I don't hate this one per se- I think the 'whoops, Dax might've murdered someone by the standards of Federation law' gets swept under the rug with about the same final two-minute rush as the ends of episodes where they discover God is real or whatever. It feels more like it just has the perennial Trek issue of wanting to be five minutes longer and never being exactly sure whether they want to make any of the changes stick.
I think it actually does some good work by suggesting that the Klingon/Federation thaw and alliance actually involved Klingons and Feds *liking each other and getting along*, which is honestly really thin on the ground in TNG outside of Worf. K'mpec ropes Picard into stuff he doesn't want to do, Duras is a villain, Gowron is axe-crazy, Kurn is irritated and baffled by Starfleet and is there under false pretenses anyways, the Duras sisters end up blowing up the ship, some renegades try to hijack the ship in 'Heart of Glory,' there's a whole village of difficult self-defeating Klingons in 'Birthright', the Klingon governor Picard swears at is clearly looking for trouble, etc....
So for there to be three Klingons dating from when they were straightforwardly antagonistic (and not...whatever the hell was happening in TNG) that came to trust and love a Federation personage as family, and for that to endure across decades, at least feels like a gesture towards there actually being something besides some geopolitical abstraction backing up the alliance. Even come Voyager when the EMH's holographic son adopting Klingon styling is viewed as being a 'bad kid', it's rare that they can quite get to suggesting that Klingons are just okay people to know- but DS9 occasionally does better (see Martok, Grilka, the guy at the deli, everyone in 'Soldiers of the Empire') and this seems the start of that.
Kang and Koloth are whatevers, but I've always really liked that Kor is still playing a TOS Klingon and that accounts for his being a fish out of water as clearly as his age and his drinking. When he first meets Worf and basically throws the entire Klingon honor apparatus under the bus, grinning all the while, we see a crafty version of the Klingons that were almost entirely supplanted by their Shakespearean blood-and-thunder descendants.
That is very well-observed, as ever! Focusing on the Klingon in the food court -- I wonder why they so seldom took the approach of showing Klingons who were NOT warriors! We know Klingon Opera exists (presumably invented as a throw-away gag for something no one would want to sit through), so why do we never meet any singers? Why does the one Klingon who most disdains the warrior ethos (K'Ehleyr) have to die so pointlessly, and why is it a catastrophe if Alexander follows in her footsteps? And why couldn't the Duras sisters just retire from politics and become regular interstellar traders? The one time we get any real window into the non-warrior castes and the possibility that they might not be self-evidently central to everything is, bizarrely, in Enterprise.
I too like the not-Martok lawyer in Enterprise, in part because he suggests that the cultural currency of warriors is something novel, between an affectation and a coup, and really that simply has to be true.
I think we mostly saw warriors because they had a good thing going and to steer the ship in other directions would come perilously close to figuring out how the Klingon Empire 'actually' worked, which is a style of worldbuilding that Trek (generally wisely) avoided. I think the best explanation is that the Empire is in fact functionally feudal, and that the reason we mostly see warriors obsessed with violence and honor is that the Empire is arranged in such a way that leadership and leadership questions are inherently vested in a class that owe their positions to promises of military service.
It's what they're hinting at in cases like Martok's enmity for Kor's old class prejudice, but Trek was never quite interested enough in being political fiction to close the circuit and come out and state the implications of that view- that Worf is not just a random Klingon orphan but something like a Klingon duke, and that's the reason why all his shenanigans always seem to end up as duels on the floor of the High Council, a litigation mechanism that simply can't be where most criminal questions end up in an empire of billions.
If Worf is a Klingon duke then being raised by humans is no longer just a case of a Starfleet officer having a big heart- it simply had to have some political *something* in the mix, that this was some formal ritual of mutual support like a royal wedding, or alternatively that the Federation was removing a politically complicated loose end (as child heirs often are). The Rozhenkos simply can't be all that ignorant of the mechanics of Klingon law- especially since, with Kurn and the like, we know that the Mogh family still had property like land.
And, of course, the most complicated trick, then, is that the Federation is apparently buddy-buddy with a civilization that simply has to be formally social stratified to a degree that seems Bad. Which they could talk about! Maybe the end of the TOS Cold War era with ST VI brought with it the end of a formal caste system that persists informally. Or, what makes sense to me, the TOS Klingons were fundamentally a different political system that collapsed in the wake of the events of ST VI and were replaced by an aristocracy kept on the simmer- to make the Russian/Soviet/Russian analogue come full circle. They waved in that direction with L'Rell's unification in Discovery, but, once again, no ever quuuuuuite gets all the way there...
