But Star Trek is not an audiobook or radio-drama. If we handwave production design as irrelevant to continuity, we're basically giving disproportionate responsibility and credit to the writers in what is supposed to be a visual medium depicting an extrapolated, science-fiction(-like) reality set in our actual galaxy, with a good measure of technical consulting. Star Wars is very clear on that subject: design continuity matters. Rogue One had to be consistent with the audiences' memory of ANH. Solo was explicitly imagined as a Star Wars movie designed in the 1960s (think Harry Lange). Star Trek has been less clear in making leaps like TMP, then letting things settle for budgetary or other reasons into what eventually came to look like one physical reality (some welding required). It's about precedent and what happens when you deviate from it and by how much exactly.
When did canon become such a hot-button issue?
- Thread starter Amasov
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It has always been "anything goes" where Trek is concerned. The story is always going to take precedent over canon and continuity, and always should. Canon and continuity stick out more for me when I'm not being entertained. Which is probably why I notice it far more in Discovery.
When a new artist takes over a comic book, it's pretty much expected these days that they'll use their own distinctive art style, redesigning the characters to fit it. This is seen as a good thing. An artist's distinctive style is what gives that artist their creative identity and their fanbase. People want to see artists draw things their own way instead of copying what their predecessors did.
So you have it backward. Respecting artists' freedom to reinterpret how they portray a fictional universe is not marginalizing them, it's freeing them to be creative. Because that's the real point here. Continuity is not the sole purpose of fiction. It's just a tool in the kit. The purpose of fiction is to be creative. To exercise your talent as a storyteller or artist. It's not about cold conformity to some index of facts and figures. It's not about creating consistent Wikipedia entries. It's about imagination and talent and artistry and emotion.
I am so sick of people assuming that just because Star Wars does something, that somehow requires Star Trek or other franchises to follow suit. There is no universal law for creativity. The whole thing that makes it creative is that everybody gets to do it their own distinct way. (Not to mention that Star Trek is a decade older than Star Wars. We were here first, so we don't have to copy the latecomers.)
Star Wars and Star Trek are very different entities, and each does things in ways that suit its distinct nature. SW reuses the same designs because it's always, always been an exercise in nostalgia. It was created as George Lucas's tribute to the adventure serials and movies he grew up watching as a kid, so it's always been intrinsically backward-looking and celebratory of the past. But Star Trek looks in the opposite direction, toward the future. It was always meant, from the start, to be cutting-edge and forward-looking, to push new ground in TV production and extrapolate design and technology forward into the future. So it's in character for ST to keep advancing its visual futurism to fit evolving real-world technologies and aesthetics.
See, but why only visual? Why not throw the entire backstory out the window and gradually reimagine everything with 201x in mind?
Also, what has Star Trek been since ENT (especially S4) if not an exercise based in nostalgia also? The updates to production design are actually a minimal compromise between the needs to cash in on nostalgia and modernity at the same time. At least TNG had swept the past under the rug and freed itself a bit with the time jump, which DSC will hopefully use in S3 to the same effect.
It’s pretty much mixed messages, hence the complaints. One cannot establish a particular precedent, then expect to introduce another without long-term fans perceiving it as an error in approach.
Also, what has Star Trek been since ENT (especially S4) if not an exercise based in nostalgia also? The updates to production design are actually a minimal compromise between the needs to cash in on nostalgia and modernity at the same time. At least TNG had swept the past under the rug and freed itself a bit with the time jump, which DSC will hopefully use in S3 to the same effect.
It’s pretty much mixed messages, hence the complaints. One cannot establish a particular precedent, then expect to introduce another without long-term fans perceiving it as an error in approach.
Yeah, I have to agree with you there. While I might wish for a bit more consistency in production design elements across Star Trek, it's a much different animal from Star Wars. Part of the allure for Star Wars fans is it's consistency in production design elements. It's part of the fabric of Star Wars. And it probably has something to do with the way the primary trilogies are designed. In a sense Star Wars is one continuous story, from "The Phantom Menace" through to the upcoming 9th film in the trilogy (and you could probably argue the various add on films like "Rogue One" or "Solo" are part of that ongoing story as well). That's not as much the case with Star Trek. Star Trek is NOT one continuous story from "Broken Bow" to "Nemesis". It's various stories involving numerous ships, crews and locations with only a loose connection to each other, much looser than Star Wars stories.
