Harberts: Canon And The Klingons
2 min read
During a recent Star Trek: Discovery press day, Aaron Harberts was interviewed by StarTrek.com where he spoke the new show, including dealing with canon and those popular Klingons.
It’s the “biggest job I’ve ever had in my life,” said Harberts. “When you come on to Star Trek, and I’m guessing this was true for anybody who ran any version of Trek, the thing I realized so early out of the gate is this show is bigger than any of us.”
One thing that makes the job difficult is canon – not going where one has gone before. “It’s frustrating when you’re pitching story and you hear, ‘Ah, that’s not possible,'” said Harberts. “When I hear that, you just say, ‘OK, got it. That’s the rule.’ The last thing we want to do is feel like we came into somebody else’s house and took the plates out and moved them somewhere else.”
But Harberts encouraged fans “to be patient because sometimes you’ll see us do what seem like a violation, but we’ll fix it in the next episode.”
The Klingons are going to be a bit different than in other Trek series, because they’re not united. “Mainly, when you cut away to Klingons (in previous Treks), they’re screaming ‘Qapla!’ and firing torpedoes,” said Harberts. “(And on Discovery) you’re going to find a race of people who have their own philosophy, know it’s a philosophy of isolationism and it’s a philosophy of wanting to maintain their own unity in the face of their own…The Klingons have never been more fractured at this time, and they want to unite. They want to focus on themselves rather than focus on anything else outside that. We’ll discover that, too. We’ll discover how a war breaks out sort of by watching it happen on both sides.”
The Klingons are based on current U.S. society, according to Harberts, not the Russians. “My take on the Klingons right now,” said Harberts, “and it’s hard to say it’s a perfect analogy because I believe too that things need to kind of move, but for me in the Klingons, I really look to the United States and the division that’s happening within our own country.
“The Klingons want to unite, protect what they have. They don’t want to let anybody else in. They’re not interested in shaking Starfleet’s hands.”
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