Were Discovery's early misteps actually Bryan Fuller's fault?

So, you lead off your rebuttal of my statement by proving it in contradiction of yours? No prob.

 

Yeah, I guess since CBS is using Discovery to launch their streaming network, there would be a ton of pressure from suits to have a product that will appeal to as many people as possible to make dollars. It reminds me somewhat of when Voyager was being used to launch UPN and we got episodes heavy on Seven of nine, special effects pew pew and a special guest appearance from The Rock at the expense of meaningful stories and characterisation. Personally, I'm judging discovery in comparison to the first seasons of the other trek series and in that regard I think it's doing well, At the same time I do understand how it's causing frustration for people.

TNG had it's fair share of struggles in the first 2 year with the turnover of writers and interference from Roddenberry's lawyer etc.. but it pulled through. Hopefully Discovery will be the same and what we are seeing at the moment is just teething problems/birthing pains/Babies first dump .

 

With the exception of TOS, DSC is frigging LIGHT YEARS ahead of where the other Trek series were at this phase of their lifecycle.

 

It seemed to me from early episodes that Fuller's vision was not the leading light.
I got the impression that this was a Star Trek series made by people who had never worked on a Trek show before and were not quite sure of what they were doing.

 

Indeed. I've been having some insomnia issues due to some medication that I'm on. The first season of DS9 helped me get over that

 

I think Fuller wanted to start each new season in a new era, and have the cast play different characters each time (á la American Horror Story). If true, I for one am happy this never got to be; rather see these characters grow for multiple seasons.

 

I tend to sleep better with TNG Season 1... speaking of which, g'night all

 

Same if you Google "Batmobile" in a few years.

But what does break the story is including the holographic tech which directly contradicts both Voyager and DS9, and having TNG/VOY/Nemesis-style forcefield technology 10 years before TOS.

Not to mention a working spore drive, but I suspect they'll technobabble a reason why nobody can ever use it again before the series ends.


Obviously, someone circulated a memo saying DSC must always be referred to as "prime universe" even though it very clearly isn't the same world as TOS in looks, technology or tone.

 

"Prime Timeline" and "reboot" are a contradiction in terms.

People have been throwing all kinds of Orwellian redefinition around like 'soft reboot' and 'visual reboot', but basically if you consciously change something big, into something that it cannot mutually occupy - that's not a "prime timeline" anymore folks, that's a new timeline.



Now if you want to go back 90% of the way through Trek's aired material to the last time something as disruptive happened, i.e. the celebrated Motion Picture redesign of the Klingons - which is being used to justify everything these days - first, the change was done at a time when Star Trek was only three seasons long - not twenty eight seasons long - second, it changed something dramatically, not just replacing it with a 'meh' design - and third, the whole thing was not actually as hard justify in people's heads - we had authors positing multiple races of Klingon - people speculating on genetic engineering already - compare to this:.



The correct equivalence, rather than a malleable organic species, would be if the Motion Picture NCC-1701 had been a sphere or cube or something that cannot occupy the same identity, under any circumstances (jokes about the thickness of the saucer aside, it maintains enough of the basic shape that 99% of audiences wouldn't even think - and they still threw a line in about it being a refit for fans).

1968, the Klingon battlecruiser:


1979, the higher detailed Klingon battlecruiser:


1987-2001, the Klingon battlecruiser is used in TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT:




2001, the unused D4 was designed by John Eaves:


2009, the Kelvin timeline's battlecruiser:


2017, it basically looks like a Dominion ship:


As The Wormhole said - to actively (i.e. proactively) choose another ship design - is to actively (with volition) disregard canon. The show can still be fully canonical, if it turns out D7 is a misunderstood term, or the Klingon designs of the past show up in future. So it's not yet set in stone. But the current 'visual reboot' would basically mean 'reboot'.

By comparison to the D7, a few holographic emitters aren't so big a deal. They can be a feature that was replaced for an obscure reason, or was just rarely seen, i.e. in Azetbur's chamber in Star Trek VI.

