Do we know why Pike and co are in the different uniforms?
- Thread starter Infern0
- Start date
There's a lot of bad Trek, because there's a lot of Trek.
I don't know why it never occurred to me before - maybe because I don't usually play the "explain it all" game - but I've worked in military environments, off and on, since the 1980s and in some settings you'll see everyone in one uniform some days and very different uniforms on others - and sometimes there's a choice of several at a time.
I'm not talking about deployments, just basic admin and headquarters-type assignments.
Oh, I wasn't offering that to counter @Serveaux's scenario. To what degree it actually supports his scenario requires quite a bit of unpacking though.
Myself, I don't subscribe to "canonical literalism," or I'd have to accept that for a moment Kirk's insignia was on the wrong side of his shirt while on Eden. Worse, I'd have to entertain silly explanations for why the exterior geometry of the ship changes in minor ways from shot to shot. We know the explanations/probable explanations for these issues in terms of real-world causes. In the case of the latter, the stock footage VFX was made while the 11-foot model was in different states or it was made with the 3-foot model. In the case of the former, IMO the editor probably made the decision to flip the film to maintain consistency of which direction the characters were looking.
While the show was getting started, stock footage was limited. It made sense from a production perspective that they would draw on footage they had shot during the pilots. They did it with the VFX, so why not for shots of the crew running around? The major complication here in how to interpret the footage is that in the case of the VFX footage, the viewer apparently isn't supposed to notice or care that the ship's geometry is changing in minor ways from shot to shot. Are they actually supposed to notice or care for the crew footage that their uniforms are pilot uniforms? (I'm assuming that the scene in "The Man Trap" was leftover footage from the pilots, and not shot anew with extras running around in WNMHGB uniforms, but Memory Alpha supports this by citing the scene in the pre-broadcast version of WNMHGB [http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Man_Trap_(episode)].)
In answer to the question of whether we are supposed to notice, maybe not, in which case it doesn't support the scenario. Myself, I believe that the answer is in fact probably not. We probably aren't supposed to have noticed at all, or cared if we did, in which case it doesn't really support the scenario (though it certainly doesn't contradict it).
On the other hand, maybe there is a happy medium short of the extreme position of canonical literalism where the answer is yes. Maybe some sections of the ship exercised an elective to wear the other uniform, like say, people in the below-decks of the engineering hull.
It's probably one of those head-canon things.
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/3x20/waytoeden_431.jpg
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=95&page=15
Except it isn't really illogical at all. See how many different uniform styles you can spot in TMP...
Robert Fletcher, costume designer:
"But this time in order to give visual variety, everyone had a dress uniform, a Class A and B uniform, fatigues, recreational—just as you do in a real military organization...the uniform system was worked out where everyone had five different uniforms...one way to get visual variety is for people to change their clothes. That is another reason for giving everybody five different kinds of costumes..."
Susan Sackett & Gene Roddenberry's The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1980):
"Dress uniforms are worn only on formal occasions and at Starfleet Headquarters. The best example of this can be seen in Admiral Kirk’s uniform worn at the beginning of the movie...Class A uniforms are double-stitched and have gold braid designating rank. Some of them have open necklines or other variations...B uniforms utilize shirts which look similar to evolved T-shirts...in addition to these uniforms, there are jump suits...these are a kind of work suit...other costumes included leisure wear, field jackets...and space suits."
-MMoM
[ETA: Yes, I know it was just a joke, @Nerys Myk! And I see now that @Serveaux raised the same point about real life military uniforms in the meantime.
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This pretty much. Disco had Disco shirts, there's nothing preventing a bunch of variant uniforms that conveniently show up only a handful of times early on - especially with the Man Trap. The Kirk wraparound just kind of appears then goes away, and dress-uniform seems to be pretty fast and loose. Didn't Picard have a sweater variant of the regular uniform in Darmok or something?
There's nothing in the canon that technically establishes that the sweater and familiar TOS uniform weren't concurrent. It's awful convenient, but so are a lot of things in this series ("Enterprise! You're the only ship in the sector!")
We're talking canonical literalist logic here.
I hated that course in college.
That only goes to show that they were removable badges all along, just like DSC shows!
Same with "The Enemy Within" (TOS)...
I just meant that even by such logic, it should work fine to have both types alongside each other.
Let's also not forget their appearance on the crew of the Antares—who, to be fair, were actually intended to be "the equivalent of merchant marine or freighter personnel"—in "Charlie X" (TOS):
...which BTW is a great episode all around for showing off diverse uniform types, as practically every other scene features a different variant:
Plenty of room for a few more elsewhere! "The Cage"/"The Menagerie" also featured this one-off dinner jacket:
(Of course, that could just have been part of the illusion! But if one goes down that road...then so could everything, for that matter! So much for canonical literalism!
)-MMoM
Incidentally, that athletic wear from "Charlie X" (TOS) reminds me of Stamets' and Culber's jammies from "Choose Your Pain" (DSC):
-MMoM
-MMoM
That's Adama good idea.
"It's too bad she won't live! But who does?"
I love Charlie's brown wraparound jacket.
I'm not much of a fan, but I think Discovery is very much "Star Trek". Right down to the paper thin plotting, and the simplistic moralizing that is inherent in most of it.
I think after fifty years I was expecting more. Deep Space Nine handled war in a far more realistic manner twenty years ago, MASH did it forty-five years ago. The people involved talked a good game, but when it came right down to it, it is still "Star Trek" and they were never going to be allowed to do anything that would really offend anyone or push boundaries. So, the Federation continues to be vanilla good guys who can't do wrong, the way its mostly been on TV/film since 1987. Everyone one else is simplistic evil.
I guess I wanted something like Star Trek: Vanguard, written large. A complex, deep story with lots of angles and no one is really "good guys" or "bad guys". I wanted to see Federation officers have to make gut wrenching decisions like Diego Reyes did with Gamma Tauri IV.*
*Yes, I like Vanguard. Probably the deepest, most satisfying story in the history of the franchise. From my point-of-view.
I agree with you, mostly, but I think the Shedai where pretty much the bad guys (minus the Apostate). Other than that you're right, though.
You're right. I was thinking more along the lines of the traditional Trek players: Federation, Klingons, Tholians, Romulans.
I'll spilit the difference with you - I think for the 90s, it tells a good job with the impact of war but its actual representation of ground warfare was quite laughable in terms of how dated it was - it wasn't even the 1950s let alone the 1990s. the siege of AR558 is a mishmash of a homage to different types of war films.
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I was thinking more along the lines of how it compares to Discovery. I thought the show had a really strong cast, but the writing (we'll never know whether the fault lies with the writers or CBS) was just uninspired to me.
