Shouldn't be.
Spoilers Season 2 Trailers, Previews, and Promos
- Thread starter KennyB
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I had no issue with this one. I know I'm in the minority.
But, as for death, Star Trek is uneven but can do it well. Aging is more the difficult one. Very rarely do characters get to age within the universe in a way that acknowledges that aging, becoming more experienced, reflective on the past, is actually a thing that humans do. For that, I think that Picard S1 is highly reflective of themes in classical literature. That is the one thread of potential interest in Season 2 for me.
Nothing in this sequel spin off has felt new viewer friendly. It has felt very heavy handed at times to be not new viewer friendly.
The Department of Homeland Security is mentioned on one of the uniforms, so that exists at least.
Yes it should, and that’s a good thing. I don’t get the fans wanting Star Trek to be our future. There are plenty of other shows/movies that do that.
At this point they have sent a man to go to Saturn and back. We haven’t even got to Mars yet.
If there's any time travel event that could potentially explain the differences between our world and Trek's (Eugenics Wars aside), it'd be this one.
I actually know quite a lot of people from The Musketeers fandom who came into Star Trek: Picard completely cold just to see Cabrera, having never watched any Star Trek before, and they all loved the show and had no problem understanding what was going on despite not being familiar with the backstory. The show builds on the history of the franchise quite heavily, to be sure, but it isn't as impenetrable to new viewers as you'd think. Most of the backstory it introduces is explained well enough within the text for newbies to cope with.
I enjoyed the new trailer. I'm looking forward to the new season.
Good, I'm glad.
I care so much more about these characters than I do about the state of the Federation post-Voyager, so I think I'm more amped for this than others. I'm just happy to see this motley crew again, and Q's always a delight. I can see why it would be disappointing for some though.
Really? Even the murder girl?
Pretty generic trailer, I've already forgotten half of it. Going back to the 21st century seems incredibly lame and simply done to cut costs. Time travel story, saving the future by going to the past, been there, done it. I'll watch of course but no too hopeful.
The visual effects in both Picard and Discovery seem done on the cheap for sure, I guess CBS are being tighter with the budget than the shows need. Going to the 21st century takes it to a whole new level though.
When Star Trek productions run low on money, they travel back in time. Hence: Tomorrow is Yesterday, TCOTEOF, Star Trek IV, Time's Arrow, Past Tense, Future's End, Carpenter Street...
Cheaper to film down the street rather than build some complicated contraptions.
Having been a bit meh about the alternative timeline business in the teaser, I’m much more excited after the new trailer. Whilst it’s hardly the most original sci-fi trope (and we had the overused ‘oh noes - the machines will kill us all!’ trope last season), I really enjoy the Mirror Universe stuff (and think Discovery did it very well) and The Voyage Home is one of my favourite movies so feel very optimistic. Plus, genuinely think 12 Monkeys was one of the best sci-fi shows in recent years so think Matalas’ input will be a good thing for the series.
As for the future, who knows really? I’d love nothing more than a final mission with the original crew but given Data’s gone it would feel a bit hollow without his presence. Plus, I think Stewart specifically didn’t want it to be a big ‘getting the gang back together for more TNG style adventures’ sort of a deal. I quite like that Picard’s doing its own thing and we get to see the universe (and indeed the characters) away from Starfleet. Having said that, I do feel there is a gap for a Starfleet-based series set in the Picard era. It wouldn’t surprise me if he is eventually back in Starfleet with his own crew though in the final series.
Re the future of the show, I never thought we’d see Stewart back in the role so even just one series was a huge bonus. Hoping for four seasons myself given their relatively short length but given his age and everything think it’ll probably end up being three seasons. He does appear to be in very good shape though like his friend Sir Ian McKellen, who I saw in Hamlet the other week and appeared to be in much better condition than I am at thirty (albeit as I have various health issues)! My main hope is that the show has a fitting end (i.e. better than Nemesis).
