Nitpicking Star Trek: Discovery and Strange New Worlds – Experimental Ship, Experimental Uniforms

Too much vitriol has been written about where Discovery went wrong. And most of the “problems” wouldn’t have been problems if the show had been set 100 years after Picard. New uniforms? naturally. Spore Drive? cool. Funk Bald Klingons? OK that might have taken some getting used to.

Bryan Fuller’s original pitch for Star Trek: Discovery was for an anthology series, similar to American Horror Story, where each season would tell a self-contained story with a new crew, ship, and setting. The goal was to create a “platform for a universe of Star Trek shows,” allowing them to revisit different eras and characters within the Star Trek franchise each season, from the time of Captain Kirk and Picard to periods never explored before. However for reasons not yet fully disclosed, CBS ultimately opted for a single, serialized show to be launched first. 

CBS also opted to turn the reins of Star Trek over Alex Kurtzman solely based on his work with JJ Abrams and the Kelvin-verse Trek films. Kurtzman bastardized Fuller’s first season anthology story and placed in pre-Kirk with so many canon inconsistencies that it pissed off the fanbase, this writer among them. Had Discovery taken place AFTER Picard and Co. Few (if any) fans would’ve complained. In fact IMHO Discovery has some of the best Star Trek writing.

That leaves it up to the Guild to explain within continuity and canon WHY Discovery’s uniforms are completely different from anything else seen in that era of the timeline.

Easy, Starfleet WAS phasing in these uniforms as seen on the USS Shenzou and the were accepted fleet-wide as superior to “Sweater pull-overs” in use just two years prior (The Cage ca. 2256). The USS Discovery was designated a test platform for new uniform materials, which included antimicrobial threading and self-venting panels. These were to be shipped fleetwide… until Starfleet Logistics learned that the new fabric was so expensive that a single set of pants cost as much as a shuttlecraft coolant pump.

Thus, the Enterprise and the rest of the fleet was issued the far more economic Yellow, Red and Blue uniforms. Discovery’s uniforms were quietly forgotten when the ship time traveled to the future.

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