Spoilers Star Trek: Prodigy General Discussion Thread

Uhh, yeah, that's the whole point, that different creators make different artistic choices and it's nonsensical to say one is "wrong."

 

I disagree. While original artistic choices indeed can't be "wrong", but when you are tasked with replicating someone else's previous artistic choices, you can definitely be wrong. The Excelsior was shown at Warp during the time of Undiscovered Country, in two different productions. But they used two different warp effects, therefore the second must be a mistake, or in error, if you prefer, even if done on purpose (in this case, likely because the Voyager VFX team didn't have an easy way to replicate the older effect). The fact that the Excelsior has glowing warp grills in Flashback is also a much more egregious error than the blink and you'll miss it warp shot, and that was definitely done on purpose (and also conflicts with the footage from the movie shown in the episode).

 

I'll never understand how people can get so hung up on irrelevant minutiae.

 

Was John Byrne wrong because he drew Superman his own way instead of copying Curt Swan or Joe Shuster? Were The Flamingos wrong to give "I Only Have Eyes for You" the doo-wop arrangement that everyone knows today instead of sticking with the original 1934 arrangement?

It is missing the point of legacy creations to assume that the purpose is slavish reproduction of what was done before. That's not art, it's copying. The purpose of a legacy creation is to inspire subsequent generations of artists to create new variations on the theme, not to quash their creativity.

I mean, come on, we're talking about an animated series here. Look at Prodigy's Janeway. She's not a perfect photorealistic reproduction of Kate Mulgrew. Is that "wrong?" No. It's art.

 

Stop moving the goalposts. Was John Byrne drawing a story meant to be seamlessly inserted into the middle of one of Curt Swan's Stories? No? Because that's exactly what "Flashback" was. The whole point of the anniversary episodes was "slavish reproduction of what was done before". So I'm perfectly within my rights to believe they didn't do it right.

And I'm not making any comments on Prodigy, we are way off topic here.

 

Umm, I didn't even know you were talking about "Flashback." Those are your own goalposts. I've been talking all along about a much wider topic, the way that different artists working for the same series are entitled to bring their own design styles to it, and how Star Trek has always done so ever since ST:TMP completely redesigned everything in the entire universe. My point in this series of posts has been that different shows with different costume/character designers using different uniform designs is no more unexpected than different makeup artists over the decades using different designs for Klingons, Andorians, and Tellarites. It's an established norm of Star Trek going back to TMP that new productions redesign things. Even the Berman-era shows, with their consistent design team and mostly consistent makeup designs (aside from occasional tweaks like the Ferengi gaining cheekbone appliances or the Trill being completely redesigned), had multiple gratuitous costume redesigns.

So I have no idea how I'm the one moving the goalposts when you injected a complaint about warp effects in "Flashback" to my conversation about costume design. I mentioned changing warp effects as one of several examples of things that get redesigned by different artists, but it certainly wasn't the goal I was aiming for. (Kicking for? Throwing at? What does one do with goalposts?)

 

Actually, what we saw in Message in a Bottle was the original prototype Defiant, it had USS Defiant NX-74205 on its hull and the officers who beam onto the Prometheus bridge were background extras from DS9.

And even if we entertain your theory that newer ships of the same class have different transporter pads and thus different effects, the Sao Paulo was supposed to be a completely new ship, and its transporters still used the TNG effect.

 

Sorry about that, for the record, @The Wormhole brought up Flashback, and then you quoted my reference to it that started us down this path.

Well, we know what the CGI model had written on it, but can you actually read the hull in the episode? And If you are going to be that much of a stickler then both Defiant class ships we see in the episode are labeled NX-74205. And the Sao Paulo was only 1000 digits up the Defiant, However its registry number was higher than Voyager, so that's a point in your favor (but then we also know how unsequential registry numbers can be). But the point is, if there is a plausible explanation for possible discontinuities we should use them, this boat has enough holes in it already.

 

Regardless, the fact that the CG model has the Defiant's name and registry written on it, and the officers who beam onto the Prometheus bridge were regularly seen on DS9 which creates enough of a compelling case that one of those ships really was the Defiant.

I typically explain this by half jokingly suggesting the other ship was the Sao Paulo.

 

no huge differences there

and when working in an established time frame within the same universe, why not adhere to it?

which of course always moved forward into not yet established time frames... or not? and when they did go back to previously established times, they kept things consistent and didn't redesign things.

new ships can easily have old pads

different origin pads, not the defiant, why would only one ship have these rifles in the same time frame...

