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Episode Analysis | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x01 “The Broken Circle”
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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l am happy that La’an seems to have some sort of characterization other than “hates the gorn and is angry”. There is potential for her to be interesting but she was downright forgettable to me in season 1.
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?
It goes without saying I agree with others about M’Benga and Chapel just taking drugs and fighting Klingons. We can find ways to justify it and make it make sense but it feels out of place.
I also just… don’t like Chapels character. It doesn’t really make sense to me that half the time the Nurse is doing the things the doctor would normally be doing but also is a kick ass bad ass action star. If anything the way they’re portraying Chapel should be how La’an is portrayed.
Honestly now that I type that out, I’m thinking about how in TOS Chapel is just a small quiet side character. If you’re gonna have Chapel in SNW maybe it would make more sense for HER to be the one emotionally scarred by the Gorn, and her character arc over the course of the show being a lot about her mental and emotional recovery. Going from being totally reclusive but accepted into starfleet medical for being competent to coming into her own and finding her strengths.
Is the consensus that the Klingons "changed"? I assume it's taken as a design characteristic. The same way this Enterprise feels very different and more futuristic/advanced than the one in TOS, but it is the same Enterprise. At least that's how I take it.
The reason why I say the Klingons "changed" and it's not just a design characteristic is when the crew of DS9 goes back in time to the tribble incidence on board the enteprise, a character (I believe Odo) asks Worf to explain why the Klingons then look so different from him. He gets agitated and refuses to talk about it. If I recall as well, Afflication, the ENT episode has a story indicating that something regarding Augment experimentation resulted in different looking Klingons.
Oh I had no idea! I'm not well versed outside of TOS, TGN (not much) and STN :) Thanks for sharing!
Absolutely! Highly recommend watching DS9 :)
I once proposed on the sub that the different Chapel we see in TOS is because she was traumatised by "What Are Little Girls Made Of" but people preferred this retcon so felt such an explanation was both tragic and unnecessary.
Gene always said that TOS Klingons would have had ridges the whole time if they'd had the budget for more elaborate makeup. Kor, Kang, and Koloth had the redesign. There's no proof that anyone outside of a handful in that Enterprise arc ever lost their ridges-- and would you really put it past the Klingons to lethally enforce a quarantine?
Good point about the Klingons enforcing a quarantine with force.
I’m pretty okay with just accepting it as a design change, I only bring it up because they previously tried to explain it.
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
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.