Entertainment
Modern Star Trek’s So Ugly It Makes The Writing Look Good
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When longtime fans complain about NuTrek, they usually focus on the writing, which is understandable; after all, you can only hear so much vulgarity-induced Zoomer slang before you ask why characters hundreds of years in the future all sound like today’s edgy teens and not, you know, competent Starfleet officers. However, the biggest problem facing the franchise today has nothing to do with the writing or even acting.
The worst thing about modern Star Trek is that it has become relentlessly ugly. Despite spending over eight million dollars per episode, the uniforms, ships, and outer space visual effects are the worst in over 60 years of franchise history. If you doubt that, don’t worry: like a good Ferengi, I’ve got all the receipts!
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Let’s start with the uniforms, and in the spirit of fairness, let’s start with what has actually worked well. The uniforms in Strange New Worlds look great, though that was always a given; one of the goals of the show was always to update and modernize the aesthetic of Star Trek: The Original Series. That earlier show’s ‘60s uniforms are still absolutely iconic, and SNW simply updated their look, giving us something akin to the Kelvinverse: a slick redesign of the most timeless uniforms in the entire franchise.
This may be a hot take, but I actually really liked the uniforms in the first two seasons of Star Trek: Discovery. They felt like sleek, modern versions of the blue Away Team jackets worn by Captain Pike and Spock in the first Star Trek: The Original Series pilot episode.
Plus, they fit into existing lore better than most fans think: there have been weird uniform variations in this franchise from the beginning (like different insignias for different ships and variant uniforms for different specialties), and the Golden Age of Trek constantly featured characters using different styles of uniforms (like the mix of TNG and DS9 designs in Generations).
Throw in the fact that the Discovery was an experimental ship seemingly backed by Section 31, and these characters getting snazzy blue uniforms makes perfect sense. However, the crew ditched this killer look once they jumped to the 32nd century. Instead, they embraced brand new uniforms that just had one major problem: they were downright ugly, beginning a decline in Star Trek aesthetics that continues to this day.
It’s About To Get Ugly
In Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery, our favorite characters get new uniforms that feel like a serious downgrade: those beautiful blue costumes get replaced with soulless gray uniforms whose dreariness is only broken up by a colorful division stripe. The characters looked blander than ever, and it didn’t help that this season’s storytelling was a serious downgrade from Season 2. Adding insult to injury, these drab uniforms looked way too much like what Kirk and crew wore in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and that movie’s pastel pajamas are widely considered some of the worst uniform designs in the franchise.
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 tried to correct this terrible design, replacing the blandness of the previous season with uniforms that were bold and colorful. That’s a good idea on paper, but in practice, the new uniform designs looked like what you’d get if you ordered Original Series costumes from Temu.
It’s hard to take any of these characters seriously when the open flap on the bottom of their tunics makes them look like a white-collar boss who felt wild enough to untuck his shirt and unbutton the bottom buttons to celebrate Casual Friday in style.
No, Captain, My Captain
The next Star Trek fashion fail is partially the fault of arguably the most popular living Star Trek actor: Patrick Stewart. When Paramount lured him back for Picard, he was insistent that he didn’t want to wear a Starfleet uniform, which is why his character and his Season 1 crew run around in dark outfits that Stewart might as well have stolen from the set of David Lynch’s Dune. This is a big part of why the first and second seasons are so painful to watch: on top of writing so bad it makes Nemesis look like a masterpiece, the costume design for our series regulars is lazy and completely phoned-in.
The Starfleet uniforms were a bit better than Picard’s crew, but not by much: they alternated between looking like updated TNG Academy uniforms to uniforms that looked like plainer takes on the ones worn in Lower Decks. By Season 3, everyone was just wearing leather jackets with some light Star Trek theming on them.
This caused our returning TNG crew to look (embarrassingly enough) like bikers from an AARP-themed motorcycle club. It was like the producers were deathly afraid for this to look or feel like an actual Star Trek show, which is insane for a wildly expensive revival of the show that definitively brought the franchise back to life.
These Students Failed Fashion 101
The latest offender on the Star Trek fashion front is Starfleet Academy, a show that can’t decide exactly what it wants its protagonists to look like. Sometimes, instructors like Jet Reno wear uniforms that look like colorful hourglasses slapped haphazardly on a large expanse of black fabric.
The Doctor is wearing something akin to a monochrome version of his Voyager outfit, and Holly Hunter’s chancellor is wearing something like a monster maroon tunic without any of the flair. Over at the War College, Commander Nelrec is wearing something that looks like somebody tried to draw the Battlestar Galactica reboot duty blues from memory after being hit on the head.
Incredibly, the cadet uniforms are even more stylistically scattered: they mostly wander the campus in drab grey uniforms that look like an even worse version of what everyone wore in Star Trek: Discovery Season 3. Sometimes, though, they unzip that to wear just tight red shirts and black pants (which they adorn with futuristic tactical vests for rousing games of laser tag). Speaking of laser tag, after winning a single game against the War College, they wear letterman jackets, which leaves me wondering if anyone on the writing staff actually played sports in school.
None of these designs is great (minus the inexplicably comfy-looking Starfleet Academy hoodie), and several are downright ugly. That ugliness is made worse by the sheer visual chaos of characters that have more wardrobe changes per episode than most cosplayers do all year. This is symbolic of Starfleet Academy’s biggest problem as a show: it’s trying to be too many different things all at once, ultimately losing its own identity in a frantic rush to please fans of every era.
Clothing Maketh The Spaceman
Believe it or not, this barely scratches the surface of what makes NuTrek so ugly. I haven’t gotten around to forgettable ship designs (quick, draw the Starfleet Academy teaching ship from memory, I dare you!) and lazy outer space effects that make battles increasingly hard to follow. Those battles alternate between being visually boring (like the Battle of the Binary Stars in Discovery) to pathetically lazy (like Riker threatening the Romulans in Picard with an entire fleet of copy/paste ships). After spending more than $8 million per episode, NuTrek gives us space battles with less variety and excitement than Deep Space Nine did in the ‘90s.
The biggest issue is still the clothing, which has just gotten worse since Discovery first aired nearly a decade ago. Star Trek is a franchise with over half a century of cool clothing designs, and The Next Generation is proof that Paramount once knew how to update the designs that made The Original Series into a pop culture phenomenon. If the creators behind NuTrek are completely incapable of making these shows look decent, they will have nobody but themselves to blame when audiences stop watching altogether.
Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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