Are the NuAbrams movies the only canon ?

Of course not. What Orci means is that the canon is the original work from the original creators or owners. Star Trek is, originally and fundamentally, a screen franchise, a TV and movie series owned and produced by a television production company (formerly a TV/film production company before its split). So the canon is the body of television episodes and feature films produced, released, and copyrighted by that studio, while works in prose, comics, or games created by other companies under license from the owners are apocryphal.

Of course it doesn't literally mean that every single frame of film is canon -- that's a nonsensical interpretation. Every creative work is edited in the course of its creation, and the parts that get edited out are not part of the final, official work any more than the leftover chunks of marble on Michelangelo's studio floor were part of David. If you start to define deleted scenes as canon, then you end up with the absurd conclusion that blown takes and bloopers are canon too, or that the shot of the guy with the clapper board at the start of a take is canon, or that the raw FX plates before the animation and compositing are done are canon. And those are obviously nonsensical premises. The film is the finished work that gets released, not the thousands of unused takes and cut scenes that were just part of the raw material.

As for different scenes added in alternate released editions, the thing to understand is that canon is about the whole, not the individual details. Every long-running series will adjust and retcon its details over time -- Kirk's middle initial changing from R to T, or Vulcanians becoming Vulcans, or UESPA becoming Starfleet, or Data routinely using contractions until he suddenly couldn't, or whatever. Those internal contradictions are just as much a part of the canon as the contradictions between the theatrical and director's editions of a movie. Canon is not a guarantee of absolute consistency or "truth," it is merely a delineation between the core material of a franchise and its licensed tie-ins. That core material will inevitably have its own internal inconsistencies and retcons. As a rule, when two bits of canon contradict each other, it's the later one that's taken as gospel, because that, too, is part of the ongoing process of editing and revision by which works of fiction are created. Which is why we accept that Kirk's middle name is Tiberius instead of, ohh, Ruddigore or something.

 

It's funny, it's my least favorite show, and even in its short run it produced more unwatchable episodes to me than any other Trek show -- yet I'm absolutely tickled by this fact. When the NX-01 made its cameo in Marcus' office, I very nearly cheered.

 

Agree.

 

Indeed.

That and the reference to Porthos in 09.

 

You misunderstand. I'm not complaining that the deleted scenes add contradictions to established canon. Quite the opposite. Scenes added (e.g. TMP size of cloud) whose dialogue contradicts the previous edition can easily be fixed by a dub-over. I'm talking about items introduced in scenes that are otherwise unmentioned elsewhere. The Connie in Marcus' office doesn't contradict anything. Khan's baby son doesn't contradict anything. The lack of Klingon tear-ducts doesn't contract anything (that I remember....).

So, how do we deal with these issues?

 

Not to Porthos. Beagles have a lifespan of 14-15 years. Porthos would've been gone for nearly 90 years by the time of Scotty's experiment with "Admiral Archer's beagle." (For that matter, it's unlikely that Jonathan Archer would still be alive by then; I took the line to be a reference to a child or grandchild of Archer's, one who inherited his pet preferences.)

I already answered that. The canon is the finished work, not the bits and pieces that are discarded in the process of construction. Anything outside the work itself is apocryphal, whether it's a deleted scene or an earlier script draft or a tie-in novel or comic. It may not contradict anything, but there's no reason future canon can't contradict it, because it's not part of the actual, official story.

Although, as I said, canon can just as easily contradict things that are part of the official story, because it is, after all, just a story. So canon is not a guarantee of "reality" or consistency. And it's certainly not a set of instructions that fans have to worry about following. It's just a term of literary criticism used to distinguish the core work, with all its inconsistencies and imperfections, from everything else. And deleted scenes fall under "everything else."

 

Ignore the stuff that wasn't part of the finished product. The point of a canon is to have a body of work that is basically agreed upon as ``the stuff that we have to pay attention to when commenting on or drawing inspiration from the thing''.

