Spoilers Season 2 Trailers, Previews, and Promos

[fireproof78]

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?

Yes. The scalability is quite unique in terms of what Unreal can procedurally generate.

 

[lightspeedbear]

It also bears mentioning that new showrunner Terry Matalas is most well-known for his excellent work on 12 Monkeys...which was a time-travel show. So he might be sticking close to his wheelhouse.

Another new showrunner?? Both Discovery and Picard always seem to have new people in charge either in the middle of or between seasons. No wonder the narrative is so rocky.

 

[eschaton]

Another new showrunner?? Both Discovery and Picard always seem to have new people in charge either in the middle of or between seasons. No wonder the narrative is so rocky.

Chabon announced awhile ago he was leaving because he got a deal whereby CBS would be developing one of his books into a series. He did stay on in the writer's room through the end of Season 2's drafting process though, and wrote several of the episodes.

 

[Tuskin38]

Another new showrunner?? Both Discovery

Season 3 and Season 4 so far have kept the same showrunners.

and Picard always seem to have new people in charge either in the middle of or between seasons.

What do you mean 'and Picard'? This is the first time it has happened for Picard, and Chabon left by choice because CBS offered to let him produce an adaptation of one of his stories. He's still a writer on Season 2 so he isn't completely gone.

 

[lightspeedbear]

I thought Picard got a new showrunner half way through season 1, hence the shift in tone? Obviously I'm wrong, fair enough.

Season 3 and Season 4 so far have kept the same showrunners.

Good news, well done them.

 

[Scionz]

To be fair, in the longer view, Discovery is the analogue of TNG, since Picard/SNW are "production spinoffs". And It took TNG a few years to get its behind the scenes drama sorted out into the Berman-dominated production that guided the rest of TNG, all of DS9 (however loosely), Voyager and Enterprise. it's actually pretty remarkable how similar Discovery is to TNG in this respect. Both had massive creative/writer/producer upheaval and a resulting series of direction/story shifts in Season 1. Season 2 had the legacy of that and more upheaval but the beginning of the path to something sustainable. Season 3 the shows found themselves and had a stable behind the scenes situation for the first time. And with that being the case, the franchise begins to expand.

I'll say again: Rick Berman had his problems (very well documented) and clearly he and Braga had run out of creative gas and motivation sometime in late Voyager, and after a brief respite, sometime in Enterprise, but the franchise we love was incalculably enhanced by the creative stability and consistency he brought to it for his tenure (along with the long tenured staff that carried over show to show). He was Kevin Feige for Star Trek in a big sense. The first two seasons of discovery shows what happens when we don't get that. Four different creative directions. Purple Bryan Fuller Klingons. That Red Angel nonsense. A pointless tangent to the Mirror Universe. I really think going to the 32nd century is going to end up the best thing to ever happen to Discovery.

We have Alex Kurtzman for 5 more years. The franchise will benefit by having one guy behind the wheel again. That in itself will help with creative consistency (even if it is a clear deviation from the Berman era, which is fine in most respects) compared to whatever the hell the convulsions of Season 1 and 2 of Discovery were. But I do have big doubts if Kurtzman is the right man for the job. At $5 million a year he's hugely expensive. He is a subscriber to the "JJ Abrams Philosophy of Attention to Detail and Continuity is for Losers". He has his hands in a lot of things beyond Star Trek and his creative capacity is, how shall we say, not even Rick Berman's level. He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who will ask for multiple passes for starship design from concept artists in order to push for the best product.

I don't know. Rick Berman was the kind of guy who could be a complete tool about stuff like a starship having too big or too many windows. But there is also benefit to a guy who thinks in terms like that for creative a cohesive universe, as opposed to someone who thinks details like that are stupid and not worth their time. It remains to be seen where Streaming Trek falls in that. ST: Picard and Discovery Season 3 got some of it perfectly. But it also missed the mark in other places.

 

[fireproof78]

I really think going to the 32nd century is going to end up the best thing to ever happen to Discovery.

Probably not, at least for my money.

 

[thribs]

Probably not, at least for my money.

You think it needs to jump another thousand years?

