How THE KLINGONS Changed - Lore Evolution 

@Levy Panik Gee, I wonder why.

@@devinsmith4790 Yep, it's ST:D... not only because of standard abbreviations over the years but because STD is really appropriate for that story arc epoch.

@Levy Panik STD sounds right because watching it is like getting a STD !!!

InstaBlaster...

@@joshuaidris9312 Wait... that sounds familiar. "InstaBlaster"... was that an Easter Egg weapon in a Playstation game in the 90s? I also vaguely remember a weapon that instant-killed anything had that name but its refire rate sucked, so use for big guys and not swarms. Am I remembering "InstaBlaster" or something that sounds similar? Hell, I can't even remember the game(s)... it's been decades.

Old comment, I know, but if they were so determined to make klingons more "alien," they should have made a new alien. What they did was take a species whose design has been the same for the past 35 years and change everything except their names.

Me too.. My biggest issue was the acting not coming through. The prosthetics hindered the performances. The fake teeth made them sound ridiculous. Not good if I want to laugh. But I didn't hate them. But damn. Less can be more. The Axanar fan stuff was far more effective because the actors could act. The Discovery Klingons had about the same amount of movement as a Muppet. I think Picard did a great job with the Romulans. Honoring the old and new and giving us far more diversity in their looks.

@@Majima_Nowhere I thought the same. Maybe they remember how the Kazon were taken. I think the Kazon looked bad but they could have been interesting if they focused on them as being rebels in a war that have to remain nomadic cause they're enemy is superior. The other problem is the idea that dis isn't a reboot or in the reboot timeline ect. And you can get away with changes like TOS did because there wasn't video recording at the time and the show was old. And even the TOS movies were the ones that changed it. TNG followed it.

@@Majima_Nowhere It's kinda weird to make sentient alien races in the Star Trek universe. Obliviously it's budget reasons, but it's pretty established that in space we'll encounter aliens that look like us but with face bumps.

@@devinsmith4790 i think you have missed the point of ST.because its not about realism, its about the story, though the STD klingons look realy stupid.

The Hur'q (the guys that stole the sword of Kahless) invaded Qo'nos in our 14th century. When the Klingons drove off the invaders, they kept their tech.

"Too much make up and prosthetics on an actor and you loose all humanity in their face" "you loose all humanity in their face" - that was kind of the point of the redesign "Too much make up and prosthetics" - before you say you cant see them emote, i dare you to watch the scene between Voq and Lrell on board the shenzhou - and for 90% of the time all you need to see is their "arrgh war" and "arrgh honor" face

It was helpful when they "Finally" added the hair in season 2 of std.

Turns out they were removing their hair in Discovery and stopped by the end of season 2.

Discovery Klingons suck !! They are way over done.

@@SC-mq1eh , the point failed, as it reduced Klingons to humans wearing plastic looking masks rather than something more alien.

They simply don't know why things were done the way they were done before, and they don't care to know. They arrogantly think they know better, but produce an objectively worse, technically flawed result because they've never done the work themselves and never hired any of the people who could explain it to them. The make-up on Star Trek was an evolution, where lessons were learned as they went along, designs were developed in logical ways and standardized. Klingons especially underwent significant development in their visual language, arguably more than any other alien species. Probably hundreds of man hours went into every detail of the Klingons in the TNG-ENT era, so that audiences would immediately recognize them, understand them and the different factions, and have the appropriate emotional reaction on a subconscious level. STD's designers went: "eh, they're aliens so let's make them look weird" and called it a day. The audience backlash was predictable and correct. Human audiences respond better to human-like aliens more than alien-like aliens. Humans only care about human stories. You can anthropomorphize non-human characters, and get an invested audience, but you cannot go the other way without falling into the uncanny valley, and making people tune out and stop caring about the story. Nobody cares about a zombie and what happens to them. They're just a monster, their motivations and trials are irrelevant. Actors also can't act as well with a bunch of rubber covering their face. Wearing a mask hides the performance. It cripples it. The product is objectively worse. The idea to go for "realism" just demonstrates the utter incompetence of the showrunners and their design staff. These people do not understand storytelling, they don't understand that design needs to serve a function for the story, and they don't understand any of the visual language and performance that goes into a prosthetic appliance. They are amateurs, and they will always be in the shadow of the giants who created Star Trek. This is a technical flaw, on par with failing to light a scene so the audience can see it, not recording the audio correctly, so that it comes out too quiet to hear, or too garbled to understand, or an actor failing to get an actor in frame so their head is cut off and all you see is their torso. It's not a legitimate artistic choice, it's an error.