This is why, rather than court another controversy, the producers should just put out a definitive statement on their intentions. The only reason I can think, why terms with multiple interpretations are being used, like 'prime timeline', is that they want to sit on the fence and not alienate people hoping for canonical drama. I think honesty would build a less toxic relationship with fans. Say you are rebooting Trek if it is your intention. The act of causing controversy leads to a lot of bad faith with fans, who should ideally be your advocates, not people you lead on for season upon season. What is this, like Star Trek's third massive dispute with producers in three attempts? If it's not a reboot, throw in a battlecruiser and some facial hair, if it is, say so, and we can accept the new work for what it is.

 

Let's not push it. Voyager was story oriented. Seven of nine came later in the series, way after the launch of UPN, and she and the Doctor were fans favorite. She was truly a fascinating character. Like other Star Trek series, most episodes were topical and meaningful stories whether you like them or not. Special guest appearance? I don't even know what you're talking about beside The Rock. Have you actually watched Voyager? When Voyager was airing, many internet fans wanted to turn Star Trek into BSG, but you never see me re-watching an episode of BSG ever, while Voyager is still fun to watch and meaningful. You can always pop-in an episode and have fun while being intellectually engage. It may not be the best trek for you, but it's top quality sci-fi much better than many of the other sci-fi series out there. I wished they did remastering of all Trek series. Maybe at one point the cost of doing those remastering will go down. Voyager and DS9 should be next.

I don't know why some fans feel they need to rip other trek series to make their points. There was a lot of great sci-fi series (Firefly, Babylon 5, Fringe, Sliders, The 4400, Andromeda, Earth 2, Lost, Falling Skies, etc), well not that many when you think about it, but all Star Trek series are way better than most of the sci-fi out there. I prefer Star Trek series over most of them beside maybe Doctor Who, Outer Limits and Stargate. Most of the time Star Trek stories are truly topical and true sci-fi stories ('what if' stories).

 

I grew up watching Voyager, it's what got me into Star Trek at 14 years old, I'm 34 now. That doesn't mean I can't be critical of it or think that it had faults. People's tastes can change over time, mine have. I used to watch Voyager religiously, now I rarely do, I don't really find it engaging anymore. Having said that, I like the relaunch books written by Kirsten Beyer and have purchased each one and enjoyed them. So to answer your question yes, I do know what I am talking about. You and I just have different opinions, big deal, welcome to trek fandom.

People can be a fan of something and still be critical of it. Acknowledging that something you love has faults, doesn't make someone any less of a fan. Sorry but I don't do blind devotion. Star Trek has faults and plenty of them, but i love it inspite of those faults.

 

If I grew up on Voyager or any Star Trek, I would want a BSG, Spartacus or Game of Thrones. You won't want to watch just one type of TV shows or even sci-fi TV shows. I understand people who watched TOS, TNG, Voyager or DS9 who wants something else too. There's no need to say Voyager was not story oriented, full of guest stars and that Seven of Nine was for the launch of UPN. Most of the Voyager and other Star Trek series are topical, true sci-fi stories among the best in the world of television (the short list ).

 

Sorry mate, but i can say whatever I want about Voyager, just like you can. This board is not an echo chamber where you're only going to hear opinions that agree with yours. Just because you and I are both star trek fans doesn't mean we should have the same opinion and like all the same things. People can appreciate something and be critical. Looking back, I don't think Voyager lived up to its potential but that doesn't mean that i don't appreciate its contribution to the Trek Franchise or what it meant to me growing up. You and I are probably not going to agree on how topical Voyager was, but that is ok, we don't have to.

 

Still, I feel like I won this argument.

 

That's cool. I didn't see it as an argument but as two people with different points of view having a discussion.

 

Getting back to the topic at hand...

I'm starting to suspect that a lot of Fuller's input has been removed, at least as far as heavy plot details. His name was all over those first two hours, and those episodes seemingly have been the ones to generate the most complaints from those unimpressed with the show (I personally love it, and have no problem with those episodes).

Given Meyer was once said to have written the second episode, but that was then apparently cut, and the fact that Captain Lorca himself has just said in an interview that the first script he got for his first appearance came with a warning that the whole script was being scrapped... it just leads me to believe that they pulled most of everything's Fuller was doing. Given how good I feel this show as been from week to week, obviously it was a good move on CBS and the producers part. My gut tells me that too much money and time had been committed to the pilot storyline for them to make substantial changes to that episode too, else I suspect a lot more of Fuller's input would've been pulled out too.

