Alex Kurtzman: 'Star Trek: Discovery' Will Spark Debate And Adhere To Canon

[CorporalCaptain]

Thinking that choices that were made don't make sense is not being in denial about anything.

Actually, it is, and again you provide the perfect example of what I'm talking about, really spot on. The choices aren't required to "make sense" in the literal sense of the words, they never are. Star Trek never, ever literally made sense. It never could; it depends upon fictional, fantastic technology that itself ultimately doesn't make sense, and it visits worlds with aliens that are both literally utterly improbable.

Your idea suffers from the error that your fanon should take priority over canon. You're not obligated to like the creative choices, but the reality is that they make all the sense that they ever could and therefore all that they need to make. You seem to be equating your opinion that the choices "suck" with the notion that they don't make sense.

 

[BillJ]

I like the idea that the uniforms are just two different outfits designed by two different people for two different series a half a century apart better.

Be easier to take seriously, if the Discovery uniforms weren't so awful. Looks like something a high school band would wear, with a comm badge.

 

[CorporalClegg]

I agree they're awful, but one thing has nothing to do with the other.

 

[fireproof78]

I know what youre referencing but, as I said, I haven't seen too much of that. Everyone is aware that DSC is an official, canon Star Trek show. Someone is denying that? Thinking it sucks is not denying anything. Thinking that choices that were made don't make sense is not being in denial about anything. It's just a bizarre reference/analogy.

I've been around enough fan boards and theories to here the "not real Star Trek" comment.

Also, as much as I like "The Cage" that doesn't mean the entirety of Starfleet was that way.

 

[Christopher]

We've seen the DSC era in the Cage.

We've seen one ship in that era in "The Cage." Maybe the uniform change didn't happen, err, uniformly across all Starfleet at once. Consider how the TNG and DS9 crews were simultaneously wearing different uniforms for years. Okay, they were variants on the same basic uniform style, but they show that it's possible for different crews to have different uniforms at the same time, or for a change to take time to propagate through the whole fleet.

Everyone is aware that DSC is an official, canon Star Trek show. Someone is denying that?

But "canon" doesn't mean "everything actually does fit together perfectly." That's an impossible standard with something as complicated as a multi-series TV franchise made by many different creators for different audiences and eras. A canon is just an overall body of fictional works that maintain a pretense of representing a continuous reality, but that in practice finesse and refine the details of that reality over time.

There are many, many massive continuity errors in the previous half-century worth of Star Trek content. Fans over the years have done a lot of work to help maintain the illusion of a continuous reality by inventing fixes and rationalizations for the inconsistencies. (There are two races of Klingon! Chekov was belowdecks when Khan took over the ship! And so on.) Eventually, we will do the same for Discovery.

 

[Noname Given]

That's a linear progression. One is set after the other. Uniforms can change over time. They do even in the real world. But ST09, Rogue One and DSC all have a setting already shown before and that rightly needed a strong continuity with what was shown before.

Again ST: D takes place TWO YEAR after the events shown in "The Cage" <--- Plenty of time to go with new uniforms. (And if you're try to square the uniforms in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" - there's plenty of precedence to show that Starfleet has gone back to old uniforms from 'newer' ones too. )

 

[Christopher]

Really, there have been so many arbitrary changes of uniform design over the decades that it's kind of pointless to try applying any real-world logic to it.

 

[Tarek71]

Actually, it is, and again you provide the perfect example of what I'm talking about, really spot on. The choices aren't required to "make sense" in the literal sense of the words, they never are. Star Trek never, ever literally made sense. It never could; it depends upon fictional, fantastic technology that itself ultimately doesn't make sense, and it visits worlds with aliens that are both literally utterly improbable.

Of course they should make sense. And yes, in the literal sense of the words. Even in fantasy and soft sci fi, we don't throw out the idea there is such a thing as a continuity of characters, or event. The implausibility of magic wands doesn't relieve authors of fantasy from most of the same considerations that authors of other genres have in this regards. The plausibility of warp drive has nothing to do with whether Sarek should seem like Sarek if you say it is still Prime universe Sarek.