they themselves call there language "klingonee" not klingon.

@@flyingfoamtv2169 what I was trying to say is why is there only one kilingon language as not all humans speak the same language so you would expect different languages to develop on other worlds

Ferengi lore evolution. They really came into their own in Deep Space Nine.

Why is this here? This isn't the Ferengi lore video.

Well you just gave it some of your time of day to write a comment about it

I'll raise you a changeling = slime (sort of)

Don't forget Ferngi = Goblins

how could you forget the Borg = Undead/Zombies and the most powerfull necromancer/liich ever, the borg queen

Borg = Cybermen, but actually scary.

Xindi = Hyper Evolved/Mutant Earth animals

I agree. I liked how more or less every series built a piece of the puzzle around the klingon ridges. That one DS9 episode where Worf says "we do not like talking about it" when he was asked about their foreheads was also a nice piece in the total story. Just made everything fit. I didn't appreciate the " I do not care about the enterprise episode". He might not care, but I found it pivotal and great!

@@rikujoyce7672 FASA had the "Smoothies" and "Bumpies". Sometimes the Bumpies were in control, sometimes the Smoothies. If anything they should've just had Dorn in the SlavOriential TOS makeup for that episode.

Yes, THAT'S what they remind me of. I couldn't quite pkace my finger on it before now. Thank you

I think they look like Mass Effect aliens. I wouldn't be so offended if they weren't Klingons but were instead a completely different race.

Yeah, but it was in an extremely tongue in check way for an (admittedly funny) one off joke in an episode that didn’t take itself too seriously.

Eh... no. The Star Trek movie that had Klingons in it (Star Trek 2) had Klingons look different for the first time since TOS. Christopher Lloyd played the Klingon captain and he was the first Klingon to have a pet Targ... also that was the first appearance of a Targ. DS9 was the first to address it and made it an in-canon murmur. Enterprise gave it a full-on clarification.

Way back in the 1980s The FASA Star Trek roleplaying game retconned TOS Klingons with smooth foreheads as a faction of Klingon-human fusions, or hybrids, that held power but then lost it and were replaced by TMP Klingons.

@@dang7799 At least FASA's one worked better. Or That Tribble episode should've had Dorn in the SlavOriental TOS makeup.

The same author - John M. Ford - wrote the Stars Trek novel 'The Final Reflection', with the Klingons as the central characters. With the material he'd developed for FASA, the characters and culture felt a lot deeper than the sometimes cardboard characterization displayed in the movies. (He also wrote another Star Trek novel, 'How Much for Just the Planet?', a screamingly-funny novel about the settlers on a world that turns out to have massive dilithium deposits resisting the efforts of both the Federation and the Empire to assert control over the planet. Read it.)

Worf could've worked if they'd leaned into his Russian-Jewish upbringing (go look up the actors who play his parents). But it was all "Waugh waugh Klingon This, Klingon that Kling Kling Kling" no "Oy Meshuggah, that Martok's got some chutzpah."

@@hellacoorinna9995 That's the point, he overcompensated for being raised by humans by obsessing over his birth culture.

I get what you mean, but Discovery was going for a more modern allegory with its Klingons rather than the whole Cold War thing.

@@RowanJColeman This is a problem with creating prequels inside an established written history, but then choosing to largely ignore that very context. Perhaps setting such an allegory in the future of Star Trek, say the 25th Century, would have been wiser.

