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Crazily shaped assignment patches

GSchnitzer and Shawnster, thanks for the excellent linkage. That memo from Justman is especially interesting.

Indeed, it was.

I disagree with Justman's decision, however. I really enjoyed seeing different patches for the various ships.
 
The Defiant had the arrowhead of the Enterprise in the episode The Tholian Web, What they did in In a Mirror, Darkly was a retcon.
The prime universe used the arrowhead as the fleet standard, the Defiant in the mirror universe ( IAMD ) was from a different universe than the prime, IMHO.

The Defiant did come from the "prime" universe and slipped into the mirror universe. It's the same ship from The Tholian Web.
 
GSchnitzer and Shawnster, thanks for the excellent linkage. That memo from Justman is especially interesting.

I'm 41 years old and have been a fan of Trek all my life. I'm still learning new things. I thought those memos and conversations were all very enlightening.
 
The Defiant did come from the "prime" universe and slipped into the mirror universe. It's the same ship from The Tholian Web.
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In the episode The Tholian Web, the Defiant crew were wearing the insignia above. In In A Mirror Darkly, the Defiant crew had the insignia below.
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Two different Defiants. From two different universe, the Defiant from "Web" isn't the Defiant that traveled to the Mirror universe.


:)
 
There's a lot in Star Trek that wasn't intended to be nitpicked at HD resolution. This is one of those things.

But it's still a little sad that ENT got it wrong.

Yeah, but I don't think ENT necessarily "got it wrong".

I'd like to know why so many shots in The Tholian Web on the Defiant, in which the resolution is such that one would make out the emblems on TV's of the day, seem so cleverly staged as to cover them up. If the intent was for the Defiant crew to have an arrowhead emblem, then why all seeming efforts to hide the emblems? Did some costumes not have any emblems sewn on them at all? I guess that could be a reason, but then why sew any on for any of the Defiant crew? Why not just have the crew all face down or away from the camera, or otherwise hide that part of the costume?

Sure, we've seen the Justman memo, but a) the ship on uniform emblems had already sailed by then (ha ha), and b) Justman's memo is from the second season, but Justman had a different role on the third season than he did on the second. Is it possible that he changed his mind by then, or that there was a different policy then, or that he just didn't care anymore?
 
There's a lot in Star Trek that wasn't intended to be nitpicked at HD resolution. This is one of those things.

But it's still a little sad that ENT got it wrong.

Yeah, but I don't think ENT necessarily "got it wrong".

I'd like to know why so many shots in The Tholian Web on the Defiant, in which the resolution is such that one would make out the emblems on TV's of the day, seem so cleverly staged as to cover them up. If the intent was for the Defiant crew to have an arrowhead emblem, then why all seeming efforts to hide the emblems? Did some costumes not have any emblems sewn on them at all? I guess that could be a reason, but then why sew any on for any of the Defiant crew? Why not just have the crew all face down or away from the camera, or otherwise hide that part of the costume?

Sure, we've seen the Justman memo, but a) the ship on uniform emblems had already sailed by then (ha ha), and b) Justman's memo is from the second season, but Justman had a different role on the third season than he did on the second. Is it possible that he changed his mind by then, or that there was a different policy then, or that he just didn't care anymore?

I suspect it was trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Having let two occasions go by with ship-specific patches and with the edict from Roddenberry and Justman to not repeat the "mistake" in the future, they might have split the difference. They used the arrowhead patch like they were supposed to, but then tried to obfuscate the issue.
 
Having let two occasions go by with ship-specific patches and with the edict from Roddenberry and Justman to not repeat the "mistake" in the future, they might have split the difference. They used the arrowhead patch like they were supposed to, but then tried to obfuscate the issue.

That's probably right. It makes the most sense.
 
There's a lot in Star Trek that wasn't intended to be nitpicked at HD resolution. This is one of those things.
The photos of TOS are from screen capture of a DVD, not a HD Blu-ray.

We've seen multiple example of alternate universes in Star Trek, the mirror universe itself is one example. Given the difference in insignia , why the insistence that the Defiant in TTW and IAMD are the same ship?

:)
 
why the insistence that the Defiant in TTW and IAMD are the same ship?

Because that was the writers' intention, going from interviews of the day.

