Nature of the visual reboot
- Thread starter Groppler Zorn
- Start date
Discovery's Star Trek looks different beyond production values. Beyond better quality cloth for uniforms and cardboard sets. Beyond gadgets that are more compatible with Star Trek's competition in the market. It looks different because of choice. I'm not even sure about that 25% need to tweak design report anymore... but discounting that, when the team designed Klingons they chose to interpret a version that would be inconsistent with TOS Klingons. Everything that is a visual reboot is because Discovery wants to leave its artistic mark. I personally think its spore drive technology was incompatible with the era and the holographic messaging as well.. Ship designs I am embarrassed to say don't bother me too much. When I saw the Enterprise at the end of the Discovery first season I instantly recognised it and thought - cool.
Fitting in with the referenced TOS has to be the endgame though.
Fitting in with the referenced TOS has to be the endgame though.
Why do creative people have to be creative? I want everything to be the same, like Applebee’s!
Their shit ugly Klingons did them proud, lolHow dare artists do that? O_o
If the producers of DSC wanted their people to be creative *only* and put their visual stamp on Star Trek, why set the show in an era that has been represented in a very similar visual manner over the past 50 years? If creativity was the sole motivation here, why not put the show in a time or universe (say, like a full reboot) where they could be as creative as possible?
The visual reboot is in conflict with the notion that this show is a direct prequel to the well-established TOS and uses existing facts and events from that timeline - as one of those facts is the design of the Enterprise (in-universe). Another is the look of the tech and the uniforms- just like saying civil war era rifles look like shorter muskets - that design is a historical fact in our real history.
I’d have preferred them to make DSC a full reboot and let the creative team do their thang. I’m pretty sure we’d have been here keeping the buzz alive between seasons in any event...!
To be honest I could have got on board with the starfleet ship designs (no pun intended) if elements like the spore drive hadn’t been included. I know it was based on real science - especially the mycelial network - but it just seemed like a convenient plot device to get discovery places more quickly, or a convenient way around the anachronistic cloaking device the Klingons weren’t supposed to have.
Do non-trekkers have a preconception of FTL drives based on Star Wars? Did it have to be more like BSG’s jump drive or Hyperspace? The technology seemed borderline “magical” - and as for projecting into the future, warp drive is still sufficiently advanced to us in 2018 for it to be a credible mode of transport.
Although I would have loved someone to refer to warp drive as “time warp drive” as a cheeky reference to “the time factor” in The Cage...!
As for holograms and holodecks, there’s enough evidence of holograms in TOS for me to (grudgingly) accept the holo-tech. It seems jarring on the surface but I can live with it.
The spore drive otoh seems jarring even in the “25%verse”...
Yeah there is very little "Creative mark" on Discovery. It throws away beautiful clean design work of Star Trek for near literally copy-pasting everything from Uniforms to sets from Mass Effect.
One of my biggest gripes with Discovery is literally how lazy the design work actually is. It's high production and high value, but actually very lazy, bland design for the most part. As I've said here a lot, you are working in one of the most iconic visual eras of science fiction ever and you just make everything look like a bland video game. GG.
Back on the canon debate. The reason they make it "Prime" is because marketing. They know fans will be more invested in a "Prime" show than a non-prime show. It's absolutely clear to me and many others that Discovery is somewhat of a half-way between of the Kelvin and Prime Timeline and basically it's own universe. At panels and on After Trek, the production team constantly use "The Discovery Universe" so it's pretty clear that they don't even consider it really prime.
Canon will always be a fan concept first and foremost, when rights holders use it, they use it for marketing.
One of my biggest gripes with Discovery is literally how lazy the design work actually is. It's high production and high value, but actually very lazy, bland design for the most part. As I've said here a lot, you are working in one of the most iconic visual eras of science fiction ever and you just make everything look like a bland video game. GG.
Back on the canon debate. The reason they make it "Prime" is because marketing. They know fans will be more invested in a "Prime" show than a non-prime show. It's absolutely clear to me and many others that Discovery is somewhat of a half-way between of the Kelvin and Prime Timeline and basically it's own universe. At panels and on After Trek, the production team constantly use "The Discovery Universe" so it's pretty clear that they don't even consider it really prime.
