What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

Kurtwood Smith is the best Federation president, yes.

The award for goofiest Federation president goes to Jaresh-Inyo....

 

I believe even the production team were underwhelmed by Herschel Sparber's performance. He gives every indication that he doesn't really understand or care about the role, but maybe he just found he wasn't able to perform as he wanted to under heavy prosthetics.

 

Maybe Grazerites are just more naturally dry, unemotive and laid back. He did say that his own people had to push him into first running for his seat on the Federation Council and then for President.

 

Those have got to be the lowest bars in the history of low bars.

 

STAR TREK related opinion...

Currently on Pluto TV, TOS and TNG share time on the STAR TREK channel. They have been doing this since the channel started years ago.

The MORE STAR TREK channel had VOY sharing the time with DS9. Until recently, where DS9 got its own channel. But the one VOY is on is still called MORE STAR TREK, instead of calling it STAR TREK: VOYAGER. (I have a feeling ENT will end up sharing this channel with VOY soon. Episode count is close when you combine these two in comparison with TOS and TNG combined.)

Proof that DS9 was the best series... it not only has its own channel, but is only named that series.

I have spoken.

 

Possible hot take....

The worst production/set design ever in Star Trek was the NX-02 Columbia bridge in Star Trek: Enterprise.

It's a set-redress of the NX-01 Enterprise bridge. I understand they want to make it explicitly clear to the audience that it's not the same ship, and in the history of the franchise usually this takes on the form of the set designer making the carpet a different color and inserting extra "flair" on the set to make it visually distinct and different. The exterior of the NX-02 has a slightly different color than Enterprise and its deflector dish is bigger than the Enterprise's.

But NX-02 takes this to weird and nonsensical levels with the bridge, which feels like the set designer waited until the very last minute to figure out what to do with it, and came in drunk that day, decided "screw it" and started throwing in anything they could find to attach to the bridge set.

There's a floor-to-ceiling scaffold to the side of the helm that stores a single monitor. What possible use that monitor could serve and why you would put it in that exact position where anyone having to use it would be in such a weird standing position relative to everyone else, is beyond my levels of personal head cannon. Also, the back of the bridge now has a row of flashing tubes, implying warp plasma is being routed through those tubes and through the bridge. It gives the set the bridge a pulsing light source that would be weird even at a rave or club, but here it seems like something that would either give the Columbia's crew a massive headache or be EXTREMELY dangerous if it was damaged by the exploding rocks that Starfleet's consoles have inside them.

 

Yeah, the NX-02 bridge kinda sucked. Those pulsating, vertical lights behind Captain Hernandez's chair were just ridiculous.

 

It's not great but hardly worst design.

 

Speaking of bridges ...

Re-watching DS9, the Defiant's bridge makes some odd choices ... especially if you're thinking about it from the perspective of having to shoot it, positioning the camera, and the angles you can get where the principal actors are all in frame or positioned towards the action.

Unlike most of the other bridge set designs, which tend to be circular in how they position the crew around the set, the bridge is much more linear and shaped more like a rectangular-ish room. And it seems like the circular design has some advantages, in terms of camera angles.

The cast members who sit at the consoles on the sides of the Defiant set, if they're pretending to operate their bridge station, either have their back to the captain's chair and the center of the room, or they have to sit sideways relative to the console to both look at Sisko and forward towards the viewscreen.

In order to shoot it, you either have the cast looking backwards over their shoulder towards Sisko to deliver dialogue, or they have to break away the set where the camera is positioned in front of the cast member and they say their lines where they're looking almost directly into camera with Sisko in the background, or they sit almost sideways if the camera is looking down the bridge from the front.

The NX-01 bridge has a similar shape to the Defiant's, but they get around these issues by putting the main cast's bridge stations not on the walls, but facing forward and towards the captain's chair and viewscreen.

There's also the table in the back of the bridge, which I'm guessing they originally wanted to be a place where the crew could have discussions, but the area is way too small for that if there's more than two people in the shot. It's probably the reason the "Mess Hall" set is usually used as the equivalent to TNG's "Observation Lounge" in order to have the cast discuss issues aboard the ship, and why it seems like they were ready to abandon the table altogether if the holo-communicator from DS9's "For the Uniform" ever became a thing.

