Chabon's (selfish) disinterest of ship porn.
Okay, so, first off, let's get one thing straight here:
Chabon is not selfish for having particular artistic interests. No one work of art is for everyone.
Or, rather, Chabon is only as selfish as he
ought to be. Because, you see:
Art is not a democracy. In the words of Nicholas Meyer, writing and director of
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and co-writer of
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: "Art is a dictatorship."
An artist's obligation is to tell the story she feels compelled to tell, to the best of her ability to tell it. That's it.
It is
not an artist's job to tell the story the audience thinks it wants to see, because: 1) no artist will be able to tell that story as well as the story she actually
wants to tell, and 2) the audience rarely actually knows what it wants to see anyway.
To the extent that you are upset at Chabon for not being interested in starship porn, you are engaging with the art incorrectly. That does not mean that there are no legitimate criticisms of PIC. PIC is a flawed work of art -- as
all works of art are flawed -- and there are legit critiques to be made. But assessing a work of art requires that we separate our subjective tastes from objective criteria of quality, and an inability to separate the two is a sign you are not consuming the art correctly.
To be clear: Being upset that PIC does not give you starship porn is like walking into
The Shining and being upset that it's not as funny as
Ghostbusters, or as family-friendly as
Hocus Pocus, or as heartwarming as
A Christmas Carol. The artist(s) created a particular type of art, that's doing a particular thing, and it is not reasonable to be upset at the art for not doing something else. It's not reasonable to be upset that a horror movie isn't telling great jokes; it's not reasonable to be upset that a character study doesn't focus on cool starships.
How do you expect people to react to you when you use that kind of vitriol against a fellow poster for the crime of thinking there's nothing particularly unrealistic about an incredibly minor aspect of a TV show?
Well when you say that Starfleet having 200 ships of the same class is realistic, then delusional is the only thing you can be. I'm not sure if anyone's told you this, but real life planes, cars, boats, ships... don't just come in 1 shape and size.
On the other hand, it's not unrealistic to see the Air Force send a squad of identical or nearly identical F-16s or F/A-18s on a mission. Given that the
Inquiry class is supposed to be Starfleet's newest, and given that they were up against the clock to get them to Coppelius before the Tal Shiar fleet arrived, I could easily imagine the
Inquiry is the fastest class and that Starfleet decided to send a crap-ton to protect the Coppelians from genocide.
And, yes, if the fleet had featured a mix of ships, I could imagine realistic scenarios for that, too!
Because, you see, this is a work of
fiction, and the diversity or homogeneity of starship classes seen for a couple of shots in a scene that lasts a couple of minutes, is really not that important, and plausible scenarios can be imagined to justify either choice.
Eaves is a TOS fan from way back; he knows his shit. I'm 100% sure that if it were up to his tastes alone, he'd probably design something more Matt Jeffries-looking. But it's not -- he's hired to deliver the particular aesthetic the producers want.
Really,[/quote]
Really.
because none of his ships since long before Discovery or Picard resemble Matt Jeffries' designs.
Okay, so, first off, let's unpack that incredibly broad, sweeping statement that is shockingly reductive of the entire career of a guy who's been working on
Star Trek off and on since
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Since you're keen on examining the relationship of his pre-DIS work to the Jeffries lineage, let's look at Eaves's Starfleet designs (excluding his work on support craft like the Type 11 shuttlecraft, scout ships like the INS scout or the
Argo, or the
Sovereign-class captain's yacht).
His first Starfleet design was the
Enterprise-B modification to the
Excelsior class, modifications necessitated by the script featuring part of the hull being ripped away from the ship and by the production crew's need to avoid actually cutting into the original
Excelsior model:
Seems pretty faithful to the TOS-TMP-TSFS design lineage as it existed up to that point. The modications are relatively minimal and they mostly just give it more of a sense of balance to the engineering hull. The modifications made to the back of the saucer help give it a sense of flow.
