Bring Back Kathryn Janeway to the Voyager books! Online Petition!

HAHA, yeah I have to back this one myself. I was just saying in a conversation at st.com that we need to know what the next movie will be about that way we can move on from speculating about it to complaining about it.

 

But there is a difference between historical fiction and a historical reenactment. It was my understanding that TATV would be compared to a reenactment of the Titanic as opposed to the film Titanic. Of course, even by that example there will be errors in the reenactment since we don't have the whole story of what went down that night. However the deaths of key characters are not in dispute.

The concept that Section 31 covered up the facts is believable and a great way to work around the problems with the episode, by the episode alone, we have no reason to believe the program was historical fiction since Riker and Troi speak of those events as if they happened in reality, not just in a story.

 

It certainly did.

But a reenactment is not a primary source. In the study of history, the more removed a source is from the event you're studying, the less it can be trusted. You can't just assume it's an accurate representation of the truth. Even the most sincere and well-intentioned chronicler or reconstructor of history is still going to have a set of biases or assumptions through which they filter their interpretation of events. Even a primary source -- meaning a firsthand account by a witness or participant in the event being studied -- can't be relied on absolutely because of that inherent bias or selectivity in human experience. Even raw film or video footage is selective by what it chooses to point at and what it excludes from the frame. So historians are trained to be skeptical of every source, and not to treat any source as authoritative by itself. Everything has to be corroborated by other sources.

And the farther a source is removed from the original events, the less you can rely on it to be accurate, because it's going to be filtered through multiple layers of interpretation and distortion and there's no way of telling what kinds of error might have been introduced. Re-enactments can and do get things wrong. Myths and folklore get confused with facts. There are historians today who sincerely believe that Europeans thought the Earth was flat before Columbus "proved" otherwise, even though that was a myth invented by Washington Irving and his contemporaries centuries later. And those are real historians. The errors you find in popular, mass-media programming that purports to re-enact historical events are likely to be even greater.

Yeah, and a lot of people believe things about the past that are not actually correct, because history is not an exact science and because misinformation and misinterpretations about the past will inevitably arise. Columbus didn't prove the Earth was round, an apple never fell on Isaac Newton's head, and George Washington didn't wear wooden dentures, but millions of people believe that these myths are historical facts. Even trained historians don't necessarily know for a fact what happened in the past -- but they know they don't know for a fact and are thus more careful about verifying their sources than a layperson like Riker or Troi would be.

 

Yeah, I realize now that is probably the best way to treat this. I'll admit with the holiday craziness at work, and with my medical problems acting up again, I got a little more annoyed with this whole thing than was really necessary. My sincere apologies.