The other day, I read the Vanguard article in the new Star Trek magazine, and I was quite blown away. I consider Vanguard one of my favourite book series, and absolutely adore it, but I've always enjoyed them for the books themselves. I've only watched isolated episodes of the Original Series. Any references beyond the totally obvious (Hey, there's Gary Mitchell! Hey, there's Captain Kirk!) went totally over my head, and I had no idea at all that Vanguard, as well as being kick-ass stories in their own right, was also creating the epic glue to hold the Original Series episodic stories together. With Open Secrets coming out next year, I've been planning on rereading the series, but with the added knowledge from that article, I now want to reread it with the context of the Original Series stuff. I'm excited to see how it'll change the way I see the stories with this whole new layer on top of it. That being said, has anyone made a list of episodes related to Vanguard? Would anyone be willing to? Kind of like, watch these episodes, then read book 1, then watch these other episodes, and read book 2, etc.
^ I don't know that there's anything which would be considered "required viewing" so far as Vanguard goes. The first three books take place after "Where No Man Has Gone Before" but before "The Corbomite Manuever," and therefore don't really play directly off events from any TOS episode. Also, the intent of the series is to add a new context to TOS. Rather than simply offering sequels to episodes or picking up a dangling plot thread and running with it, Vanguard (hopefully) will end up showing how events from the series did not take place in vacuum, and how events in and around the Taurus Reach might impact the Trek tapestry as a whole. Open Secrets will continue this, but will unfold over a greater period of time. Events from certain TOS episodes will play into the storylines to varying degrees, but more as a means of showing how the "bigger picture" is evolving both within and beyond the Taurus Reach, rather than as direct ties to the book itself (or vice versa). And then, Mack will come in and blow up whatever's left in Book 5.
Hm... so instead of picking out single episodes, and watching and reading in a certain order, it's a matter of meshing all of Trek TV with all of the Vanguard series. It's a more holistic approach than the piecemeal-ish list I was looking for. Which is even more awesome, when I think about it, but it leaves no shortcuts for me other than to watch all of TOS... which really *is* something I should get around to doing anyway...
I would guess watching all the episodes would be a good idea. Something tells me the answer to T'Prynn's katra problem is going to be something out of Spock's Brain.
I'm not positive, but I think Vanguard might have been mentioned as a possible future comic series, along with Titan.
The original series is probably the best Trek, which is one of the things that attracted me to Vanguard in the first place. However there are some differences in tone and the type of storytelling done in Vanguard compared to TOS. Most of that comes from the fact that society isn't as uptight about certain things any more, I mean TOS was shocking by having one of the first bi-racial kisses, I can only imagine what people would have said if they could have read Vanguard back then. But once you allow for that difference, the two mesh together really well.
More than one, actually. Shatner also kissed France Nuyen, who's half-Vietnamese. That was actually filmed well before the Kirk-Uhura kiss, but aired later.