(Sorry, not sorry for the old yet still valid meme)
I just wanted everyone here to know that [email protected] has been taken over relaunched by me and will become an active community again!
In the name of interplanetary peace, everyone here is invited to sub if you have not already done so and to start posting whatever news/discussion/memes related to The Orville you can think of.
I’m going to add .world’s c/startrek and c/tenforward to the links section of our community and I hope you guys do the same.
Happy Arbor Day! (No, seriously, the 25th of April is actually Arbor Day.)
I think the problem is the writers clearly had a show that they wanted and for some bizarre reason they decided that it was also going to be a Star Trek show even though they clearly didn’t actually want it to be Star Trek.
If they just made it its own thing it would have been fine, but all this Star Trek lore kept popping up and then they had to come up with some hand wavy explanation for why their particular vision doesn’t fit established canon, and the whole thing just didn’t work as a result.
I would have been totally down for a “magic exists alongside the sci-fi technology” show. There’s a lot they could have done with that concept, but then for some reason they kept trying to introduce Klingons into it.
I’d argue that it was hurt by specifically trying to fit TNG-era Star Trek, or people expecting that of it.
It would have worked perfectly fine as a TOS/TAS show, since they never really shied away from there being unexplainable magic with the science out in the universe. Witches, wizards, and the devil are all real, and one universe away, so too is actual magic.
Whereas TNG and post-TNG would always try and hammer that into the work of a godlike entity such as a Q, or some grounded science. Q abilities are the work of highly sophisticated subspace interactions that have yet to be technologically replicated. There are particular neurotransmitters, psychology, and brain structures involved in telepathy, and it’s not simple ESP/psionics.
And people wanted the latter. This is most notable with the cause of the Burn. People hated it because the idea of a child being able to psionically disrupt dilithium galaxy-wide would have been silly in TNG, without them being a child Q, or something like that.
But as a TOS/TAS plot, it fits in fine. Lazarus briefly caused the entire universe to blink out of existence, and Charlie X, due to the powers bestowed upon him needed to keep him alive, could explode ships either his mind, and would have destroyed the Federation if left unchecked.
TL;DR: It worked as Trek, but people basically wanted TNG and got TOS.
Ones with a third different head shape, no less!
Fourth. You forgot about the “Kelvin timeline” Star Trek films.
I remember right before Discovery aired they showed a few behind the scenes pictures and one of them included the Klingon uniforms.
Me and a lot of other people started saying “Did they steal those from the Abrams movies?”
Wouldn’t that be 5 then?
Interesting point! Had to look up some screenshots, but it does look like they were maybe trying to “bridge the gap” between the TOS and TNG-era Klingon look in that film, which I am going to be watching again after this meeting in order to verify.
Even if it’s an intentional transitory look, I’ll agree that it’s still unique, and therefore counts. Great call.
I’d say there are up to 8 designs, depending on how much you want to nitpick:
Enterprise also had slightly different looking Klingons and IIRC addressed why (a genetic disorder or disease IIRC)
In Enterprise, they made an augment virus that went wrong, and to avoid going the way of the Illyrians, they made a cure, that basically turned them human/into the TOS Klingons.
This is starting to feel a bit too nuanced.
Yeah, like I say, it’s pretty nitpicky. I’d probably collapse everything from TSFS to Kelvin into one, if I were being more lax. I don’t find the Kelvin design to be all that different from what came before, but I do find TMP to be really distinct in comparison. But I know some people who seem to be the exact opposite on that, so 🤷
Yeah, how dare those artists do their jobs! I can’t stand this sentiment. Times and technology change, and so designs can change because of that. Yes they ham fisted an explanation witht the ENT arc. But like, should we go back to the racist Asian caricature based look? People who can’t separate the stories from the fact that their real productions that have to actually exist in reality don’t deserve Star Trek.
You can change costumes and makeup without completely changing unnecessary parts.
Klingons went from being established as clearly mammalian and very hairy to a completely different reptilian-in-appearance species (also with an entirely different culture but let’s ignore that), then back to mammalian.
They also made significant changes to Andorians. The hair, facial structure, skin tones, and antennae changed, but they were still clearly Andorians, so nobody cared. If they made them red with yellow hair and a rhino horn instead of antennae then it would be rightly ridiculed.
The assertion that if you’re against what early DIS did to Klingons then you’re a racist who wants Asian caricatures is absolutely insane. What are you smoking?
Agreed. It’s a decent action scifi show that is hurt by trying to fit the IP. It did do some interesting things with the mirror universe, and some of the latter season parts where it takes nonsensical one off TOS concepts and completely seriously says “that’s canon, let’s build a plot point on it” were entertaining, if not good.
But it just doesn’t get Star Trek and it says something that I tell people getting in to the shows not to watch it.