It should be also noted that reportedly a lot of these issues cropped up during the initial iteration of the Defiant's bridge for "The Search," where it gets heavily reworked after the season 3 opener to make it a little bit better to shoot on (e.g., a second row of monitors are added to the side consoles, the consoles and the cage around the captain's chair are changed, the captain's chair and helm sit on separate raised platforms instead of sharing one long raised platform).

 

Just like the TOS bridge in which literally everyone has their back to the captain when sitting and operating their station.

 

I'd forgotten how weirdly awful Columbia's bridge was. They could have just thrown some red paint on the consoles, called it a day and it would have looked better.

 

Except, the circular design of the TOS bridge makes it easier to position the camera to keep the actors in frame while they deliver dialogue, since the camera can sit at a tangential angle relative to the different stations and keep everyone in frame delivering dialogue.

 

The wedge-shaped modular nature of that set was a real blessing for the camera crews.

 

Unless there's a quote from someone who worked on DS9, from someone who would be able to give us an authoritative opinion, saying that they screwed up, I'm going to assume that they knew what they were doing and that the Defiant bridge set did not cause major problems that they weren't expecting. "Small and cramped" was the vibe they were going for, and I think they succeeded.

By the way, one problem that the TOS set had was that the side of the console that was uncovered by the removal of its neighbor was quite often plainly visible, as it is in that picture above, for example. Now, I never considered that to be a great problem, it's only a minor problem (I'm pretty forgiving of any and all "theatrical" limitations), but it's one that there is motivation not to repeat, since it requires showing the set in an out-of-universe configuration, with the seams showing, so to speak.

 

Per Memory Alpha:

When it came time to film DS9 Season 3 premiere "The Search, Part I", the relatively small set used as the Defiant challenged the production crew, who had transferred to DS9 from TNG. (Captains' Logs Supplemental - The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages, p. 82) They began to find design flaws as soon as they started filming on the new set. "Initially, it was very hard to shoot in the Defiant set," confirmed Director Kim Friedman. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion (p. 163)) David Livingston added that this was "because we hadn't been in there a lot, and it's cramped; any time you shake the camera or move the camera it takes a lot more time." (Captains' Logs Supplemental - The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages, p. 82) With the floor of the Defiant's bridge including a central raised platform under the command chair and a frontal raised platform beneath the helmsman's station, the filming workers discovered the bridge, whose layout was permanent, didn't allow for sufficient room to lay a dolly track, which restricted the camera movements. The tight physical restrictions influenced Friedman to watch old World War II films involving "people sitting in cockpits," in an effort to increase her familiarity with methods employed when shooting in constrained places. Another issue was that, since the cloaking device was initially only meant to be used during the "The Search" two-parter, the set was not made with variable lighting; all the light bulbs had to be manually changed (by stopping filming) whenever the cloak was used. When the cloak was kept, this made filming nightmarish and reshoots an exercise in hurry up and wait. Subsequent alterations to the Defiant bridge set made it a lot easier to film in. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion (p. 163))​

 

The NX-01 bridge wasn't terribly spacious, either. Even the tactical display table at the rear was surrounded on three sides by walls and the fourth side was the railing behind Archer's Captain's chair.

 

Thank you. That tells an interesting story. In the end they changed the set to fix a lot of problems.

 

Specifically I seem to recall they wanted the Defiant to have a "submarine feel".

 

I remember reading a couple of articles talking about how the NX-01 bridge was inspired by the Defiant bridge.

 

I’ve never cared about ship registry numbers. I’ve always assumed that, being bureaucratically assigned, the number ranges are decided by essentially whatever Starfleet feels like that procurement season, and over time I wouldn’t be surprised if numbers get reused anyway. So I’ve never really gotten arguments about which numbers are appropriate to which eras, etc; I’ve assumed it’s much like uniform designs — at the end of the day, essentially random.