Spoilers Ah, the NEW uniforms...!

I thoroughly enjoyed DSC but a hard reboot would have been better. Get rid of the nostalgia and fear of the audience.

 

I mean, if they were afraid of the audience, they wouldn't have changed it so much.

 

I was talking about the time of Picard's premiere in January 2020 and leading up to it. Ideally, someone would be able to go straight from Nemesis to Picard without worrying about what another series did in-between (besides the destruction of Romulus as mentioned in the 2009 Film). I strongly feel that what happened at the end of the 24th Century isn't Discovery's story to tell. It's Picard's.

Whatever happens afterwards, happens afterwards.

EDITED TO ADD: In a very strange way, when I first watched "Remembrance" and right before it, I had the same feeling I had right before I went to my High School Reunion in 2017, reuniting with people I hadn't seen in 20 years, finding out what everyone's been up to, and much they have (or haven't) changed.

Definitely NOT the same type of feeling Discovery would've given had it been set then.

 

Ha! Steal away...

Funnily enough, I tried that combo too -- it works but I was deliberatey trying not to wander too far from what they had done for the show.

I still think they missed a trick in not having Culber and the other medics in the standard DSC uniforms (blue with silver in this case) for non-clinical situations, restricting the white variants to actual sickbay clinical work. This is pretty much what happened with McCoy in TMP and TOS; the white uniforms were for clinical work and outside of that he wore the standard duty uniform.

I still dislike the plain black cross on the DSC delta badges for medical. The TOS uniforms always had physicians in blue with Sciences emblems and the only "cross" insignia was the red one worn by Chapel in TOS. Given that the very stylised Starfleet version of the caduceus from TMP (later used throughout the TNG/DS9/VOY-era) was subsequently used as far back as ENT, if they had really wanted to set up separate medical versions of the delta badges for DSC, they should have used that symbol instead. That's no longer an issue now that we're back to one standard pattern of badge for all branches.

 

Probably a good idea to have your medical staff stand out from other science crew.

"Help him! He's been wounded!!"

"Ah...I'm a geologist."

 

A doctor in geology is still a doctor.

 

So, should that doctor of geology be setting your broken bone?

 

Didn't say they weren't.

 

If they're gonna touch anything in my body it'll be my... kidney stones, and not even those now that I think of it.

 

You can blame Patrick Stewart for that.

The whole reason that red is now the command color, is that the TNG runners decided Stewart looked better in red than gold. So that's why they switched the colors.

No, but geology is still a science, so it only makes sense that a geologist should wear blue.

That said, I'm wondering if any Starfleet doctors who happen to turn up on PIC would wear white, rather than blue. As per DSC, docs were wearing white before TOS, so why wouldn't they be wearing white after it?

 

My initial comment was a joke to the comment that a doctor in geology was still a doctor. Being able to distinguish medical personnel in a crisis seems like a good idea.

Also, technically, per ST 09 medical personnel were wearing white on the USS Kelvin

 

Yes, having role-specific clothing for medics is relevant to both the the nature of their clinical work and to aid with identifying duty medical staff in emergency situations.

Both of those are perfectly sensible, but that doesn’t mean that medical staff can’t wear more “standard” uniforms in other situations.

I’m generally wary of drawing analogies with contemporary uniformed services but, for example, Army and Navy medical personnel don’t spend all their time in scrubs or wearing utilities with Geneva Red Cross non-combatant emblems.

Service dress and normal working dress are much the same as for all other personnel, with identifying branch-specific features. McCoy wore standard uniform in TOS and had his medical smock in sickbay. In TMP he wore a blue uniform but white in sickbay. In the later movies, he wore the standard maroon officer uniform with medical branch colours and, again, white in sickbay (an updated re-use of the TMP uniform).

Throughout TNG/DS9/VOY medical staff wore standard blue/teal uniforms. Crusher had her blue lab coat and Pulaski the two-piece variant (although that was less to do with the character or role snd mainly so Diana Muldaur didn’t have to wear a one-piece jumpsuit, which she felt was inappropriate).

like I said, I like the white medical uniforms in DSC but it always seemed unnecessary to use them outside “on-duty” medical situations. The white was just so glaringly different to all the other uniforms for non-clinical situations.

 

I'm of two minds on this one. On the one, of course we want things to be more uniform. On the other, it's not like medical personnel have a clear insignia in standard uniform could lead to confusion in an emergency situation. Which is a lot of the plots we end up with any way.

So, if we add in what contemporary militaries have, i.e. devices on the uniform that indicate medical corps, then having them in standard duty uniform makes sense. But, we haven't seen that in Starfleet much so the distinction seems more appropriate at this point.

 

I am a doctor — I don’t spend my life in scrubs. Equally, I have worked with EMS but I don’t spend my life in a bright orange, fire retardant helicopter flight-suit...!! My armed service medical colleagues wear standard working dress when not actually in clinical situations (or deployed...). Naval MOs don’t spend all their time afloat in rescue gear and coloured jackets.

I get the recognition thing but that’s not the be-all and end-all. This is the Sci-Fi future — there are other ways of identifying critical roles in an emergency! On a smaller or medium-sized vessel with limited staffing, the medical department are probably known by sight to all the crew anyway!

 

Nurses like Chapel had the red cross on the insignia in TOS. Unfortunately, McCoy and M'Benga didn't, which added some needless inconsistency. IMO, everyone in TOS medical should have used the red cross insignia.

Enter TMP and the other TOS-era feature films, in which Robert Fletcher designed clearly-delineated medical staff insignia, consistently established, with both the caduceus patch and the green branch coloring.

They did away with that, for the most part, during the TNG-VOY era (with the rare exception of some folks like Crusher and Ogawa wearing blue lab coats). I don't think it was until DSC, and later LDS, came around with the addition of white-colored uniforms and/or boots to re-establish a separation between medical and general sciences.

 

Thanks, doc. I understand such distinctions, how real world doctors dress, how naval officers dress, etc. I'm not saying that's currently the real world practice but looking at the limitations in Star Trek as portrayed.

 

No worries man — I get the limitations of a TV show (and the creative decisions that go with that).

I always got the clear impression that it was a conscious decision to put McCoy and M’benga in Sciences uniforms, in their role as life scientists as well as clinicians.

The distinction with the nursing uniform comes from a time when there was a rather different view of nurses and their role — hence the (rather Earth-centric) red cross on the nursing badge. Let’s face it, back in the mid-sixties there was still a lot of very sexist thinking and those in senior positions were largely the 1940s war generation so their cultural background was from even further back.

I have no problem with a generic badge for all the medical department in the (original) DSC era, even if it is a pretty clear departure from what was established in TOS).

I do wonder if their use of a medical badge with the cross was actually a misinterpretation of the TOS uniforms...? It’s certainly not the symbol I would have picked.

It will be very interesting to see what they choose to do for the medics on Pike’s Enterprise in Strange New Worlds. Do the they stick with blue, in keeping with what was established with McCoy (with or without the DSC medical version of the delta badge...?) or will they introduce a white version of the nu-Enterprise jackets with a black collar?

I’m really hoping they keep the blue!

 

I suppose the red cross insignia could be replaced with something a little more "secular". As I mentioned above, Fletcher introduced the caduceus in TMP, used through TUC, which could possibly be used, albeit slightly predating its actual canonical use in the prime universe:

DSC already stretches the boundaries of canonical ship designs, sets & uniforms in the TOS era. Why not this? It's small & innocuous and everybody recognizes it.

 

I'm game. I think there needs to be a clear distinction of medical corp if they are in blue uniforms.