How Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Honors The Original Series' Old-School Look
Ever since "Star Trek" debuted its new live-action shows on Paramount+ it's been a little bit confusing. "Star Trek: Discovery" and its spin-off "Strange New Worlds" take place prior to some of the previously established events in "Star Trek" canon (quite a few of them too), and feature characters we already intimately know from their future stories ... which came out in our past. Look, I said it's confusing.
Throw in some jarring continuity shifts about what Klingons look like, characters with more siblings than we ever knew about, and a general visual aesthetic that has more in common with the alternate "Kelvinverse" movies than the more canonical TV shows, and you'd be forgiven for thinking all bets were off. The latest "Star Trek" shows have been throwing continuity out the window.
But you'd be wrong. Well, somewhat.
While we can always hem and/or haw about various canonical flubs and weird revelations from prequel shows like "Strange New Worlds," the people behind the production are taking pains to stay consistent with "Star Trek" as far back as the original 1960s television series. And some of their callbacks are so tiny that even die-hard Trekkies might have missed them.
The trouble with dapples
In an interview with /Film's Witney Seibold, "Strange New Worlds" cinematographer Benji Bakshi — whose credits also include the cult horror western "Bone Tomahawk" and *checks IMDb* a LOT of Billy Blanks' Tae Bo instructional videos — revealed that the team not only watched "Star Trek: The Original Series" before production began, they went above and beyond to recreate an extremely subtle detail on the Enterprise.
"Little things," Bakshi explained, "like in the doorways of the bridge in the original series, there was a lighting effect where they shot light through a sort of metal grate and it created a shadow pattern around the doorways. And I don't know if that was actually ... I guess it was intentional because they were creating a sort of visual interest. But the way it was done was using sort of antiquated lighting techniques. And a lot of effort was spent recreating that exact shadow pattern on the wall through the grate."
"But we didn't want it to just splash all over the actor's face because that kind of looks like an old way of lighting, very shadowy and kind of rough," Bakshi added. "So they blocked out the center of the doorway so it wouldn't hit the people. But it was hitting the doorways. And that was a canon lighting effect on the doorway because if you look at this bridge, it needs to transition into the original series bridge. There's things like that that they wanted to maintain in honor."
So the next time you're watching "Strange New Worlds" and think the continuity between shows is grating, just remember... they went out of their way to get the grating right.