ENT got the last laugh. It's not only a lot more popular and respected than it was when it went off the air in 2005 but it also became the only Trek series that's part of the continuity in both the Prime and Kelvin timelines.
Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
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ENT got the last laugh. It's not only a lot more popular and respected than it was when it went off the air in 2005 but it also became the only Trek series that's part of the continuity in both the Prime and Kelvin timelines.
Talking down to people is his MO. Really isn't worth the time if you want to have a fun discussion.
It is amusing that the same fans who think we should all be adults and accept visual changes without argument are the ones who'll often nitpick in-universe narrative explanations and retcons and repeatedy mention how they insult their intelligence. Klingons with a new makeup design that never gets explained are fine, but the reason Klingon appearances change is something to rage over because "it was just a jokey line in one episode and how dare the writers expand the universe with an explanation I think is stupid."
Trekkies. We're usually our own worst enemy.
Trekkies. We're usually our own worst enemy.
Marcie: "What do we do with the Easter eggs now that we have them, Sir?"
Peppermint Patty: "We eat them. We put a little salt on them, and we eat them."
Marcie: [eats her egg, still with the shell on, and gulps it down] "Tastes terrible, sir!"
It wasn't part of any marketing material though. None of the advertisements or anything.
Depends on how they render the magical mushroom drunken-ballerina-dance spore drive (not a bad concept in some ways, but at the same time are the inertial dampers working in hyperactive mode too?) and merry-go-round rotating saucer bits (despite being as cool as they look are grossly inconsistent with the established "Prime" universe) to be discontinued from all future starship designs in the Prime universe. Agree or disagree with aspects of the Kelvin timeline, which becomes posts in of themselves, the underlying idea of an alternate timeline did allow for much. DSC/STD/Disco/etc would make more sense in the Kelvin universe. Or its own alternate alternate timeline (how long before we get to the alternate alternate other alternate timeline of the sort that Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf would use as parody fodder anyway, despite the latter already having done so 30 years ago, zoiks... it's BAD when non-parody sci-fi does shtick that previous genre work already lampooned. Seriously! Or just not watch the old sci-fi that influences the regurgitated remakes/reboots/rewhatevers and it won't seem as tacky, I suppose. 
)
Couldn't care less about other visuals' changing, a good storyline with crafted character archetypes and robust acting and every other polished scripted word that had more depth than a piece of tissue paper are always more important than how precious it looks, though not many will argue that "it looking authentic as opposed to making it out of cardboard" without claimed reason... ENT already proved that can work and season 4 showed the series deserved a 5th year...
And once they make it family-friendly then it'll be far better. A few characters one can positively look at for proper, well-written inspiration as opposed to being stick figures spouting infantile profanity as if the show's written by teenagers themselves or something. Now that would be four-letter-wording cool, ironic as that is. Even "South Park" avoided such language, but that show was never intended for kids...
)Couldn't care less about other visuals' changing, a good storyline with crafted character archetypes and robust acting and every other polished scripted word that had more depth than a piece of tissue paper are always more important than how precious it looks, though not many will argue that "it looking authentic as opposed to making it out of cardboard" without claimed reason... ENT already proved that can work and season 4 showed the series deserved a 5th year...
And once they make it family-friendly then it'll be far better. A few characters one can positively look at for proper, well-written inspiration as opposed to being stick figures spouting infantile profanity as if the show's written by teenagers themselves or something. Now that would be four-letter-wording cool, ironic as that is. Even "South Park" avoided such language, but that show was never intended for kids...
And yet the finale did the questionable fanservice of bringing in...
***drumroll***
The Enterprise.
Oops.
(Well, there are many interpretations, the bulk or all of which are technically not invalid either...)
Press interviews, ComicCon panel discussions, all that stuff is a form of marketing. They're promoting the show and using this made-up Prime Timeline designation to connect threads in people's minds, even though most of the time other series in the franchise don't really have a big impact on the actual story being told. Most of the time the connections are at best superficial or exist solely within fans' memory or imagination. And that can be fun. It's fun to have more insight into Sarek's relationship with Spock through a DSC episode like Lethe. But a person coming to DSC for the first time can watch Lethe having never seen TOS or knowing anything about Sarek's history with Spock and still enjoy it. Lethe as a story exists in and of itself and can be enjoyed all on its own. Its ties to TOS can be interesting, but they are in no way essential.
I had no desire for them to try and shove Super Burnham into Spock's family tree.
Not following? Pike is Captain of the Enterprise in this point in the prime timeline. There's nothing contradictory about it showing up.
I mean, that's fine. I'm just making a point that the connections from one series to another can be fun/interesting (or not), but that every Trek series can be watched and enjoyed entirely on their own with no reference or connection to anything else. Each series works as a self-contained story.
Yeah but it doesn't say what universe.
Could have easily been Kelvin.
People who only followed the adverts on TV wouldn't know about the interviews saying it was prime.