Your idea suffers from the error that your fanon should take priority over canon. You're not obligated to like the creative choices, but the reality is that they make all the sense that they ever could and therefore all that they need to make. You seem to be equating your opinion that the choices "suck" with the notion that they don't make sense.

Critique is a core part of the arts, and critiques can be critical. In this case, we are most certainly not required to accept the bonkers idea that literally every choice they make must always be regarded as making all the sense they ever could. So switching Sarek and Mudds personalities, motivations and careers and still saying its the Prime universe would "make all the sense it ever could"? You are certainly entitled to think that, but not agreeing is not "denial".

 

[Christopher]

Critique is a core part of the arts, and critiques can be critical.

They should also be based on actually having seen or read the work in question, rather than making speculations based on a single trailer. It's still a couple of months too early for any critiques to be meaningful. The most we can do at this point is to critique the production design, but even that would be hasty without giving it a chance to work in context.

 

[Tarek71]

We've seen one ship in that era in "The Cage." Maybe the uniform change didn't happen, err, uniformly across all Starfleet at once. Consider how the TNG and DS9 crews were simultaneously wearing different uniforms for years. Okay, they were variants on the same basic uniform style, but they show that it's possible for different crews to have different uniforms at the same time, or for a change to take time to propagate through the whole fleet.

Sure. The Cage doesn't establish how many years this uniform has been in use. It could have been just a few months. And they can establish that. Also, I do think keeping so much of art direction of ANH was easier for Rogue One because of how high quality and amazingly non-dated it was. For the most part ANH doesn't seem 70's in the way so many other films and shows reflect the aesthetic of the real world era of their production. C3PO and R2 work better today than Twiki and Crichton from Buck Rogers would for instance.

But "canon" doesn't mean "everything actually does fit together perfectly." That's an impossible standard with something as complicated as a multi-series TV franchise made by many different creators for different audiences and eras. A canon is just an overall body of fictional works that maintain a pretense of representing a continuous reality, but that in practice finesse and refine the details of that reality over time.

I wouldn't say "perfectly", and clearly there are some cases where they are trying to make it fit visually. As we get drips and drops of different sets and props that is apparent. Seeing them all together in complete episodes will show how well they work together.

 

[Christopher]

Also, I do think keeping so much of art direction of ANH was easier for Rogue One because of how amazingly non-dated it was. For the most part ANH doesn't seem 70's in the way so many other films and shows reflect the aesthetic of the real world era of their production.

More to the point, because Star Wars isn't meant to be a plausible projection of our future. It's a space fantasy set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." And it was deliberately retro to begin with, an homage to the things George Lucas loved as a kid -- '30s Flash Gordon serials, '40s WWII movies, '50s and '60s cars, you name it. Despite the space-age setting, Star Wars was always, always an exercise in nostalgia. So for its new incarnations to look backward and cling to the past is just a continuation of what it's always been about.

But Star Trek is the opposite. It was always meant to look forward. Okay, there were some bits of nostalgic influence here and there -- it was meant to homage Horatio Hornblower, it was presented somewhat as a space Western in an age when every second show was a Western, it had classic orchestral scoring instead of experimental electronic music, and its director of photography basically lit it like film noir -- but essentially it was meant to be a plausible future for our world, to project forward from its own time. And so subsequent incarnations of Trek have always done the same, making it look futuristic by the standards of whatever era it was made in, rather than misguidedly trying to be retro. Star Trek is not Star Wars. They are completely different things and what's right for one is not right for the other.

 

[Tarek71]

More to the point, because Star Wars isn't meant to be a plausible projection of our future. It's a space fantasy set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." And it was deliberately retro to begin with, an homage to the things George Lucas loved as a kid -- '30s Flash Gordon serials, '40s WWII movies, '50s and '60s cars, you name it. Despite the space-age setting, Star Wars was always, always an exercise in nostalgia. So for its new incarnations to look backward and cling to the past is just a continuation of what it's always been about.