 

[fireproof78]

You think it needs to jump another thousand years?

Do I hear two thousand?

 

[Biggles]

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. <snip>.

Superb post, thank you!

 

[Dukhat]

He is a subscriber to the "JJ Abrams Philosophy of Attention to Detail and Continuity is for Losers". He has his hands in a lot of things beyond Star Trek and his creative capacity is, how shall we say, not even Rick Berman's level. He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who will ask for multiple passes for starship design from concept artists in order to push for the best product.

I think you're being overly harsh toward Kurtzman. First of all, Abrams revered Trek continuity just fine. If he didn't, then he wouldn't have bothered creating an alternate timeline so that his films wouldn't contradict what came before. If anything, Bryan Fuller's vision of DSC (and CBS backing him) was the continuity-killer.

I think Kurtzman is doing just fine. If anything, he's taking what he was given and trying to make it better. As far as ship designs go, I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll see some ships that have more of a TOS aesthetic than the ships we saw in season 1, both Starfleet and Klingon.

 

[Scionz]

I think you're being overly harsh toward Kurtzman. First of all, Abrams revered Trek continuity just fine. If he didn't, then he wouldn't have bothered creating an alternate timeline so that his films wouldn't contradict what came before. .

I think Abrams created that alternate reality not out of respect for previous continuity, but as a plot device for Nero and Spock-Prime to play a role in the reboot. The script would have had to be entirely different in absence of their connection to the Prime reality (what is Nero's motivation? Why is there an old Spock?). But Star Trek (2009) was very typical Abrams. It pulled from a lot of previous sources - sequel stuff, "best off" stuff, prequel stuff; it was a testament to style over substance. Heck the man weirdly went around bragging during the press junket that he wasn't a Star Trek fan and was more a Star Wars fan.

Of course, then a few years later he did Star Wars where he did the same thing - did a riff on the original trilogy, planned nothing across a supposedly planned trilogy because stuff like that's for losers, brought in a counterfeit Darth Revan and a bunch of leftover Ralph McQuarrie designs.

Kurtzman was neck deep in his involvement in that in his Star Trek movie work, but also Transformers, which couldn't even maintain a consistent story between two sequels. He's not guilty of it like Abrams is to be sure.

If anything, Bryan Fuller's vision of DSC (and CBS backing him) was the continuity-killer.

I agree, but I think there was a different kind of motivation behind it. I think Abrams had (as he always has) a kind of malevolent sneering at backstory, continuity and attention to details. When he rarely discusses this topic, you can see him dripping in contempt that anyone cares at little details in fictional universes.

Fuller, who was long enmeshed in Star Trek, I think saw himself in the position of the leading staff of TNG in 1987.

Consider this. From the perspective of 1987, with the only thing that is "Star Trek" before your new show in TNG being TOS from 20 years prior, TAS and 4 movies, and those movies didn't go terrible deep into the Federation or details of the time. Star Trek to you, is almost a blank slate.

So we get:

• an Enterprise that looks like no ship we've ever seen (and in fact, is something of an outlier as later ships pull back closer to the Excelsior style)
• an enterprise that families in it, so now young children are part of regular cast of characters on the ship, including a 15 year old boy on the Bridge Crew
• We get a change in division colors, with Command and Operation swapping colors.
• We get a bridge which is kinda like the TOS, just much bigger and with different positions emphasies. Also in the most '80s move, the ships therapist gets a prime seat,
• We got type-2 phasers that look like TV remotes
• We got a radical new visual style to an old enemy, the Romulans, whose ship looks nothing like the 1960s Bird of Prey. Also they have forehead ridges now.

And so forth. The list of changes made in between TOS and TNG and Classic Trek and Discovery have many, many parallels.

I think Fuller intentionally set out, not to do a reboot, bu to begin a new visual design language for Star Trek, like had been done for TNG, both as a means of bringing it into a modern era but also to be a marker of ownership. This was to be "Bryan Fuller's Star Trek Era", so to speak, and the difference in Klingon design would not require any more explanation as to why Romulan designs change. After all, if TNG could do it after a 20 year television hiatus, why couldn't Discovery do it after 15?

