Star Trek: Discovery Review - 6 Ups And 5 Downs From Season 1

11. Nay To The Klingon Scenes

While Klingons have long been established as, like all Star Trek races, having their own language, it’s a little much having to sit through entire scenes of artificial alien dialogue.

The guttural grunts and choking enunciations throughout long soliloquies and politically charged diatribes are unpleasant to the ears and, by nature of being a fictional language, difficult for actors to believably express with the emotions they’re going for.

Burnham’s infiltration of the Klingon Ship of the Dead led to a moment where the franchise’s trademark Universal Translator came into effect for the first time, briefly making the Klingons appear to speak English, but it’s hard not to wish that they'd simply kept this effect in place throughout the rest of the show.

There are countless examples throughout the franchise’s history of alien dialogue mostly sounding English; Trek fans are easily able to reconcile the idea that the language is being presented in English purely for our benefit.

That’s an approach that might’ve improved the Klingon scenes seen so far in Discovery. The subtitles aren’t the problem - it’s when the accompanying scenes are comprised of marble-mouthed lizards waxing lyrical about nationalism that an alternative is preferable in the interests of pacing and performance.