Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

Which were specifically meant to be that franchise's most hyper-advanced races.

 

What's that got to do with anything? This is a conversation about real-world creators' decision to use the trope, and that has more to do with the real-life advancement of special effects technology than with the level of advancement in-story. The in-story advancement is arbitrary, because we've seen the same kind of holograms used for everything from "advanced" far-future stuff like Dark Matter to cutting-edge present-day tech like Stark Industries (see Stark's holographic presentation early in Captain America: Civil War). It's real-world advancement that's the determining factor. The kind of interactive hologram effects we see so often today are so common because today's digital FX technology makes them feasible, and because they've become so common that SF audiences expect to see them.

 

Not to mention the fact that we seem to be slowly inching towards that kind of thing in real life.

Now that the story has been completely I don't really see why they felt Discovery's story had to be told in the pre-prime TOS era, most of the TOS connections could probably have been switched out for TNG-VOY era connections and it really wouldn't have effected thins that much. An alternate timeline ala the Kelvinverse would have worked just as well, and since all of the familiar elements understandably looked different might even have worked better than what we got.

Wait... TMP is only 3 years after TOS? I've always assumed it was at least a decade. I'll admit, I never really paid that much attention to that part of the timelines I've flipped through.
Not only did the tech change a lot for that short of a time, but the crew sure aged pretty drastically for that short an amount of time. That must have been a pretty rough three years for everyone to have aged as much as they did.

 

Well, it's two and a half years after the end of the 5-year mission, so probably more like 3.5-4 years after TOS proper.

Actors don't always look like the age they're playing. TWOK through TFF spanned only maybe 9-10 months of story time -- maybe a week or two between TWOK & TSFS, 3 months to TVH, maybe a month for the trial, and a 6-month shakedown before TFF according to Harve Bennett -- but the actors aged 7 years in the interim. And let's not even talk about Riker and Troi in "These Are the Voyages," which was supposed to happen during "The Pegasus" from 21 years earlier.

 

I think you meant 11 years. "The Pegasus" aired in 1994. "These Are the Voyages" aired in 2005.

The most egregious (non-Trek) example I can think of with respect to actors being way, waaaaaaaaaay older than their characters were supposed to be came from The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, a 1985 TV movie sequel to the 1967 film. Despite both films taking place in 1944, the actors reprising their roles from the original (Lee Marvin, Richard Jaeckel, and Ernest Borgnine) are 18 years older, and Marvin in particular looks every bit of it.

 

Well, they looked 21 years older...

Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines in Doctor Who: "The Two Doctors." Both pretending to be the same age they were 17 years before (judging from the reference to Victoria). Stood out particularly for Hines, a 41-year-old pretending he was still 24.

 

I actually just watched The Motion Picture - The Undiscovered Country (skipping over The Final Frontier) and the characters aging didn't bother as much as the TOS - TMP age changes.

Gah, that one still drives me crazy.

 

Funny. I never really noticed the TOS-to-TMP aging that much, except in Leonard Nimoy, but it seemed to me that the actors changed a lot between TWOK and TFF, especially Kelley and Doohan.

 

Scotty gets real fat, real fast, in in-universe terms between movies II-V

 

Blame the Klingon food packs.

 

Oh, is that what it was?

 

Scotty is stress eating from all the craziness between the Enterprise being destroyed, then being tasked with overseeing the most advanced engine in history, then being dragged into a mutiny by his old crewmates, then being stuck on an old bucket of rust for the rest of his career.

And for McCoy, having a Vulcan katra rooting around in his mind might be enough to age him prematurely. It's certainly not the most relaxing, serene situation to be in.

 

I do seem to recall that the viewscreens and computer screens were supposed to actually be holographic, even during the original series. We saw it as 2-d of course, but I think the idea was that they were all 3-d. The only time I sort of picked up on it was in TSFS at the beginning when Kirk is standing by the main viewscreen and starts to walk away, you could see some of the stars moving as the camera moved away and not in a way accounted for by the ship moving through space (it's hard to describe here but it was something I picked up on).

 

There were occasional shots in TNG, I think, where the main viewscreen was shot from the side and the person superimposed into it was also shot from the same angle, so that it looked like we were looking sideways at a 3D image.

 

This reminds me of something else that I've wondered about. Have any of the books ever given an explanation for why the Bounty's bridge changed so drastically between The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home?
For a while I thought maybe the Vulcans changed it, but then I realized that pretty much all of the Klingon bridges we've seen since TVH have looked like that one.

 

I suspect we're just supposed to squint and pretend it looked like that all along in Trek III.

Well, nearly every Klingon bridge we've seen since TVH is just that set recycled. Also, if the Vulcans had changed the bridge during the ship's stay on Vulcan, why would all the computers and wall text still be written in Klingon?

 

Yup, the usual thing we're expected to do with Klingon stuff.

 

I assume the Bounty simply had two bridges.

The Final Reflection runs with this, in fact. In that novel, Klingon ships have primary and secondary bridges.

 

And before, for that matter. The Amar's bridge in TMP has a lot more in common with the TVH bridge than the TSFS one. Though the TVH bridge was the debut of what would become the Star Trek standard of having the outer consoles all face forward to the wall (more photogenic for seeing multiple characters at once and having them talk to one another easily, but dispensing with the original rationale for the circular bridge that the Captain could look over everyone's shoulders from his seat and see what they were doing), and the TMP bridge had the Captain in front of everyone else, something that'd, IIRC, come back in DS9 for the Klingons (and, come to think of it, means he has no easy way of seeing what's going on at the various stations).

 

This is definitely the case- I always thought it was a cool little detail.