His next Starfleet starship was the
Sovereign-class USS
Enterprise-E:
Now, I'm sorry, but this is just an objectively good design. And it seems to me that it flows nicely out of the Starfleet lineage of aesthetics -- it combines the round features of the
Galaxy with some of the harsher lines of the
Defiant. Both it and the
Intrepid-class
Voyager by Sternbach seem like organic outgrowths of where Starfleet has been, and they both seem to reflect the more combat-oriented roles new starships were made to reflect both in-universe and out-universe.
After that, Eaves designed the Federation holoship from INS:
It's a boxy, ugly thing, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be. It's a radical departure from the Starfleet lineage, but its evil mission is a radical departure from Starfleet principles, so that's weirdly appropriate.
His next Starfleet designs were from ENT: the
Emmette type from the end of the ENT opening credits, the NX-Alpha, NX-Beta, the UESF Intrepid type, the UESF "Warp Delta" (Gange class), and the Sarajevo type.
Now, all of those ships look to me like designs that could plausibly have been part of a lineage that eventually produced the TOS
Constitution. The only exception is the
Sarajevo type, which was a transport that brought the inventor of the transporter to the NX-01 in "Daedalus;" it doesn't really fit in with the Starfleet lineage. But, it also could have been a non-Starfleet ship, or a non-Earth design purchased by United Earth as a transport -- the episode was unclear.
Finally, when he worked on ST09, Eaves and Alex Jaeger designed the S.S.
Kobayashi Maru:
Per
Memory Alpha, "They based the design on Roger Sorensen's blueprints from 1983 of the prime universe class 3 neutronic fuel carrier
Kobayashi Maru and its image on the cover of the novel
The Kobayashi Maru, which in turn, was a depiction of a
Tritium-class starship (β), originally designed by Rick Sternbach for the
Spaceflight Chronology."
Now, to me, all of these ships look like they fight within, or are plausible precursors to, the design lineage of the TOS
Constitution class.
Specifically, I would say that, pre-DIS,
Star Trek as a franchise had four distinct Starfleet aesthetics that were supposed to flow into one-another (to variable degrees of plausibility):
- The ENT aesthetic (e.g., NX-01)
- The ST09
Kelvin-era aesthetic (e.g., USS
Kelvin)
- The TOS aesthetic (e.g., the TOS
Enterprise)
- The TOS Movie aesthetic (e.g.,
Constitution refit,
Miranda, Excelsior, Constellation)
- The TNG/Probert/Sternbach aesthetic (e.g,
Galaxy, Ambassador, Nebula, Olympic)
- The
First Contact/Eaves/Sternbach/Jaeger aesthetic (
Defiant, Intrepid/Voyager, Sovereign, Akira, Steamrunner, Saber, Nova)
The ENT asethetic is supposed to look boxier, more primitive than TOS, and uses darker colors to evoke what I think of as a pseudo-steampunk shorthand for "less sophisticated than." The
Kelvin aesthetic feels to me like it could plausibly flow from the ENT aesthetic, but it doesn't feel to me like it flows into the TOS aesthetic. The TOS Movie aesthetic, with its drastic jump from pulp futurism to Space Art Deco, really doesn't feel like it flows naturally out of the TOS aesthetic; in publication order, it was the first implausible aesthetic shift IMO. The TNG aesthetic, with its emphasis on smooth, round lines, feels like a reasonable evolution out of the TOS Movie aesthetic after 80 years, and reflects the show's less conflict-oriented emphasis. The FC aesthetic, with the sharper lines and harsher angles of Eaves and Jeager, represents an era of ST where the show was more action-oriented and conflict-oriented.
Voyager, to me, feels like an in-between of the TNG and FC eras, and the
Defiant feels to me like it's the codifier of the harsher angles look.
Now, sure, the DIS era ships complicate that particular lineage flow. But that lineage flow? It already had a
huge, implausible-feeling jump in the shift from pulp futurism to Art Deco, and the addition of the
Kelvin to the 2230s made the flow from the ENT era to the TOS era feel more complicated than a simple progression already.
As I said, personally, I would have preferred if the Eaves/DIS aesthetic had been more TOS-like. To me, his DIS ships feel like they'd fit better in the FC era. But that's not really a continuity error, and they don't feel like they
couldn't flow into the TOS aesthetic, either.