@@LazarusRemains Honestly both allegories work side by side. The TOS allegory set up the relationship between the Federation and Klingons. Whereas Discovery used a different allegory to dive into the motivations of the Klingons.

They are actually supposed to be in the midst of a civil war, STD is happening near the end of it. The radically different ships in STD and TOS and later is due to the great houses no longer having access to imperial shipyards during the civil war. Some may be Hurq ships, some may be quickly built on Hurq designs. This is also why things feel so different is that they are fighting a massive civil war and the House Mokai, and their allied houses being the most powerful of the factions before being exterminated were in some ways physically different. That at least is how they are trying to explain it away after many fans called them out for their compete divergence.

The discovery allegory doesn't work at all. There's being considered and relevant (ST VI) and there's being a parody of your intentions, setting up strawmen for a preachy bit of self-indulgence (STD).

I want to do the Paragon adaptation myself haha

Rowan J Coleman I think one book which I personally would LOVE to see in Tv show form, is Fahrenheit 451, if you haven’t read the book, I would implore you to give it a read, in the simplest turns, it’s reverse Star Trek, and it is glorious...

I think the more interesting aspect of Lore Evolution is that it can cover the behind-the-scenes aspects of that evolution. As such, I think Stargate Command fairly boring tbh, because most of its evolution is actually in universe. It‘s not like the Borg or Goa‘Uld Where concepts changed drastically over time to a point when their earlier incarnation doesn’t always make sense. Jaffa would be more interesting. I would love to see a Lore evolution on the Cylons or maybe an aspect of Babylon 5.

Exactly how I felt. Some things just don't need 'explaining'.

@@craigtowse4340 This is Star Trek, ofcourse it needs explaining. Everything needs explaining. RU-vid is full of explaining Star Trek. But I agree, DS9 had the best "explaining".

The ENT storyline was entirely unnecessary, and the DS9 explanation was perfectly fine. What STD did was make acting behind all that rubber impossible, so the show was objectively worse for it.

Hey at least they TRIED to make the aliens look... You know... Alien! Something the rest of the franchise (besides Kelvin) sorely lacked.

Alberts Choise well it’s shown in an episode of tng called the chase in s6 the shows that humans romuulans Klingons and carrdassins are all genetics related due to meddling from a long extinct race

There are some interesting design ideas, like the gothic cathedral-like look of the interior of the Klingon ships and their weird marine life/coral-looking armor(which would be better for an aquatic race). But the Discovery Klingons are just too removed from the passion, the warrior joy and the charisma of the Klingons we all know and love. Same with Picard's Romulans, they just don't feel like the real thing to me.

right. The Discovery Klingons could have been done on the budget of past Star Treks, but those old creators had better taste and were not beholden to early 2000's fantasy and horror movies.

It wasn't bad when they changed the TOS Kilingons because they were only in a handful of low budget TOS episodes. In legacy trek they were in hundreds of episodes spanning 4 different shows, two decades, two main characters and several recurring characters. They were obscure villains in TOS. In legacy trek they were redefined and developed. We learned about every aspect of their culture from death rituals, coming of age, marriage, divorce, legal systems, parenting, government, war planning, family feuds etc. By the time discovery was made they had a huge amount of well established canon to pull from and they ignored most of it.

Mayhaps ;)

Poor writing. More pewpew, more lens flares, more in your face current day politics rather than nuanced narrative. Pick one

Yeah and in that episode they played it for laughs with a simple, "We do not like to talk about it." Which is really all it needed.

Yes, and Worf indicated that it was a sensitive issue--perhaps Klingons went a period of envying alien looks and used plastic surgery.

@@RowanJColeman We can disagree. But it was a step in a less monolithic image of the Klingons. Also, the moderns Klingons had too much of an iconic look to screw with. Since Discovery has been revealed to be Prime and not Kelvin it actually is not fucked with.

