[crowd cheers]
Beat that, human
[crowd chants]
Klingons are sort of the
TOS villain of record, right?
Really, the Klingons were in the sort
of Cold War analog that was The Original Series.
Frankly, I never liked Earthers.
They remind me of Regulan bloodworms.
That Cossack.
The Klingons were the Russians.
We were the Americans.
And you know, you can sort of see this sort of
Cold War-like annexing of worlds and jockeying
for position and influence, and a kind of hatred
and then reluctant alignment.
And so as we go back to TOS,
in that continuum, we wanted to go back
to the original villains as well a little bit.
Klingon battle cruiser just warped in.
I was on Discovery for the first year
and we certainly visited the Klingons there.
We're sort of triggering the conflict that we know
from TOS in Discovery.
Members of the Federation,
what you call your most remote borders,
I call too close to Klingon territory.
There was a Klingon war that was started
as a result of some of the actions
at the beginning of the first season of Discovery.
And one of the things that happens that season,
not to get, you know, too into the weeds
in terms of canon and backstory, but they end up traveling
through time, and we miss months and months,
because they go to the Mirror Universe,
they come back late in the war.
[Cornwell] Stardate 4789.6.
Klingon vessels launch hypothermic charges at Kelfour VI,
burning off their atmosphere
and killing 11,000 civilians instantly.
Klingon/Federation relations,
at the beginning of Strange New Worlds Season 2,
are fraught, but we are not at war.
So, you have two superpowers who were
essentially adversaries, but not in an active firefight.
And so that creates a very tense, kind of ongoing standoff
where either side could transgress,
and that Cold War could instantly become a, a firing war.
This is an antimatter detonation switch,
You better hope I don't let go.
Are you sure you have no Klingon blood in you?
One thing that we try to do in Strange New Worlds,
and you'll see it in a couple of characters,
very much I think in M'Benga, is we try to talk about war
in a way that's lasting,
the effects of war we understand today.
I think people have probably started to understand
that there's nothing noble about war, there's nothing,
there's no grace in war.
War is hard.
Do you know, that after the Battle of ChaKana,
there was so much blood in the air, the rain turned red.
Star Trek has wrestled with war a lot in the past.
You know, some of my favorite episodes
came out of Deep Space Nine and the Dominion War,
because they really wrestled with
some of the moral complexities and difficulties
of this unbelievably thorny thing, you know.
What is it when two cultures come at each other
and murder is everyday?
And what does that do to people who have to live through it?
The war's over, Joseph.
Yes, but how it can ever be?
This sort of coincided with, weirdly, Season 1,
we never put M'Benga in a fight.
And people may not realize this, but Babs,
who plays M'Benga, is, like, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu master.
Like, he's an unbelievably talented fighter.
And we sort of got to the end of the season, we're like,
"How we never put him in a fight? How is this possible?"
It's something he's unbelievably good at.
We had a lot of fun putting together the fights,
and choreographing that,
and helping to finesse the movements
as to what I would appreciate and like.
[Babs] We're even here. I put him down that way.
[Director] Yes, that way, that way. Very good.
I loved shooting that episode.
I'm very into stunts. I love the physical challenge.
The rehearsal and preparation for that was so much fun.
There was so many, like, pinch me moments,
where I would just stand back and just kind of chuckle
at the fact I was getting paid for this.
Cause it's just like a bunch of adults on the weekend
in this set, this spaceship set,
pretending to hit each other and making punching noises.
"Psh! Rah!" Like slow-mo, like wrestling.
It was just so much fun, So ridiculous.