Spoilers S4. More new uniforms - hooray (!).

It's a fair point to make. To me it shows Discovery leaning back in to the TNG mold in terms of episodic style, captain as the lead, show format. How that plays out is anyone's guess but it is interesting to me that the new uniforms feel very much like TNG style dress uniforms, and the colors match quite well.

 

This is entirely the correct way to look at it in my view. I loved the First Contact uniforms but the Voyager sets weren't designed with them in mind and thematically they would have been out of place on Voyager. I say we got an inkling of that on the few times where there were Alpha Quadrant scenes/episodes after their introduction.

Conversely I think the Dominion War's darker episodes would have been ill served by having Starfleet wearing the early DS9 / Voyager uniforms. Can you imagine the battle of AR-558 with those uniforms? It would have been weird. I think DS9 was served well by the uniform switch because it illustrated a change in the seasons, from peace time to war time. And just the same, I think it's pretty great a more "peacetime Starfleet" went back to a more TNG/DS9 style uniform in the 2380s with the Lower Decks and Picard (2380s) uniforms.

If you really want to get into a "what if" scenario, consider if Star Trek: Insurrection would have been better served by everywhere wearing the TNG uniforms rather than the FC ones. I think it would have. But First Contact and Nemesis were clearly best served by the FC ones.

I'll say it again: everything about how the Discovery Season 4 uniforms work will depend on the color grading of the final episodes. If they get it wrong, it'll lead to a severe clash. If they're careful, and with some changes to set lighting, it could world. Season 1 and Season 3 look very different after all. And that was just because a change in set lighting, a tweak uniforms and color grading. The gold standard I think will always remain "In A Mirror Darkly Part II", which showed that 1960s set and costume design is nearly fully compatible with modern productions with tweaks to set lighting, cinematography and color grading.

 

Same with getting a new Enterprise for the TNG Movies. The scene where they're in their space suits and fighting the Borg on the deflector dish would not have worked at all if it were the Enterprise-D. I can't even picture it.

When the Enterprise-E swoops to the rescue during the Borg Attack at the beginning of First Contact, and when it rams itself into the Scimitar in Nemesis, that only works with the E. I can't picture those movies with the Enterprise-D.

Whereas I could easily see Insurrection on the D.

 

I'd love to see the D's dish that close

 

Oh yeah that's something I didn't even think of. Insurrection would have been far better on the D. Every aspect of it. Even the scenes internally on the Enterprise. The Enterprise E corridors were even more claustrophobic than an Intrepid class one third its size. Why? To add narrative tension in First Contact. And conversely fighting the Borg in the Enterprise D Saucer section corridors would have been silly. I think they kind of figured this out too: for Insurrection, on the Enterprise E bridge they removed consoles, redid the lighting and repainted much of it to give an overall brighter appearance compared to the more militarized look in First Contact. And then they reverted some of it it and add a lot of details for Nemesis.

It also never made much sense to me the Enterprise E had a tough time with a couple of shitty Son'a warships in Insurrection, but was this unstoppable battleship in Nemesis (and yeah I know there was a weapons refit). Don't get me wrong, the Nemesis Enterprise is how it always should have fought - using every phase strip it had, firing blindly when it needed to, pumping out both types of torpedoes and changing which side of it's shields were facing the enemy in order to protect itself. The cumbersome Galaxy class would have just been far better in Insurrection. It's a powerful ship with a lot of weapons, but never the most capable or agile.

In consistent story telling, First Contact / Nemesis Enterprise would have made short work of the Sona. Heck, the Defiant probably could have.

And there is of course, the Enterprise-A bridge between Star Trek V and Star Trek VI. Physically nearly the same, just repainted, relit and recarpeted. I love the Star Trek VI bridge. Also the scenes on it wouldn't have worked if they had been on the bridge of Star Trek V. I think with Discovery in Season 4, it'll be an opportunity to see what other changes they make in a similar vein to this to help with storytelling. Discovery has been bogged down for three years from the long legacy of Bryan Fuller's weird, aborted vision (and in many ways slowly undoing it step by step), the bridge as we saw it in S3 remains one of the last vestiges of it. From the trailer there seems to be some major destruction of it that goes on at some point. Maybe this will be an opportunity to just start fresh with a new design in late Season 4 or Season 5.

 

Yeah, the front of the bridge is way too flat, just looks amateurish.

 

The Ambramsverse Enterprise shares the same problems with Discovery too, though it has better reasons. The bridge is a set, the uniforms are costumes and their all tools to tell a narrative and evoke certain emotional responses. During the pre-production of TNG and again on Voayger, the production staff did a clean look at bridge designs and came up with alternative layouts, only to be drawn back to riffs that stuck pretty close to the TOS bridge because from a sheer storytelling standpoint, the layout of stations and dimensions of the room worked best.

With the TOS bridge, in true 1960s show style, the camera would have the star of the show, William Shatner, in almost every frame, from every angle. His Helmsman and Nav officers were in front and lower from his Roman-style chair, underscoring his authoirty, The Amera would always have the turbolift door, Uhura's station or Spock's station in view. And size wise everything was close enough and in focus. It worked from a cinematic perspective.

