Or the characters are interesting.
Spoilers Season 4 Trailer
- Thread starter Khan 2.0
- Start date
Well, you set the parameters, comparing it to the "franchise".
The fact that these shows are not only different from year to year as well from each other is pretty refreshing to most of us, making it completely relevant in comparison.
Sameness? A darker war-tinged season for DSC-1? Not really high concept. Season 2, super-AI, Pike and less dark? Again, no really the same. Season 3, literally removes the show from the previous timeline (!!!) and has a completely different feel and is the first to have a high concept story with less conflict.
Picard, a personal story for Picard and his past. Season 2, Q? Not really that similar. How can Q be similar to that?
I think you've convinced yourself of samness, and are happily settled into it, and those of us who are enjoying the expansion and freshness definitely see the difference in contemporary Trek.
RAMA
Or they just reused an old shot because the season is still in production.
They also used old shots of the Discovery in Season 3 Episode trailers for episodes after the refit.
So that really doesn't mean anything.
My basic feeling about Discovery Season 3 is it jettisoned most of what made the series divisive, which got rid of a lot of bad, but some good as well. Ultimately it ended up with a really beige, Voyager vibe to it. There was absolutely nothing terrible, but IMHO less highs than Season 2 as well.
I get why they did it. I think the new uniforms look good. It just seems like something that could have been thought about before they even designed the greys in Season 3. You know, like... they knew the DSC crew would eventually be wearing them so... ugh. I don't know. I like Discovery a lot, but everything seems to get chopped and changed from season to season. Years from now when it's all done and dusted it's going to be an absolutely fascinating show to watch in terms of it's development but watching over the years in real time it's schizophrenic.
That's Star Trek.
I mean, I could say the same thing about the TMP to TWOK uniforms.
The universe might be in great danger but you can bet the solution will be the crew bonding together in mutual love and understanding. Burnham saves the universe by unburdening her guilt over a bad command decession by crying in the Captain's chair asking the crew to forgive her which they do as they all come and hug her in the chair as sad music plays. This for some reason makes the cosmic anomaly slowly fade away to be replaced by a beautiful space shot of stars and bright lovely colors. Jason
I think there's a difference. It's no secret that TMP had issues, but they had a few years between movies to iron out problems. In this case rolled out new uniforms early in the season knowing that the DSC regulars would be wearing them... at some point in the design process did nobody look at the Season 3 uniforms and the Discovery sets and put two and two together?
Again, I know it's a small thing and I want to reiterate that I like Discovery. I think it's a great show. It just seems to have such a slapdash thought process behind it sometimes in a way that Lower Decks or Picard don't.
Possibly not. Filming schedules are usually tight and restricted and moving in a different way. But, I think that TMP fits because there is no clear design lineage between those and TWOK. The Discovery ones feel like a straight line, as well as an acknowledgement to Starfleet's past as explorers, rather than survivors.
But doesn’t it make sense in universe, too to update the uniforms?
Starfleet is notorious for changing uniforms with paradigm shifts in their history.
5 year program was the original uniforms.
TMP was the attempt to overhaul their fleet.
TWOK was post 5 year missions, an era of apolitical stalemate with exploration seemingly being on halt.
TNG shifted the focus again on pushing the frontier out, not so much 5 year missions, but very mu c1 exploration and Expansion.
Dominion War, speaks for itself.
Post Dominion War (the flashback uniforms seen in Picard) a time of crisis management.
Picard time uniform, pretending everything is back to normal,.
Post-Burn uniforms, Starfleet was in Triage mode for a century. Discovery briefly got those uniforms assigned after being re-incorporated fully into the fleet.
But they also caused a new paradigm shift with finally ending the Burn Crisis and restoring Starfleet to beacon of hope and peace status.
All their uniform designers need to roll out another update.
Completely in line with their modus operandi for the last millennium.
Starfleet is notorious for changing uniforms with paradigm shifts in their history.
5 year program was the original uniforms.
TMP was the attempt to overhaul their fleet.