Sure, but the end product looks less like those influences visually than DSC does. Lucas was influenced by classic sci fi, but whereas the Kelvin uniforms were deliberately designed to evoke classic sci fi aesthetic, the Imperial and rebel costumes look more modern and futuristic even though they were designed decades earlier. Like the Kelvin uniforms, the DSC ones show a stronger retro-futuristic influence than ANH did. And while the setting was "far, far away" there is no particular reason any of those SW worlds couldn't be found by the Enterprise. Earth of a 1,000 years in the future could look a lot like Coruscant city scapes.

Had SW had a badly dated look, I am not sure any "nostalgia" would have been enough to prevent substantial updating and redesign. But it doesn't need it to work today. The droids, the uniforms, the fighters, the capital ships, rifles, pistols and other props and doodads work well today for the most part. That's amazing. It is possible that setting it outside of Earth and our Galaxy actually helped to make it not only less 70s, but less visually retro. IDK. But in any case, the end result requires far less updating than the Cage pilot would.

 

[fireproof78]

Because the end result isn't mandated to be connected to humanity's future in any way, shape or form.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

So switching Sarek and Mudds personalities, motivations and careers and still saying its the Prime universe would "make all the sense it ever could"?

Call me if they ever do that, and it's not some alien device like what switched Kirk's and Janice Lester's minds, or Q being a prankster, or one of Mudd's schemes gone awry, etc. Give it an "explanation," and I absolutely could see them doing it. Not every deviation from expectation requires such an explanation for audiences to suspend their disbelief, some percentage of naysayers notwithstanding.

 

[Tarek71]

Because the end result isn't mandated to be connected to humanity's future in any way, shape or form.

Has nothing to do with the mandate. Id more easily believe a Stormtrooper rifle is part of Earths future than the Flash Gordon ray gun TOS rifle. It looks more modern and futuristic, even to Earth, despite the stated setting. You could take a lot of SW props like that, without modification, hand them to an extra in a 2017 sci fi film and they would blend seamlessly with everything else. Disco trek uniforms look less futuristic than SW rebel and imperial uniforms of 40 years earlier. And I mean Earth future. There is no meaningful difference between Coruscant and 31 st Century Earth. All the planets in SW could be alien of week worlds in Star Trek.

 

[Mudd]

Wow this is a pointless debate.

Fifty years have passed. Trek, and the rest of the world, is moving on.

 

[fireproof78]

Has nothing to do with the mandate. Id more easily believe a Stormtrooper rifle is part of Earths future than the Flash Gordon ray gun TOS rifle. It looks more modern and futuristic, even to Earth, despite the stated setting. You could take a lot of SW props like that, without modification, hand them to an extra in a 2017 sci fi film and they would blend seamlessly with everything else. Disco trek uniforms look less futuristic than SW rebel and imperial uniforms of 40 years earlier. And I mean Earth future. There is no meaningful difference between Coruscant and 31 st Century Earth. All the planets in SW could be alien of week worlds in Star Trek.

And, no, just no. I can find more connections within Star Trek to Earth's future than in Star Wars. It has everything to do with mandate and budget. The difference being that Star Wars decided to live in its design aesthetic, with little changes (save for TPM) while Star Trek employed some imaginings of Earth's future in to it.

 

[Tuskin38]

Id more easily believe a Stormtrooper rifle is part of Earths future than the Flash Gordon ray gun TOS rifle.

But that rifle was made from a real world SMG, so it doesn't look futuristic at all

 

[Christopher]

You could take a lot of SW props like that, without modification, hand them to an extra in a 2017 sci fi film and they would blend seamlessly with everything else.

But that's only because so much of film/TV sci-fi over the past 40 years has been influenced by Star Wars. The reason its designs look "futuristic" to you is that you've seen a bunch of fictional portrayals of the future that were informed by its aesthetics. So it's kind of a circular argument.

 

[Tarek71]

[

And, no, just no. I can find more connections within Star Trek to Earth's future than in Star Wars. It has everything to do with mandate and budget. The difference being that Star Wars decided to live in its design aesthetic, with little changes (save for TPM) while Star Trek employed some imaginings of Earth's future in to it.

Yes, I mentioned the quality of ANH vs Cage which reflects partially the budget. Part of why ANH look can be preserved without as many modifications as the Cage look would. That's what I'm saying. But they are also better for Earths future than Disco's goofy retro uniforms, for instance.