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Disco's version of TOS/TAS: Differences

Discovery isn't the first time TOS-prime has been reimagined. After Star Trek (2009), Dave Stern's novel The Children of Kings mashed up elements of Enterprise, the Kelvin universe and TOS. Klingons were developing cloaks in the Pike-era. The cover has the TOS versions of Pike and Spock and the TOS Enterprise, but the Kelvin warp speed effect.
To be fair, The Children of Kings is sort of a No Man's Land kind of novel. At the time, Pocket wasn't sure where they were going to take 23rd century novels, this having been before Bad Robot forbade Kelvin Timeline novels thus making the decision for them. So they decided to do a novel that doesn't really tie into either continuity, can belong to either or be its own thing.

So they said anyway, there's a lot of references to the Prime Universe anyway, like April commanding the Enterprise before Pike, the Enterprise having bathtubs running on water, and even an explanation for paper print-outs in The Cage. Yet, despite having Jeffrey Hunter on the cover, the Author's Note says the author imagined Bruce Greenwood as Pike while writing it.
 
What I find amusing about the scene is that the waitress doesn’t recognize Worf as a Klingon. Sure, he’s wearing a funny hat to hide his ridges, but it’s fairly obvious who he is (at least to the audience, anyway.) And why did Worf feel the need to hide his ridges anyway? The scene seems to imply that the only Klingons anyone knows about are the oily human ones. So if no one has ever seen a “natural” Klingon, then there’d be no reason to hide that fact. (obviously ENT screws this up later, but that’s another story). The only logical reason why he’d have had to hide his ridges would be so that the TOS Klingons didn’t recognize him. But why would that matter?

Probably because this was a Federation station, and the situation with the klingons was not good at the time, and the only other klingons known on the station came all from the one klingon battlecruiser.

Worf tried to hide as "just another background alien in a bar". Because if anyone (either the klingons, or the humans) would have noticed he was actually klingon, that would have opened up a lot of questions, and attention, where he came from, was he on the klingon battlecruiser and whatnot. It makes sense he wanted to avoid that. Also, it's damn funny having him hide the ridges in the one scene with TOS klingons.
 
Probably because this was a Federation station, and the situation with the klingons was not good at the time, and the only other klingons known on the station came all from the one klingon battlecruiser.

Worf tried to hide as "just another background alien in a bar". Because if anyone (either the klingons, or the humans) would have noticed he was actually klingon, that would have opened up a lot of questions, and attention, where he came from, was he on the klingon battlecruiser and whatnot. It makes sense he wanted to avoid that. Also, it's damn funny having him hide the ridges in the one scene with TOS klingons.
Well put. :beer:

The idea was to blend in, not call attention to themselves.
 
This is really the crux of the issue about DSC/TOS continuity. The problem is that TOS, while loved by millions, looks ridiculously out of date now. Why? Because it was a ‘60’s vision of what the future would look like. DSC is a 2018 vision of what the future will look like. And visually, DSC looks great and realistic tech-wise. But it is folly (and quite frankly, an insult to my intelligence) for someone to say, “yeah, in ten years everything in this show will look like TOS, because it’s the ‘prime’ universe.” And saying it’s a ‘visual reboot’ doesn’t really hold water either, because if it’s not supposed to look like TOS, then it doesn’t take place in the same universe TOS does.

I’ve been watching the show now that I have the Blu-ray’s, and I really like it. But I’m not kidding myself that it actually takes place ten years before that show made in the ‘60’s. It takes place ten years before some other (as yet nonexistent) show that looks kinda similar to TOS but with 2018 aesthetics.

This. So much this.

I really do still wonder if our fault lies in The Next Generation declaring the 1960s look historically canonical (through the holodeck scene in "Relics", cute though it was) and DS9 ("Trials and Tribbleations") and ENT ("In A Mirror Darkly") then ratifying that. Yes TMP was a visual leap, but on some level it and the following movies played it cool on the whole visual change thing and even may have infered a few times that parts of it are how TOS 'really' looked. TNG then followed this up by retaining the movie era aesthetics as the way 'past Starships' look (some write it off as a mistake, but there's a little part of me that wonders if the use of the movie era Enterprise to represent the TOS ship in "The Naked Now" was more like a retcon.) My point, I guess, is that we've all gotten a little used to this idea that TOS in universe looked like a product of 1960s era television, thanks to the Next Trek era declaring that to be so. That's where any 'blame' lies. It all feels like very inflexible thinking, let alone a little silly. That said, I do still feel things like warp limits and subspace radio times and site-to-site beaming limits etc are conceits a prequel show should respect, even if aesthetic looks from the 1960s aren't maintained. ENT and DSC have both ignored these things in various ways and I find that a much harder pill to swallow than whether or not people wear miniskirts or have authentically 'retro' looking set designs.
 