 

And it only lasted a season.

 

But Luke Cage wasn't, and I'm sure I could find other examples of current shows with executive producers in the double digits. In the case of the Marvel shows, it's because they're adaptations and you've got a lot of different companies involved -- Marvel, Disney, and Netflix even before you get to the actual show producers' companies. DSC is a similar situation -- you've got CBS as the owners, Roddenberry Productions with a stake in the franchise, plus Alex Kurtzman & Heather Kadin's Secret Hideout Productions and Bryan Fuller's Living Dead Guy Productions as the co-creators' companies.

Plenty of shows these days have a lot of cooks behind the scenes. It's more the rule than the exception. And yes, sometimes that leads to conflict and confusion, but it's not a given.

The EW report confirms what I'd heard earlier from a source I trust. If you heard it from the VFX team, they were probably talking about Fuller's preference for the look of the show to be like TOS, rather than the writing and storytelling approach. Given Fuller's record of creating very offbeat, unconventional, weird shows, it would be incredibly out of character for him to want to write a Trek show that worked exactly like TOS. The claim is utterly unbelievable.

No, it doesn't, because DSC's holograms are just transparent, intangible images like the ones in Star Wars, not solid forcefield constructs that can interact physically with their environment. The term "hologram" is a misnomer for either one (they're really volumetric images), but especially for the 24th-century variety, which are something much, much more complex than holography.

The difference in the forcefield technology is mainly a matter of depiction -- the fields in TOS were invisible, the fields in Berman-era Trek were normally invisible but scintillated when touched, and the fields here have a visible energy structure. That's just an advance in FX techniques and budgets, a matter of depiction rather than function. The only real functional inconsistency is that the hangar bays have permeable "pressure curtain" fields of the type first seen on the TMP Enterprise, while the TOS ship had to vent its hangar bay to launch or receive a shuttle.

But that's no worse than the hundreds of other inconsistencies that have always existed in Trek. If the Universal Translator in "Metamorphosis" can read brain waves and convert them into speech, how come Captain Pike could only communicate through beeps a few months earlier? If they had seat restraints and security armor in TMP, why didn't they have them in TNG 90 years later? If they had thermal regulation in their standard uniforms in "Spock's Brain," how come they needed heavy parkas in TWOK? If it was acceptable for the Federation to conduct genetic engineering experiments in "Unnatural Selection," how come it was established 8 years later that genetic engineering had been illegal for centuries?

Fans have been ignoring or handwaving away Trek inconsistencies for 50 years now. The inconsistencies DSC is introducing should be child's play to reconcile, because we have tons of experience at it.

(For that matter, I have read some Trek tie-in books or comics that retroactively gave pressure-curtain force fields to the TOS hangar bay. So this isn't an unprecedented retcon.)

You're getting the creative process backward. The ideas and stories come first, the designs later. The show was conceived and written to be in the Prime universe, but then the producers decided to reinvent the look of that universe and depict the technology as more sophisticated -- which is exactly what TMP did 38 years ago. And, yes, there were fans back then who refused to accept TMP, TWOK, and the later movies as part of the same universe as TOS, but their opinion didn't win out.

The tech in Trek has been portrayed in massively inconsistent ways over the decades, but that doesn't matter much to the creators, because stories are not about gadgets, they're about characters, drama, and ideas. The tech is merely there to support those things, so its continuity is less important than the way the characters, their cultures, and their values are portrayed.

 

We know why Fuller left; he was trying to juggle both DSC and American Gods, and the former production was being hurt because he couldn't adequately focus on both.

As for whether or not his influence remains, Aaron Harberts and Gretchen J. Berg were his "number ones" and learned directly from him, so they know what his writing sensibilities are and are talented enough, based on their individual bibliographies, to mimic said sensibilities.

Also, the idea of doing DSC as an anthology series may have been Fuller's original concept, but it was abandoned long before he departed the series.

 

Considering that the Klingon redesign was apparently his idea this seems unlikely.