Star Trek: Strange New Worlds EPs Explain Why Their Klingons Look Different From Those in Discovery

The following contains spoilers from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 2 premiere. Proceed accordingly.

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 2 premiere — now streaming on Paramount+ — Spock & Co. absconded with the Enterprise to a mining planet on the edge of Klingon space, where they prevented an extremist group from instigating a war with the Federation.

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The episode, titled “The Broken Circle,” also introduced Klingons with natural skin tones and full beards, looking very much like those from the original Star Trek series. In contrast, the Klingons from Strange New Worlds’ parent series Star Trek: Discovery (which, in Season 1, took place during the Federation-Klingon war) boasted alien-like skin with dark blue and purple hues and elongated heads that really set them apart from previous iterations.

Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers acknowledges that the Discovery team took a big swing with their version of the Klingons, also noting that Strange New Worlds opted for a more classic look.

“[The Discovery crew] were really excited. They had these big, intense ideas. They bent the Klingons a bit,” Myers tells TVLine. “As we were starting our season — we’re working with a lot of folks in our production who are from Discovery — we were trying to find something that spoke to the old-school Klingons from [the original Star Trek series], from the movies, but that also didn’t speak against the ones that happened on Discovery. This is just what they look like right now.”

With the Klingons’ finalized look in Strange New Worlds, Myers says they “wanted them to feel like Klingons.” Additionally, the slight redesign was due to “some things that made it easier for producing. It just made our lives slightly easier to do that because we wanted to have them come back in some ways and see them a bit more.”

Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman, who also executive-produced Discovery, boils the Klingon differences down to both shows having their own unique vibes.

“We have our own aesthetic; Discovery has its own aesthetic. Our transporter room doesn’t look like Discovery’s transporter room, and our bridge doesn’t really look like Discovery’s bridge,” Goldsman explains. “We take [the original series] and we kind of extrapolate into this imagined version of that. It was a more classic Klingon, and a little bit truer to what we use as our basis for picking things.”

Plus, the makeup for Discovery’s Klingons was hard to work with. “That application was so difficult and really slows down shooting,” Goldsman shares, “and we have a lot of Klingons.”

Myers adds, “Honestly, I like to imagine that Klingons are a diverse species, and that means there are many different looks the Klingons have. It’s that simple.”

How are you feeling about the Klingons in Strange New Worlds‘ Season 2 premiere? Grade the episode below, and then share your thoughts in the comments.

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