As for the future, who knows really? I’d love nothing more than a final mission with the original crew but given Data’s gone it would feel a bit hollow without his presence. Plus, I think Stewart specifically didn’t want it to be a big ‘getting the gang back together for more TNG style adventures’ sort of a deal. I quite like that Picard’s doing its own thing and we get to see the universe (and indeed the characters) away from Starfleet. Having said that, I do feel there is a gap for a Starfleet-based series set in the Picard era. It wouldn’t surprise me if he is eventually back in Starfleet with his own crew though in the final series.
Re the future of the show, I never thought we’d see Stewart back in the role so even just one series was a huge bonus. Hoping for four seasons myself given their relatively short length but given his age and everything think it’ll probably end up being three seasons. He does appear to be in very good shape though like his friend Sir Ian McKellen, who I saw in Hamlet the other week and appeared to be in much better condition than I am at thirty (albeit as I have various health issues)! My main hope is that the show has a fitting end (i.e. better than Nemesis).
It's by far the most expensive Star Trek show ever made, but I think the money is going into the typical places most any mega-production in Hollywood goes nowdays.
- The Name Brands behind the product
Back in the Berman Era, almost all of the costs were dumped into the shows themselves. Star Trek was pretty lavisly produced, with high quality sets, great VFX (motion control and CG) and casts that were affordable (though they got expensive around Season 6) The Captain of the show and the producers didn't make gargantuan paydays.
Not so with Streaming Trek. It's followed the model that's emerged the past few years in many franchises of "creative guiding vision" people making gargantuan paydays. Sure, Patrick Stewart is getting paid better than he ever has in his career for his participation, but while exceptional, it's also understandable as an actor. Less understandable is mega paydays of Alex Kurtzman, Michael Chambon and Avika Goldsman. Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor and Brannon Braga made good money. Berman never walked away with the $5 million per season for 5 year deal Kurtzman is walking away with. That's money that's in the budget, that doesn't go directly into the show's production costs.
Again, Star Trek isn't unique in this happening. These brand name behind-the-scenes names across many franchises and genres have been adding costs that simply didn't quite exist like this 20 years ago.
- Modern CG is a racket.
Did you know that huge amounts of the CG in the Mandalorian are done using the Unreal Engine, that is first and foremost a video game engine? It's what allows them to do the real-time VFX edits on their virtual stage (something Star Trek recently adopted too, though with different tech). It also allowed them to do a huge number of locales very cost effectively, because the Unreal Engine is designed around usability and scalability.
But most productions don't use the Unreal Engine and massively over-produce their VFX compared to 20 years ago.
Back in the DS9/Voyager/Enterprise days, Star Trek was the biggest (and sometimes only) customer of a handful of excellent CG houses -Santa Barbara Studios, Digital Muse, Foundation Imaging, Eden FX. These were not huge companies. A couple hundred people tops. Very often ship design came down to one or two guys, who were Star Trek fans, who sometimes did it for free out of passion. And entire scenes were produced by a handful of people. Star Trek's CG was very high quality for the time (compared to early Stargate, which got far better over time, or Babylon 5) but was also scalable and cost effective. The Trek Yards Youtube Channel has done tons of forensics on the CG of the Berman Era. Some of it stands up. Some of it doesn't (video game meshes from the mid 2000s were sometimes superior). But it usually looked great on screen. But most of all it was calibrated for the product of the time: over the air TV, and later with Enterprise, HDTV. Much of the talent that worked on Enterprise transitioned over to Battlestar Galactica, in which they refined their techniques to make a show that looks amazing to this day.
Much modern CG you see in TV shows and worse movies, are over designed. Much of it is built "future ready" for 8k. At a minimum, 4K. This requires ever more detailed models, ever more shaders and complex rendering. And always, always, ever more ambitious use of lighting and shadows (which the Berman era was careful about because of how it looked on TV). Having things scaled for that requires far more work, render time, resources, people and thus costs. VFX studios have grown from hundreds to thousands of people.
Most productions don't need to look this good for their target audience, but that's the norm now and it's going to be a hard standard to break out of. What would be appropriate for most shows? A modernized version of what Battlestar Galactica had. But the ambitions of the shows often grow far past that now, even if it doesn't look all that good. Take "the Battle of the Binary Stars" in Discovery Season 1. It was cinema-quality production values. In a way though, it was grossly inferior to battles we saw in BSG, Stargate SG-1 Enterprise or DS9, because those production values went into the wrong things (over-complex ship design, bad lighting models).
