Indeed, it is because of the current storyline in STO that we now have the official name "Kelvin Timeline" for what we have been referring to as the "Abramsverse" for the past seven years.
Actually "Kelvin Timeline" was coined by Mike and Denise Okuda for the updated
Star Trek Encyclopedia that's coming out soon. STO got the name from that and was able to use it first.
Wouldn't it be possible to not have Romulus destroyed in the novel timeline?
Not unless it were clearly marked as an alternate reality like
Myriad Universes, I think.
I don't really understand why they can't just have Romulus be destroyed. Don't mention specifics. No involvement from Spock, nothing about Red Matter or supernovas. Just that Romulus was destroyed in a horrible circumstance.
That
might be possible, depending on the specific parameters used by the approval process. Sometimes you're allowed to mention something even if you're not allowed to make it the focus of a story -- like how I was required to write out the Spider-Man cameo in my X-Men novel but was still allowed to mention that Spidey was involved in the action just a block away. But I'm not sure if that would apply here as well.
Conversely I don't see why they should even be bound to not contradict a film which they are at the same time not permitted to reference.
Because it's still part of the franchise we're tying into whether we get to use it or not.
Star Trek is the universe defined by the onscreen canon. That is the real thing. We are telling conjectural stories that are set against the backdrop of that universe, by permission of its owners. Some of us get more limited permission than others, but that doesn't change the nature of the universe we're writing about. The fact that a licensee may have a
lessened right to use every element of that universe does not somehow give them an
increased right to redefine the very nature of that universe. It's like if someone lets you stay in their house but forbids you from going into their private workroom. The workroom is still part of their house, you just don't have access to it.
Back in the '90s, DC had the license to TOS and TNG, but Malibu had the license to DS9. That didn't allow DC to ignore DS9 or contradict it. They still had to be true to the entire canon; they just couldn't actively use every part of it. (Although they did collaborate with Malibu on a crossover miniseries.)
It's no different then Kirk recognizing Sarek in TFF even though it wasn't Mark Lenard. Or the hologram of T'Pau in "Darkling" not looking like Celia Lovsky, but still looking like T'Pau to the people in-universe. Or them swapping Owen Paris's actor from Warren Munson to Richard Herd.
Or the two Saaviks, the two DaiMon Boks, the two Zefram Cochranes, the three Tora Ziyals, etc.
With TOS, I do not like to accept the "evergreen" status. The original actors were the "template" to those iconic characters. I do not feel that those characters are "actor-interchangeable".
Except there are multiple instances where the actors
were interchanged, like Saavik and the others. It's just a matter of what you're used to.
And really, the folks who cast the new movies did an astonishing job. The new ensemble is just fantastic, both at capturing the spirit of the characters and at just being damn good actors in their own right. There are a lot of things the movies get criticized for, but the casting hasn't really been one of them as far as I've heard. The new ensemble is solid proof that recasting
can work, even with characters that have been strongly identified with a single actor for decades.
Consider: thirty years from now, will there be another re-casting if they stay with TOS characters?
Of course. That's what you do with enduring characters like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond or Tarzan or Batman or Hamlet or King Arthur or anyone else. Why should we condemn great roles like Kirk, Spock, and the others to cultural obsolescence by forbidding them from being reinvented for new generations like so many other great characters have been?
Really, for most of history, the norm was for most every character in drama to be played by multiple different actors. Since all people had were live plays, that was really the only way that people in different places and different generations could even know those characters. It's only in the past century or so since film came along -- a blink of an eye on the scale of human civilization -- that it's been possible to keep watching the same actors in the same roles in the same production even generations after the fact. So that's really an artificial limitation. How can it possibly be wrong to do something that was normal for all dramatic roles for thousands and thousands of years?
Again, TOS is not "evergreen", in my opinion.
Which sounds like a very negative thing to say about TOS. We're talking about a franchise whose core idea was about seeking out the new and embracing the future. How do you honor TOS by saying it should be an unchanging relic of the past?
The problem will occur with the next feature film and the Chekov character, will it not?
I think the most tasteful thing to do is to retire the character, to say that Chekov has been promoted and is off on the
Reliant or some other ship. After all, Chekov was only in 36 episodes of TOS, less than half the series, and zero episodes of TAS. He's not an indispensable character.
No reason the same thing couldn't happen here.
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