There is two key differences though. The first is that Gene Roddenberry himself was responsible for initiating or approving many of the things TNG changed compared to TOS, and especially the movies, which he had little involvement in. There is a big difference between the creator making a change, and a marginally affiliated successor doing it. The second is that production values, storytelling techniques, accessibility and fan consciousness enabled classic Trek to hold up a lot better today than TOS did in the 1980s. TOS needed the overhaul by the 1980s. Berman-era trek largely kept overhauling itself along the way and advances in technology and changes in storytelling over those 19 years means that the needed overhault today would be much smaller.

This is why true creative reboots are increasingly hard to do unless a franchise truly self destructs (see: Michael Bay's Transformers) and its better to do more modest overhauls. I think Fuller, in short, wasn't being malicious but was the wrong person for the time. Kurtzman, ironically, probably would have been better from the start.

I think Kurtzman is doing just fine. If anything, he's taking what he was given and trying to make it better. As far as ship designs go, I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll see some ships that have more of a TOS aesthetic than the ships we saw in season 1, both Starfleet and Klingon.

I think Kurtzman is good enough. What I was rereferring to was that Berman was such a detail micromanager that he personally approved the design of every ship and every prop and forced changes that sometimes seem arbitrary and even cynical and disrespectful. Often times this really helped (see: the Enterprise-E, in which he saved John Eaves from himself). Sometimes it was way overboard (see: the saga of the D4 class from Enterprise). But the show benefited from at least *someone* being the single guiding hand in a cross-decade attention to visual continuity. Just look at the really lousy design of the Inquiry class in Picard for what happens when John Eaves doesn't have someone checking his work. And the generic 21st century sci-fi designs of most of ST:Picard's ships all kind of feed into that. Again, it's not the end all and be all, but a Kevin Feige figure, a Rick Berman figure, a George Lucas figure, Stan Lee figure, is just a clear essential aspect of any franchise over the showrunner-of-the-season model modern Trek started with.

 

[fireproof78]

I hate the near constant shitting on Kurtzman and Abrams. The way people talk you'd think they walked on a stage and declared their Trek the only true Trek.

 

[StarMan]

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.

Great post and very informative. I didn't know that about the VFX connection between Trek and BSG.

I'm in the middle of my umpteenth BSG re-watch -- knowing those guys transitioned to BSG explains a lot.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I'm really excited for the Pike show, we get to learn more about number 1

I hate the near constant shitting on Kurtzman and Abrams. The way people talk you'd think they walked on a stage and declared their Trek the only true Trek.

There are no true trek fans /s

 

[Scionz]

Great post and very informative. I didn't know that about the VFX connection between Trek and BSG.

I'm in the middle of my umpteenth BSG re-watch -- knowing those guys transitioned to BSG explains a lot.

It actually goes a lot further than I said now since BSG was 15 years ago, but yeah Season 1 of BSG outsourced a lot of it's VFX, but Gary Hutzel, BSG's VFX supervisor (who also did that job on TNG and DS9) brought many Trek vets into the internal team he build for Seasons 2,3, and 4. In the time since Star Trek VFX artists have worked on Stargate Atlantis, Transformers, Caprica, Terra Nova, Defiance, and most recently, the Expanse. There's vets all over the place. It's really interesting to see who as mid or entry level (but significant!) in the 1990s who is very senior now. There's, however, not many involved in Streaming Trek from the classic era. I think John Eaves is pretty much it, and he's an illustrator, not a CG guy.

My personal favorite bit is that Alex Jaeger, who was Star Trek First Contact's VFX Director and designed all the CG ships involved in the Battle of Sector 001 except the Borg Cube, Defiant and Enterprise E, also is the man most responsible for the look and design of the Transformers in the Michael Bay movies, and was VFX Director on Avengers and (in a non director role) a whole lot of Star Wars sequel trilogy stuff.

