Saturday, December 12, 2020

The Yor lore I have in store is bound to bore!

Look, I just have to apologize for this one up front. I am about to talk about a Star Trek thing so nitpick-y and so hyper-fan obsessive that you will almost certainly lose whatever respect you may have left for me. So either bail out now or brace yourself. We're going in.

Buckle up, we're in for some nerdulence.

Ok, one of the downsides...
I may have mentioned before that I've been really digging Star Trek: Discovery as a thing. It's great. I mean, obviously as a huge nerd, I have opinions about it and can point to certain things that don't work for me, but as a whole I look forward to each new episode. So when something clangs for me or feels a little off or if there's some minor error or data point that clashes with the fifty years of Star Trek canon I feel like such a dork complaining about it or pointing it out to my friends. It's the downside to having an encyclopediac knowledge of Star Trek.

Discovery's medical staff is so impatient.
I mean, I'm sure they'll patch it out eventually.
After all, the writers and actors and everyone who works on these shows aren't there to reinforce some esoteric lore, they're there to make compelling television. I mention all this because before I get into my nitpick, I want you to know that I am aware of how I sound. Anyway, on this week's episode, there's this scene at the very beginning where David Cronenburg-who's on the show, you should watch it-is telling Wilson Cruz's character why Michelle Yeoh is fritzing out like a glitched Ubisoft game. 

He explains that it's because she's both from another universe and another time. And so her temporal whatevers are out of synch or something. It doesn't matter, because he calls up a hologram of some alien who also died of similar techno-nonsense. This alien, says Cronenburg, both jumped across universes from the alternate reality introduced in the J.J. Abrams movies, and traveled through time. 

David Cronenberg and Wilson Cruz seen here
conducting some high-level nerdy exposition. Chef's kiss.

The 24th century is quite keen on the
 "goth mechanic's jumpsuit" aesthetic.
If you didn't watch this episode, it's not super important that you know what the hell I'm talking about, just know that there's this hologram of some alien named Yor in a Star Trek TNG uniform who David Cronenburg says either traveled from 2379, or landed in 2379. He's a little unclear on the point, but either way the costume department put Yor in a TNG season one lycra jumpsuit. Now this is the part where you might never look me in the eyes again: TNG season one is set in 2363, and the uniform for 2379 should be the jumpsuits from the TNG movies. 

No offense...
Does it matter? Of course not. It's a ridiculous piece of trivia and who even cares? But that's the thing, Star Trek fans care, admittedly way too much, but we do. I mean, what's the one thing Star Trek fans are famous for? If you said an obsessive attention to details about a fictional universe, you would be correct. And again, love the show, and I get that lore isn't their number one priority when it comes to producing it, but I mean, it takes like ten seconds to look at the Star Trek wiki page about uniforms. A page that exists for exactly this kind of thing.

Look, what I'm saying is if they need someone to skim over their scripts and find this kind of thing before some dork with a blog spends a Saturday morning complaining about it, I'm their dork. If you know someone who works on the show, give them my number. I have like, nothing else going on right now.

"You know what this script needs is some dork with a blog's opinions."
-No writer in the history of television

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