It is a truth universally acknowledged that Glenn and I love a good establishing shot, and Discovery provides them in spades. They're just gorgeous. And I have noticed something about them this season.
I haven't actually gone through and compiled all the examples, but Season 2 definitely has a theme going on with establishing shots that start upside down, and then right themselves on the way to the actual scene. Glenn and Valerie noted this in the Calypso review (though that one was explicitly going for being disorienting). But in the first three or four episodes of S2 there have been at least one or two examples per episode.
The ones that stand out in my memory are: 1. the Tilly half-marathon scene; 2. L'Rell addressing the High Council (or whatever that is). I know there have been a couple more but they are escaping me now. Is there something thematic about this, or is it just cool? I, for one, love how Discovery is playing a bit with the concept of "there's no up in space". Long overdue, in my opinion!
At what point does this just become a different kind of JJ Abrams lens flare kind of thing. I can see it as a way to make show distinctive and can also see it being overdone. I guess if they change it every season.
And here's a relatively subtle one, since we don't know what this ship is "supposed" to look like before we see it.
A couple more and then I'm done. @pauladz nailed it in that it's really all just in Point of Light that this happens, and I mentally extended it to the rest of the season. This is the marathon one, which is actually one of the shortest, but also one of the ones that stuck most in my memory.
I noticed these upside-down, off-kilter shots in "Point of Light", too. At first I thought they were there to show the generation of artificial gravity on the Discovery, but changed my mind because some of the scene-opening shots were at severe angles rather than upside-down. There must have been at least five of them in this one episode, and they definitely caught my attention. Thanks for the screen caps.
These GIFs make my day. Thanks for putting this together!
A lot of people complained about this episode and these. They make me a bit dizzy too. There were an awful lot of them. (I’ve been making a bunch of gifs too! I curate the twitter account as a favor for my other favorite podcast and I’ve been posting them there. Star Trek Discovery Podcast. It was the podcast I first listened to when Disco started. I always recommend it and this one now.)
Incidentals…
The big one...
Lord help me, I'm actually skimming through the episodes again and making GIFs out of all these. For the record, if you watch at CBS.com in the browser, you can take video captures (at least on the Mac), unlike in iTunes which blacks out the video!
Warning: big GIFs ahead!
Yeah, this is a great catch: the show-runners are up* to something.
*I want points for resisting the obvious pun there. Seriously, it took everything I had.
I bet you are right. In Season one mirrored shots were everywhere. It really probably is a subtle theme.