While I generally don't believe in the concept of "personal continuity" (i.e. picking and choosing which episodes you'll accept as canon), here's what I do believe is true: - The current 'Trek-lit' continuity - In TOS, the command division uniform color is GREEN - Starfleet Marines exist, and in TOS, they wear black uniforms
My wife's father's brother changed the spelling of his last name during WWII so it would sound French instead of Italian. So here we have brothers whose last name is spelled differently.
1. The modern novels (with some exceptions) are my personal canon. 2. ENT: "Cogenitor", TOS: "The Alternative Factor", "All Our Yesterdays", TNG: "Suddenly Human", VOY: "Threshold", "Oblivion", "Ashes to Ashes", "Barge of the Dead", and "Shattered" don't exist. 3.Most but not all of TAS is canon. 4. Star Trek 2009, Star Trek Into Darkness, and the IDW comics are somewhat altered. 5. The "Krios Prime" from "The Mind's Eye" and the one from "Precious Cargo" and "The Perfect Mate" are two different planets. 6. All inconsistent stardates are not the true stardate of the work. 7.Spock's line in "Balance of Terror" that "Invisibility is theoretically possible" is different. 8. The Enterprise-A's journey to the center of the galaxy in The Final Frontier was possible because of an unstable intermittent natural wormhole. 9. Sarek, Lwaxana Troi, etc are not Federation "ambassadors" (since they aren't assigned to foreign capitals), but rather a more logical designation such as sub-national ambassador or special emissary 10. Lwaxana Troi gives up her overbearing personality at some point after her canon appearances. 11. Annika Hansen/Seven of Nine ditches her catsuit as soon as the onscreen events of "Endgame" conclude. 12. There are lots of offscreen Hem'Quch Klingons in the TOS era and there are both ridged and ridgeless Romulans. 13. Universal translators do not render the Ferengi as saying "hew-mon" for human. 14. Zefram Cochrane formed the United Earth Space Probe Agency from the remnants of NASA, ESA, etc between 2063 and 2067, and it eventually ascended to become a New United Nations/United Earth agency in the early 22nd century. 15. Starfleet has logically created numeric designations for all stars, planets, etc. which Starfleet officers use. 16. Characters do not refer to Federation "member planets", only "member states"/"capital planets of member states". 17. The United States of America still exists in the Federation as a "historically popular name" or whatever of the (central) North American province of United Earth. 18. The multiverse of the current novels has a plausible version of Star Trek Online. 19. The Earth Spacedock seen in the TOS movies is indeed Starbase 1 and is still active in the 24th century. 20. The Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Gorn, Breen, Tzenkethi, Talarians, etc are part of the Federation by the 31st century.
In TUC there is a Colonel West, he is a Marine. While he seem to be wearing a Starfleet uniform, the uniform is actually the generic uniform of the "armed forces" and is wore by Starfleet, Marines and if there is such also Army personnel. It's not solely a Starfleet uniform.
I agree that Nemesis was pretty awful, but I can accept that Data died. For me however, the scene with Picard and B4 (where he starts to sing) doesn't happen, therefore keeping Data's death as a heroic and noble sacrifice without cheapening it by giving us Data 2.0.
In the opening to the novelization of TMP, Roddenberry (writing as Kirk in the first person) calls TOS an exaggerated dramatization of the five-year mission. There's also a quote from Paula Block in Voyages of Imagination (also here: http://www.canonwars.com/STCanon.html): "Another thing that makes canon a little confusing. Gene R. himself had a habit of decanonizing things. He didn't like the way the animated series turned out, so he proclaimed that it was NOT CANON. He also didn't like a lot of the movies. So he didn't much consider them canon either. And-- okay, I'm really going to scare you with this one--after he got TNG going, he...well...he sort of decided that some of the Original Series wasn't canon either. I had a discussion with him once, where I cited a couple things that were very clearly canon in the Original Series, and he told me he didn't think that way anymore, and that he now thought of TNG as canon wherever there was conflict between the two. He admitted it was revisionist thinking, but so be it.
any event in printed trek fiction or on screen that i enjoyed is canon for me and it doesn 't matter when latter events clearly contradict those events for example the 1980s dccomics trek story explaining explaining why the organian peace treaty is not enforced is canon for me similarly i don't think 'nemesis' was the first time that a starship used ramming as a weapon : i think it happened in the novel 'federation' i enjoyed both these things but they are not canon but there is one thing that is canon and is going to be canon for a very long time : and that is jj abrams star trek any event which hastened the arrival of the universe that nero created should crystalized forever and never tampered with
It's not confusing at all. The owning studios are responsible for declaring what is canon and what is not. Roddenberry was famous for revisionist history. So, of course he decided question the legitimacy of certain things. Particularly the films, where he was all but ignored because he was a creative nightmare. I would never concern myself with Roddenberry's thoughts on canon. If it's onscreen, it happened. And, since it's a make believe fictional universe, it doesn't actually matter too much.
If Paramount had simply let Roddenberry do the time travel movie where Spock murders John F. Kennedy in Dallas with a phaser, everything would have been fine ... right?
One thing's for sure. It would have given Shatner a chance to play Kevin Costner's role. "Back... and to... the left. Back... and to... the left." --Sran
I think the second 5 year mission comes from the fact that TMP was originally planned to be a new TV series. CCC.
I think the idea here was that Data had evolved as far as the writers could take him, and they wanted to create a tie in character in case there was a new series. CCC.