TWOK was post 5 year missions, an era of apolitical stalemate with exploration seemingly being on halt.
TNG shifted the focus again on pushing the frontier out, not so much 5 year missions, but very mu c1 exploration and Expansion.
Dominion War, speaks for itself.
Post Dominion War (the flashback uniforms seen in Picard) a time of crisis management.
Picard time uniform, pretending everything is back to normal,.
Post-Burn uniforms, Starfleet was in Triage mode for a century. Discovery briefly got those uniforms assigned after being re-incorporated fully into the fleet.
But they also caused a new paradigm shift with finally ending the Burn Crisis and restoring Starfleet to beacon of hope and peace status.
All their uniform designers need to roll out another update.
Completely in line with their modus operandi for the last millennium.
Meh.
No doubt, it absolutely works in universe.
It's the thought process of the production team I'm questioning and it's something that's plagued the show since Season 1. Klingons look like 'this' except when they look like 'that'. It's a prequel show about a war/time travel/the mirror universe/section 31 that isn't a prequel anymore 'cause it's in the future now... we've been through as many captains as there are seasons. The spore drive works one way until it works another way, until it doesn't work and only Stamets can operate it until suddenly someone else can operate it...
But yeah, the idea of Starfleet paring uniforms back to grey while they are laying low then brightening up when they are in the ascendant works well enough.
How things can look in real life compared to how they look on film can be two very different things. The 32nd century uniforms might have looked fine on set in person but it wasn't until editing and coiour grading etc was done that they realised the costumes were clashing with the sets.
On another note, I'm happy to see '2021' and despite folks griping about another universe ending threat or whatever, I think the anomaly sounds cool. And they do all look good in the new togs, plus Saru is still around.
If I recall correctly, there were quite a few comments last year about the 32nd Century uniforms quite obviously being designed for the “futuristic” sets that went with them — and that they probably wouldn’t work so well on the Disco sets.
I fully accept that this may have been less obvious before post-production and that we were seeing this in the context of fully finished episodes.
I think what surprised me was the logic of changing the uniforms and not the sets. I’m sure there *will* be some updates to the Disco sets but, from a bigger picture point of view, I would have thought that they would have preferred to make more effort to visually differentiate 32nd Century DSC from (nu)TOS-era SNW.
I get the logic behind the uniform changes for DSC (and I certainly don’t dislike them) but I really would have thought that doing more to bring the Disco ship sets into the 32nd Century aesthetic would have been higher on their agenda.
As it is, they’re going to have two series running concurrently, the best part of a thousand years apart, both with similar looking ships and uniforms.
Yes, we, the fans, will notice any number of small details — but that’s probably not true for the majority of the wider casual audience.
I fully accept that this may have been less obvious before post-production and that we were seeing this in the context of fully finished episodes.
I think what surprised me was the logic of changing the uniforms and not the sets. I’m sure there *will* be some updates to the Disco sets but, from a bigger picture point of view, I would have thought that they would have preferred to make more effort to visually differentiate 32nd Century DSC from (nu)TOS-era SNW.
I get the logic behind the uniform changes for DSC (and I certainly don’t dislike them) but I really would have thought that doing more to bring the Disco ship sets into the 32nd Century aesthetic would have been higher on their agenda.
As it is, they’re going to have two series running concurrently, the best part of a thousand years apart, both with similar looking ships and uniforms.
Yes, we, the fans, will notice any number of small details — but that’s probably not true for the majority of the wider casual audience.
Last edited:
I think the reasons why they didn't change the sets are driven by 1) budgetary concerns, and 2) they want it to still be recognizable as the same series. At the end of the day, it's still a TV Production.
Captain Spock: "Even logic must give way to physics."
Producer Spock: "Even storytelling logic must give way to production realities."
Captain Spock: "Even logic must give way to physics."
Producer Spock: "Even storytelling logic must give way to production realities."
We know Star Trek production teams have a long, long history of avoiding building new bridges after all...
Perhaps they are the exact same uniforms and they've got 31st century colour changing fabric like Captain Marvel had.