@@johnkelly7757 That is a good one, too. I would have laughed at that and been satisfied due to it being a cultural issue and a contrivance. However, I like the eugenics explanation. I wonder if Rowan cries over explanations for why superheroes choose the colors they wear.

Enterprise handled it far better than a bad joke in an otherwise good episode of DS9, plus the Enterprise episodes gave us a very overdue explanation of the Klingon appearance, one of Trek's worst sore-thumbs. Also Enterprise showed how early well meaning contacts with the Klingons lead to hostility, although none of that was the early contacts that lead to a policy of studying a species before contacting them, as the Vulcans also a Federation founding world had already contacted the Klingons, and also developed protocols for first contacts.

It also doesn't make up for why every Klingon in std looks like an anthropomorphized alien xenomorph.

@@pderham26 I didnt particularly cared about the designs, but they paired it with... well, everything about STD and it was just one more thing to complain in a series that had few, if any, positive points. A good script could've saved the appalling designs, obviously that didnt happened.

@@pderham26 Agreed. Discovery's fatal flaw is it's writing... Makeup , art, and costuming are pretty bad, but good writing could've saved that, but it was not to be had. Its' a shame too because they wasted all that talent they have in their cast.

@Species 443764 Breen so someone who gets into star trek through discovery isn't a star trek fan then? Good to know.

@@mrsaltyauthor5992 don't listen to the radicals, I too have many MANY issues with STD (too many Mary Sue first season number one). But they are doing better, the writing is improving (I think due to the huge failure of Star Wars) and CBS wants to avoid that. TOS and ENT suffered the same issues with writing, TOS only the first few episodes but they had some of the greatest writers of the time working on the show so it quickly improved. ENT took until nearly the third season before it felt like anything more than a weak copy of TOS. Discovery had a few bad ones, Voyager and ENT both had some issues but took the time to address fan critiques. I imagine STO including STD into the game, and how good they are at making things flow and work (gamers are vicious critics and will walk with their money if things don't make sense) it will improve STD. I keep hoping they go with the whole "the ships are different due to the civil war" which is the only thing that makes much sense.

One word... Adblock.

Wait, CoinOpTV? That’s not a name I’ve seen in a long time. I used to watch your Skylanders videos all the time back in 2013

@@AzraelAngel945 Portal Master rank up :)

Watch youtube on a browser with an adblocker. It’s like night and day

Agreed. I approached this series as a cheap and generic scifi to read once and forget it ever existed, but it surprised me with a lot of great ideas. It could work well as a TV series, since the books are rather short, but full of action sequences.

Yeah I agree. Imagine if some one went and changed the look of the Vulcans, that is what is irritating about the changes. The new Klingon look isn't bad, it's just unnecessary.

@@CallSignGhost Yeah I agree. It was basically an entire species redesign for no good reason.

the optical changes are not those those who destroyed them. Compleatly rewriting their entire culture is the problem!

@@CallSignGhost Not a big fan of Discovery's change to the Andorians, either.

agreed! plus CBS is full of assholes that killed one of the Best Fan films out of spite.

it's interesting to see wider culture of SciFi shows

Production incompetence. That's the explanation. It's a technical flaw, not a legitimate artistic choice, to make alien characters so alien that human audiences can't empathize with them, and put so much rubber on actors' faces that they can't perform as actors under it. It's like failing to record the audio in a scene, or cutting a character's head off when framing the camera shot.

fox five up 23 degrees at time 20.

You’re dead right. I really don’t like much of the show, but I think those changes would improve certain aspects of it greatly.

"3.6 roentgen, not great. Not terrible."

Yes, I’ve been enjoying his videos but I found that a little off-putting. Obviously that’s his prerogative, he made the video; but I think the Discovery/modern Trek controversies do tend to divide people more often along political lines. Who knows how fans will see things 30 years from now, but personally I found the attempt by the writers to compare Klingons to nationalists a bit trite (especially when everything’s trying to win ‘woke’ points these days).

Par for the course