Canon will always be a fan concept first and foremost, when rights holders use it, they use it for marketing.
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I assume they set it in that era because it serves their story. For example they couldn't have done the Burnham/Sarek/Spock relation in a 25th century series, since Sarek would be dead by then and Spock too, technically. And if they had invented two new Vulcans to basically act as Sarek and Spock a shit ton of people would be complaining about how they just copied those characters. And then there's the aspect that a lot of the characters are deeply flawed and then a huge amount of people would be complaining that humanity is enlightend at this point and that this show doesn't make sense or whatever. And of course the Klingons are in a very different position at the end of the Berman/Braga era. In Discovery they an enemy that the Federation doesn't really understand at this point while the Federation has had lots and lots of experience with them after Nemesis. And since Burnham is like, thirty or something, I guess you'd have to set the show seriously far in the future for her backstory to include the Klingon terror attack thing.
The only advantage I can see of setting it post-Nemesis is that they could keep the spore drive, but that's really all. The holograms would still get a lot of flack because they're flickering and we've seen more modern holocomm in DS9.
Fair points. But... and I know I’m being *really* awkward here, did the DSC story *need* the Klingons? Did it require the 23rd century setting at all?
Boiling the story down we have an orphan whose parents were killed in an alien attack and that gives her PTSD and then those same aliens attack the federation.
The Tzenkethi, the Dominion, even the cardassians could have been options here. Or, invent a new alien threat to the alpha quadrant and have them be the aggressor.
But, no, people know Klingons are because they appear in that “star trekkin” song so we best use the Klingons.
Ok, fine - so have the relationship with the empire sour in a *century* or so since TNG. Have some kind of disaster (omega related) that destroyed parts of space that forced the Klingons back into their former Viking-like tendencies. Also that mutated their whole bodies because radiation so they look like monsters who have all gone bald and had armour playing evolve on their chests and stuff.
Sarek’s character has been rebooted in DSC so make him a whole new Vulcan. Same for Mudd - create a *new* psychotic murderer since he’s a whole new character in DSC rather than unfairly look back at TOS through a modern lens.
If the DSC producers really wanted to flex their creative muscles (which, let’s not forget, resulted in Lorca turning out to be a pantomime villain so maybe we shouldn’t wish for that) then they shouldn’t have been restrained by the prime timeline or canon or whatever. They could have invented all their own backstories and redefined the sociopolitical landscape of the alpha quadrant and taken us to strange new worlds, rather than referencing the worlds we saw in far superior episodes elsewhere in the franchise (I have a bee in my bonnet about the Mintaka III namedrop - that’s such a good TNG episode!)
Instead we’re left to ponder the age old question of “when is a reboot not a reboot”...!
(Sorry if this sounds like a rant, it’s not, honest!)
It’s the star track Enterprise!!! Haha!
But seriously I think you’re right. The thing is if they *had* gone post NEM, they could have come up with a reason for changing the communicators to hand held devices again - the omega radiation means that commbadges don’t work so good so they need an amplifier therefore handheld devices are the way forward. Then you could have had something that looked like Star Trek to muggles and a reason in-universe for the change to seemingly retrograde tech.
It just seems counter intuitive to say “1) we’re confining ourselves to established canon, but 2) we’re gonna make a squitload of changes”
1) seems to be to keep the fans happy by referencing “things we know and have seen in Star Trek” and 2) is to hook in people who think 60s Star Trek is analogous to 60s Batman so they can prove that new Star Trek is sexy and brooding and dark like the vampire shows the kids are watching.
Maybe season 2 will be amazing...
You're clearly wrong. Any decisions made by those working on DISCOVERY are purely made to spite fans who love TOS. They're all together now, laughing maniacally as their devious plan unfolds. There's no genuine drive to want to tell a story of per-established characters, it's all just done for cynical reasons only, because they hate us all and want to kill Star Trek!
I don't think that the Dominion would be a good choice for that, unless the Dominion would be the main villain for the rest of the show, so I'd be gravitating more towards Tzenkethi or a new species. In the end it probably does come down to Klingons ebing actually well-known as opposed to the one-off Tzenkethi, that were a plot point in like one episode.
