#combadge

Here’s a closer look at the interior details. I kept it pretty faithful to the diagram that appears in the TNG Technical Manual.

And here’s a look at the spread I created for the reverse side, just so I could simulate the appearance of thin paper!

Zoom in on that away team… or landing party as they used to call them.

[Images © CBS/Paramount, Ex Astris Scientia, Tadeo D’Oria, probably others]

“The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before”

More like sewn-on merit badges than the Swiss army communicator badges we’ll visit in later series, the emblems that we first see in the two pilots were very functional and straight-forward, excepting that the department insignias and color combinations were evidently anyone’s guess.

Star Trek: The Original Series

By the time TOS made it to the airwaves, they’d finally settled on the department insignias and color combinations that we’re all familiar with. Still just practical cloth badges that were sewn on the uniforms, the emblems communicated exactly what they needed to. Just not literally with each other yet.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

We’ll discuss the uniforms next week, but let’s start with the makeover to The Motion Picture badges first. We’re going to find that the outfits lack color and that might be because suddenly the badges had way more of it! With way more color coordination, it got confusing to us pretty quickly as to who was who, what department was which, and where the hell the department insignias went!

TOS Films II through VI

The typical officer’s badge that gets introduced in The Wrath of Khan and runs the course of the TOS movies is pretty striking, with its shiny gold metal that finally seems to have some kind of weight, and its rounded rectangle background that makes it really stand out. We’re fans.

We see glimpses of some nice straight-forward badges for Enlisted Crew and Civilian Services in the movies as well, but we got pretty hung up on the strange choice made for Starfleet Security in The Search for Spock. The outlining just looks like an ugly bottlecap, and the usually slim delta shape may have been spending too much time in the replimat, if you catch my drift.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

The TNG combadge is everything you need and more. It’s got a walkie talkie, a universal translator, a homing device, a cheese grater: everything for the Starfleet officer on the go who also wants to look fashionable. And its shape and color contrast are pretty classic too. The delta rests on a golden platter looking like a downright snack. Cut me a slice.

“Future Imperfect” In the imagined future we glimpse in Riker’s faux future, everyone’s still wearing basically the same uniforms but with ugly new badges! Controversially (at least on this podcast), your rank is now on both your collar AND your badge, which seems a touch redundant, and also the rank bars here just end up looking like sewer grates. And boy does it look unbalanced if you’re an ensign with only the bottom bar…

“All Good Things…” et alia We spy the future of the combadge in a couple flashforwards in TNG, DS9, and VOY, and that future is bright and shiny! The asymmetrical shapes behind the outline of the delta look really smart (kinda like a stole worn over a graduation robe – that’s how smart). And keeping the light silver and gold color combination also catches the eye.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and TNG Films

This combadge is super recognizable because we see it the most. It graces our crews throughout Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and most of the TNG films, so its familiarity gives it a boost in popularity. We see another crisp shape and another brilliant combination of those metallic colors that we like so much together. But once you start thinking of the backing as a hair clip, that’s all you can see.

“Relativity” We take a trip to the future in the Voyager episode “Relativity” and it’s pretty grim… for badges anyway. The delta is on its side, which could be interesting, but then it does this weird thing with a roughly textured shape of metal extending from it like it’s flying through spacetime. What we’re left with is a sadly squashed quadrilateral of some kind that has done some bodily harm to our favorite Starfleet shape.

Red Squadron Just for fun, here’s the cadet badge for all the little sickos in Red Squadron. It’s another delta shape on its side, this time with a sharp command insignia that looks like it could be stabbing it? It ends up reminding us a bit of the mirror universe emblems you’re going to see later down the list, and that strikes us as just about right.

Star Trek: Enterprise

We’re in prequel territory, so we’re back to sewn-on badges. As we’ll discuss next week, Enterprise does a great job at bridging the gap in aesthetics between today’s NASA flight suits and the Trek universe uniforms, and the badges that we see (and we see a lot of them because every ship has their own!) are no exception. A couple extra points to the M.A.C.O. badge for the shark joke.

Star Trek: Discovery 

Seasons 1-2 Come the currently running series and we’ve redesigned everything, from the Klingons’ faces to the uniforms to the combadges, which are metal and sleek. We like that the division insignias are back, as they lend to a kind of internal consistency, but what we don’t particularly like is putting rank pips in teeny-tiny little nubbins on the bottom. Like we said about the “Future Imperfect” badges: keep rank where you can see it clearly.

Let’s also take a moment while we’re here to look at that admiral’s badge and quietly ask “why with the wreath of deltas?” Is Starfleet really that conscious of branding that they know to put deltas on everything so you can buy it on etsy for more money than it’s worth? Well, we’ll see in the coming weeks when we talk about uniforms that the answer is “Duh.”

