Now You See It; Now You Don't

Finally, a night off with no new TV shows premiering (of interest to me, anyway). That's Friday for you. (But Battlestar Galactica returns in just two weeks. That's the TV event I'm looking forward to more than any other.)

Given the gap, I thought I'd backtrack a bit and talk about the newly "remastered Star Trek." It's been a few weeks since I first mentioned it, and now it has actually begun. At some point during this past week (depending on when your local station carried it), the remastered version of Balance of Terror debuted.

I'm going to wait to form my own final judgment on this... teehee... enterprise after I see a few more episodes. But my early thoughts on it are that these updated versions are probably going to have something for everybody... to be annoyed by.

I'm sure there are people with an opinion between the two possible extremes here, but basically the two camps on this are: "why are they messing with this stuff?" and "wow, they could really update this and make it look really cool now!" And based on Balance of Terror, I think neither camp is going to be satisfied.

The "why are they messing with this camp" is probably breathing a sigh of relief when they compare images like this one of the Romulan warbird from the original version:


...to this version from the "remaster":


Can you tell the difference? Well, not everyone can -- and very few people would know anything was up without seeing the images side by side. I played some tidbits of the new CG stuff in this episode for a couple of my friends who aren't Trek fans, and they had absolutely no idea. And really, if you hadn't watched this episode frame-by-frame like I did in my time at The Company, how the hell would you know? Purists, breathe easy -- no one is messing with your baby.

At least, so it seemed until the minor plot point in the episode about the Romulan ship and the Enterprise passing through the tail of a comet. Here's what that comet looked like originally:


...and here's how it looked in the remaster:


Now here, I think anybody could easily spot that there's stuff going on that wasn't possible for television in the 1960s. It was particularly striking in motion, watching the tail swirl with more subtle detail and realism than even the comet from the opening credits of Deep Space Nine. It looked pretty. And it stuck out like a sore thumb.

And herein lies the problem: consistency. Yes, some people don't want anyone to mess with the original. Others want to see these new CG artists to take full advantage of their modern equipment and serve up exciting new material. I say they need to figure out which group they're going to piss off, and go for it full tilt. Either make it look amazing, or don't bother.

I'd say three-quarters of the new effects (or more) in this remastered Trek episode were like the first example -- essentially indistinguishable to all but the incredibly geeky. Consequently, the other quarter or so that were like the second example looked all the more out of place.

We'll see if they achieve a more consistent look in future episodes -- starting with The Devil in the Dark in the coming week. (If you're curious about what lies ahead, the full schedule for an entire year is available at StarTrek.com.