What is your personal Star Trek canon? — Page 5

Superweapon VII said:

Channel72 said:

Superweapon VII said:

I generally accept DS9 as canon, though not many of the elements I dislike about TNG that carried over, such as the depiction of Klingons. I’m not sure if I accept Jadzia’s death and Ezri Dax’s existence as canon.

The TNG depiction of Klingons is just a slight variation on the depiction of Klingons in The Motion Picture, The Search for Spock, and The Undiscovered Country. (Except they no longer have pink blood in the 24th century I guess, and the honor culture thing gets cranked up to 11.)

I’d say the TNG Klingons are flanderized versions of the TOS film Klingons. Also TUC had the most well-rounded depiction of the Klingons.

Yeah, in the 1980s the Klingons still had some USSR in their DNA, but the honor-based warrior culture was suggested by things like, for example, the impulsive glory-seeking behavior of that idiot Klingon captain in Star Trek 5. One of the ironies of Klingon thematic evolution over the years is that we ended up with a warrior race that values honor and dying in battle but also is particularly well known for their (cowardly) cloaking technology. That thematic incongruity probably dates back to TOS, when Klingons were depicted as using Romulan technology due to budgetary limits at the time probably.

TNG made Klingon’s space Vikings.

I do remember some of the complaints around this a long time ago.

^ I was introduced to the Klingons mostly through their TNG/DS9 depiction as well. But I always found the “space viking” thing a bit too reductive. I mean sometimes it gets really ridiculous, like there’s an episode of DS9 where Klingon soldiers use Bat’leths instead of disruptors during an actual military battle.

But on the other hand, the TOS/TOS-movie Klingons didn’t exactly have a well-defined culture beyond “generic vaguely Eastern stand-in for the USSR/China”, valuing collectivism over individuality. The TOS writers (I think it was Gene Coon) said that the Klingons were based on the USSR and China, but also a little bit on Imperial Japan during WW2, and the original script for the TOS episode “Errand of Mercy” explicitly refers to the Klingons as looking like “Orientals”. I think it was this strain of their thematic DNA - based on Imperial Japan - that evolved into the “Space Viking”/Samurai-esque honor-based warrior culture of the TNG era. The USSR metaphor was kind of obsolete after 1991 (I still blame Gorbachev for the Praxis disaster), but Samurai/Space Vikings can be cool in any era.

I have some old Trek paperbacks I got at the thrift store, library sale and flea market but that wasn’t one of them I’ll have to pick it up.