2017 audiences aren't going to pay to see velour, Ware Theiss underboob and crystal buttons no matter where it stands in the timeline.
Anything can work if done well. The converse if done... less well. I've seen some very well-tailored sparkle-velour Starfleet uniforms that people have made in recent years. The civilian and alien fashions can be all over the place, revealing and non, and will either look good or not.
As for the "primitive" controls, I thought it was understood since the '70s... At any rate, it was already part of the fandom zeitgeist by the time I grew into it in the '80s. The controls are discrete and raised from the panel so they can be found by touch. They require a certain amount of pressure to trigger, so the mere act of finding them by feel doesn't activate them. The internal componentry is deliberately separated out and easily replaceable because the ship is intended to operate out in unknown space away from fleet support and the crew is going to have to be able to repair, reroute, or kludge things that break. This was the big push out into uncharted space, following the breaking of the "time barrier" which made such voyages no longer prohibitive.
That was the biggest missed potential of Enterprise, IMO. With just a few stupidly simple tweaks it would have made an utterly perfect showcase of the early voyages of good ol' Pime NCC-1701 under Captain Robert April (who Scott Bakula would be perfect for). Instead, the show we got just doesn't work in the Prime timeline, but does work as a prequel to JJ-Trek.
Do Doctor Who fans go through this??? LOL
Ish. A pretty good appraisal was given upthread, but it comes down to a lot of subjective factors. No one ever wants to see a popular Doctor go away, even when he's just being replaced by another white guy. If they made the new Doctor black or a woman, that would add a whole 'nother layer of ignorant honking from the fan base. One of my favorite Doctors was Peter Davison, who was only on for one season, in part because of the wall of hate he received for replacing Tom Baker, who'd been the Doctor for thirteen years.
There were two big problems facing TNG when it started. On the one hand, there were problems at the production level -- with Gene's ego, with no clear sense of the characters' personalities or arcs, with Paramount waffling on whether the pilot should be one hour or two, or maybe an hour and a half. Ultimately, I'm glad for that waffling, because when they went from one hour back to two, Dorothy Fontana had to scramble to fill the run time and came up with the whole Q story.
But the other problem was first-generation fans who refused to accept it as Star Trek because it wasn't about Kirk and Spock. The first half-dozen episodes didn't help argue the studio's case. "Code of Honor" was embarrassing. "Lonely Among Us" suffered from the same level of Idiot Plot™ as did Discovery's pilot, and would have been far better if they'd just focused on the issues of the squabbling delegates. "The Last Outpost" might have been wonderful if they hadn't botched the introduction of the Ferengi. And so on.
But this is a different animal from what was going on back in '87. At that time, the
only Trek in existence was the adventures of Kirk & Co. on the pre-and-post-refit NCC-1701. The playing field now is one where we've had four more series and eight more films, in two universes. We've seen a lot more variety and diversity of what can be called Trek. They don't need to trumpet that -- we sort of expect it from Trek. What they needed to focus on was -- my old mantra -- good stories, well told. Ditto the Who-verse.
Sybok. Carol Marcus. Warp drive. United Earth Space Probe Agency. First contact with the Klingons. The first Enterprise was the NCC-1701 (now it's the NX).
Sybok wasn't a disaster as such. Certain elements were (Vulcan has royalty?), but Spock first called him a fellow student, and only reluctantly fessed up to the rest. Kirk didn't know Spock had any siblings. But that's par for the course. When Sarek and Amanda first came aboard, he didn't know they were Spock's parents.
Carol Marcus was introduced well. There were hints that there was some history between her and Kirk (which we had come to not be surprised by, thanks to TOS showing us about one in three of the Earth women we met had a history with Kirk), and in the scene where they interact face to face for the first time, everything is perfectly summed up in Kirk's "I did what you asked. I stayed away."
What about warp drive?
Starfleet is a unified service encompassing all of Human space. I expect the United Earth Space Probe Agency is Terra's operating authority as part of the larger organization.
