This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Strange New Worlds 2x01 The Broken Circle.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

  • Commod0re
    1·
    1 year ago

    I am confused by the choice to have the Klingons look like the redesign. This is TOS era so surely they should look like TOS era Klingons, no?

    In the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” some of the cast time travel into the (legendary) TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” and when asked why the Klingons from that era look different Worf only says “we don’t talk about it”

    SNW takes place a number of years before that TOS episode, so perhaps we will learn what happens sometime in the future as SNW gets closer and closer to the start of TOS

    • williams_482OPMA
      1·
      1 year ago

      There is a S4 Enterprise arc which was clearly intended to explain the smooth headed Klingons (it’s a disease brought on by attempted genetic engineering, basically). If one wishes to find a visual literalist explanation beyond that, it would simply be that there are lots of Klingons out there and some of them look very different.

      The other approach would be to accept that aesthetics change with budget and technology, and just shrug it off. I’ve grown increasingly supportive of that position as new material has come out, but it’s hardly a new take: Roddenberry himself, asked about the Klingons in TMP, said that they were always supposed to look like that, but the show never had the budget to make it happen.