Cut scenes can be interesting, but they can't let us draw any conclusion. Was a scene cut because it muddled the theme of the movie? Was it cut just for time? Was it cut because the director decided it suggested implications he didn't want? Was it cut because the only really good take included an extra sneezing right where you can't miss it? How can whether Khan has a Baby Son on board the Reliant depend on things that aren't in the text?

 

I wouldn't put it that way. There's nothing wrong with paying attention to apocrypha, and nobody "has to" do anything when it comes to analyzing or appreciating fiction. Canon is not a value judgment or a No Trespassing sign; it's just a way of defining the distinction in category and origin between the core work and its derived apocrypha.

As I understand it, the concept of a "literary canon" was first used in the context of Sherlock Holmes, when the question was raised about whether the Holmes play by William Gillette -- which Doyle approved, but which was inconsistent with Doyle's stories in a number of ways -- should be counted as part of the "reality" of the stories written by Doyle himself. And even from the start, it was an ambiguous issue. Nominally, the 60 Doyle works are the canon and the play and all the thousands of subsequent Holmes pastiches, films, and the like are apocrypha. But while the Gillette play contradicted the canon, Doyle actually borrowed a character from it (the pageboy Billy) in later canonical Holmes stories -- and the play contributed much to the popular image of Sherlock Holmes, including the curved pipe, the deerstalker hat (which did not originate in the play but was widely popularized by its promotional art), and the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson." So even though it is clearly not part of the canon, it still very much deserves to be paid attention to. The label "canon" does not exist to dismiss or denounce apocrypha, merely to classify it as separate.

 

Yes, and canon also includes the outtakes and bloopers, such as characters messing up their lines and then swearing, reciting their lines in goofy voices, singing and dancing on set, etc. All of this is included in "that which is filmed."



Kor

 

A case can be well made that mistakes don't count. Continuity errors, for example, are a curiosity but forgiven from canon.

 

Some contradictions are errors, others are deliberate adjustments -- like the Enterprise going from an Earth ship in the early first season of TOS to a Federation ship later on, and lithium crystals becoming dilithium. In a novel, you can rewrite and tweak and refine everything before it's published, but in an episodic series, by the time you think up a better alternative to your first idea, the first idea is already out there. So you just have to retcon it, pretend your new version is the way it always was, and trust your audience to understand that it's a work in progress that's being refined as it goes.

So canon is not about consistency or exact details. The canon is still a fictional account, and thus subject to inconsistency and revision. It's just the fiction that comes from the original storytellers rather than other storytellers building on their work. (Or, in the case of a media franchise with many creators, it's the fiction that's generated by the copyright owners rather than licensed to other companies.) Gene Roddenberry liked to suggest that Star Trek was just a dramatization of the "real" adventures of the Enterprise crew, and that dramatization was sometimes inaccurate in the details. Which was why he felt free to change those details as he went, like redesigning the Klingon makeup for ST:TMP. Canon isn't about exact details, it's about the overall narrative being presented. Lithium crystals are part of the canon, but since the overall narrative says they're actually dilithium, we disregard the alternate name. But Khan's baby or Commander Martin Madden is not part of the canon, because neither one made it into the finished narrative at all.

 

That's all good about story continuity. But Kor posed a reductio ad absurdum argument to diminish WarpFactorZ's point that scenes which were filmed could be considered canon. I was speaking mainly of bloopers such as blown lines and boom mics dropping into frame. No one believes that if a boom mic gets past editing, or a camera crew is briefly seen, that it implies there are camera crews and boom mics in every part of the ship.

