The reasons behind it were ridiculous. The mutineer assaulted her captain (and best friend for nearly a decade) to act on information about the Klingons which was hundreds of years out of date. Ironically this takes a similar stance to Q from The Next Generation, who assumes present day humans are a 'dangerous savage child race' based on their ancient past.

It's even more ridiculous when you realise that her plan would not have worked. Even if it could in some other circoumstance, the sole reason the Klingons were there was to have this battle, and they were a bunch of fanatics. Firing first would not have made them rethink anything. The only difference would be the federation fleet arriving to see wreckage of the Shenzou.

And if we're talking stupid decisions - Klingons letting the crippled Shenzhou and her crew live to "tell the story" made no sense whatsoever. Multiple starfleet ships just warped out of that system. That's plenty of survivors right there, more than enough to tell the Federation what happened. No reason not to destroy Shenzhou or take her crew captive.

Watched it at last.
The plot:
Klingon suprematists menacengly lurking to start the war with progressive Federation. And they succeed, because suggestion of black-lesbo-trans woman to strike them down first (before they use their beacon to unite alternative klingons who fear that progressive humanity will take away their klingon identity) is denied by white male president... I mean admiral, who thinks that free broadcast shouldn't be abolished and desires to talk with both sides.

Yeah completely non-political message that tells us, you should shoot first at everyone, whose values and code are different from progressive, and deny them free speach.

Too bad that all efforts were put into creating this allegory and none left for making aesthetics and lore faithful to the real Trek.

I wanted to like it. I was hoping that it would have that sense of "everything's still new", but it seems like they are going after the Game of Thrones audience. Plus those camera angles were annoying as hell, not to mention what they did to the Klingons. Enterprise was able to skillfully explain why the Klingons in the original series looked different from those of the movies and Next Gen, which I thought was a nice touch until this show ruined it. Speaking of, when did Klingons start caring for their dead? After a warrior died they saw the body as a husk.

I am going to give this STD a solid pass. It is not Star Trek.

I am hoping that the big twist in this series is that it is actually taking place in the Mirror Universe.

I'm liking it so far. I just hope they're prepared for more than 1 season, I'd prefer a long lasting series. Usually character building takes half a season at least.

(Do agree the 'new' Klingons take getting used to, especially since I watched DS9 only a couple of weeks ago)

Yes, TNG did a great job of taking a minor race and reinventing it as a cool sort of samurais in space race.
And there was the nod towards the old style Klingons as well which was fun and interesting.
They should've done a similar thing here by picking a relatively minor race and redesigning it instead of taking a much beloved one.
And there are plenty of weird ones to pick from in the huge canon.
The Andorians, although not quite a minor race, would've been a decent pick.
Even the Betazoids would've been better IMO.

Ouch... totally forgot about that one due to the altered timeline of nowadays movies - but reflecting on the few episodes that played therein and reading the comments in regards to STD here so far, I would bet that they even managed to contradict a few canonical moments (or nodal points in time that would lead to such moments) of the mirror universe... I can't remember the mirror universe episode from "Enterprise" at the moment, so I am not sure if the story wouldn't already have violated the mmu canon. But a series about the MMU, now that one would be a cool move - alone the fun moments of the episodes taking place in the classic universe (be it old or new timeline - new one would make more sense due to the time of STD)

If only they set the show after Nemesis (or at least after TOS), then they could for example bring back the Gorn, a fan favourite "villain" race that we really barely know and give them the TNG/DS9 Klingon treatment.

A great choice, iconic yet relatively minor.
Also would've given them the chance to throw in some Kirk references to please the old fans.

Plus it's the one race fans wouldn't mind getting an updated look, since it's obviously necessary.

And I wouldn't mind seeing more of the Xindi, I thought the idea of multiple vastly different races evolving together was very interesting.

But no. We have retarded Klingons stripped of two whole series (and a great movie) worth of developement.

And two games perhaps, I don't really remember the plot of those.
They were decent games though.

Just watched the first episode and part of the second. I was hoping they learnt their lesson with Enterprise, but it seems they have not. In fact i'd even go as far as to say this makes Enterprise look great (and I hated Enterprise.)

The reasons have already been said by others in this thread, so all i'll say is I will not be watching it.

I'll add that i'm very disappointed with this as I was really excited for a new Trek.

How exactly, does one lose track of the Klingon Homeworld for one, and for two, why would the proud warrior race go into hiding? If losing their forehead ridges didn't stop them, what woud?

A Gorn did appear in a Season 4 Episode of Enterprise (so did Tholians). Although admittedly, by today's standards, the CGI they used for it looks about as dated today as the costume from TOS did then.