WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 1, "The Broken Circle"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' season 2 premiere provides the perfect answer to the lingering questions about Star Trek: Discovery's Klingons, and ensures the iconic aliens future in the franchise. In "The Broken Circle", Lt. Spock (Ethan Peck) is left in charge of the USS Enterprise and absconds with it to Cajitar IV, a contested planet on the fringes of Klingon space. With tensions still high in the wake of Star Trek: Discovery's Federation-Klingon war, Spock's mission of mercy to save La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) risks reigniting hostilities between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. However, that's exactly what the pro-war conspirators on Cajitar IV actually want.
As Star Trek: Strange New Worlds continues from the events of Star Trek: Discovery season 2, there was always speculation as to how the show would tackle the Klingon Empire. There are multiple versions of Star Trek's Klingons, which could have made their appearance in SNW difficult. As well as the more animalistic Discovery Klingons, there were also the flat headed Klingons from Star Trek: The Original Series. However, despite all these canon complications, Strange New Worlds season 2 takes the best possible course of action to answer the thorny Klingon question.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds wisely ignores the Klingons from Star Trek: Discovery instead of complicating Klingon canon by providing an in-universe explanation for the multiple variants. Star Trek: Enterprise famously attempted to explain why the Klingons in TOS had flat foreheads and the movie and TNG-era Klingons has ridged foreheads. It papered over the cracks in canon, but never held up to much scrutiny. When Star Trek: Discovery started, it radically redesigned the Klingons, making the differences between TOS and TNG-era Klingons even more complicated. Strange New Worlds has no interest in squaring these design choices in canon, and instead gets on with the business of telling a good Star Trek story.
"The Broken Circle" is fundamentally a Spock story, showing how he handles his first mission in command by averting a second Federation-Klingon war. The episode also sets up Spock's Klingon peace mission in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country by establishing his ability to hold his own among the old warriors. "The Broken Circle" is a pure-and-simple Klingon episode that rightfully puts the focus on telling a thrilling conspiracy story instead of squaring the various inconsistencies in Klingon canon. It was the perfect decision, and allows Strange New Worlds to tell future Klingon stories without getting bogged down in canon.
When Star Trek: DS9 brought back 3 TOS Klingons, it ignored the fact that they previously had flat foreheads. Bringing back Kor (John Collicos), Kang (Michael Ansara) and Koloth (William Campbell) for the DS9 episode "Blood Oath", the decision was made to just make them up to look like the TNG-era Klingons viewers would expect. This is exactly what Star Trek: Strange New Worlds does in "The Broken Circle", which adopts the classic Klingon look to tell a thrilling story about a conspiracy to restart the Federation-Klingon war, ignoring any canon inconsistencies in the process.
Much later in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in the 30th anniversary episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", the crew traveled back to Kirk's Enterprise to avert an assassination attempt. While in the 23rd century, Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) was quizzed on the differences in Klingon appearance. Worf flatly responded that "We do not discuss it with outsiders." Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 took Worf's words to heart, and the lack of discussion about Klingon variants makes "The Broken Circle" a lean political thriller that's a perfect season 2 opener.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 streams Thursdays on Paramount+.