The bar is where the bar is because television and filming budgets are finite and the capabilities of art directors tend to be limited by what they can realistically do. Sometimes the sequel has a smaller budget than its predecessor and can't reproduce the old sets, sometimes they have a shit ton MORE money and they decided to do all the things they wanted to do in the first place. (BOTH of these things have happened in Star Trek on multiple occasions.)
All of which means that TV/movie audiences have become accustomed to scenery and visual presentation changing noticeably from one installment to the next. We often complain about it (because we're a bunch of assholes who complain about EVERYTHING) but even glaring inconsistencies like this:
don't actually break the progression of the STORY.
When evaluating running speed, "Faster than a bengal tiger" is certainly a better standard than "Faster than the guy behind you," but the first standard is usually the more achievable one.
You don't have to create a perfectly visually consistent narrative, it just has to be close enough that your audience doesn't immediately ask "What the fuck am I watching?" (Example: Batman Returns --> Batman Forever)
At minimum, anything that doesn't pose an immediately obvious logical contradiction.
Example: an episode in which two characters walk through a shuttlebay during a conversation and they pass 12 parked shuttlecraft on their way to the door. Twenty minutes later, a crewmember takes a shuttlecraft on a mission and crashes, and someone on the bridge says "With Shuttle one out of action, that means we only have one left." The visuals contradict the narrative, which requires that they only have one shuttle other than the one that crashed, rather than the 11 that we plainly saw parked in the hangar. To be specific: it isn't believable because the narrative is unfolding in a way that is inconsistent with what we can obviously see.
Lots of things (especially in action and scifi movies) strain believably but don't themselves present obvious contradictions. Another really good example of this is in the movie "Sphere" where Norman finally figures out that Harry screwed up in decoding the alien transmission. In the book, it's explained that Harry (probably subconsciously) made a single transcription error when he was translating the message by hand. In the movie, it's shortened so that Harry's entire coding algorithm is wrong, which has the same effect, except that the entire code being wrong somehow only affects the spelling of a single line of text in a series of messages (e.g. "My Name is Jerry."). It's a contradiction because that line is NOT the only time in the exchange the letters J or E are used, so the spelling error should show up repeatedly in the message (e.g. "I make a hournay, you meke e hournay, we meke a hourney together."). It's not as obviously noticeable, but it breaks the flow of the narrative in that it renders a relatively important plot point completely nonsensical.
To be clear: the reason this happened is because the producers shortened the translation scene so the entire translation sequence happens electronically rather than with pen and paper. The kind of error that Harry makes in this movie is NOT the kind of error you could actually make with a computer, but a computer is what we see.
Which makes your entire objection kind of moot, doesn't it?
Because if it's just a question of interpretation, "willing suspension of disbelief" is just a question of how willing you are to reinterpret what the old installments looked like.
This is probably one of my favorite aspects of DISCO. No, I didn't need it as a story. But, I thoroughly enjoyed it, far more than Sarek's appearance on TNG, since Trek must be compared against Trek.
I think it has been established that "suspension of disbelief" for Star Trek is set very low indeed going by the arguments here.
Since reciprocation is what you're seeking...
In reverse order
No and no.
Generally speaking, "Broad strokes" is almost always feasible. Being more specific and faithful to the original becomes increasingly difficult the more time passes between productions.
There are far more and better examples of visual inconsistency than consistency, and I've named several of BOTH for the purposes of this discussion. You have made no attempt to back up your assertions with concrete examples from the genre, except to point out your ignorance of many of the examples I mentioned. Perhaps you could, if this "almost always" happens the way you claim, explain why the depiction of Gotham City differs so dramatically between "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight?"
Oh look, argument from assertion, ad hominem, and a straw man, all in one paragraph!
In reverse order
No and no.
Generally speaking, "Broad strokes" is almost always feasible. Being more specific and faithful to the original becomes increasingly difficult the more time passes between productions.
There are far more and better examples of visual inconsistency than consistency, and I've named several of BOTH for the purposes of this discussion. You have made no attempt to back up your assertions with concrete examples from the genre, except to point out your ignorance of many of the examples I mentioned. Perhaps you could, if this "almost always" happens the way you claim, explain why the depiction of Gotham City differs so dramatically between "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight?"
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I've criticized your claims and your flawed arguments... I haven't taken potshots at your understanding of words or your knowledge of basic concepts (not that you haven't presented opportunities), or jumped to conclusions about your age, education, or experience, or derided you personally.
I matched your ridiculous assertion (that visual consistency almost never happens) with a counter-assertion. You're the one making an extraordinary claim, yet you offered no evidence for it. We can all readily stipulate that occasional examples exist (e.g., the brdige of the Klingon ship you just posted), but a phrase like "almost never" calls for a lot more support than that.
There is no ad hominem or straw man in the passage you quoted. The difference between "broad strokes" and "as much as feasible" is akin to the difference between your low bar for minimal coherence and a higher standard of believability, the difference between the least a show can get away with and the best it can achieve; it's logically self-evident. As for connections between shows, you offered a definition that was so minimalist as to sweep away a wide range of connections that I and other posters had already pointed out; your reasons for doing so can only be a matter for speculation.
