They should have been One Ep anyway, not broken up into two. Because its basically setting up who is to be a Main Character, a girl raised by Sarek, and her unusual outlook on things. So it all happens on a ship that's not discovery, with a bean counting Captain whose religious adherence to the Prime Directive ends up starting a war.
These Klingons are Klingons. When One of them Dies, they all do the Klingon Death Ritual which Worf demonstrated in "Heart of Glory".
And these Klingons may look slightly different, but they are Klingons. Just missing some hair and a bit meaner looking.
The Story is what makes this Trek. It's not just the gadgets or the ships, or the aliens, it's the social commentary.
Imagine, a White Klingon. Who has no Family Name. Imagine an androgynous person who was raised by Sarek to think critically? These are very relevant things, relevant to us. In all of these years, nobody ever considered that Klingons also have Races.
The Klingons here, react as to "The Other", as "Us vs Them", in fear of losing their culture. Because Michael, our main character, happened to accidentally kill their Torchbearer.
That's another concept, "The Light of Kahless", it's as if this is something Holy to the Klingons, and Michael inadvertently contaminated it. It's like one of us, touching a Muslim's Quran. We can't make any progress until we start respecting other people's belief systems, and that includes Atheism as well as our 3 world religions and the many others.
That's what Trek really IS, it's not how their Communicators and Tricorders look, or how their uniforms look, or how their ships look. It's all about a different way of thinking. And that was why Michael failed to convince her Captain to dole out the Vulcan Hello, because The Prime Directive was being treated as an Absolute.
