In about a month, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy makes its premiere. I'm looking forward to it. It may be tonally different from typical Star Trek, and that's actually okay with me. I want Trek to do different things. Sometimes, it'll work and be awesome like Lower Decks or Prodigy. Other times, it'll be utter trash like Section 31. They can't all be winners! I'll be giving it an honest shot like I do with all shows in the franchise, and I'll be going in with positive expectations.
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| She looks like she could kick my ass, and I'd thank her for the pleasure. |
One character that's caused an annoying amount of discourse is Gina Yashmere's character Lura Thok. According to pre-release information, Thok is half-Jem'Hadar, half-Klingon. The character is also female, as you can probably surmise. As stated in Deep Space Nine, the Jem'Hadar are a genetically engineered race of all-male soldiers who age rapidly and reach maturity in only a few weeks. This allows their Dominion masters to create platoons of soldiers in a fraction of the time it would take for most species to even complete basic training. DS9 also stated that these beings are entirely male--after all, no need for sexual reproduction in an engineered species designed solely for combat, right?
Of course, people seem to be forgetting that Academy takes place over 800 years after the end of the Dominion War, and, well, a lot of things can change over the course of eight centuries. The character is clearly part of Starfleet, and the Federation has a known history of strict guidelines on genetic manipulation: DS9 showed us what happens when you simply don't disclose the fact that you've had alterations in the case of Doctor Bashir. Poor Dal from Star Trek Prodigy had no idea he was made up of over a dozen different species and he would've been excluded from joining the Academy were it not for Admiral Janeway's intervention. While it's very possible the Federation has since altered its policy on genetic alteration, it's just as possible that the Jem'Hadar have been further altered themselves.
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| Never forget that Third Remata'Klan, one of the most memorable Jem'Hadar characters, was played by the same guy who played Jackie Chiles on Seinfeld. |
The Jem'Hadar's loyalty to the Dominion was controlled via Ketracel White, a drug their bodies needed in order to function. I don't see any White containers on Thok, so clearly, that hurdle has been jumped. I believe there are one of two possibilities: One, the Dominion and/or the Federation modified the species to include sexual reproduction as it's easier and to propagate a species that way instead of relying on engineering; or two, the Jem'Hadar were originally like any other species in the galaxy and were modified into a race of soldiers and were now reverted to their original state. Maybe they shared a common ancestor with the Tossk! There is, however, a simple way to find out what the answer is...
You watch the damn show.
It's as simple as that! There is very clearly an answer as to why Thing That Was Once One Way Is Now Another Way, and you can find out by watching the thing! Quit being some irritating pedant on the internet whining about canon and instead, watch the thing and make your own judgement. Whatever the show is doing, it's not violating canon, it's adding to it.
This isn't even the first time this happened with Star Trek in recent memory. Remember the excellent season 1 finale of Strange New Worlds, "A Quality of Mercy"? When previews went up, people were going, "duh, they can't be doing Balance of Terror yet, it's too early" or "why are they ripping off Balance of Terror", and all I could think was, gee, maybe we should watch the episode? And it turned out to be a time travel/what-if story, where they asked the question "What if Pike was in command of the Enterprise during the encounter with the Romulans at the Neutral Zone?" The answer was: everything went horribly wrong for everyone except Pike.
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| I'll never pass up an opportunity to talk about how much I love this thing. |
I've already spoken at length about the GQuuuuuuX Gelgoog and why I love it, and it still bothers me that people get mad that it looks like a GM and don't understand why! Once again, the explanation is in the show. It even has a different model number, like come on, people. It's clearly the same suit in name and role only. But of course, people who only pay attention to the latest model kit drops and not the actual show itself complained, because why actually watch the show? I realize that Gunpla is a great hobby and you don't necessarily need to immerse yourself in the worlds of Gundam to enjoy it, but it helps to have the actual context for why things look the way they do.
We've come to think of the lore of our favorite sci-fi and fantasy properties as these monolithic, unchanging things, when that can't be further from the truth. They're always changing, always evolving. Sometimes they realize things work, and sometimes they realize things don't. Star Trek's Trill changed drastically between their first appearance on TNG and the introduction of Dax on DS9, and I think we can all agree that was for the better. Early TNG even stated that the Klingons were part of the Federation, and by the time the episode "Sins of the Father" rolled around, the writers explicitly decided to abandon that because having the Klingons not be a part of the Federation opened up more ideas for Worf. Sometimes, you need to just throw some established canon out the window to tell better stories, and at the end of the day, isn't that what matters?
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| A classic from Poorly Drawn Lines. |
So much of this comes from a sheer lack of imagination on the part of fans. They don't want things to be different. They want it to be exactly the way it was how they remember it. I find that sad. Isn't half the fun of seeing new trailers and information about new entries in your favorite franchise speculating about what things might be? Sure, too much speculation and fan theorizing can lead to disappointment and sometimes outrage when the final product doesn't meet those expectations, but it's better to actually engage instead of just complaining that something may have changed before you've even seen how.
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