USS Enterprise Crew Pike’s crew from the Enterprise strolls in in season 2 in their new garb with something more like the classic TOS badge shape, but metal. And let me tell you: there’s something just refreshing about a combadge without a ton of bells and whistles. It’s easy to spot with its black outlining; the insignias are clear and crisp. These badges are just a breath of fresh air. It looks like we’re going to see a lot more of these in Strange New Worlds and that alone has us excited.

Seasons 3-4 In the future setting of Discovery, the future Starfleet has a new future combadge… that’s somehow the least futuristic thing about the show, but that’s beside the point. The clamshell oval shape… we’re not terribly keen on. Those damn rank pips are back on the badge because no one has learned anything in 900 years. And the colors, while close to the nice gold and silver we’ve been lauding, look harder to differentiate now. Meh.

Star Trek: Picard 

Season 1 Everyone and their admirals first looked at the new combadge in Picard and for a split second thought it was the same one as in “All Good Things” that you saw earlier, but a closer inspection proves it’s got some differences: the colors are a little more samey and the fatter graduation stoles don’t extend over the top of the delta. It’s a very nice nod to one of the shapes we liked, but does it hold a candle to the original? Check out our favorites below to see.

Visitor badge What a slightly bizarre badge to see grace Jean-Luc Picard’s jacket when he visits HQ. It’s a partly comic and partly tragic effect to see how far the mighty has fallen to be reduced to being a visitor instead of an officer in the first place, and this badge is so huge and clunky and kind of juvenile that it just brings attention to that fact. It looks like a big, awkward bottle opener, which is actually probably the intended effect.

La Sirena We couldn’t help including the very artful and beautiful mermaid badge of Rios’s ship La Sirena. The colors are peaceful and evocative. The negative-space shape is almost too clever for its own good. And of course we acknowledge the nod to the themes of duality in the show since this badge comes in two distinct pieces that have to be worn together. We’ve definitely been lured in by this siren’s song because it’s so beautiful.

Season 2 Adding to the menacing sense of the dark side in the latest trailer for season 2 of Picard is the updated combadge for this alternate dimension / reality / universe / thingy. Everything about it feels slightly wrong, absolutely enormous, and unquestionably violent. This badge isn’t for doing science work; it’s for stabbin’. It’s also ugly as hell (the rank pips look like little staples now?! what?), and we’re gonna have to see if it serves its purpose, because right now we’re a bit put off.

Kelvin Movies

The badges that we see throughout the Kelvinverse movies all harken back to a really stripped down, shiny metal variation on the classic look. And thank goodness! We really appreciate that for once in a modern movie there was a place where less was more. The differences between badges that we see here are all just small variations for specific roles or occasions, and the minimalism of it all just works.

Terran Empire

TOS and ENT mirror universe Let’s take a trip through the dimensional mcguffin to see what they’re doing in the mirror universe when it comes to emblems and insignia. The aesthetic of the Terran Empire is basically “all swords, all the time,” which strikes us as accurate. We have to give some props to the Enterprise globe-getting-sworded for actually including the whole map instead of just the western hemisphere as well.

Discovery mirror universe But oh boy, let’s talk about the overwrought Discovery trainwreck for a second though. The upside-down delta shape is kinda funny if a little on-the-nose AND lazy (kinda like the title sequence we discussed previously), but it’s the mirror universe so we accept it, albeit reluctantly. The utterly strange element though is that the map in this version of the mirror universe is BACKWARDS, which goes from being on-the-nose to punch-in-the-face.

Star Trek: Prodigy

We nearly didn’t notice the new combadge in Prodigy because all the marketing images were still using Janeway’s Voyager combadge. Silly marketing! But in the show itself, we get to see this shiny new toy aboard the Protostar! Its main differentiating factor is that the command star is more abstractly referenced since we only see half of it. Are all the departments going to be like that? It’s an okay combadge; we just weren’t really expecting the need for a new one.

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We see a lot of very similar designs here of course, but some of these badges are an aesthetic delight to see and some of them take us out of the moment whenever they’re onscreen. Here’s where we radioed in overall:

Favorites

Ames: “All Good Things”

Honorable mention: La Sirena

Chris: The Wrath of Khan, et alia

Honorable mention: DS9/VOY

Jake: The Wrath of Khan, et alia

Honorable mention: The Undiscovered Country (Civilian Services)

Guest star Liz: Discovery (seasons 1-2)

Honorable mention: anything with a nice circle/oval!

Least Favorites:

Ames: “Future Imperfect”

Dishonorable mention: Discovery (mirror universe)

Chris:  “Relativity”

Dishonorable mention: The Motion Picture

Jake: Discovery (season 3-4)

Dishonorable mention: The Search for Spock (Starfleet Security)

Guest star Liz: “Relativity”

Dishonorable mention: Picard (season 2)

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