time and time again, and only twice has the franchise bothered to treat it as an in-universe change that needs explaining rather than just a change in production methods. And DSC didn't bother explaining how L'Rell's cranium got much smaller between seasons 1 & 2, any more than TNG explained why Worf's forehead ridges changed completely between seasons 1 & 2.
Just looking at the variety of designs in The Undiscovered Country is a great example, Chang, Colonel Worf, Gorkon, and the various other Klingons had huge variation, and were all meant to be the same species.
Looking like TOS would not have been doing things correctly.
Not really. I mean, they definitely tried to suggest the idea of it, but there's no mistaking the touchscreen controls of ENT as being "less advanced" than the colored bead controls of TOS, or the depiction of fantastical internal circuitry in ENT as being "less advanced" than the wood-and-wire internal computers of TOS.
Which is a completely legitimate creative choice -- it is, in fact, the correct choice.
Nope. TMP was set two years after the end of Kirk's five-year mission, so it was set maybe three years after TOS S3. Absolutely not enough time for the kind of total change of the entire Starfleet design aesthetic.
But we accept the change in TMP because it's a work of art and not everything has to be Realism/Naturalism all the time.
Seem simple enough: Kirk preferred to use the viewscreen instead of holo-comms for the same reason some people prefer phone calls instead of Zoom meetings. The holo-comms in DS9 were probably far more advanced than those in the 2250s since holo-tech was more advanced (probably had the ability to physically interact with the other side of the connection, etc).
Also they used DIS-style holographic displays and controls in early TNG ("The Last Outpost," for instance) before discontinuing them within TNG.
Adhering to your preferred aesthetic taste is not "getting it right," and deviating from it is not "getting it wrong."
You gonna whine that the 1996 Broadway revival of Cabaret didn't use the same sets and costumes as the 1966 production? If a new production of Fiddler on the Roof doesn't use the same set design for Anatevka, are they getting it "wrong?"
This is false. The tech of the 32nd Century is a mixed bag -- some of it, like programmable matter, is more advanced. Others are the same or less advanced, as a result of the Burn's effects on the interstellar educational and technological infrastructure.
Of course it does. Its sets include touchscreen controls, digital displays, and consoles that are not visibly made of wood. This assertion is pure nonsense.
"Not so much with discovery"? What the hell are you talking about? "DIS looks more advanced than TOS" is one of the most tiresome, repetitive complaints on the TrekBBS since DIS premiered.
In what manner does DIS's tech seem too "magical?" And when you say that, are you referring to S1-2 or S3-4?
This. This this this this this. Thank you.
For that matter, you need only look at the differences between, say, Peter Dinkledge and LeBron James, to remember how diverse Human phenotypes are in real life. Or, if we introduce deliberate genetic alterations, how different Chihuahas are from Great Danes are from Rottweilers, etc -- yet they're all the same species! There's no reason aliens might not be even more diverse.
Wait...those are the same species? Impossible! Someone explain this to me!
Doctor Phlox was trying to cure all the subjects of the Canine Empire from a terrible virus created through genetic engineering, but his cure accidentally mutated all the Empire's wolves into the breeds we see today.
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