The weirdly small and empty universe of Discovery

They altered the model and changed the paint and such. I think fans have long considered this a refit, even if it was never called one.

 

Some of the things you are pointing out actually have precedent in Star Trek, so I don't agree with everything you said; for example telepathic links across interstellar distances were depicted a couple of times in the TOS era specifically.









































But your general point I do agree with; the galaxy feels very empty of interesting things, and world building. Star Trek isn't a lonely sub-light sci-fi setting like The Expanse. If you look at say the opening 5 minutes of TOS: "The Trouble with Tribbles", the feel that is built, is that the galaxy has history, depth, geography, etc. A lot of modern sci-fi seems to suffer from this world-building problem, which is really strange to me considering how little technology the likes of Stargate SG-1, Farscape, Babylon 5 and Star Trek had to work with in the 90s, yet managed to create hugely interesting living and breathing settings. We are back to Doctor Who and rock quarries in many modern sci-fi shows. Another example of this was Stargate Universe and Battlestar Galactica, where the only places they ever landed were unexotic, full of gravel, and of grey hue.

We haven't hardly visited any planets; the ones we have visited are strangely empty.

If I was looking for a word to describe the planets of Discovery, Universe and Galactica, I would say "unimaginative".

 

All of those beautiful pictures highlight the lost art of Matte paintings. Some of those are pretty impressive for a TV show. I don't recognize a lot of them.

 

That's kinda what is missing from shows like Discovery..... judicious use of things like matte painting, interesting filming locations, establishing shots that show scale, establishing shots the empathise distance and time. You can make a 10x10 meter room look like its part of a vast city, or 20 miles under the crust of a planet, with the right skill. You can make ten extras look like the population of an alien bazaar. You can make a description sound like an ancient culture with eons of depth.

Farscape, Babylon 5, The Next Generation, etc, all did this amazingly.









Modern sci-fi for some reason either eschews it, or else is ignorant of how to do it. Planets and cultures are often flat or unconvincing, because they try to be like real environments on Earth, such as a gravelly beach. They should aim for igniting imagination and possibility. The use of suggestion is important. The fact that a "Gammak Base" even existed in the Uncharted Territories in Farscape suggested a string of military infrastructure. The fact that something like a "commerce planet" existed, suggested widespread economic ties. Ruins suggest ancient antiquity.

 

They've said they'll have more planet stuff next season.

 

Yeah, the one time I got any sense of "awe" from Discovery was the brief scenes on Vulcan in Lethe. These were the only planet-side scenes with any sense of bustle to them, and stylistically were well done. However, Enterprise did a better job in Season 4 making Vulcan seem like a living world than Discovery did in that little scene.

As to the decline in worldbuilding in sci-fi TV, I wonder if the rise of CGI, and the concurrent falling of practical effects to the wayside, played a role here?

Honestly, at least to my mind, it creates a more false "stage" style setting, and not as immersive of a story. If you only put in the bare minimum of extras, props, and practical effects which are needed to move the story along, it creates the feeling that you're just watching actors moving through a set, rather than people moving through a busy living world.

Of course, Discovery arguably went too far in the other way in its opening bits. Witness the ludicrously over-designed Ship of the Dead - much of which we never got a chance to take in because we were so busy reading subtitles.

 

Yes, the "Beehive" bridge from "The Cage" was scaled to match the bridge set for the Enterprise at a time when the ship was conceived as being ALOT smaller than it wound up being. This is why the little graphic on the bridge next to the turbolift basically suggests a starship about 11 decks high and probably not much more than 140 meters long. And considering "The Cage" was basically de-canonized until Rodenberry decided to recycle bits of it, the doubling of crew size probably reflects the doubling of the SHIP'S size as well.

 

Interesting. I always thought the change to the bridge module shape was purely aesthetic.

As far as lack of matte pantings, I agree that the rise of CGI has made it more of an all or nothing proposition as far as doing some Peter Jackson sort of fly-thru as static shots are all but verboten these days. A pity.