I don't hate this one per se- I think the 'whoops, Dax might've murdered someone by the standards of Federation law' gets swept under the rug with about the same final two-minute rush as the ends of episodes where they discover God is real or whatever. It feels more like it just has the perennial Trek issue of wanting to be five minutes longer and never being exactly sure whether they want to make any of the changes stick.
I think it actually does some good work by suggesting that the Klingon/Federation thaw and alliance actually involved Klingons and Feds *liking each other and getting along*, which is honestly really thin on the ground in TNG outside of Worf. K'mpec ropes Picard into stuff he doesn't want to do, Duras is a villain, Gowron is axe-crazy, Kurn is irritated and baffled by Starfleet and is there under false pretenses anyways, the Duras sisters end up blowing up the ship, some renegades try to hijack the ship in 'Heart of Glory,' there's a whole village of difficult self-defeating Klingons in 'Birthright', the Klingon governor Picard swears at is clearly looking for trouble, etc....
So for there to be three Klingons dating from when they were straightforwardly antagonistic (and not...whatever the hell was happening in TNG) that came to trust and love a Federation personage as family, and for that to endure across decades, at least feels like a gesture towards there actually being something besides some geopolitical abstraction backing up the alliance. Even come Voyager when the EMH's holographic son adopting Klingon styling is viewed as being a 'bad kid', it's rare that they can quite get to suggesting that Klingons are just okay people to know- but DS9 occasionally does better (see Martok, Grilka, the guy at the deli, everyone in 'Soldiers of the Empire') and this seems the start of that.
Kang and Koloth are whatevers, but I've always really liked that Kor is still playing a TOS Klingon and that accounts for his being a fish out of water as clearly as his age and his drinking. When he first meets Worf and basically throws the entire Klingon honor apparatus under the bus, grinning all the while, we see a crafty version of the Klingons that were almost entirely supplanted by their Shakespearean blood-and-thunder descendants.
That is very well-observed, as ever! Focusing on the Klingon in the food court -- I wonder why they so seldom took the approach of showing Klingons who were NOT warriors! We know Klingon Opera exists (presumably invented as a throw-away gag for something no one would want to sit through), so why do we never meet any singers? Why does the one Klingon who most disdains the warrior ethos (K'Ehleyr) have to die so pointlessly, and why is it a catastrophe if Alexander follows in her footsteps? And why couldn't the Duras sisters just retire from politics and become regular interstellar traders? The one time we get any real window into the non-warrior castes and the possibility that they might not be self-evidently central to everything is, bizarrely, in Enterprise.
I too like the not-Martok lawyer in Enterprise, in part because he suggests that the cultural currency of warriors is something novel, between an affectation and a coup, and really that simply has to be true.
I think we mostly saw warriors because they had a good thing going and to steer the ship in other directions would come perilously close to figuring out how the Klingon Empire 'actually' worked, which is a style of worldbuilding that Trek (generally wisely) avoided. I think the best explanation is that the Empire is in fact functionally feudal, and that the reason we mostly see warriors obsessed with violence and honor is that the Empire is arranged in such a way that leadership and leadership questions are inherently vested in a class that owe their positions to promises of military service.
It's what they're hinting at in cases like Martok's enmity for Kor's old class prejudice, but Trek was never quite interested enough in being political fiction to close the circuit and come out and state the implications of that view- that Worf is not just a random Klingon orphan but something like a Klingon duke, and that's the reason why all his shenanigans always seem to end up as duels on the floor of the High Council, a litigation mechanism that simply can't be where most criminal questions end up in an empire of billions.
If Worf is a Klingon duke then being raised by humans is no longer just a case of a Starfleet officer having a big heart- it simply had to have some political *something* in the mix, that this was some formal ritual of mutual support like a royal wedding, or alternatively that the Federation was removing a politically complicated loose end (as child heirs often are). The Rozhenkos simply can't be all that ignorant of the mechanics of Klingon law- especially since, with Kurn and the like, we know that the Mogh family still had property like land.
And, of course, the most complicated trick, then, is that the Federation is apparently buddy-buddy with a civilization that simply has to be formally social stratified to a degree that seems Bad. Which they could talk about! Maybe the end of the TOS Cold War era with ST VI brought with it the end of a formal caste system that persists informally. Or, what makes sense to me, the TOS Klingons were fundamentally a different political system that collapsed in the wake of the events of ST VI and were replaced by an aristocracy kept on the simmer- to make the Russian/Soviet/Russian analogue come full circle. They waved in that direction with L'Rell's unification in Discovery, but, once again, no ever quuuuuuite gets all the way there...