The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3, Episode 5, "Reflections," now streaming on Paramount+.
Starfleet's uniforms are among the most iconic in pop culture, with their distinctive red, gold and blue colors officially part of the franchise's introduction. Yet despite the fact that they're essentially military uniforms, they have undergone a staggering amount of changes over the years. Every Star Trek show has a fresh variation on them, and the franchise's largely successful efforts to keep them in canon mean that its characters switch uniform styles every few years.
Star Trek: Lower Decks takes a sharp jab at the trend in Season 3, Episode 5, "Reflections." In the process, it admits the reality that Star Trek's uniform situation is completely out of hand. But it also quietly acknowledges that -- far from being a detriment -- it's become part of what makes the franchise so fun.
Like a lot of aspects of Star Trek, the uniforms evolved -- sometimes inelegantly -- as part of the franchise's natural development. The first two pilots of the original series featured muted tunics for their respective crews, which were replaced by the classic "tricolor" designs when the series was picked up. (Both were the product of costumer Bill Theiss.) The latter were brighter and fit in with the show's colorful aesthetic more readily. They also provided a benefit for the network, which wanted vivid shows as color TVs slowly replaced black and white models.
The movies took the uniforms in a radically different direction. Star Trek: The Motion Picture went back to far more muted tones, in an effort to match the gritty aesthetic of Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope, which had opened just a few years earlier. Those, in turn, were replaced by "the monster maroons" in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: wine-red uniforms that Kirk and his crew wore for the remainder of their big-screen adventures.
That style arose from the sensibilities of director Nicholas Meyer, who explained the change on the Wrath of Khan Blu-ray. (He wanted Starfleet to more closely resemble a traditional navy akin to the Horatio Hornblower novels.) Star Trek: The Next Generation returned to the tri-color pattern of the original series, which cemented their status as icons of the franchise and which has been followed in some form or another by every Star Trek series since.
Despite this, the need to differentiate one series from another led to a staggering variation in cut and pattern. Starting with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the only thing that's stayed "uniform" are the three colors and the Starfleet logo communicator badges. In other words, it's a hot mess. And like so much else about the franchise, that's become part of the enjoyment: providing cosplayers with increased options, offering rewards and add-ons for games like Star Trek Online and even doing their job of being an easy visual reference to mark which particular show is which. The franchise itself has added to the chaos with each new series, even though those changes aren't usually mentioned by anyone in-world.
Lower Decks itself is as guilty as any other show: their uniforms arrived in an in-world era marked by Deep Space Nine's "grays" which are still worn by the higher-ups on the show. The constant variation is the basis of the joke in "Reflections." Brad Boimler and Beckett Mariner are manning a Starfleet recruitment kiosk at a job fair, where they endure the taunts of other nearby vendors who look down on the fleet. The jabs eventually come around to the uniforms -- specifically the way they keep changing. That's a step too far for the crossover-ready Boimler, who explodes with rage after one of their tormentors pulls the pip off his collar.
It's a funny moment, but Boimler's sensitivity on the matter suggests some real basis for the jabs. Clearly other characters in the Trek universe have noticed all the switching around, and some of them find it decidedly weird. That eccentricity is part and parcel of Star Trek, where even the silliest developments often become beloved traits of the franchise. Lower Decks, as always, gets a big laugh simply by saying the quiet part out loud.
New episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks stream Thursdays on Paramount+.