Neville Page Says ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 1 Klingons Were “A Salty Broth”
Neville Page Says ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 1 Klingons Were “A Salty Broth”
It didn't have to be all or nothing. A few bald Klingons in the mix with long-haired guys would have been fine. The head ridges and tweaking of the design was cool, it was just too much. And then the camera flips upside down while spinning around the room. Michael whisper-yells something.
I really liked the addition to canon that the Kligon Empire is experiencing the tail and of a very long fall from grace. It explains a lot about how such a violent fuedal society could have science on par with the Federation.
I didn't like just about everything else Discovery Klingon's screen time. They were just so wearying to watch. They felt like some exhausting loud neighbors I have had.
the Kligon Empire is experiencing the tail and of a very long fall from grace. It explains a lot about how such a violent fuedal society could have science on par with the Federation.
It turns out the real 'merica was the Klingons we met along the way.
This is my not-safe-for-Reddit opinion but I thought the S1 Klingons were great, interesting and impressive.
I think the cranium size was the biggest "miss" in the design - I quite liked the season two iteration of the same basic ideas.
What's done is done. What I'd simply like to know is the why. Maybe it's in this article somewhere, but I gave up halfway. Probably just too sleepy atm. Someday I'll read a source that gives a sensible why. Because what I've heard never really made sense. Why keep so much intact and change one thing so drastically?
It's not in the article, and I don't think I've ever seen an "official" answer, but...I do think "because we can" is a valid answer. It was valid when they did it with TMP, and it was valid the subsequent times they tweaked the makeup.
In terms of how it served the story being told...I can see the appeal of having more alien-looking, "scarier" Klingons in a season that was ultimately about the dangers of xenophobia.
Makes perfect sense. But why not invent a whole new alien? Why modify an existing piece of canon (again)?
Except blue isn’t scary anymore after the Andorians. I can only fathom that they thought brown Klingons look like black Klingons and people will think that’s racist.
Oh how I wish people stopped separating humans in races and just stopped thinking in races and colors at all.
“There is only one race: the human race” - Robert Sobukwe, South African anti-apartheid activist
I kept waiting for a eugenics storyline where the Federation tries to make Klingons more human and turns them into TOS Klingons, thereby completing the narrative justification circle.
Instead…
I was honestly thinking/waiting for the same explanation. Haha.
If I remember correctly that's kind of what happened. The Klingons used augment genes from Earth's eugenics wars (the ones used to make Khan and others) to try and create their own augmented Klingons. It went wrong and the result was human looking Klingons and it somehow became a transmissible virus. That's where the TOS looking looking ones came from. All of this is retcon of course.
Edit: What I wrote was pretty close. Here is a link to the Klingon page on memory alpha. The explanation is just after the start of the "History and Politics" section.
... the removal of the hair, having done hairless Klingons with J.J.’s films. So I’d personally already gone through the Internet backlash, and so when Bryan said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do bald Klingons, like it’s gonna be tricky, man.’ And so everyone was salting the broth.
Sometimes you just gotta keep making the same mistake until you learn. At least this guy is humble and practical about it.
I always kind of liked the Kelvin Klingons.
Well, the makeup, anyway. I don't care for the costumes at all.
I completely forgot about the Kelvin Klingons.
I had to Google it. They're not bad. I think there's some fun to be had with the idea of their weird virus that messed with their ridges.
Like disco Klingons are the original pre-virus Klingon, ToS and Kelvin are some of the variants we get during the virus, and TNG is the Post virus
Much of discovery season one would have sat better with me if it had just taken place after voyager.
You mean the Skittles Klingons?
The weird ultra-racist stereotypes that sounded like they were designed by a colony-supporter of another era?
I wouldn't call it a salty broth but a big racist piece of shit.
Wut?
Agreed... wut?
Clothes very similar to the stereotypical "african clothes", they have dark skin and it is a core part of their identity, they got the actor of Tyler as a way to have an "exotic" accent, they also made them cannibals, with weird voodoo religious rituals with suggested (even if not so simple) rape, and if I'm not mistaken they commit terrorist suicide attacks as well.
They feel like a concentrated mix of the racist ideas gathered over the past 200 years, and are used to show that they are scary. Or to make it more obvious, they are shown like "exotic brown people who hate the white ones, and just want to eat them, rape them, and suicide on them to mass murder civilians to instill fear".
I'm not the only one who noticed that but I really can't understand how anyone can not see it.