They figured the panning shots in "The Tholian Web" were so brief that no one would notice the Enterprise insignia on the uniforms.
 
There's a lot in Star Trek that wasn't intended to be nitpicked at HD resolution. This is one of those things.
The photos of TOS are from screen capture of a DVD, not a HD Blu-ray.

We've seen multiple example of alternate universes in Star Trek, the mirror universe itself is one example. Given the difference in insignia , why the insistence that the Defiant in TTW and IAMD are the same ship?

:)

It's an interesting theory.

Is there any evidence that the Defiant in IAMD is *not* the Defiant from the Prime universe? (Well, I mean evidence other than this costuming glitch.)
 
There's a lot in Star Trek that wasn't intended to be nitpicked at HD resolution. This is one of those things.

But it's still a little sad that ENT got it wrong.

The word is "retcon"

By these ultra-nitpicky standards, every episode of TOS exists in its own separate universe. James R. Kirk? Hand lasers? Antimatter destroying the universe? How many brothers does Kirk have?

It's a television show, not a history exam.
 
Having let two occasions go by with ship-specific patches and with the edict from Roddenberry and Justman to not repeat the "mistake" in the future, they might have split the difference. They used the arrowhead patch like they were supposed to, but then tried to obfuscate the issue.

That's probably right. It makes the most sense.
Yes, that sounds good.

There's a lot in Star Trek that wasn't intended to be nitpicked at HD resolution. This is one of those things.

But it's still a little sad that ENT got it wrong.

The word is "retcon"

By these ultra-nitpicky standards, every episode of TOS exists in its own separate universe. James R. Kirk? Hand lasers? Antimatter destroying the universe? How many brothers does Kirk have?

It's a television show, not a history exam.
Right.

There's a lot in Star Trek that wasn't intended to be nitpicked at HD resolution. This is one of those things.
The photos of TOS are from screen capture of a DVD, not a HD Blu-ray.

We've seen multiple example of alternate universes in Star Trek, the mirror universe itself is one example. Given the difference in insignia , why the insistence that the Defiant in TTW and IAMD are the same ship?

:)

HD, DVD, whatever. The point is that it is doubtful that they could have been definitively made out during the original broadcast on TV's of the day. I know that I couldn't make them out in the 1970's. Although we didn't have a VCR then, our TV wasn't exactly substandard either. What I do remember, though, is all the actors seemingly posed to hide the emblem in shots when they would have been unmistakable.

You may as well be asking, given that Kirk's middle initial is shown as an R., why the insistence that WNMHGB occurred in the Prime Universe?
 
That secretary, or whatever she was, at Starbase 11 in The Menagerie also has an arrowhead emblem. Given that Miss Piper quite clearly has a flower emblem, it gives a great deal of weight to the idea that at least some uses of the arrowhead on non-Enterprise personnel were costuming errors, either that just fell through the cracks or that were deemed too marginal by the production staff to justify the expense of correcting.

I would have at least liked to have seen that secretary's emblem turned into a flower for TOS-R. Perhaps it would have been too expensive an operation for convincingly "repairing" just a few seconds of footage, even in 2006, assuming the production staff even noticed it.

Lucasfilm had demonstrated the viability of doing this sort of thing a couple of years earlier, when they fixed Admiral Piett's mirror-reversed badge near the end of The Empire Strikes Back for the 2004 DVD release. Unfortunately, for some reason, they didn't fix a similar problem with Lando in the Rebel cruiser hangar in Return of the Jedi (I speculate that they deemed it much less noticeable and/or it would have entailed too much expense to fix, much more than fixing the Piett segment in Empire cost). It's also worth noting that while they did a pretty good job fixing Admiral Piett's badge, it still looks a little fake.
 
I would have at least liked to have seen that secretary's emblem turned into a flower for TOS-R. Perhaps it would have been too expensive an operation for convincingly "repairing" just a few seconds of footage, even in 2006, assuming the production staff even noticed it.

I suppose if they started fixing stuff like that, the natural question might be to ask is, where should they stop? When Spock stuns that guard in Whom Gods Destroy, the wall wobbles a bit when he falls. Should they fix that? I have no answer or opinion, I'm just wondering aloud... :)
 
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