Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x11 - "Perpetual Infinity"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Quite honestly, if you took out all the Trekkian content, Star Trek Discovery never would have been made. After Fuller was fired and his original plan blew up CBS would have just folded up shop and eaten the money he blew in pre-production. The only thing that kept the show going was CBS's desire to revive the Star Trek franchise.
If it was a new show with no Trek involved Fuller may not have been fired because the level of expectations and demands on what he created would have been very very different. Its just as likely that he would have been able to get away with the crazieness he wanted to stuff in for at least a season or two if it had been an original product.
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It was also heralded to be one of the main draws for CBS All Access which I suspect is what really kept the show alive.
Reversing that would have been very embarrassing, I do not think it got to the point where they considered cancelling the plan altogether though, the main problem at the time is that they did not have anything else to replace Discovery with so they had little choice but to continue.
OTOH, if it wasn't Trek, Fuller wouldn't have been given a ridiculous budget to blow away in the pilot episode. Given Fuller was fired from American Gods (IIRC) in part because he demanded obscene levels of money for production, Fuller may have just quit if CBS wasn't giving him the cash needed for an overproduced mess of CGI.
Honestly - and I say this as someone who likes both shows - The Orville and Discovery are in some ways polar opposites. I say that because Discovery takes Star Trek's canon, but is not particularly similar to older Trek in terms of direction, lighting, tone, themes, story structure, etc. If you took away the references to the Star Trek universe, no one would really see a similarity to Trek beyond two sci-fi shows that take place on ships. In contrast, The Orville is set up to be exactly like Star Trek except for not existing in the Trekverse. Okay, and having a higher humor quotient. But still, it's sort of an exercise in seeing how "Treklike" you can make a show without a single reference to Star Trek.
I happen to enjoy watching cinematic filmmaking in the vein of the Nicholas Meyer's Star Trek films and First Contact. If any TV series can look like they are 45 minute movies like this every week that is the last thing I'll complain about.
Disco does look like and feel like old Star Trek, the look however just happens to be old MOVIE Trek in terms of direction, lighting, tone, and even to a certain extent themes, story structure, etc. IMO, old Star Trek movies are still Star Trek.
PS. other shows cost as much as Disco does, and don't look like a fraction of their budgets reach the screen, this one does.
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I'd agree with that assessment overall. And, I too, like both. Although, Discovery is trying to more modern stories while The Orville is living in an over glorified past. So, ultimately, I prefer Discovery a bit more. But sometimes revisiting the good old days is nice too.
Not to belabor the obvious, but The Orville isn't a Star Trek series.
DSC is rather like TNG in that regard. For its time, TNG was groundbreaking.
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I'd already seen Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica on the small screen offering at least 1970s cinematic levels of production value the decade before TNG broke. By comparison TNG looked chintzy to me for the most part. And by the 90s Babylon 5 and then Farscape pushed TV scifi ahead far further than any of the Star Trek series, followed by the BG reboot. IMO, Discovery is the first Star Trek series in 50 years to set any kind of new standard where TV space opera is concerned visually. I expect Consider Plebas however to break the next new ground, however.
Movie Trek has been notoriously hit or miss in general. But IMHO nothing since TUC has actually been better than a popcorn flick for one reason and one reason alone. All of the TNG movies, and all of the Kelvin movies, can be broadly summarized as "defeat the bad guy, and save the day." This is the simplest, most hackneyed style of storytelling. It's also somewhat at odds with Trek as a TV show, where it's notable how few true villains there are across the series. There are antagonists, for sure, but for the most part Trek depicts them as complicated people whose own agendas cause them to come in conflict with the crew.
I should also note that you often need limitations to come up with good creative product. Some of the best episodes of Star Trek - from Charlie X on TOS, to Yesterday's Enterprise or Lower Decks on TNG, to Duet or In The Pale Moonlight on TNG, were done with nothing but the standard ship sets.
The big senseless waste of money was the decision to shoot on location in Jordan in the premier. Particularly because it was a scene only a few minutes long, and it later turned out they added all of the rocks in post-production. I can't see how CBS ever okayed that. I mean, I realize the show is being filmed in Toronto, and no deserts are nearby, but surely visiting California like all of the other series would have been easier.
In general the show looks great now, but in the premier - hell, throughout season one - it is widely thought the external ship shots looked like garbage. Heavily stylized, cartoon-like, often out of focus, etc. Honestly I saw more beautifully rendered ship shots in video games from ten years ago.
The idea that high production values=low quality story is ridiculously reductive and inacurate to boot, just as low production values does not force writers to be better than they are. Yes some of the best Trek stories are on limited budgets, and some of the best cost a mint to produce. Some of the best Science Fiction films I've ever watched had massive budgets, some of the best didn't. .
We all know California is an amazingly expensive place to shoot anything. The Orville costs almost as much as Discovery for example and looks like its budget is a fraction of Disco's. Where is all their money going, if it isn't to production values? Was Jordan really so expensive to shoot a couple of people walking across some sand?
As for the old 'widely thought' chestnut you bring up about Disco's VFX looking cheap. Yeah, widely thought by Midnight Edge and its followers. Not by me with my decades of TV/Film watching.
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Coming from a gamer, I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a video game from 10 years ago that had ships rendered better than DSC.
I read this with a Swedish accent.
Most Trek between TOS and Disco has been kinda crap, with the exception of a good chunk of DS9 and maybe 3 seasons TNG. Sadly, IMO, the neither Voyager or Enterprise were qualitatively better then most of Stargate (which I eventually gave up on as well) and were notably poorer than Stargate Universe for the most part.
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That's how I always pronounce the name of the show.
Agreed. Stargate was exactly what it said on the tin-a weekly action/adventure show that slowly built up its own lore and mythology. Even when it was poorly done (some of the time travel episodes) it was still very entertaining. The characters went through interesting and some distinctive arcs that made it all the more worthwhile. It could be uber-serious and use torture, and it could take itself less seriously and be light hearted and fun.
I'll take Stargate a lot of times over a lot of Trek, especially Berman era.
It was consistently mediocre, bland and uninspired.
Agreed. It was a ground based TOS derivative that had most of the ingredients adventure-wise but with TNGs breadth of exploring the themes on a narrowly proscribed imaginative scale. As such, it could certainly be fun, but had precious few of the great WTF?! moments that TOS generally enjoyed just about every single episode, which at the very least Disco tries to subscribe to.
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