First Contact with the Klingons was in the 2220s. Enterprise is an alternate timeline. Ditto in the Prime timeline, NX-01 was the
Dauntless.
Things the Prime timeline
has borked?
• Klingons and Romulans -- their looks, their ships, their technology, and where it all goes on the timeline and why. Should have stuck with the "different phenotypes" explanation of the TOS/non-TOS Klinogns, should never have given Romulans Bumpy Forehead Syndrome (or such bad tailors), and Romulan ships are blood-green while Klingon ships are more bronze (special case for the TOS BoP, which I won't go into here).
• Time travel. There are two mutually-exclusive theoretical models for how time travel could possibly work, and Trek uses both of them, too often badly. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, "Parallels", the JJ-verse, and our own timeline which doesn't lead to Trek, the Multiverse Model is the one the bulk of evidence supports. The Continuum Model (where you go back in your own timeline) has none of the dramatic tension Trek or Back to the Future present, as your actions in the past would have already occurred to lead to the present you left. Any attempts to change things would bring about the very events already recorded. There would be no "waiting for the timeline to sort itself out" lag. Q, the Guardian of Forever, and the Prophets and their Orbs get special dispensation to not play by the rules, and I allow for localized temporal-distortion effects ("Time Squared", "Cause and Effect", the Nexus, and like that). The end result is only a couple episodes that Just Don't Work™ -- "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" and "Past Tense", and the film "First Contact" -- and one major element -- Sela.
***
As far as Discovery... I'm with several people on here. I found the acting and characters wooden and unconvincing, but know that can change over the course of a season. For all the pre-production that went into this, I would have hoped they'd done tests of the actors with each other to find chemistry and charisma before moving forward. For instance, Firefly nailed it right out of the gate (if you actually watch the first episode first). I think I would have been more taken with the first episode if they hadn't done the stupid things they'd done and if Michael (I knew a girl named Michael back in the day, so I've got no problem with that) were even remotely likable, like either Spock (our first Vulcan-raised fish-out-of-water) or Tom Paris (our first in-prison-for-life-but-we-need-him character).
I'm so burned out on regular television I don't watch any more. I got out of the habit over five years ago and any time I tune in the commercials are even more jarring than ever. Plus the ever decreasing run time. I agree it'd be better if they could do a full 50-minute episode, as TOS had. I think with the ever-expanding commercial break, we're now down to, what, 40 minutes per episode? If it were on regular TV, I
might keep watching to see if it gets better. If the commercials were less obtrusive and the episodes had more run time, I'd
likely keep watching to see if it gets better. As it is, it's in the category of "if it shows up on Netflix, I might put it on as background noise".
I am annoyed at all the continuity gaffes - new and perpetuated. I'm annoyed The Powers That Be still try to maintain that Enterprise is Prime timeline rather than JJ-verse and any time elements from that show (the uniforms, First Contact with the Klingons, the ship's name and tech, the Ferengi, the Borg, etc.) show up in later lore I twitch. I agree this would be good in the JJ-verse as something set in
their 2250s or so. Or even, if it were Prime, tweak the ship designs a little and have this be Star Trek: The Generation After the Next Generation, somewhere in the mid-25th century. Like a few others on here, I winced at them stamping out a delta-insignia shape in the sandstorm, for all the reasons cited, plus one more. That wasn't the insignia of Starfleet as a whole at that point. It also wasn't the insignia of just the
Enterprise, as others maintain. The best solution I've come up with is that each of the nominal ten fleets in Starfleet had their own insignia, and the familiar delta is the emblem of the First Fleet. This was the overall Starfleet insignia of the time:
And on the
Enterprise:
Buuuuuut I suppose I can give it a pass, as they're apparently part of the First Fleet and that's the insignia they have on their uniforms, so their ship would still know it was them. Took me a couple minutes at the time to recognize that and that my ire is more at the general lack of awareness of their own history that the showrunners have had for the last seventeen years or so.
--Jonah
cool:cheers
