I want to see those damn turtleneck sweater uniforms from The Cage & WNMHGB!

Every damn thing about the Klingons. Though some of that goes back to TMP.

 

Yeah. The contradictions have been around for years. Its not new.

I suppose TMP's production team didn't care since they completely ignored TOS in its visuals. Or Generations, and its extremely confused uniform mash up.

Discovery is just par for the course.

 

People acting as if DSC is worse than what came before is in itself revisionist history. Dare I say a retcon?

TNG, DS9, and VOY were the anomaly if anything, since DS9 and VOY were produced by the same people who made TNG, they directly spun-off from it, and those three series ran from 1987 to 2001. It's pretty amazing that PIC is sticking as close to the series it's picking up from as it is.

 

I find it mildly disappointing, to be honest. Not enough to not check out the show but it does dampen my enthusiasm a notch.

 

No, from DAY ONE in 1966 STAR TREK has always been inconsistent with a lot of it's minuate and small details, and it was no better during the Berman era.

 

Anything made by human hands will be rife with plot holes, continuity errors, inconsistent tech, changed premises and so on.

If so inclined, one could almost put together a guide to all these nitpickings...

 

IMO, there is a difference between inconsistences due to time and budget,versus deliberate changing.

 

And Star Trek, in all it's incarnations have done both. Most uniform changes are deliberate. The change from the pilots to TOS, the change from TOS to the films and the change from TNG to DS9 are all deliberate. As far as I know there's no explanation as to why there are different uniforms in DS9. The appear without explanation. Fannon tried to say they were "station" uniforms. Then they appeared on VOY too. So much for that idea. Same for changes in sets and props. How many versions of engineering did we see in TOS? How did the ship in TOS keep switching from the pilot incarnation to the series incarnation in the same episode?
If TOS did an actual flashback episode I'm willing to bet they would have used the current uniforms rather than dig the pilot uniforms out of the mothballs. It would have been a deliberate change based on budget. The best (worst?) of both worlds.

 

The most egregious example was Voyager's "Latent Image". I like the idea of The Doctor having to have a memory erased because the moral dilemma it put him through was too much for him to process -- so I'm fine with the basic premise -- but they didn't even try to make it look like the third season in the flashback to the incident. Everything looked like the fifth season, down to the hairstyles. They were careful not to have Seven in the flashback, but Kes's absence was noticed (especially since she was working in sickbay), and, like I said, the overall look and feel was off. Not enough to do the episode in, but it was there.

And Janeway's attitude seemed off too. In the past and present scenes. "As difficult as it is to accept... the Doctor is more like that replicator than he is like us," anyone? Sometimes they'd just make her personality fit whatever the episode was. I have several different moods myself, and outlooks that change with them too, but jeez.

 

It was 100 years later, why wouldn't they change the way they did?

All I'm saying is that it got worse and worse. Okuda, Zimmerman, Sternbach, Probert, etc. made things fit and make sense. They cared. The new team goes wild with interesting designs that would be great in a different show or a different alien culture, but doesn't fit between the established 'before' and 'after'. Take the BoP - the transition from ENT to III makes sense, but now they supposedly had gothic bats in between. Or the bat'leth - the ancient one and the ENT-VOY one make sense, but in between, it's now supposed to be a twisted stick with spikes and no separate grips. Boreth was a monastery that awaited Kahless' return and later helped make it happen. Now they're supposed to also have time crystals. The Klingons themselves are now supposed to be "avian" with sensory organs on the back of their heads. That's just too much non-sense change just for the sake of changing things IMO. It got better in S2 when they corrected some of those things.

Uniform changes follow the progression of time, so why would they not fit or contradict anything? Of course changes for later times are deliberate. But since it's later, it can be different. GEN shows that there was a transition time for the uniforms, the TNG ones faded out as the DS9 ones faded in. I remember one (main) engineering set in TOS. They used previously shot model footage for cost reasons. Don't tell me the 'mistakes' in DIS are due to reused old shots for budget reasons. They could have kept consistency and chose to dismiss that option.

That was a great episode. I don't remember noticing any inconsistencies, but my need for visual continuity doesn't apply to things like hairstyles that people can change on a day-by-day basis I suppose
Janeway was quite broad in her swings anyway, from 'We must uphold Federation values no matter where we are!' to 'I will torture this man and arrest my first officer for interfering!' XD

 

I think this gets to the root of the matter - it's all very dependent on an individual's personal tolerance for what qualifies as an "important" inconsistency.

 

I guess that's one of the advantages of being a straight guy.

Janeway's bun/ponytail hybrid in the third season is several inches longer than the haircut she has in the fifth season. So she'd have to have cut it and regrown six (?) inches between episodes. But the Doctor could stimulate the follicles to grow faster...

 

This is where I will completely disagree because things like this are not a linear progression, nor can there be no variation. One of the things that I completely appreciate regarding DSC is that it is being additive in some places regarding expanding design language. It is completely unreasonable, unrealistic even, to have a singular design language for an interstellar empire. Certainly not one like the Klingons who have their variety of Great Houses.

No, they are artists telling stories in humanity's future. The expectation that things remain the same is unreasonable, at best, and just sets up for disappointment.

This. Though, what's more amusing to me is how much DSC gets taken to task for things that TMP and TNG did.

 

TMP was a 100 years later??? TNG made extensive use of the Klingon Uniforms from TMP. And most subsequent designs were based on them. And there is no way the Klingons could go from smooth heads to bump heads in the time between TOS and TMP. (Yes there is a late addition of the Augment virus)

The TNG uniforms were always shown to be concurrent with the VOY/DS9 ones. Characters from both shows wore them through out both series. Both disappeared from DS9 when the FC costumes were introduced. VOY stuck to them for "reasons".
Point is the uniform was never treated as something new.
There are entire threads about the ever morphing engineering set in the Trek Tech forum. Probably in the TOS forum too.

 

And you'd still be full of it in that Okuda and those folks were JUST AS RESPONSIBLE for their own YATI additions over the years. Just because you like some of the more ridiculous rationalizations the Okudas came up with in their Star Trek Chronology doesn't make them any better for the fact that writers and the Okudas on occasion themselves would contradict what they had in their own Chronology.

Again, it's an utter fallacy on your part to think Star Trek in general has had 'better' cohesion and consistency after TOS when IT HASN'T. It doesn't matter who's in charge in that IF they feel the need to ignore, change or disregard something established in a previous episode of film for the story they're currently telling - they will - and that was JUST AS PREVALENT in the TOS feature film era, The Berman and Braga era, the JJ Abrams films, and the current Kurtzman era.

 

It started with Roddenberry and TMP. He wanted to do more with the budget and the designs and he did so. And then Meyer came along with no Star Trek background before and did whatever he felt was important to the story.

And that's my thing-what is Star Trek about, what's the story it is telling? I'm sorry, but it isn't uniforms and phasers or design. It is about humanity's future, a future where humanity is working to become better than it was before, to embrace differences and diversity and not fear them.

I enjoy a good discussion regarding tech and uniforms, but there is a point where it seems to take away the actual enjoyment of the show.

 

It may have started even earlier than that, when the Animated Series opened up greater visual possibilities.
That was also when they started considering redesigning the Klingons for the first time

 

Even the TOS Klingons bounced back and forth in design for various reasons. You have the swarthy bushy eyebrowed Klingons like Kang and Kor , the basically human types like Koloth and his crew and Kras (aka Bob the discount Klingon) who was somewhere in between.

 

True, but the designs they were playing around with were eeriely similar to what ended up in Discovery
http://www.trek.fm/saturday-morning-trek/s3