The US/Canadian VFX scene just isn't that big and there's been so many openings and closures in what's been an extremely volatile market since the 1990s that all the classic Trek talent is scattered all over the place, but much of it is still at work on something genre oriented, and yes, a few even streaming Trek. For what it's worth, I do suggest checking out the Trekyards channel. The guys there are tight with Berman era Star Trek VFX artists and have gained access to _all_ the original files of ships and scenes from that era, and most hold up pretty well, a testament to the quality of the workmanship of the time. But the most comprehensive archive of Trek CG is going to be on the computer of the guy (whose name escapes me) who does the CG for Eaglemoss for both the physical models and the magazine itself, since his first step has been to take the original TV/movie models from the shows of all eras, evaluate if they're of high enough resolution for modern needs, and then upgrade them where necessary.

 

[Scionz]

I hate the near constant shitting on Kurtzman and Abrams. The way people talk you'd think they walked on a stage and declared their Trek the only true Trek.

Kurtzman did not do anything like this. But he has a track record of less than stellar attention to detail and Star Trek is a franchise where details have always and will always mater because of the nature of its fans. But the franchise can certainly be in worse hands. I've very much enjoyed Discovery Seasons 2 and especially 3 and Picard, even though I wish Picard was a different show. If nothing else franchise will benefit from him being "the dude" for at least a total of 7 years, as opposed to passing through a bunch of outsider-of-the-season with different visions.

Abrams is another story. First, he spent most of the time with his involvement in the 2009 Star Trek movie going around telling folks he wasn't a Star Trek fan and was more of a Star Wars fan. It was an ill conceived, and short sighted (particularly with how fandoms of all types have been treated in subsequent years) gimmick to try and bring outsider credibility to his film. Second, and perhaps more importantly it's not really even about him and Star Trek. It's about him and how he does his job. He shows it in nearly every project he's involved in, that if it involves attention to detail, planning, internal consistency, he not only will not do it, he's cynically scornful of the entire idea.

When he was named Director of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and then mastermind behind the sequel trilogy, I think may of us knew exactly what that meant. In the context of that first movie, it was almost cute people had debates about Rey's parentage, or the nature of Snoke, or what Finn's storyline across the sequel trilogy was going to be. It presumes that somewhere on JJ Abrams computer, there was some mullti-picture master plan of where (broadly) he was going to take these characters. The guy had planned precisely zero of it. It was all wishcasting about what we imagined we would do, in his shoes. The Star Wars suddenly gets way better when Lucasfilm rushes Abrams to the exit with the Rise of Skywalker, and more or less gives Dave Filoni and John Favreau he's old job as Star Wars mastermind. Guys who, shockingly, can be bothered to plan plotlines and character arcs before hand.

The problem with JJ Abrams isn't a "no true Trek fan" thing. It's that his approach to film making is fundamentally incompatible with any type of film that could be part of a franchise and requires planning. We saw it with Star Trek, and worse with Star Wars. Could you imagine if he were given Superman, as was floated years ago? It would have been a disaster. Or a MCU movie? He doesn't have the sensibilities. He needs to stick to nostalgia-heavy one offs or places where story details don't matter.

 

[fireproof78]

Abrams is another story. First, he spent most of the time with his involvement in the 2009 Star Trek movie going around telling folks he wasn't a Star Trek fan and was more of a Star Wars fan. It was an ill conceived, and short sighted (particularly with how fandoms of all types have been treated in subsequent years) gimmick to try and bring outsider credibility to his film. Second, and perhaps more importantly it's not really even about him and Star Trek. It's about him and how he does his job. He shows it in nearly every project he's involved in, that if it involves attention to detail, planning, internal consistency, he not only will not do it, he's cynically scornful of the entire idea.

That's not malevolence. Also, if you read quotes about his fan status he also acknowledges that he had a lot to learn. It wasn't just "I'm a Star Wars fan. Deal with it."

You can disagree with his approach but assuming a malicious intent is just too much for me.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

If that's the prime Earth and this was post First Contact where people were freaking out a bit about aliens, how did prime Earth get the Mirror Universe logos?

 

[Tuskin38]

If that's the prime Earth and this was post First Contact where people were freaking out a bit about aliens, how did prime Earth get the Mirror Universe logos?

None of those are mirror universe logos.

The shots with those logos are also in the 24th century, not the 21st.