 

That one time aside, those rifles were never seen on any ship other than Voyager. Not to mention, every other time we saw the Defiant, they were always using the old TNG rifles.

Hey, there's another thing, that always gets changed around. TNG phaser rifles continue to be used throughout all of DS9 all over Starfleet. Voyager has the pulse rifles and with one exception appears to be the only ship in Starfleet to have them. The Enterprise E has its own type of phaser rifles, which were for some reason used briefly during the third and fourth seasons of Voyager. The Cerritos also appears to use those rifles as well.

 

The captains or security chiefs could be given the choice at the beginning of the mission which types of equipment they wanna have. Janeway preferred the thicker rifles, Picard preferred the FC ones, Sisko preferred the TNG ones. But it's all the same overlapping time frame. And we're talking badges here, not equipment types. Don't you think badges should be uniform and consistent? It makes perfect sense to have nut just one type of rifle available, but why change badges only to then change them back to the previous design again? It could also be that the PRO badge is the same as the LDS badge, just with more detail because it's more detailed 3D CGI instead of cartoonish 2D line art.

 

Nope. The LD badge and the Voyager badge were used concurrently, on two different uniform styles. Per Picard, the Voyager badge will be used by (some) in Starfleet until at least 2385, and eventually another will be used (in its place?), reminiscent of the All Good Things badge.
* 2349-2371 - Delta with round background (TNG badge)
* 2371-2385 - Delta with horizontal double-bar background (Voyager badge)
** 2380-2381 - Delta alone (LD badge)
** 2383 - Delta with odd split (Prodigy badge)
* 2399 - Delta with two vertical bars (Picard badge)

This isn't the first time we saw multiple Starfleet badges being used at the same time, by different ships. That would be the TOS era, which had about seven different patches worn at the same time. Discovery, ten years prior, showed us two concurrent badges.

 

A Bob Justman memo unearthed a few years ago (by members of The TrekBBS, if I'm not mistaken) revealed that the Antares patch seen in "Charlie X" was meant to represent the Starfleet merchant marine, and that all capital ships like the Enterprise were meant to have the arrowhead insignia, as seen in "Court Martial" where everyone in the starbase bar has it. But the makers of season 2 episodes like "The Doomsday Machine" and "The Omega Glory" somehow didn't realize that and gave other ships different insignias, hence the Justman memo coming out subsequently to correct the error. The Defiant uniforms in "The Tholian Web" go back to the arrowhead, although it was barely visible and the makers of ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly" missed it, giving that ship a different insignia based on the Starfleet command chevron from TOS.

In my Enterprise: Rise of the Federation novels, I posited that the different insignias from TOS originally represented the different founder worlds' fleets that combined into the Federation Starfleet -- the arrowhead for UESPA (since VGR: "Friendship One" established it as a UESPA insignia going back to the late 21st century), the Constellation "pretzel" for Andoria, the hoof-shaped Antares insignia for Tellar, the rectangular Exeter insignia for Alpha Centauri, and an IDIC patch for Vulcan. I presumed that over time, as the fleet became more unified, these subfleets evolved into just different administrative subdivisions that used the legacy insignias, so the Constellation and Exeter might have been under the administration of those different subdivisions instead of the UESPA division that oversaw the Enterprise and most other ships we've seen in that era. Eventually, by TMP, they did some kind of reorganization and dropped the other insignias.

 

Yeah, I'm aware of most of that, and specifically made no reference to what they might mean (fleets? ships?) in the failed hopes of avoiding a long history lesson.

It's possible that the three different arrowhead badges in the 2380s represent different fleets as well, a Capital/Main Fleet (Enterprise, Voyager, Deep Space 9), a Home/Support Fleet (Cerritos), and maybe an Experimental/Testing Fleet (Protostar, although we really need more info on this one).

 

Hmmm...interesting idea there, Tim.

 

Badges are equipment.

Not necessarily.

 

There was a time when the fandom believed that the crews of each vessel of the Constitution Class during the time of TOS had their own unique insignia patch design. Then things started getting a little muddy.

 

Not just fandom, but production staffers too, as evidenced by "In a Mirror, Darkly."

 

I mean, that's been going on for a while. I recall reading the TOS Concordance and different ship insignia being described. Then the Star Trek encyclopedia came out and showed pictures of different insignia. And it carried over, as @Christopher notes with "In a Mirror, Darkly. "