This. So much this.

I really do still wonder if our fault lies in The Next Generation declaring the 1960s look historically canonical (through the holodeck scene in "Relics", cute though it was) and DS9 ("Trials and Tribbleations") and ENT ("In A Mirror Darkly") then ratifying that. Yes TMP was a visual leap, but on some level it and the following movies played it cool on the whole visual change thing and even may have infered a few times that parts of it are how TOS 'really' looked. TNG then followed this up by retaining the movie era aesthetics as the way 'past Starships' look (some write it off as a mistake, but there's a little part of me that wonders if the use of the movie era Enterprise to represent the TOS ship in "The Naked Now" was more like a retcon.) My point, I guess, is that we've all gotten a little used to this idea that TOS in universe looked like a product of 1960s era television, thanks to the Next Trek era declaring that to be so. That's where any 'blame' lies. It all feels like very inflexible thinking, let alone a little silly. That said, I do still feel things like warp limits and subspace radio times and site-to-site beaming limits etc are conceits a prequel show should respect, even if aesthetic looks from the 1960s aren't maintained. ENT and DSC have both ignored these things in various ways and I find that a much harder pill to swallow than whether or not people wear miniskirts or have authentically 'retro' looking set designs.

I think what we're experiencing now is a what happened in the late-'70s and '80s. In the movies and the early seasons of TNG, the mentality was "THIS is what Star Trek really looks like!" After the 25th Anniversary, Star Trek became more comfortable with its roots. Spock appeared in "Unification" and the title didn't just refer to the Vulcan/Romulan storyline but to Star Trek itself. TOS, the movies, and TNG were reunified. The very next year, Scotty shows up in "Relics" and we see the TOS bridge. It was a change in mentality but the change didn't happen overnight.

When we see Kor, Koloth, and Kang in "Blood Oath" there's still the sense of "This is how it always looked!" Then a few years later, for the 30th Anniversary, we had "Trials and Tribble-ations" which wasn't just reunification with TOS but a full embrace; complete with smooth-headed Klingons, who were acknowledged in Star Trek for the first time since TAS in 1974.

Jump to ENT. It's the first time we have a series set before TOS, but they didn't want a show from 2001 to look like a show from 1966, so even though they weren't back to "This is how it always looked!", this is the approach they took as a compromise: "TOS looked like how it did in TOS but the times surrounding it before and after, it didn't look like that." They even added in some flashing, blinking lights to the NX-01 to show that in-universe they'd be heading in the direction of TOS someday. "And as a bonus, since the show is ending, we'll even explain the Klingon foreheads!" Except it was all intended to be strictly in-universe and not something they'd actually do in an ongoing series on a regular/permanent basis...

Which brings us to DSC. Now they were actually doing a series set in the vicinity of the TOS Era. The creative team had changed but the mentality was still the same: they didn't want to actually ever make a show that looked like it was from 1966. So, Star Trek ended up going right back to the mentality it had in the late-'70s and '80s: "THIS is actually what it really looked like!" Full circle.
 
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I for one am glad we are back to a more senseable "This is what it always looked like" approach and not the silly "It looked like a cheap 1960s tv show. I have a dislike of Relics just because it brought back a look TMP and later films had killed, caught on fire and buried in the woods.
 
If I thought that the TOS aesthetic would be taken seriously in current entertainment environment then I would concede the need. Now, I think that Discovery could do more to reach that gap better, but, that said, I also think that there is room for multiple design languages that could be apart of Starfleet at the time, and even with later additions to the canon, the TOS Constitution has been regarded as very special and different breed.
 
If I thought that the TOS aesthetic would be taken seriously in current entertainment environment then I would concede the need. Now, I think that Discovery could do more to reach that gap better, but, that said, I also think that there is room for multiple design languages that could be apart of Starfleet at the time, and even with later additions to the canon, the TOS Constitution has been regarded as very special and different breed.


The TOS Connie looks older than the NX man
 
TOS's aesthetic can be updated without it looking "cheap." I've seen a few fan renders that update it nicely without throwing it all away. Even ST09 payed homage to TOS's Enterprise bridge with the Kelvin's bridge. And even the Kelvin was a nice modernization of the TOS ship aesthetic.
 
It does to me, it clearly predates it in design and simplicity. I dig the redesign though, mostly
I've seen both in design language with simple being indication of more advance (re: Ipod and the one button) while more accessories indicating more functions. It just depends on the presentation and personal interaction and familiarity with the device.
 
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