Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
- Thread starter FPAlpha
- Start date
The last nine years of Star Trek in a concise sentence.
Sure but we surely should not use Star Trek as a correct depiction of real world 21st century military promotion practices, do we?
I may simply have not been paying attention and missed it, but can anyone ID the large object visible in the Aquatic Park yacht basin, at time index 0:05 in the trailer?
In the screencap above, it's the inverted y-shaped object at lower right.
In the screencap above, it's the inverted y-shaped object at lower right.
might be be a member of an as yet unknown class of starship.
or maybe an Admiral's yacht.
After the (justifiably) visceral reaction to the s1 Klingons, it's clear that modern Trek shied away from massive visual reboots of other species, including reverting Klingons back to the 24th century design with higher fidelity makeup.
But no advances at all in pedagogy in over a thousand.
That too.
Like most star trek timeline changes, little actual change will be evident, just redesigned tools and more light grey tones. It seems humanity in this universe entered a social and anthropological stagnation in the late 21st century, playing out the US Navy fighting bad guys in space for the rest of our time as a species. With the possible brief (and much maligned) exception of early TNG, a time traveler would notice little difference across almost a millennium span.
That's fine, it's a show for 21st century Westerners, I get that. It may even be somewhat realistic - I've read futurists who expect AI and communication technology to lead to "cultural lock in" at some point. But it does make you wonder what the point of leaping forwards all the time is. The later TNG era showed that multiple stories can coexist in one timeline even if one of them is doing a high stakes storyline.
Yeah.
Theoretically, it's a move to wipe the slate clean. Yet look at all these familiar species all mixed and matched. Apparently, we're supposed to think it's important that one of our main characters is a Klingon. It looks like they're going to be completely unable to tell a story without referencing the fuck out of standing canon, even though they've provided themselves with an opportunity to start from scratch.
My guess is it's some kind of future seagoing vessel.
I see the Academy is at Fort Baker, where SF HQ was in Enterprise.
I find it silly to think some of the buildings they show in San Francisco will still be standing in the next millennia.
I also find it even sillier that the city looks so contemporary. No one seems capable of imagining a city that far in the future that doesn't look like something so now.
So much is clear, but with so much attention overpaid recently to made-up “backlashes” and visceral fan reactions to things that were nothing, I've found myself wishing less attention was paid to those, I almost wish they had stuck with it, given that it was just a look, even though I wasn't overly fond of it at the start. Certainly being too shy to show a single Klingon in several seasons was going too far, regardless of what design choice they took.
Whatever issues I had with it, the new look had made Klingons look significantly more alien and foreign, and gave a distant space alien vibe to the Klingon sequences, to make up for my decreased sensitivity for those things since I first saw Klingons on TV when I was 10. That was nice. I remember more of the Klingon interaction at that time than much of the new stuff they've attempted, so certainly it was memorable if anything, and is worth it more than the blandness of having a 32nd century that's barely different than the 23rd.
Negativity is a feeling. And certainly one excited more successfully than melodrama misplaced in time that we had to be told with visual cues to partake in.
I know I'm just reiterating a silly fan wish with this, and probably wouldn't have worked as great as it sounds in my head, but that all greatly summarises why I wish they had done the bold thing at the end of the search for “the Federation” on their arrival in the 32nd century, and simply found it on/near Qo'noS, with Klingons as head of Starfleet and many other key positions. Conceptually, it's the same as what they did with Unification III and the Romulan demographic on Ni'var overwhelmingly voting to stay in the Federation, and how that felt for Burnham to hear, but it was closer to the war the crew had just gone through, and what us as audience had witnessed.
The future was supposed to be a massive shift, that would have been one, instead we get this bland and uninteresting feature where everything is so similar despite the implication of all changing. “Oh my God, Earth is not part of the Federation” (until a year later it is), hardly qualified. Some issues with dilithium resolved with a year, either. Start by actually turning the world of the time travellers upside down. Would also excuse radically changing Starship interior design, even if you think humans would generally stick with something similarly looking. And a different perspective on what Federation values mean.
I'll admit my fan idea isn't much about novelty, either, but it would have been a start. Even referencing existing canon completely can still be futuristic if you actually depict in a way that differs from TNG era. Federation based on Qo'noS, also with a large contingent of people who were once Romulan refugees, but also Vulcans, humans, etc. If some coordinations between shows had been had, you could have some SNW-style Gorn officers to make up for their apparent one-dimensionality in SNW. Or some descendents of the Jurati Borg (yes, I hated that season, but that was a good destination). The Breen could have been friends instead of what they were (although I didn't mind what they did with them).
Specifics, I guess, don't matter. Any significant changes would have been better to have than giving us the same with some window dressing.
Tig Notaro had excellent chemistry with Rapp. It was fun seeing two equally but differently irascible trying to work together. I wish they'd found a way to somehow get her back to SNW instead of yet another irascible engineer character we have now.
I love Carol Kane's work.. but my god, I can't understand anything Pelia says. I have to replay her scenes with close captioning every time, and it's annoying.
I'm glad they're not having everyone wear/use the GODAWFUL ST: D S4 and S5 crew uniforms.
And I guess they did destroy a number of Discovery sets because the Bridge set Holly Hunter walks onto is a redress of the SNW Enterprise Bridge set.
I remember someone commenting, and I can't recall the reference now, that the Discovery Bridge set was in pretty bad shape by season 3.
I thought they filmed at separate studios.
There are millennia old buildings still in use today. Though they tend to be religious sites. I think one of the oldest is the Pantheon in Rome which is now the Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs.
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