I'm going to be SUPER generous to Discovery here, but I'd argue it's not AS dumb as it comes off? Or at least, it's not dumbly-INCONSISTENT with Trek in general.MightyDavidson wrote: ↑Mon Jan 07, 2019 7:20 pmBut they WOULD have noticed he's a Klingon. There's still Klingon DNA in there after all, they couldn't possibly have replaced all of it. He'd have read as an incredibly maimed Klingon barely clinging on to life sure but a medical scan still would've told them that this man's a Klingon.RobbyB1982 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 07, 2019 2:29 pm Yes, its incredibly stupid.
But it is the reason they gave for why he wasn't immediately noticed as a Klingon.
Also the show wanted some of that sweet Game of Thrones torture porn that Trek is so well known for.
I don't think that surface scan tech is as advanced as it's sometimes conveniently written off (Trek-CSI-effect, if you will), because even in the 24th century we see that Bajorans have a hard time finding Cardassian deep cover agents (go a step further to the original ending of Second Skin they wanted it to be inconclusive, which yes, didn't make it in but it wasn't abandoned for scientific reasons, but character ones). And the Feddies didn't realize about Seska until she was cracked open like a walnut. Enterprise IS an earlier era, but they also have trouble differentiating human life signs from alien ones, in that bit where they need to lock onto T'Pal to get the away team back. And the Drumhead's plot has a not-insignificant plot point about not detecting Romulan DNA until it's deliberately searched for, which yes, is very close to Vulcans, but they are a mortal enemy of the Federation and you think that's something they'd check, at least once, in the Academy or during commissioning. And while it might be argued that Cardassians and Bajorans are semi-implied to share a common ancestor, and thus closer to the minor deviation between Vulcan and Romulan, Klingons are enough like-Humans that injecting a buttload of Human DNA into them doesn't result in massive organ failure, and they seem to be more compatible than say, Klingons and Trill, so there might enough leeway in there to fall under that category.
Which, makes sense. Like, when we hear "four life signs, three human one klingon", or from the movies, "population 9 billion, all Borg", they're probably not scanning DNA and amino acids at range, much more likely they're...for lack of a better term, racial profiling with the images they get back and approximating as best they can. Surface medical scans probably do the same thing without taking genetic samples, because it's inefficient to run a DNA test to fix tennis elbow.
Discovery's problem is it does fall apart that while you might buy that Ash gets away with sneaking into the Federation, transferring to a top secret project without a deep scan seems reckless. ...Which isn't entirely out of character for the Federation.
). We are talking about someone who has just been rescued from a Klingon prison after many months and has been brutally tortured. Extremely extensive medical scans should be routine for someone that underwent that level of physical abuse, looking for every possible injury and any implants such as a tracker or explosive (the very next episode featured someone whose body had been modified to act as a bomb, seems prudent to assure rescued prisoners aren't rigged to explode). Also brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome are real enough today, shouldn't a brain scan be standard procedure when returning a POW after a long imprisonment?