I honestly don't understand your perspective here. You're defending a show taking shortcuts it doesn't need to take, introducing inconsistencies it could avoid, raising questions it can't answer. More than that, you're literally deriding viewers who would like to see it live up to a higher standard... to be precise, the standard the showrunners said they would live up to. You're saying we should all shut up and eat our McDonalds hamburger when we were promised a nice steak dinner, and stop criticizing it. What possible satisfaction do you gain from taking this stance?
I matched your ridiculous assertion (that visual consistency almost never happens) with a counter-assertion. You're the one making an extraordinary claim, yet you offered no evidence for it. We can all readily stipulate that occasional examples exist (e.g., the brdige of the Klingon ship you just posted), but a phrase like "almost never" calls for a lot more support than that.
There is no ad hominem or straw man in the passage you quoted. The difference between "broad strokes" and "as much as feasible" is akin to the difference between your low bar for minimal coherence and a higher standard of believability, the difference between the least a show can get away with and the best it can achieve; it's logically self-evident. As for connections between shows, you offered a definition that was so minimalist as to sweep away a wide range of connections that I and other posters had already pointed out; your reasons for doing so can only be a matter for speculation.
I honestly don't understand your perspective here. You're defending a show taking shortcuts it doesn't need to take, introducing inconsistencies it could avoid, raising questions it can't answer. More than that, you're literally deriding viewers who would like to see it live up to a higher standard... to be precise, the standard the showrunners said they would live up to. You're saying we should all shut up and eat our McDonalds hamburger when we were promised a nice steak dinner, and stop criticizing it. What possible satisfaction do you gain from taking this stance?
But not counter-examples, nor have you actually addressed the mounting evidence that the visual consistency you claim to be "the norm" is not actually present even in Star Trek. The most we've had in that regard is the rather vague and generalized notion that all of the spinoff series looked more or less similar to each other because they were closely connected stories that were almost (if not entirely) concurrent. The only outlier in that regard is actually Enterprise, which -- surprise surprise! -- actually looks nothing like its predecessors because it's in a completely different time period and isn't connected to them at all.
So what you've actually done is committed a very elaborate special pleading fallacy: You are trying to argue for a universal standard of consistency that Discovery has failed to aspire to, but so far have failed to demonstrate that ANYTHING ELSE measures up to that standard to begin with.
A standard that nobody meets isn't a standard, it's just a wish. To repeat: when you're being chased by a bengal tiger, it is not necessary to actually outrun the tiger, you just have to outrun the slowest person in your group.
That's just it: you're claiming that film and television properties "almost always" maintains very tight visual consistency across multiple unconnected stories. Multiple examples from Star Trek show that it is not, in fact, one of those properties. So you are in essence stating that even though Star Trek does not (and has not) consistently maintained visual consistency, the fact that it isn't doing it THIS TIME is especially problematic... because... reasons.
That's fair, considering there was no ad hominem or straw man in the passage YOU quoted.
I'm not using a shifting/subjective definition of "believability," given the "willing" part of "willing suspension of disbelief." On the contrary, I'm stipulating that it is impossible or at least highly implausible to believe things that are inherently contradictory, no matter how much you want to.
In other words:
Is a nonsense standard, especially in science fiction, and DEMONSTRABLY so in Star Trek. More importantly, it's a standard that no science fiction production in history has ever truly met.
The PREVAILING standard is such that CONTRADICTIONS are not logically self-evident, so there's no problem in suspending your disbelief. This is what allows you to believe that superman can fly despite having no visible means of propulsion or method of generating lift; this allows you to believe that artificial gravity can pull objects towards the floor but somehow not pull other objects towards the top of the ship from hundreds of kilometers away. This allows you to believe that an alien life form can evolve on a completely different planet under completely different conditions and still look exactly like a human except for some funny business on the bridge of his nose. These things are HIGHLY implausible, but we believe them anyway, because there's no OBVIOUS reason why we shouldn't.
This relates to visuals the same way. Changing visuals from one story to another is stupendously common, especially in Star Trek. We roll with these changes, because there's no obvious reason why those changes COULDN'T have happened. On the other hand, there are some changes -- (Ziyal's constantly changing appearance, the 4 foot Enterprise model, the terrible shuttlecraft set) that present contradictions within the context of their own story; these are ALOT harder to swallow, but GOOD LORD do we ever try...
No, I'm saying they aren't "shortcuts" at all, they're deliberate choices by producers who are unaware of the imaginary standard you dreamed up just now. This is the inherent flaw of the Special Pleading fallacy: if you try to create a rule that only applies to a very specific situation, your rule quickly becomes meaningless.
So now you think the differences between Batman Returns and Batman Forever were a problem? They shouldn't be, according to you, because
and that
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