TNG's Enterprise bridge resolved the biggest "problem" of the TOS Bridge in that it was able to have the entire crew, at their stations in one frame. TOS could only do that if Uhura turned around and Spock stood up and moved to the railing. This was in keeping with the more ensamble nature of show compared to TOS. It also did the most 80s thing possible and put the ship's psychiatrist in one of the three main seats. Nonsense from an in-universe reason. From a storytelling reason, it put a main character at the captain's left hand. Most innovative was Worf's tactical position, because it allowed the frame to capture Picard+Riker+Worf (and sometimes Troi) looking ahead at the viewscreen, all in one frame. They could have conversations about what they were looking at without changing cameras.

Voyager built on TNG and fixed some of the weaknesses but reverted to some TOS designs. No more ship's counselor, so they shrunk the middle down to two seats. To underscore the "joint crew" Maquis/Starfleet nature of the show in Season 1 and 2, both seats are off center relative to the viewscreen, illustrating the "joint" nature of the ship. The front was shrunk to a one seat position for the helmsman. Tactical and Operations in the back were facing forward in cubbies and angled in such a way that the Camera could capture Janeway+Chakotay+Paris+Tuvok OR Kim, in a single frame, if need be. The front Engineering station was rarely seen. And as soon as Seven of Nine joined the ship, the console behind the Captain, once rarely use, became her unofficial station whenever they wanted to capture most of the crew of pull into the Captain+Seven. All of this underscores the ensamble nature of the show, just like TNG. Everything matters.

And pulling it back to uniforms for a moment, TNG was brightly lit after Season 2, so the vibrancy of the uniforms worked. Voyager made extensive use of darkness on sets (see: every Red alert, for example) to increase dramatic tension. The predominantly black uniforms of voyager really helped with this. It wouldn't have been as effective in TNG or TOS uniforms. Again, it all works together.

Abramsprise have no thought put into any of these. It's all more or less blind adaption and visual spins on things without asking "why". The Ambramsprise bridge, for example, is such an poorly thought out abomination that couldn't have Kirk look to either Uhura's or Spock's stations (which are in slightly different posiitions) without having him look through some weird glass panels and around two guys at standing consoles. And the captains chair is so big that Christ Pine looks like a child sitting in it. And the colors of the surface and screens and lighting don't at all compliment each other, nor are complimented with the uniform. They basically just said "make it look like TOS in spirit, but modern future-y asthetic" and we got a bunch of independent, clashing ideas. Or let me put it another way: you could have put the Abramsverse crew in Battlestar Galactica uniforms on that bridge, and it wouldn't have looked any worse. But really, at this point, who cares about a dead timeline we're never going back to besides using it as an example of what not to do.

The Discovery bridge has many of the the same problems as the Abramsprise (and existing in opposition to the TNG/VOY bridges), but has a better justification for it. It's big for no reason and the stations are so spread out It's impossible to get everyone in a frame in focus. The big helm and navigation consoles in the front are so far away from the Captains chair that Lorca/Saru/Pike have to keep standing up and walking ten feet forward to be in the same frame as them. The Captain's chair and Saru's position are commonly in the same frame, if only because they're the only two on the bridge close enough to do it easily and regularly. These things would all be failures for an ensemble show, but Discovery is also not really an show. It's not about the crew of the Discovery It's the first Star Trek show about a specific character (who "earned" their way up to being captain over 3 seasons). Most of the Bridge crew glorified extra's with sub-Season 1 TNG Worf levels of character development. Who is Chief Engineer now? Is it Commander Reno now? It's not important to Discovery as a show, so it doesn't get answered. Since it's a show about Burnham, who was often at Saru's (or the opposite) position, and whoever was in the Captain's chair, the cinematography worked fine because it was able to capture everyone who was important. And the blue uniforms, yeah very out of place for the TOS era as we know it, worked with the sets like.

But again, a lot of this on Discovery is just inherited. TNG has the benefit of Gene bringing the band back together, and while it had its problems in the first two seasons, the fundamentals were there from the start. It was set up by people who "knew" Star Trek from their own work in TOS and the movies. Discovery had behind the scenes Bryan Fuller, who apparently lost his mind over the last 20 years, some Ambramsverse people, and basically no one else from the Berman-era. In fact it seems like from what we know, there was some kind of informal prohibition on recruiting those people. Point is it was a nasty mess of people who had to re-learn all the lessons about how sets, costumes and cinematography work together on Star Trek, from the ground up. They're still learning it. Season 3 of Discovery had a return of holograms for communications, seemingly intent on relearning why the prior few times it's been experimented with on Star Trek, it's always quickly abandoned: the captain talking to a big head the viewscreen works as a narrative device the way the captain talking to a 3D projection (especially one that has no visual effects to show they're holograms) just doesn't.

