Disco's version of TOS/TAS: Differences

No one will ever convince me that the first season of Discovery was the best story they could do. If that was their best, I would hate to see what bad or average looks like.

 

People would whine about it not being Prime, and that being an affront to them, their families, their future offspring and the ghost of Roddenberry.

 

We'd have people calling it "STINO". Not that I want to give the other side any ideas (even though I'm about to), but that's a basher name that makes more sense than "STD".

 

I've already seen that attached to the Abrams films. From a purely business point-of-view, I understand why CBS is doing what they are doing. From a story/creative point-of-view, it rings hollow. At least for me.

 

They (TPTB) had too many cooks. They also seem to have focused on making a Star Trek show to satisfy the existing audience of Star Trek fans more than they focused on making a show capable of drawing in and establishing a brand new audience. To do the latter you have to have more game, and more talented writers with it. Instead, by comparison, they played it safe, or at least the tried to, by evidently nixing the truly original and controversial contributions of Fuller's in "The Vulcan Hello."

 

Alas, as with many articles of faith, the statements are aspirational, not guarantees.

 

I think they should go for a brand new audience in theory. In practice, Discovery is on CBS All Access. If I'm not interested in Star Trek, why would I want to pay for CBSAA? I wouldn't.

The only way I'd start watching DSC, if it were my first Star Trek series, would be if they were playing it on regular TV. "You could've watched the first episode on CBS!" Maybe. But one episode wouldn't have been enough to justify me getting a new streaming service just to watch the rest of the series. I thought "A Vulcan Hello" was good, true, but nothing is that good that I want to get a new streaming service based on the strength of one episode alone, if this was my first time watching Star Trek.

 

To me it felt like the opposite.

 

Yeah. I read you, and from that perspective, targeting the Star Trek audience specifically makes perfect business sense.

How so?

 

I think they were definitely pounding on the nostalgia button with Discovery. To the point I think they nearly broke it. I think the die-hards were the target audience.

 

I preface by saying this relates to season one but to me it felt like the people behind Discovery were gunning for a new audience. Which that's fine, but by doing so they did it in a way that felt almost, I don't want to say vindictive but perhaps maybe ashamed of what came before. They set it in the Cage Era. Cool! That's great. But visually everything is different to where it feels like a different universe altogether. Gone are the multi colored uniforms of that period. Gone are the smooth and rounded ships, Everything is more angular and sharp edged. The positive outlook and optimism is gone. It's like they were going for the Christopher Nolan/The Dark Knight type audience.

 

I think most of those things were just a product of having too much money to spend.

 

Under the circumstances? I agree it wasn't the best they could do but the BTS was as crazy as a football game in a blizzard.

 

Well in real life TOS Kirk says he has seen what it's like on worlds the Klingons have conquered,.......

 

There's evidence that the VFX/art department has been turning in visuals that are out of sync with the scripts. This has happened at least three times: Starbase 1 (which looks like it's in Earth's orbit even though the script clearly said it wasn't), the D7 (this label being applied to the ship makes it look like the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing), and the graphic of the modified Defiant (which the bridge crew seemed to accept as just a regular Constitution class).

There's circumstantial evidence that some of the changes to the visual designs relative to preexisting canon have been made for purely marketing reasons, cf the 25% different kerfuffle.

These two points suggest a compartmentalized approach to production without a single vision on top ensuring that it all meshes together into, well, a singular vision.

I was talking about the way characters are written.

I think there's room for the idea that they wanted new visuals, but they didn't want to get too far away from what constitutes "good guy" Starfleet characters as laid down in previous shows.

Sure they gave Burnham some serious issues, but I strongly suspect that they dialed it back from what Fuller had originally conceived. I suspect they were actually going to have Burnham fire on the Klingon ship and deliver a bona fide Vulcan Hello. That would have provided a more believable reason for a heavy sentence and laying blame for the Battle at the Binary Stars on her shoulders. I think that terrified TPTB, and they ordered the story to get hacked up and spliced together, while keeping the original ending. I've written about all of this before, this is really nothing knew from me. It's just a theory.

This darker/grittier tone would have perhaps gone better with the darker/grittier look. As it is, though, it's a kind of hybrid approach. Notice that we're getting uniforms with brighter colors that more closely resemble the classic uniforms in at least part of season two.

 

Which works just fine for me. I'm glad to see both side by side, kind of like it was fun to see DS9/VOY style and TNG style side by side in "The Emissary."

 

Dark and gritty is fine in small doses but a whole series of it? It's just too much.

 

As in all things, it requires balance. Discovery will find its balance.

 

Whole season. I'm not getting a "dark and gritty" vibe out of S2. Not from the previews and not from the shorts.

And, in terms of of darkness, DSC S1 has nothing on BSG, particularly its third season.

 

But the entire season was full of call backs that non-fans wouldn't get.