Discovery’s look may evolve as it nears the original series
By Duncan Smith
Star Trek: Discovery’s art department had some fascinating revelations at FanExpo Canada last week, including how the show’s look may change.
Star Trek: Discovery has a look unlike anything we’ve seen so far in the long and storied history of the franchise. While the aesthetics of the show somewhat resemble the movie reboots, the Starfleet uniforms don’t look familiar at all.
The original series, set 10 years after the events of the first season of Discovery, was colorful with lush palettes. This was a design decision largely thanks to the advent of the color television, so they wanted the colors on the show to be abundant and to pop off the screen.
In comparison, the events of Star Trek: Enterprise (which took place about 100 years before the original series) had utilitarian uniforms. Effective and useful, more militaristic in appearance and function, the uniforms on Enterprise were a bit more similar to what we see on Discovery, albeit less streamlined.
Where do the uniforms transition in the history of Trek from the utilitarian one-size-fits-all blue to the red, blue and gold we recognize from the original series? We don’t know for a fact yet, but we might get to learn over the course of the first season of Discovery.
Last week at FanExpo Canada, a number of the design team of Discovery gave some revelations during a panel discussion. Perhaps the most interesting was a comment made in passing by Lead Motion Graphic Designer Timothy Peel, regarding an interface on the USS Shenzhou.
"This is slightly blue-y. They are sort of restricting all the color schemes and they will slowly advance and become more colorful as we get closer to The Original Series, and for other reasons I can’t repeat."
Discovery will get closer to the original series on an episode-by-episode basis, and all the scenes we’ve seen in all the trailers CBS has released have been from the first three episodes of the new show.
This means that once we get past the first three episodes, we may see new design elements introduced as the look of the show evolves. In fact, we may even see the evolution from Discovery’s current blue uniforms to those of the original series over the course of the first season of the show.
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Naturally, Peel’s comments were agonizingly vague, but the open-ended nature of this information is tantalizing.