 

Wait, WHAT? "Trouble with Tribbles?" How do you get a "feel" from all of that? It's just a couple of lines of dialog describing some planet somewhere that nobody ever actually sees. The Entire rest of the episode takes place on the Enterprise, Barris' office, and a bar.

On the other hand, the very first scene of Star Trek Discovery has Burnham and Georgiou on a mercy mission on desert planet, a scene that ends with the two of them drawing a giant Starfleet Delta in the sand. Apart from the epic awesomeness of this scene, it's also revealing that this might be the first time in Star Trek television history two characters were shown covering any sort of real distance during an away mission. Even the examples you cited above are mostly just matte paintings used to hide the fact that the entire episode is actually filmed on a soundstage... OTOH, the very few location shots we got from TOS and TNG+ didn't include those nice matte paintings AT ALL. We did not, for example, ever get to see what the rest of the landscape looked like on Capella IV or on whatever planet it was that Kirk and the Gorn were fighting. We have no idea what the city actually looked like in "A Piece of the Action", and the Organian city has always been remarkably vague about just what the hell that place even was (a castle? A town? A hamlet? A set of walls built around the entrance to an otherwise totally underground city?)

If you say so.

Yeah, not like that awesome planet they showed us in the first five minutes of "Trouble With Tribbles" amirite?

 

They LITERALLY did the Peter-Jackson style flyover on Pahvo like three times. They actually OVER used it in that episode, it was one of the things that made me think it was actually a much longer episode that was drastically edited down to save time.

FFS, is anyone actually WATCHING this show or are you all just complaining about the screencaps?

 

It's not about whether they do vistas at all, it's about the quantity of them. It costs significantly more to do the fly-throughs than to make a static plate.

 

I will admit I completely forgot about much of the first episode when writing this post. It did have much more of the "awe/big universe" aspect which has been lacking in the rest of the season (despite other flaws) I've actually wondered if part of what happened is Fuller went tremendously over budget, was essentially fired, and then they had to produce the rest of the series on a small fraction of what those first two episodes cost. Discovery certainly looks notably cheaper than The Expanse, despite being a much higher profile production. Less extras, less unique sets, less CGI, less everything - despite supposedly having a higher cost per episode.

 

I think, once they get their feet wet, there will be more exploration.

 

Star Trek's canvas has become more and more constricted for the last forty years, all the while insisting in-continuity that the explored distances have become greater and greater. The whatever-quadrant that Voyager explored seemed, after a little while, to be a big suburb.

The whole franchise is simply worn out and repeating itself. They can keep producing product for the faithful, but they haven't found a way yet to reinvigorate the continuity. The Abrams movies were a good attempt, and did inject a lot of needed color and energy into Trek. But any kind of daring or innovative narrative direction? Not yet.

 

The color and energy is where I find Discovery incredibly lacking. It is very laid back. One of the big things I enjoyed about the Abrams films is how they grab you right out of the gate. Discovery gave us two people walking in a desert fixing a well. That was it. After a twelve year absence, that was the best opening they could come up with? Even "Broken Bow" opened with a Klingon crashing on Earth, a chase and an exploding grain silo.

 

Hey, they went on location for that desert - the bits of it that weren't CG'd all to Hell. Deserts are cinematic - think Lawrence of Arabia. Or Star Trek V: The Final Frontier!

 

I wonder how much money they spent on that little field trip, to tell us how great Burnham is?

 

I honestly think another Trek show more in the style of DS9 would have worked pretty well if they waited say five years after Enterprise. Make it semi-serialized, character focused, and use the established Berman-era Trek setting as the background to tell the stories, rather than insisting every single story be based upon some "anomaly" or another random planet where everyone is just like Earth except for this one weird trick.

 

Pretty much what they are doing with Discovery.

 

Star Trek is better when it's Indy on an adventure instead of Professor Jones giving a lecture. Disco is just the latter but with the hat.