 

^Sure, of course. The problem is when people think of canon as something that applies on the level of exact, individual details -- that, say, if the same prop is used on two unrelated alien planets, it must be treated as the exact same prop, or that if a character mentions a date that's hard to reconcile with other information, we're nonetheless required to accept that date information as exact and literal. Since this is a work of fiction constructed by many hands, inconsistency in the details is inevitable. The word "canon" is meant to describe the work in the aggregate, not to be a binding requirement that we accept every last tiny detail. It's not about whether this shot or that line is "canon." Canon is a noun, not an adjective. The shows and movies are the canon. The overall story they tell is what they presume to have "really" happened. But the individual details are not necessarily binding, whether it's a boom mike in the shot or "James R. Kirk" on a tombstone.

 

Don't care about canon.

 

You don't have to. One of the biggest misunderstandings about canon is that it's some kind of rule that's binding on fans. It's actually just a descriptive label to differentiate the core material from its tie-ins, but fandom insists on ascribing all sorts of mythical importance to it and worrying more about it than they have any reason to.

Fans don't have to care about canon because they aren't employed by the film or TV studio and don't have to follow its instructions. The makers of the shows or films don't have to care about canon because what they create is automatically the canon by definition, even when it changes older canon. The only people who actually do have to care about canon are people like me -- professional tie-in authors working under license from the studio and contractually obligated to avoid contradicting the canon.

Of course it can be useful to think about canon as a category label, as a way of differentiating the core work from derivative works in a critical discussion. But that's just classification, like differentiating insects from arachnids or Old World monkeys from New World monkeys, say. It's not a matter of value judgment or "truth," since it's all just made-up stories anyway. And it's not something anyone needs to worry about, just something to consider if one is curious. So there's no need for it to be a matter of controversy or drama.

 

Same here.

It became a creative straitjacket for Trek a long time ago.

 

So far every Star Trek tv show and movie has been part of the same canon. The only divergence is the Abrams movies which take place in a different reality but even with that it's a variation of the universe we've had since 1966 right down to Nimoy's Spock crossing over.

Me personally I consider it all canon but I do make the disctinction between the "Prime" universe and the Abrams universe in the same way I make the distinction between the Prime and Mirror Universe or any other parallel realities for that matter. The main universe with all of the continuity (errors and all) is the Prime Universe. Every canon Star Trek production to date is set in that universe apart from the 2 recent movies and that reality is an offshoot of the Prime Universe too so it's all connected.

I take deleted scenes as canon as long as they don't contradict or invalidate anything that they were cut from. The deleted scenes from Nemesis can easily be canon for example.

 

I'm not sure I agree with this.

Changing established continuity is quite insulting when it's done on a grand scale. If I've seen, for example, Captain Smith's identical twin brother in multiple episodes I'm going to take issue if Captain Smith states a few seasons later he's an only child. Writers should respect their audience's intelligence. Changing established story material because it's inconvenient to the current storyline being written is incredibly lazy and an insult to those who have stuck with the series long enough to remember.

I agree there's no need for controversy or drama over any of this but Captain Smith is my favourite character

 

I think that's taking it rather personally, and it's also something of a straw man example. In the past, that sort of thing was done from time to time -- see Chuck Cunningham in Happy Days -- but that was when nobody expected old TV episodes to ever be released on home video or catalogued on Wikipedia, and so continuity wasn't as great a concern. Today, creators are more aware of audiences' regard for continuity, and so changes to canon are likely to be subtle when they do happen.

But there are still cases where large-scale changes to canon are considered appropriate. Dallas retconned an entire season as a dream in order to bring a popular character back from the dead, although I gather that wasn't a universally appreciated decision. Neil Blomkamp's Alien 5, if it ever gets made, will reportedly ignore Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, just as Superman Returns ignored Superman III/IV. Sometimes the audience doesn't mind a change to the canon, or even welcomes it.

Bottom line, these aren't documentaries, they're stories. We're all just pretending any of it happened at all. And that means that if some part of it didn't really work that well, we can pretend it happened differently or didn't happen at all. Of course I'm not saying that it should be done willy-nilly; I'm just saying it's misunderstanding how fiction works to assume that "canon" means every last tiny detail is perpetually immutable.