“Making Sense”: It will become harder for Trek’s tech and visuals to make sense to modern viewers

How does a sci-fi franchise that was originally conceived in the 1960s as an update of Buck Rogers continue to present itself in the 21st Century as… well, actual science-fiction, at least from a visual perspective? This is a question that every Star Trek producer has had to answer since at least the 1980s.

Last May, before she was fired as Star Trek: Dicovery‘s showrunner, Gretchen Berg asserted that the Discovery writers were determined that their show is “going to fit into the [existing, 1960s-established] timeline,” but from a visual perspective “we have to make sure it makes sense” by reflecting “the world we live in now” as opposed to the world when TOS was designed and filmed.  

At a September convention, some Discovery designers voiced similar sentiments.

• Production designer Tamara Deverell: “So, whereas we all love TOS and the carboard sets that they had. If we did that and offered that up to all of you, I think you would be sadly disappointed in this day and age.”
• Concept illustrator Ryan Dening: “The Enterprise really, before the movies, is a bunch of cardboard sets. So, there has to be come a point we can give you more advanced technology than you have in your living room, or I think you would be kind of bored.”

Now in fairness, the original series sets were not cardboard, and they were state-of-the-art for the day. So much so that NASA wrote to the production team to figure out how they programed the doors to slide open when an actor approached them (a union guy was yanking pullies behind the walls). There are quotes from actors in every era of the franchise (from 1967 to 1987 to 2017) that describe the sensation of walking onto the bridge set and feeling like it might actually take off and fly through space. This actually makes the production designers’ point for them: a Star Trek set needs to look and feel real relative to the standards of the current audience and not the audiences of the past.

Deverell said that the showrunners “owe it to the fans to keep in time with the technology that we have.” She was referring to film production tech like 3D printing, but it also applies to contemporary audience’s sense of what constitutes advanced technology.

In a previous post I explored why 90% of the Trek installments ever developed or filmed were either Continuations of previous installments or set in Gap Years. Only The Next Generation represented a Leap into Trek’s future. In this post I will explore another significant barrier to a creating a Leap Trek series that showrunners in 2018 will have to contend with: the technology and aesthetic of the show must be updated so it “makes sense” to contemporary viewers, and it must also account for our recent awareness of the pace of technological change.

In the twenty years between when Roddenberry created TOS and TNG, the average American household and business did not look that different. In the 80s, hot technologies were microwave ovens and VCRs. Personal Computers were rare, and not very impressive compared to the hand-held and talking computers imagined for Kirk’s Enterprise. Because of this lack of massive, foundation-shaking shifts in technological development, the technological shifts on TNG were equally mundane. Other than the holodeck, the only pieces of advanced technology on Picard’s Enterprise showcased in the series pilot were Geordie’s visor and the blinking dot that guided Riker through the corridors.  

   

In the twenty years between TNG and the development of Star Trek: Federation (a 2005 undeveloped Leap series by Bryan Singer and Geoffrey Throne ), technological shifts had become more pronounced with the advent of the Internet and smaller, more powerful computers. Still, it is telling that Federation was not going to depict a massive jump in technology even though it was set 600 years after TNG. Like the Enterprise-D in Encounter at Farpoint, the Federation Enterprise would have a few token upgrades like a “singularity engine” and cloaking device. Instead of blinking dots on corridor screens, there would be “CG environments for parts of the ship.” According to Memory Alpha, the stagnation premise “would allow for the new show to feature much of the same technology as had been depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, including old Federation ships.” Here again we see the fear of the Blank Page rearing its head. Even though the show was a Leap, it was not going to represent a top-to-bottom rethink of technology and the look of the franchise.

Since then, American society has lived through even more seismic shifts. When Thorne was writing his premise for Federation, Facebook was barely two years old; Twitter had not been launched; the iPhone had not been invented; handheld GPS devices were only just coming on the market, and self-driving cars were still science-fiction. As such, society had not yet undergone the changes we have experienced since: social networks were not driving the important conversations of the day; every interaction could not be recorded for posterity; people were not addicted to their screens; elections could not be hacked… (Ever noticed there is no social media in the Star Trek universe?)

So if in the next few years the next group of showrunners or film makers decide to set their Trek far in Trek’s future, they will have to contend with two wicked Blank Page problems: 1) They will have to envision a sci-fi aesthetic that will “make sense” in the average household of the 2020s, filled as they will be with screens, VR holograms, talking coffee pots, and a self-driving car in the driveway; 2) They will have to envision how much TNG-style technology would have advanced during the decades of the Leap based on what “makes sense” according to the audience’s expectations for how fast technology evolves.    

   

Consider just one design question: the Starfleet issue Type-II Phaser. In the 80s, Roddenberry updated the pistol shape of TOS to the cobra shape for TNG. Next time, it will not be a question of what a phaser should look like one hundred or six hundred years after Riker wielded one while leading one of his many Away Teams. It will be this: does it even make sense for a human to have to lift a phaser from his or her holster, aim it and press the trigger button to remove an obstacle or incapacitate an enemy, when a piece of wearable tech or floating drone could do that more efficiently? Which begs another question: does it even make sense to send humans down to a strange new world on an away mission when a ship from orbit or a floating drone should be able to solve all the mysteries that Away Teams tend to find on such planets? Which begs another question: what does exploring strange new worlds even mean to an organization that will have been at it for half a millennium, using ships that can rip the fabric of space, time and the multiverse, that are run by AI, with the potential to be crewed by androids and sentient holograms? Will it make sense to have a helmsman sitting in a chair pressing buttons to steer the ship when the viewer might not even need to drive her own car? Do you even need a captain sitting on the bridge of that ship? Do you even need the ship?    

There are answers to these questions, certainly. But writers will have to dream them up and so many more, and devote minutes of dead-weight exposition to explaining them–all with no guarantee that longtime fans would accept it or that casual viewers would sit through it.

The answers are going to result in a sci-fi show that won’t much resemble the Star Trek people know. We could not fault these writers for thinking that it might be easier to invent an entirely new sci-fi franchise, because they would effectively have done this by setting their story hundreds of years post-TNG. This is one reason why Trek writers have chosen the safer path of setting their installment in a Gap Year, where they knew that the audience could tune in and immediately understand the rules of their story world.

That said, a vocal contingent of fandom wants the franchise to break new ground, explore Trek’s future and stay away from its Gap Years. What is the outcome of this dilemma? I forsee three possibilities.

One is that Trek will remain telling stories set in its own past. The expected look of Trek will become a kind of retro aesthetic (much like Star Wars has for itself) with phaser pistols, communicators, captain’s chairs in the middle of bridges that Roger Ebert infamously said (about the 1701-E) looked like a shopping mall security office. The backdrop will be familiar and thus free the writers to focus on characters and themes that are relevant to contemporary audiences. This is the path the DSC writers have chosen.   

Another possibility is that some enterprising writer, unafraid of the Blank Page, will chose to do the hard work and update Starfleet for the 26th Century or the Third Millennium or whenever. The show would look very strange, like something from another sci-fi franchise, but it could be familiar in other ways with Trekian themes, morality tales, and dynamic characters.   

Or, because the first option will becomes tiresome, stale and unmarketable, and the second will seem unappealing, risky, and a pointless waste of creative energy, the Trek franchise simply fades away, supplanted by a new space exploration franchise.     

We are a long way from the third option. But there are durable reasons Trek writers keep choosing the first over the second. The Blank Page is a powerful motivator to stick with the familiar.