TrekLit reference:
I'm still waiting for something that would lead to the throwaway bit in Diane Carey's Dreadnought!, in which we meet the first Gorn in Starfleet.
Ways that SNW actually improved TOS
- Thread starter Cr0sis21
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TrekLit reference:
I'm still waiting for something that would lead to the throwaway bit in Diane Carey's Dreadnought!, in which we meet the first Gorn in Starfleet.
Looks like the Gorn are trying to corner the market.
FTFY
"Under the Cloak of War" contextualizes why everyone hates Klingons so damn much.
It really does. Suddenly, the way everyone was acting in Star Trek 6 makes even more sense. I can picture Admiral Cartwright being a young officer serving on the ground in the Klingon war, and it all falls into place.
Well, surely that was implicit in TOS, that there was an existing history of warfare and hostility between the two powers. Kirk hated the Klingons so much in "Errand of Mercy" that he didn't realize how belligerently he was acting until the Organians knocked some sense into him. The entity in "Day of the Dove" manufactured some false memories to inflame hatred, but a lot of it was just amplification of the bad blood that already existed. And Kirk's "You Klingon bastard" in ST III always had an ugly sound to it, the way he didn't just say "You bastard, you've killed my son" but made a point of using "Klingon" as an insult. There was clearly some pre-existing bad blood there on top of his immediate rage.
And of course, it was Discovery that established the nature and specifics of that history of warfare, showing that it was much more extreme than TOS had implied. But yes, "Under the Cloak" did explore the psychological aftermath of that war more than DSC really did.
It would be interesting if SNW established just what Kirk experienced during the Klingon War -- although timing-wise, it would've fallen around the time that the vampire cloud attacked the Farragut, so hopefully that would be taken into account.
I always felt like, it's one thing to SAY "Oh yeah, they fought, there's bad blood," but it's another to see it firsthand.
Kind of like what happened in The Wounded. We'd never even heard of Cardassians or that war, so it was hard to get as invested in O'Brien's anger because of that.
On the other hand, it'd be easy to have a similar storyline for, say, the Jem'Hadar, because we're all intimately familiar with that particular war.
As only this board is the place anyone would care, I always felt that DISCO was retconning in the Klingon War. There was definitely a history of bad blood and nastiness among the Federation and Klingons but I never actually believed there had been a full scale war between the two powers but just individual clashes among captains. To use an example, the Federation has never been at war with the Ferengi but there were numerous piracy and terrorist attacks against the Enterprise alone by individual Daimons. Plus, we know at least a couple of proxy wars happened.
Indeed, "Errand of Mercy" only really makes sense trying to prevent what the Klingon War of DISCO/SNW ended up being, not round 2 of it.
Kirk maybe was not part of the Klingon war, if the Farragut was damaged by the cloud creature and had to wait to be fully repaired?
Or, they fled from a Klingon to avoid a confrontation and got attacked by the cloud creature.
Well, of course. But Trek has been retconning things ever since James R. became James T. and UESPA became the Federation Starfleet. We only pretend it's a coherent whole.
Don't get me wrong, I wish the Klingon War in DSC had been of a more moderate size, since its Dominion War-level magnitude is hard to reconcile. But it's what we have to deal with now, and we just have to make the best of it, like we've been doing with continuity problems in Trek for nearly sixty years. There are many things in Trek that I wish had happened differently, but you can't relitigate the past, only deal with the present.
Maybe not a war of the magnitude we saw, but it's hard to believe there wasn't some warfare in the pre-Organian part of that "almost seventy years of unremitting hostility" that Spock mentioned in TUC. After all, Kirk considered himself a soldier, and he and others in Starfleet clearly had significant combat experience. Why not against the Klingons, given their proclivities?
I don't see any reason to think that. After all, it's no different from WWII being "round 2" of WWI. Wars often have sequels if the diplomats and politicians fail to resolve the underlying issues adequately. I mean, we know the war in "Errand" began with the breakdown of negotiations. That could easily be taken to mean that the years-long negotiations to establish a lasting peace after the previous war fell apart, and the war resumed.
Maybe this isn't what you're thinking, but if the question is "Why didn't the Organians stop the first war?," the answer is right there in "Errand": The Organians aren't peace activists, they just can't stand the presence of corporeal beings and wanted the noisy kids to get off their lawn. The only reason they intervened was because the war came to Organia. So as long as the previous war didn't affect the Organian system, there's no reason they would've done anything about it.
Exactly. The only reason the Organians intervened in errand of Mercy was because both sides of this impending war planned to use their Planet as a base of operations; and as they saw what Kirk, Spock and Kor were all willing to do to further these aims; they finally decided enough was enough, and they just wanted everyone off their world and to be certain their area of space would not be used in the furtherance of corporeal violence.
They wanted everyone off their lawn... 
"Errand of Mercy" fits surprisingly well with the DSC war. Kirk speaks of having seen planets under Klingon military occupation, and the entire "disputed area" notion fits well with a recent prior war that ended abruptly by fiat without a clear winner who could dictate terms.
I'm still partial to the theory that the obscure line of TOS that inspired DSC for Fuller was McCoy taunting Spock about when Vulcan was conquered though, oddly, even with the end of the first season having the Klingons running roughshod over Federation space, Vulcan didn't seem to be in the firing line. Of course, given all the behind-the-scenes shakeups, it's totally plausible that the existing line of dialog the show was intended to play off got lost in the shuffle and no one who was left when they were writing the end of the season knew that it was actually really important to mention Klingon boots landed on Vulcan soil.
I'm still partial to the theory that the obscure line of TOS that inspired DSC for Fuller was McCoy taunting Spock about when Vulcan was conquered though, oddly, even with the end of the first season having the Klingons running roughshod over Federation space, Vulcan didn't seem to be in the firing line. Of course, given all the behind-the-scenes shakeups, it's totally plausible that the existing line of dialog the show was intended to play off got lost in the shuffle and no one who was left when they were writing the end of the season knew that it was actually really important to mention Klingon boots landed on Vulcan soil.
to answer the OP:
- VFX (obviously); the Romulan BoP looks way scarier than it did in TOS
- portraying female characters (Uhura and Chapel are noticeable improvements); including no ridiculous miniskirts
- portraying the whole cast in general
- Showing more species in the Federation
- Klingons aren't just brownface (not surprising)
Gotta credit that design to Picard Season 1
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