That's certainly a way of explaining possible design differences but it would also be convoluted as hell for casual viewers. I mean, if you tell me that some mad Klingon scienists acidentally combined the phage with Omega particles, resulting in Klingon design change and cultural shift I'm probably going to get what's happening but casual or new viewers would probably have no clue what's going on, so instead of reverting the Klingons to a point in history at which they already were it seems easier to just set the show there.
I'm not so sure about Sarek. We certainly see him in a different situation here, but I think his character has been extended if anything. The fact that he had to chose wether Burnham or Spock can go to the Vulcan Science Academy and he chose Spock who then went on to decline really enriches his character in "Journey to Babel" for me and lets him grow beyond the father who isn't content with his son's choice of career into an actually tragic figure, made better by the fact that his motives were rather beningn and line up pretty well with my own believes, about what makes someone Vulcan. It's not (just) your genetic makeup but also your upbringing and your education. And he feels very different for his two children, he is ashamed of his lying to Burnham about why she wasn't allowed into the academy because he secretely favors his son, possibly because he is of his own blood which isn't logically, so more reason to be ashamed but he also feels anger for his son who made his sacrificing of Burnham's future be in vain and since he's a Vulcan and they can't really talk about their emotions all this anger and shame directed at Spock but also himself for acting ilogically just builds up more and more and at this point we're just at a different point in Sarek's coping with it than he is in "Journey to Babel" and damnit I love Lethe, okay?! Maybe I'm reading to much into it, but that one episode made Sarek a loooot more interesting for me.
Sorry. Where was I? Yeah, Mudd. I agree that he was somewhat changed but i can kinda see that the guy who made himself monarch of an android civilization would actually revenge-murder someone. I mean, if they weren't totally subservient I can see how he would execute some of his subjects. I think the writers intended the next ten years or whatever with Stella to kinda mellow him out. But I could be disregarding some discrepancies here because, frankly, I thought Mudd was a lot of fun in DSC.
I tend to agree. I think it already said this in the prime timeline thread but it bears repeating, I'd have preferred DSC to be a reboot. But I can also see how limiting yourself can sometimes enhance the creative outcome. I think Christopher L. Bennet once said something along the lines of "I don't use plot to serve continuity porn, I use continuity porn to serve plot" and I think doing that right can really enhance a story, like it did for me with Sarek.
The only reason they look like that is so we can immediately tell it's a hologram and not a real person in the same room. The older ones would have flickered if the technology existed to do it easily was around.
Sure, but if something like that would appear in a post-DS9 episode the fans would be decrying it as non-canon becuase DS9 did it without the flickering.
Pretty sure they could do that in the 90s.
Nothing in Discovery is remotely similar to Mass Effect, and I've played all 4 games.
Yeh to be fair I’m mainly playing devils advocate here - the dominion were done so well in DS9 I don’t think a redux is necessary! The Tzenkethi could give the team chance to be creative though.
As for casual viewers, who cares about them? Filthy muggles... just kidding! In spite of all my problems with DSC I actually hope it does really well so that we get tons more Star Trek!
Is “Lethe” the one where we go inside sarek’s mind? I’ve seen the whole series but I struggle to remember the episode names with one or two exceptions. Admittedly I want to go back and watch it all again (with a cooler head, and in light of much of what I’ve read here). Plus if you love that episode that’s totally ok! Haha!
To be honest I liked Mudd in DSC too - “magic” is one of the highlights of the season for me - I just think Wilson made the character his own to the point where he deserved to be a new character overall. And I don’t buy into the theories about tos Mudd so I’m not going to drag that up!
I just hope that they don’t pull a “timeline reset” eventually meaning that it was an alternate universe all along. But given tptb’s penchant for twists that we all see coming from light years away, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how they “reconcile with canon” later...
If nothing else, it looks like people are settling in on the term and idea "visual reboot" to describe what's going on with this series.
"There's no such thing as a visual reboot" - honey, there was no such thing as a "reimaging" of a property until the day not too many years ago that some Hollywood PR people decided they needed to dodge the baggage of labeling something a remake.
"There's no such thing as a visual reboot" - honey, there was no such thing as a "reimaging" of a property until the day not too many years ago that some Hollywood PR people decided they needed to dodge the baggage of labeling something a remake.
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