Watch Jonathan Frakes’ Fun Andorian Tirade And More Behind The Scenes On ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 3

To address your last point first, TMP is largely an attempt to go back to THE CAGE aesthetic and director Robert Butler’s low-key reality-based approach. (and Butler, to address another point you make here about changing design visions, also evolved his view on TREK — he turned down TWOK because he wanted to do it with a ‘worn’ look, coffee stains on uniforms and such, and Bennett felt they needed to hew closer to the old TOS series feel.) So I wouldn’t consider TMP an update at all, especially given the too-70s-trendy beige look that I call, “Lockheed break room.”

GR tended to fixate on only a few details, like wanting the stupid oval monitors, which are extremely inefficient, while missing the boat on bigger aspects, like having consoles molded into walls at a fixed height, which is about as user-unfriendly a design as I can imagine offhand, having worked with a variable height desk for years that accommodated my relief being over a foot shorter than me.

Or even the most obvious aesthetic details — looking at the bridge from the main viewer, you see the back of the helm as a plain blank surface that gets more light than the actors — shoot, even on a cheapie like BLAKE’S 7 they knew enough to put something on off-side of the consoles with SCORPIO (probably half of a sunglass rack, but at least it looked like it belonged) so you didn’t have a distracting hunk of bland in your masters looking back at cast working their stations.

In fact, GR is probably at least partly to blame for the Abel situation on TMP, getting seduced by a bunch of pretty but probably not practical concept art and buying into that vision over the learned knowledge of his original art director on TMP, Joe Jennings, who basically got ousted for trying to straddle the updating with common sense — he’s the guy who told all the directors, ‘look, if you turn everything on all the time, then what do you have left to do visually when the asteroid is about to hit the ship?’ (I think Shatner and/or Zimmerman might have been on the right track with TFF – there, you had a kind of ‘Architectural Digest’ cover bridge, but at least you had a dramatic visual change in alert conditions that went in the right direction. TUC, for all its other appeal, always looks like a submarine, so that limits the ‘dramatic change’ of battle status displays.)

Quite honestly, I’d have been happy if TREK held onto the 90s ‘tv showroom’ look for its bridges … especially when compared to the visual overkill of Abrams, with it’s Target store cosmetic aisle brightness — PIC’s gloom and murk is overkill in the opposite direction, with the same result: how can you work in an environment where vision is impaired, either by too much light or by some kind of fog in the air?

I have always loved the silver-and-black prop aesthetic of TOS, and personally find a lot of midcentury design to be timeless, especially the way the tapering supports for tables and such even leans toward the idea that they can defy gravity a little with their furniture.

I’m at an utter loss to explain why a loss in visual clarity is a goal for any production, Trek or otherwise. Note that I’m not knocking darkness per se — if you look at season 2 of the US version of THE KILLING, man, that is seriously dark, but there’s usually a sliver of well-exposed sharp clarity that draws the eye — but murky doesn’t engage the eye, which is just one reason why most 80s stuff seems so blase … smoke works for FLASHDANCE and for a lot of Ridley Scott stuff, but is distractingly wrong most of the time (in ST IV, Chekov runs through a virtual cloud bank at one point while jogging through the interior of the CVN-65.)

I think I get where you’re coming from regarding not knocking the franchise, but personally I think that the ‘if you can’t say anything nice’ adage has to come into play, then you’re self-censoring and that is not a good thing.

I could probably go on and on, but I’ve got a deadline and probably shouldn’t have even been on this site today, cuz I still have to cut another 3000 words out of my PICARD s2/s3 cinematography article, which is verging on the impossible given I’ve already cut that much from my assembly draft. Will try to check back in Wednesday evening.

One thing I get on my high horse about is when the perceived error leading to the criticism is a chronic error — I get this way over Bond as well as Trek, but not so much with other franchises because I’m not invested in the long-term with them. I think the Bond films in particular made some wrong calls and then went much deeper in the wrong direction this century, as opposed to in the past when they reversed course abruptly after going off the rails.

With TREK, I get pissed over story structure stuff a lot more than canon … it still seems to me that shows like the s2 end for DSC were written without any consideration for dramatic tenets, it was just a wall of wrong calls and really killed any incentive I had to keep coming back (which was mainly for Mount anyway, since nobody else really engaged me and the aesthetics such as they are for DSC are the opposite of an attractor.) With series that are written by committee, it boggles my mind that apparently nobody brings up the most straightforward objections to bad storytelling. When I had a writing partner briefly in the early 90s, we were largely merciless with one another, and it was all with the hope of getting something right, and as nearly unquestionably right, as possible.