quote:Originally posted by Brown_supahero: Trailer for Discovery!
The production values are fantastic, many of the scenes epic in scope and complexity.
However, what the hell is that quadra-nostrilled Claw-ngon? Looks like a Klingon and Xindi-Reptilian had a night of passion.
And it is sooooo JJ-Trek: The Previous Generation, down to the bridge window and graphic styling. And those uniforms are more ridiculous than the Orville ones, yet not intentionally.
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posted
The whole trailer is so disjointed it's trying to show everything but reveal nothing. Sure looks cool, but whether that translates to quality storytelling remains to be seen.
This is the same problem we faced with Enterprise... they can either make it look good using modern standards, or try to navigate a minefield of canon by recreating a 50 year old style. It'll take some getting used to, but I'm not going to hold it against them (yet).
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Whew, that looks very expensive. I think they went way overboard with updating the look of the Klingons.
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Registered: Mar 2000
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They might claim that this takes place in the original timeline, but I don't think I can believe that those uniforms and that bridge are contemporary with "The Cage".
Registered: Mar 1999
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It wpild also appear that the delta-wing ship is in fact the USS Shenzhou, NCC-1227. Meaning the other design culd be the Discovery - NCC-1031, so older.
Also, Command/Sciences/Operations colours now represented by Gold, Silver and Bronze. Which is kind of overly-hierarchical, isn't it? If you're a science officer or a medical technician, you're just second-best, sorry about that. And Security or Engineering? Loooosers!
So the heroine starts off as Exec of the Shenzhou, and is being bandied about as command material - but she's meant be the Exec of the Discovery? So what's going to happen to derail her career and leave her still as Execm but now under a different captain on a diffrent ship?
quote:Originally posted by TSN: They might claim that this takes place in the original timeline, but I don't think I can believe that those uniforms and that bridge are contemporary with "The Cage".
They can say it's not the JJ-verse for legal reasons if needed, but I'll be damned if that's original universe.
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quote:Originally posted by TSN: They might claim that this takes place in the original timeline, but I don't think I can believe that those uniforms and that bridge are contemporary with "The Cage".
Starfleet changes uniforms on a regular basis, so I'm not worried about that.
As for the bridge... Does it look like something out of TOS? No. But personally, I think that unless we're winking and poking fun at 1960's aesthetics like they did in "Trials and Tribble-ations" and "In a Mirror, Darkly", we've passed the point of expecting anything in the future to look as retro as TOS.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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It's all just CBS PR. If they can get more people to watch the show by saying that it takes place in their sacred "Prime" universe when it pretty clearly doesn't, then that's what they'll say.
Visually, the show looks stunning. But ENT had good VFX too, and that show was crap. I'll reserve judgment until seeing the first episode though.
-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
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Saying that such-and-such doesn't look like an iPhone or similar is a weak approach, creatively. There are life-critical systems I am familiar with where configurable touch interfaces were available almost twenty years ago at reasonable cost, yet folks preferred a configurable keypad with physical buttons.
There are other less-critical systems at a business of my acquaintance where users were moved from a mainframe terminal to a Windows GUI. This resulted in profound slowdowns of data entry and such becaise no hotkeys were available, requiring assorted mouse clicks and window switchings and so on to do the same things.
To my mind, all one has to do to properly update the TOS style is to add some sort of proper readout screens where appropriate (I mean, what the hell can this tell you: http://filmjunk.com/images/weblog/treknobabble50_10.jpg ).
I certainly approve of the HUD stuff on the viewscreens, but making them real windows is silly.
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posted
I firmly agree that AI is underrepresented in Trek. Indeed, the little floaty robot Exocomps and nanites should've been part of TNG as a sort of "auto-repair" system a la Blake's 7.
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I reckon the uniforms are going to be the biggest sticking point from a canon viewpoint. Ships, bridges, communicators, tricorders, phasers, you can all hand wave away as regular changes in models and design over time (much as we saw in the relatively short time period - 15 years - of TNG, DS9, Voy and the TNG movies).
But uniforms... while again we saw no less than three (or four, with two running concurrently) uniform designs over those 15 years, for the most part there was a clear timeline - early TNG, later TNG and the DS9/Voyager "fatigues" variant, and the First Contact Uniforms.
We're looking at a hundred-year period withclear start and end points: starting with the ST:Ent blue jumpsuit, with Gold-Blue-Red division piping and rank pips, and ending with the classic TOS uniform, Gold-Blue-Red division-coloured tunics and rank braid. The Ent uniform was first seen in 2151 and last seen in an ep set in 2161. The TOS was first seen in 2266.
Now in between that we've got three others:
1. 2233: the Kelvin uniforms. Blue for command, Silver for Science & Medical, Gold for Engineering & Security. Rank pips, I think. The Kelvin existed before Nero came back in time and changed things, so we know this look is canon for the Prime timeline.
2. 2254 ("The Cage") to 2265 ("WNMHGB"): Gold for Command, Blue for Science & Medical and, er, Beige for Engineering & Security. Rank braids.
3. And now... this. Set "ten years" before TOS, so 2255 or 2256. Blue jumpsuits, but much more formal in design. Gold for Command, Silver for Science & Medical, Bronze for Engineering & Technology. No visible rank marking that I've seen yet (aparrently it's pips on the Starfleet delta badge), though the Captain has extra gold patches on her shoulders.
Compared to the 15 years of the TNG era, three sets of uniforms over a century ain't much. The problem is, there's a clear overlap between the TOS pilot uniforms and the ST:D uniforms.
There are points of lineage with what came before - the blue jumpsuit - and the changes in division colours aren't unusual. For instance, we could retcon the return of the gold-blue-red for TOS as Starfleet's homage to the ST:Ent era. During the red-jacket TOS movie era the division colours were expanded and all over the shop. Then later there's the swap for Command from Gold to Red.
If I were going to try to retcon this disparity, I'd say something like "the Shenzhou is overdue a uniform upgrade, or the (TOS-pilot) Enterprise had a special uniform or got the new look really early."
posted
We can't say the Kelvin or its uniforms are Prime. Even if you think Nimoy was playing Prime Spock, the simple fact is that once you monkey with the timeline when time travel has already happened in it, you are monkeying with all the monkeyings.
As I have noted elsewhere, James T. Kirk, considered a "menace" to the timeline, is basically a temporal STD, because when you screw with his life you screw with all the temporal screwings he did, not to mention those that came after him and went further back.
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posted
Spock was Prime Spock. Otherwise there's no point in him even being there. The timeline divergence occurred when the Narada emerged in 2233 and encountered the Kelvin. Therefore the Kelvin and everything on it existed before the Kelvinverse was formed, offshooted, generated, whatever.
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