But they're learning. They're getting better every season. I hope they use S4 as an opportunity to replace the bridge with a legit 32nd century one and just write up the Discovery bridge as a learning experience. And it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if Season 3 of picard, which we know features a new 2399-era ship, has a new bridge that's much more TNG/Voyager like that's repurposed for a post-Picard show. By that point you'll have an entire modern Star Trek crew who had worked on 3 live action shows have about 7 years of production under the belts, and have hopefully, by that time, relearned most of the lessons how all the parts together.

 

Wow. That's harsh.

 

I don't think there was much difference with the lighting, it's just that for a majority of First Contact the Enterprise was on red alert and the bridge was darkened accordingly.

 

Perhaps that was the point?

Abrams's Kirk is a young Captain at the beginning of his career who all of a sudden finds himself sitting in the "big chair" (literally and figuratively).

He had to fill the boots of two legends that had preceded him (Pike and April).

 

Actually it isn't. The bridge in Star Trek VI is an entirely new bridge based on the one from Star Trek V but built from scratch. It is also slightly larger, the central "command pit" has a different platform and railing arrangement, and the turbolifts are noticeably further apart.

 

it wasn't built from scratch, most of the components are from the STV bridge. Diameter is the same. Check out Donny’s Late TOS Movie Era Interiors over in FanArt for a detailed analysis.

 

Since the sections are wild, they just re-arranged them differently for VI with the elevators further apart.

It's IV and V that are totally different sets.

 

The Star Trek V bridge was destroyed in a "freak weather accident" while being temporarily stored in the Paramount studio parking lot to free up studio space. Ralph Winter, producer for Star Trek VI, said in Cinefantastique Vol 22 No 5: "We rebuilt it [the bridge] from the ground up. On this one we kept the platforms [...] and then we rebuilt everything else." Commentaries on both the Star Trek V Special Edition DVD release and Star Trek VI Special Edition DVD confirm that apart from the central platforms for the command chair and helm console, and the turbolift door alcoves, everything else was new. It caused significant issue for the film's budget during pre-production since Paramount insisted that the budget for ST:VI not exceed the original budget of ST:V ($25million) "not even by one dollar", and negotiations went down to the wire with Paramount even cancelling the project at one point. Nicholas Meyer made a last-minute plea for an extra $2.5million, largely for construction of the new bridge, asking for an absolute bare minimum budget of $27.5million from his originally requested $40million, and got it. Every other Enterprise interior used redresses of the Enterprise-D sets and the only other new set built for the film was part of the Kronos One interior.

 

It was the Star Trek 4 bridge elements that were damaged, necessitating the rebuild for 5. But the story has been so muddied over the years that even quotes from production staff can't be relied upon 100%. It's incorrectly reported in several places.

 

Voyager looked like a time capsule in comparison to the FC uniforms (the crew appeared to be frozen in time).

 

Yeah I was really sure the story went that the Star Trek IV bridge (and thus the original Enterprise D battle bridge) was destroyed in a freak weather accident. This story is confusing the hell out of me and some of it makes no sense.

What makes it credible is the background of the budget challenges for Star Trek VI, which almost didn't get made. And yet the Star Trek V bridge and STVI bridge look almost identical aside from paint job and upholstery. They have identical console, ceilings, rail details and wall details (those knee height panels) and consoles Each segment of the wall was line with 6 monitors at eye level and 4 larger monitors up top that looked functional compared to the STIV/TMP bridge's more spartan "future-y" detailing.

The TMP/STIV bridge was redeco'd as the battle bridge and other bridges in the first couple of seasons of TNG, which predated Star Trek V. But then Star Trek V happened and we never saw the TMP bridge again, and the Enterprise D got a new battle bridge and the other productions (through Voyager) got a new multipurpose bridge set.

It just seems really weird that the Star Trek V bridge inherits seemingly zero structures from the TMP bridge, but was supposed to be a modification of it. And yet every other pre-STV usage of the TMP bridge has recognizable elements of the TMP bridge. And then the supposedly all new Star Trek VI bridge, which in this version would have to be a near 1:1 clone of the Star Trek VI bridge, is repurposed dozes of times and in every version has recognizable elements of that Enterprise bridge present (often those knee-high panels).

Something doesn't make sense. The budget for the bridge for Star Trek VI is a very credible story. But the visual evidence of the Star Trek IV/TMP and Star Trek V bridges being completely different sets is very compelling.

I'll say though, bringing this aside back on topic a bit, in my opinion the TWOK 2280s uniforms really only worked on the Star Trek VI bridge with it's design, coloring and lighting. They synergized really well with all the minitors, splashe sof red and tiny details. They didn't work nearly as well on the Star Trek V bridge or the TWOK version of the TMP bridge.

 

Since they had to rebuild the bridge from scratch in TFF: William Shatner, the director, probably wanted to put his stamp on it -- since there was an opportunity to do so -- and probably asked for a new look. The new look the designers settled on was basically the TOS bridge with a TNG skin.

 

Looking at the uniforms in the recently release pics, I thought "They look a bit Romulan". Or more specifically, TOS Romulan. Not something I noticed before.

 

I had a similar thought when I first saw the uniforms in the third season.