Ready, set, go
What’s it like to walk the corridors of the uSS Discovery? our reporter boldly goes where no Berriman has gone before…
theY’ve made some inCrediBle scientific advances in the 23rd Century – transporters, replicators, warp drive – but in one respect they seem to have gone backwards: vacuum cleaner technology.
Your SFX reporter is seated in uss discovery’s captain’s chair, struggling to suppress a joyful whoop. we’re not the first. “when it came time for anson mount to sit in it,” says our guide, art director Jody Clement, “i said, ‘would you like me to take a photo?’, and he put his hand up and said ‘one minute…’ he was so moved!”
after pulling a few shatnerian poses, we have a poke around. Pressing a silver button on the armrest causes an iPad-like screen – displaying options like “raise shields” – to rise up. neat! we can’t help noticing, though, in the recess below, an alarming buildup of muck. don’t they have dustbusters in 2257?
not that this detracts from the splendour of discovery’s bridge, which is truly breathtaking when all the crew station displays are up and running. wandering about, we clock some changes. somehow, despite being in deep space, discovery has had some remodelling done. Behind the captain’s chair, to the left, is a new entrance, featuring a wall of power conduits with numbers projected onto them.
“That area was considered a bit dark,” explains Clement, “so we decided to give the set a little more interest by opening it up.”
To the right of that, lorca’s old ready room is now a science lab, containing screens and consoles – perhaps in use investigating the mystery of those seven signals? an area to one side features shelves of botanical samples, including crystals, maggots suspended in blue liquid, and some sort of bodily organ.
BITS AND PIECES
Proceeding to a different part of the studio, we head for engineering. Before passing through a doorway, we note a screen feeding an image from a camera on the other side – there so an effects tech can time hitting “open” before an actor walks into it with a thump!
in here, what was previously just a wall has been revealed as a blast shield, which is now raised. “That was a bit of a dead space, so we wanted to open it up,” our guide explains. “Behind there’s the dilithium chamber.” stepping through, we find a wall of tanks and pipes labelled with phrases like “tachyon propellant” and “argon flow”. Behind them,
a 30-foot-high printed backdrop creates the illusion of an even larger space.
next, we tread a stretch of discovery corridor, and discover that though the uss shenzhou has been destroyed, it’s still with us… “This set was designed to be modular, so the bumpers come off and new bumpers go on,” says Clement, reaching down to lift off a chunk of wall. “so this comes off, and behind it is the shenzhou lower wainscotting.”
we pause at a junction, by a panel of exposed pipes; Clement points at some letters stencilled on one of them. “who remembers the letters Gndn?” “Goes nowhere, does nothing!” SFX excitedly pipes up, recalling an in-joke from the original series. “You win the prize!”
To the transporter room next, where we stand on one of the pads, grinning like an idiot, then slide the touch-sensitive controls on the console up and down. our guide’s favourite detail, however, sits beneath a transparent panel on the floor. “if you’ve ever been to the window-scraper section of [automotive retailer] Canadian Tire, you’ll recognise these red-handled items that are holding up salad bowls!” They aren’t the only household items to be found on-board, either. “in the science lab, i neglected to point out that we had vegetable steamers in the walls!”
The culinary theme continues at our final stop: sickbay (or rather, a sickbay – the discovery now has several, with the same set slightly reworked). amidst the gurneys, mri scanner and medical synthesiser is a small wheeled cabinet. on top of it are two familiar objects. “in the original series, Bones used salt and pepper shakers to scan people,” Clement remarks. it’s true – prop master irving a Feinberg bought a couple of eamesstyle shakers, which then inspired other medical devices. “and this, as you can see...” our guide says, picking one up and turning it to reveal a letter P spelt out in holes, “… is a pepper shaker!” it’s comforting to know that for all this franchise’s advances, some things stay the same.