Star Trek: Discovery Review - 6 Ups And 5 Downs From Season 1
6. Visual Splendour
It’s no exaggeration to say that Discovery is the best-looking Star Trek show of all, taking advantage of modern effects and high budgets to provide spectacular visuals week to week.
Cinema-quality VFX combined with the high definition output now commonplace in television allows the world of Star Trek to be rendered in a more stunning form than ever before. The intricacies and complexities of the detailed surroundings is almost too overwhelming to take in at once, which is exactly what a portrayal of the future should be.
That the aesthetics don’t seem to fit with the supposed time period of the 2250s, pre-dating The Original Series is beside the point. If Gene Roddenberry had this kind of budget and technology at his disposal in the 1960s, then you can bet the bank that his Star Trek would have looked as polished and futuristic as Discovery is.
Allowing the series to be limited by a stubborn commitment to replicating the visual style of the original show would’ve been a mistake given that even the modern world in which we live is far more futuristic than the vision of future that TOS tried to realise. Discovery is certainly a world apart from the notoriously low-budgeted antics of TOS’ third season.