The joke of it is, what I said first about the Unreal Engine points the way forward. All most shows really need is a video game engine. Real time lighting and rendering will be sufficient in the vast majority of cases for a high quality production. That would drop costs a lot. But it would also mean you build assets to Unreal Engine standards and now 8k-pioneering-VFX-standards.
- Modern Trek has almost no archive.
Berman era Star Trek benefited immensely by the enormous archive Trek built starting in the 1970s, particularly with sets. TNG famously reused many sets from the movies, which in term, reused many sets from TNG for the later movies. The original Enterprise A bridge was redressed into the first Enterprise D battle bridge, the Enterprise C bridge, the Stargazer bridge, a bunch of science labs, and so forth. The second Enterprise A bridge (made for Star Trek VI) was used through the end of Enterprise. The Defiant bridge was redressed many times. The list goes on. Star Trek's ongoing presence on the Paramount lot starting with The Motion Picture allowed for investments to be repurposed. Consider the second Enterprise A bridge, built because the original was ruined in an accident. It cost $2.5 million to build, 30 years ago. But it also was reused as a generic bridge in many, many episodes whose production costs could never have paid for a full new bridge standing set. This translates into other props too. Modern Star Trek has almost none of them.
The other part of it though is the materials used. Until Enterprise, Star Trek was almost entirely built around wood and back-lit surfaces. There wasn't that much use of metal, but rather wood-made-to-look-metallic. This kept costs down and made repurposing cheap (paint job). While much of it stood up, you can see in the TNG Blu-rays where it doesn't. Enterprise was the first show that really used a lot of real metal on sets, and actual computer monitors (hooked up to Apple Cube computers). The LCARS of almost the entire 24th century era, Enterprise-E and parts of late Voyager aside, was just back lit translucent colored plastic.
Modern Trek's sets are simply not made for this kind of repurposing. There is a lot of metal and purpose built material. There is a lot of 3D printed material and objects. Through Voyager, production staff just sourced furniture from Europe, which would cost a few hundred, to a couple thousand dollars. Today, everything is custom designed.
In many ways, it's the same problem as with the VFX above. In the Berman era, each episode and the show has a budget that the crew, which carried over for most of the entire span from 1987-2005, got extremely adept in working in. So adept they were able to balance two, simultaneous 24+ episode series. They made the money they had go far, be it on furniture in a crew quarters or an alien bridge or alien clothes. Sometimes that meant going into the archive and repainting or repurposing. Sometime that meant building something new and amatorizing it over future uses. Streaming Trek, flush with money, has been much more an exercise in "we have a lot of money, how can we spend it lavishly", which ironically cheapens the look. Very frankly, I do not think a show like Deep Space Nine, which stretched the budget and production requirements to the limit, is in the capabilities of the crews doing Discovery or Picard within their budget. They would want to go too lavish, to needlessly detailed, minimal re-use.
It even gets down to the level fo the clothes people wear. The specials that show us the obscure materials and needless little details (mini chevrons everywhere! 3d printing! microstiching!) make me shake my head. It just adds costs, that don't get seen and don't look particularly good because of other design choices (the rank position in 2399 Starfleet uniforms was bad and sloppy change for change's sake). It's the kind of stuff that never would have gone down in the Berman era because of cost constraints.
Hopefully this changes as modern Trek builds up an archive of its own and gets comfortable with reuse. We're already seeing some of it in Discovery (and set reuse in Picard). What the show probably needs more than anything else right now is a "modular generic bridge set" that can be easily redressed into dramatically different looks, analogous to the Enterprise-A/Battle Bridge of the Berman era. Hopefully one of these shows - maybe Strange New Worlds in particular - can fit that its budget.
Unreal is only used for the real time projected scenes on set AFAIK. Final FX is done in whatever rendering software they use.
It's used for planetary environments that show terrain (particularly with terrain in a distance), real time sets and some interiors where depth is needed (much more in Season 2 than 1). Space scenes are done in other software
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