See The Star Trek: Discovery Cast’s Uniforms Fixed To Use The Right Colors
A fan artists changes the colors of the Star Trek: Discovery crew to match those of the original series.
Since the beginning, when William Shatner as Captain Kirk was captivating fans, Star Trek has been a franchise dominated by colorful costumes. When later series introduced different costumes, some of them were winners (like Star Trek: The Next Generation and even Star Trek: Picard) and some were losers (looking at you, Star Trek: Enterprise). Paramount Plus‘ one-time flagship show Star Trek: Discovery has changed the uniforms before in an attempt to keep fans happy, but now one of those fans has envisioned what the crew would look like if they all wore the colors established by Star Trek: The Original Series.
If you’ve never watched Discovery before, you might be wondering exactly how these are supposed to be like the uniforms that Captain Kirk wore back in the day. The uniforms the original artist used as a basis, though, are the ones that we first saw Captain Pike and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise wear in Discovery’s second season. Those uniforms were meant to be a kind of compromise between Discovery’s original uniforms and the original Star Trek uniforms, though now that Pike has his own show, you’ll notice that the uniforms in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds look much more like those in The Original Series.
Not sure what the different colors are supposed to signify in this Facebook edit? Going back to the original series, gold signified command (like Captain Kirk wore), blue signified science or medical (like Commander Spock and Dr. McCoy wore), and red signified engineering (like Lt. Commander Scotty wore), communications (like Lt. Commander Uhura wore), and security (which is why it’s always “redshirts” dying on those distant planets). In this edit, Saru is wearing command colors, Airiam, Burnham and Stamets are wearing science colors, and everyone else is wearing red.
Of course, much like with the Marvel Cinematic Universe fans, Star Trek fans love to have intense arguments with each other over the content that they ostensibly all love. For example, the original artist clearly intended this as a critique of Discovery, showing us the colors that he thought the characters should have been wearing instead of what we got. But it took fans no time at all to point out that if he really wanted to go by The Original Series uniform colors, many of these color choices would be incorrect.
For example, Tilly is wearing an engineering red in this edit but should clearly be wearing the blue colors of a science officer, especially after she infamously dropped Star Trek’s first f-bomb to declare how cool science was. Not to mention that Sonequa Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham became Captain of the titular ship at the end of Discovery‘s third season, and so should be wearing command colors just like Saru.
Unfortunately for fans of Star Trek: Discovery, all of this debate over what color uniforms characters should or should not be wearing feels a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (maybe we could whip up Leonardo DiCaprio in the holodeck and ask him for advice). We now know that the fifth season of the show will be its final season, an unexpected decision that came from the top and basically cemented the fact that Paramount considers Strange New Worlds their flagship show now. At this point, there’s nothing to do but start placing your bets (we prefer latinum, please) about what the uniforms will look like when Discovery, like Picard and now Voyager, gets its own reunion show decades from now.