In fact, I'd really rather not compare Star Trek to Star Wars. Other than they both take place in space and they are both huge franchises, there aren't a whole lot of similarities.
That is what they've been doing. Seriously, do you expect Burnham to cuddle with her male superior on the bridge during a battle? Or Tilly to proclaim she's too frightened to do her job and need a man to give her a pep talk? Do you expect there to be blatant racism towards the first officer of a starship? Or Pike to proclaim he's not comfortable with having women on the bridge?
Do we expect Ben Finney in a few years to go cram himself in a dangerous ion pod when we have repair and other droids running all over the place just seven years prior?
TOS, except in the broadest of broad strokes is gone.
They could just do what Marvel did when they brought out the Ultimate comic line which by setting it in a new universe allowed them to reimagine the Marvel universe with more modern elements and not to be bogged down in decades of continuity.
Exactly. The internet tends to act as a megaphone, often creating a false impression of some sort of massive "backlash" that doesn't actually exist.
Aliens monitoring the internet from space could be forgiven for thinking that blood was running in the streets because they gave the Klingons a makeover (again), but is the average viewer really all that worked up about it? Probably not.
See also the comic-book purists pulling their hair out because the the original Captain Marvel is now named "Shazam." Doesn't seem to have hurt the new movie's box office one bit.
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You know, in a way, this might in some ways be Rick Berman's fault. During Berman's 'regime' there was a lot more attention paid to consistency in stories and production design---now before anyone says anything I know it wasn't perfect. But overall, in his 18 some years involved with Star Trek there was a certain comfortable consistency in Star Trek. Now Abrams Trek shook things up, but I know I just hand waved any differences as to it being an alternate universe.
But now Discovery comes a long and shakes everything up and we're told it's the prime universe. I think some of us expected it to still look and feel somewhat familiar. When I heard Bryan Fuller was involved with its creation, and he being involved with Berman Trek at least for a time, that sort of reinforced that belief for me. I thought Kurtzman would be the one to shake things up (in a bit of irony it sounds like Kurtzman is actually more the one concerned with in universe consistency).
For me it's just going to take some time to adjust to the new way of doing things. I've complained about Discovery about it's consistency, which is sort of new for me. I didn't really have too many major issues with consistency before so I guess it's a bit magnified for me. But I'll come around (probably 10 years from now--well from 2017)
No, because evidence from the series indicates that every event as dated by the Okudas happened precisely on the expected date, with exactly the same characters in the same setting. Those differences you mention are only about giving Star Trek a polish, not about treating it as SF and rethinking it with 2019 in mind. Should the Eugenics Wars happen and in what year exactly? Is warp drive likely to be invented in 2063? Does the 23rd century make sense for the technical developments that could actually occur? Do we need an Enterprise refit without TMP’s requirement for production redesign?
Indeed, why not? There'd be nothing wrong with it if they did do that. Lots of fictional franchises reinvent themselves from the ground up all the time. You're trying to make this a value judgment, and that's just not how this works. It's entertainment. It's imagination. People can do it any way they want, and it's good that different creative franchises do it differently from one another, because that means there's something for every taste.
That doesn't mean it should be some kind of compulsory doctrine.
Comics send mixed messages too. The artists' styles change but the continuity stays consistent. The timeframe is continuously updated to the present but (at least in Marvel's case) the storyline is presumed to have been consistent since the 1960s. You just have to have enough mental flexibility to go along with the pretense. It's bizarre to me that many Trek fans have so much more trouble doing the same things that fans of other fictional franchises do all the time. You need to have more faith in your own ability to adapt.
I've been a fan of Star Trek for 45 years and 3 months. That's 86% of the history of the broadcast franchise. So you don't get to tell me what "long-term fans" think. Real long-term fans have been through this kind of change in Trek multiple times before and can see how silly it is when younger fans freak out about it happening again.
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For me, the way the universe feels and is presented is a lot more important than names and dates on a calendar. The Discovery universe doesn't feel anything like TOS. You have had massive societal and technological shifts in the last fifty years, there's no way for the two to be compatible narratives except in the broadest of broad strokes.
Just like if they go-ahead with a Pike series, do we honestly expect them to not use golden story nuggets like Pon Farr and mind melds?
