Meh, I'll take David Gerrold over After Trek when it comes to Trouble with Tribbles.
Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
- Thread starter Annorax849
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And I'll take DISCO's production staff comments on whether or not this is "Prime" over the Internet's. This sword cuts both ways.
Despite them being wrong?
As the people in charge of trek currently, they are not wrong here. They may have been 50 years ago, but if they say it happened x way, then it did.
So, "word of God" and authorial intent are only right if we agree with them? That's not how this works.
Apparently cheap, lazy and "Walmart" have a different meaning depending on the fan. And the Vulcans are just fine as-is along with the Orions. Even DSC's producers didn't touch their physical appearances and if even these spastic change fetishists think that the original designs are fine then they're fine just the way they are.
I doubt elongated skulls, glowing eyes or a prehensile tail that shoots light rays are going to make a Trek species more "believable" as aliens. Not every alien needs to be an Oscar-winning makeup design to entertain the audience.
Augment Klingons work. They're alien enough for the roles they're supposed to play and overengineering them to look more "cool" is a lazy choice, lazier than 1960s makeup limitations.
I doubt elongated skulls, glowing eyes or a prehensile tail that shoots light rays are going to make a Trek species more "believable" as aliens. Not every alien needs to be an Oscar-winning makeup design to entertain the audience.
Augment Klingons work. They're alien enough for the roles they're supposed to play and overengineering them to look more "cool" is a lazy choice, lazier than 1960s makeup limitations.
Man, now days that make up is cheap, you can do it yourself(cosplayers do all the time) on the cheap with stuff ordered from walmart. We all know trek has always had to scrimp and get creative because of budget, many aliens are reused make up from n older one. Hell, do you think westmore would have made the borg look as they did with modern make up and DSC's budget?
Looking like a human with pointed ears is not a believable alien man. You need to get outside the trek boards and see just what other sci-fi fans mock trek over and the number 1 is "Humans with a funny forehead that always speak English". It was what they had to work with, so what they used. But trek often remakes Aliens, otten 4 or 5 times.
So yeah, if it was me, I would have changed even Vulcans as the look does not match the races lore at all.
I don't care what other nerds mock Trek for. I'm not a Trek fan because I want complete strangers to like what I do nor does their approval matter a thing to me.
Trek will always be mocked for one reason or another. Generations of fans think Vulcans look just fine. If a small subset doesn't then that's their hangup.
Trek will always be mocked for one reason or another. Generations of fans think Vulcans look just fine. If a small subset doesn't then that's their hangup.
Just saying man, there is nothing wrong with updating the look. They did with klingons and a dozen other races, silly retcon aside.
Not really. The Klingons are the only ones who undergo drastic changes in the franchise. The only other notable changes are the Romulans getting forehead ridges in Berman productions and the Borg getting a more detailed look in First Contact.
And before anyone starts posting all the different variations we've had on Andorians, Tellarites and Caitians, the majority of which were background characters, and besides, those changes weren't really drastic. They were usually variations on the original look. Except for the Disco Tellarites.
There was never a "magic 'look human' shot." That's a ridiculously simplistic caricature of ENT's Augment storyline.
What it involved was a metagenic virus based on human Augment DNA, designed in the hope of making Klingons who were stronger and smarter, like the Augments. It worked, with the side effects that it also made them more aggressive, had morphogenic effects (dissolving the cranial ridges)... and led to an excruciating death from neural breakdown. It was also notoriously adaptive on its own, and went airborne by combining with a flu virus, ultimately infecting millions of Klingons. With the aid of Phlox, the Klingons were able to cure the virus before the fatal stage... but the physical effects remained. That's the long and the short of it.
In other words, to use it on a Klingon for the sake of making a spy would involve infecting someone with a lethal and notoriously adaptive virus, then administering the cure. That would be, to say the least, risky. After all, millions of Klingons (and apparently their descendants) already bore the physical evidence of the original outbreak; it seems reasonable to assume that Klingons would not risk another outbreak. On the contrary, they apparently spent decades working on genetic engineering techniques to reverse the physical effects of the virus. (Personally I'm partial to the fanon theory that the DSC Klingons look as they do because of an attempt at this that, shall we say, overcompensated.)
Moreover, two thoughts...
1) Unless the goal is to turn a specific individual into a spy (as with Voq), it would make much more sense to recruit spies for humanlike worlds from among those Klingons who already had humanlike appearances.
2) There's no evidence that the physical side-effects of the virus (i.e., loss of ridges) include other internal alternations — e.g., to the redundant organs we know (from TNG) that they have, not to mention basic things like heartbeat and body temperature, as mentioned in TOS's "Tribbles." Therefore, even if some Klingon were foolhardy enough to administer-and-cure the virus as a means of cosmetic alteration, the end results wouldn't fool Federation medical scanners.