But that's because there was a consistency in the art staff -- Herman Zimmerman and Richard James as production designers, Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda as senior illustrators, Michael Westmore as the makeup designer, etc. And when new talents like Doug Drexler and John Eaves came in, they were working alongside the established artists and continuing their design precedents. And TNG continue the aesthetic of the movies partly to save money by reusing assets, and partly because it had some of the same art staffers as the movies -- Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach worked on both TMP and TNG, and Mike Okuda got his start on ST IV before moving on to TNG. So the continuity of design was due to continuity of designers.
Kelvin and DSC look different from Berman Trek because they have almost completely new art staffs, with John Eaves being the only common link among the three. So they look quite different because there are different artists creating the look, bringing their own styles to it.
That doesn't surprise me at all. If you've worked in a junior role on a franchise before, then you had to follow instructions and didn't have the freedom to do things the way you would've wanted. So it's natural enough that when a former supporting staffer gets put in charge of the whole thing, they'd take the chance to do the stuff they wanted to do before but couldn't. Whereas someone who's coming to the franchise as a fan and working on it for the first time has a different perspective, informed more by that fandom and respect for the previous work.
In short, the people who are on the inside are the ones who are least reverential and most critical of the work they did. They're usually the first ones who'll change things given the opportunity.
Not to mention that if you look at Bryan Fuller's whole body of work -- Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, etc. -- it's clear that this is not a guy who limits himself to the conventional, predictable, or expected. His work on Voyager represents the barest beginnings of his career and is probably the credit that's least representative of his personal style.
This is inaccurate, as Star Wars and Star Trek are different animals entirely, as Christopher describes below:
Exactly. Star Trek looks forward in to humanity's future.
There is also precedent of ignoring, retconning and just changing things the production teams don't like.
There is not this one overarching precedent established in Trek. It has always varied from production team to production team, and even from era to era, as demonstrated by the transition from TOS to TMP to TWOK to TNG.
No it doesn't. Few expected it to have 1960s set designs and while a visual update is necessary and inevitable it should at least have adhered to the established technology level. It's simply hard to accept it is as part of the same universe as TOS when it looks like it is set post TNG. Hard they set it in the 26th century say, this radical reinterpretation would have probably have gone down a lot better.
Yeah, I know. I was just trying to be pithy again. It's not literally Berman's fault. It's like you said, there was a consistency during those years, and even as new people came on it was gradual. I got a little spoiled.
Another bit of irony is for all the Berman bashing that goes on, it's funny to see people bash Discovery for not being consistent with Berman Trek (though I guess to be fair it may not be the same people). And to be clear, I'm not really bashing Discovery even when I complain. I'd prefer a greater consistency in production design yes, but it's still a different animal than hating Discovery. And I'm not just like that for Star Trek. For instance in movie sequels I look for consistent elements as well. It's just a personal preference.
Yeah, I admit it was a misperception. I almost expected Discovery to look like a hybrid of Berman-Abrams Trek. And it does resemble Abrams Trek in some ways (like that stupid window on the bridge, ugh). But I guess that's not too surprising since we are closer in real time to the Abrams trilogy than we are to the last Berman production by several years.
Yeah, I do have to admit to a secret, um, desire to see a current show with designs consistent with the original series. Like "In A Mirror, Darkly". Now I know my left brain knows that would never work on an entire series. You can get away with it for an episode or two--that episode was sort of a nostalgic look back, lets see what those original 60s designs look like today with modern special effects. It was a fun look back and I really enjoyed it. But for an entire series, I just didn't see it happening.
But I kind of wish they pushed it ahead, to say the 25th century, maybe 100 years post-Nemesis. Then all these arguments about consistency would be sort of moot. At least for me I would have just dismissed any continuity issues as it was 100 years later, much like I looked at TNG when it first came out.
In my experience, it frequently does, particularly for such long standing characters/franchises. I’ve already seen the 9834 traditional versions. Give me something new about the character. Moreover, challenging or subverting my expectations is the likeliest way to earn my appreciation for your artistic work—even if the final result isn’t to my liking, I will applaud the effort.
This should be pinned in any and all places where anyone argues creators “need to listen to the fans”.
Well said.
Reminds me of “fans” of musical acts who reflexively abandon a band or performer who attains widespread success.
Exactly no one would care about the redesign of the Klingons or the spore drive if they had done that to begin with. Discovery's downfall is that its foundations are built on TOS. Even the main character has to been connected with Spock. A time period set sufficiently apart from everything we know about Trek would have given them greater freedom and licence to do what they wanted.
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