What it involved was a metagenic virus based on human Augment DNA, designed in the hope of making Klingons who were stronger and smarter, like the Augments. It worked, with the side effects that it also made them more aggressive, had morphogenic effects (dissolving the cranial ridges)... and led to an excruciating death from neural breakdown. It was also notoriously adaptive on its own, and went airborne by combining with a flu virus, ultimately infecting millions of Klingons. With the aid of Phlox, the Klingons were able to cure the virus before the fatal stage... but the physical effects remained. That's the long and the short of it.
In other words, to use it on a Klingon for the sake of making a spy would involve infecting someone with a lethal and notoriously adaptive virus, then administering the cure. That would be, to say the least, risky. After all, millions of Klingons (and apparently their descendants) already bore the physical evidence of the original outbreak; it seems reasonable to assume that Klingons would not risk another outbreak. On the contrary, they apparently spent decades working on genetic engineering techniques to reverse the physical effects of the virus. (Personally I'm partial to the fanon theory that the DSC Klingons look as they do because of an attempt at this that, shall we say, overcompensated.)
Moreover, two thoughts...
1) Unless the goal is to turn a specific individual into a spy (as with Voq), it would make much more sense to recruit spies for humanlike worlds from among those Klingons who already had humanlike appearances.
2) There's no evidence that the physical side-effects of the virus (i.e., loss of ridges) include other internal alternations — e.g., to the redundant organs we know (from TNG) that they have, not to mention basic things like heartbeat and body temperature, as mentioned in TOS's "Tribbles." Therefore, even if some Klingon were foolhardy enough to administer-and-cure the virus as a means of cosmetic alteration, the end results wouldn't fool Federation medical scanners.
"Just lazy"? The whole raison d'etre of the Augment storyline was to explain the canonical differences between TOS and TNG-era Klingons! Without those differences, the story is pointless. I seriously don't understand your thinking here.
Exactly! This!
You know, it's really starting to get annoying the way you keep repeatedly taking gratuitous cheap shots at TOS, its creators, its fans, and pretty much anything and anyone that treats it respectfully. We've gone around in circles on all of these points before. Give it a rest, already.
Thank god it wasn't you in charge.
Why? Seriously, why should anyone who enjoys Trek give a flying fuck about the opinions of people who are so jejune as to "mock" it, much less let their own tastes be influenced by that mockery?
LOL, so it does not count if it does not work for your argument lol Yeah, sound right, You also choose to ignore the dozen or so minor aliens that got reworked, often
Yes, lazy and cheap over a joke. There was zero difference in canon, just updated make up. The retcon created a difference.
I really don't care if facts hurt your feelings son.
Speaking of Orions, I'm 93.586% positive that those featured in the season finale were in fact, not painted in green makeup, but altered in post production to look green.
Has anyone else noticed this? Are there any BTS photos out there? I haven't seen it mentioned.
Has anyone else noticed this? Are there any BTS photos out there? I haven't seen it mentioned.
Honestly, I'm rather thankful that no fan is in charge.
Because this is supposed to be a free exchange of ideas, not accusing individuals of mockery for not liking the same things. It is ridiculous, on its face, to insist that just because someone doesn't like an aspect of Star Trek, such as how TOS looks in a contemporary world. Guess what? My wife enjoys DS9, Kelvin Trek and others, but cannot sit through TOS or the TOS films. Is she mocking them? No, she just notes the difference in production values.
Have not paid that much attention to stills, but that would be interesting. I mean, it could have up sides and remove the issue of rubbing make up.
No, but there's also nothing wrong with leaving some of the alien looks alone or just tweaking them around the edges. Few people demand no changes whatsoever to the franchise and those are justifiably regarded as the reactionary fans they are, but those who think we need to change just about everything because of a recent trend in what audiences seem to like are just pandering for the sake of being considered hip and cool.
And too much pandering and change for change's sake can ruin a product's reputation and drive away longtime customers.
Trill were changed (but with only one appearance of the original design). Everything else is near-variations on a theme. The pre-DSC Klingons were unified into a single design model. The reasoning behind the DSC Klingons doesn't jive with the rest of the franchise, since the ideas are contradicted by default (the Powers That Be claim that Klingons are naturally bald, which is factually wrong).
Since when has Trek never risked that? So many fans bitch about Trek being ruined since the 80s and yet it carries on.
"How dare they sully the Star Trek name by making a show without Kirk and Spock!"
Fans will gripe no matter what. A decade ago ENTERPRISE was the whipping boy, derided as the worst thing to happen to Trek.
To be fair "TATV..." gave me cotton mouth. 
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