Kirk is in the exact same spot in his career (desk jockey looking to get back to the captain's chair) in both The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan.
Bryan Fuller Stepping Back From Showrunner Role on ‘Star Trek: Discovery’
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Kirk is in the exact same spot in his career (desk jockey looking to get back to the captain's chair) in both The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan.
Reboot doesn't mean all continuity is ignored. It means the writers can cherry pick from the past and use what they like. The classic example would be Crisis On Infinite Earths,where some characters were tweaked, others remade and others not changed at all. And through the years elements from past continuity have crept back in.
No, using a similar or even the same plot is not a sign of creative bankruptcy or bad writing. We've been recycling the same stories and plot's for millennia . A new take on an old story can often add some different to the familiar. Star Trek does this quite often, with varying degrees of success .
Yes, TWOK is a sequel to Space Seed but that doesn't mean it's not also a reboot of TMP or TOS. One does not cancel out the other.
What parts of continuity were ignored in the 'reboots' of TMP or TWOK? (I hope it's something better than the "But-Khan-remembers-Chekov" rubbish!)
That was Meyer changing the set up toy box to his liking. Kind of works, kind of doesn't, mostly it stuck. He rebooted the in universe tech basically. I have heard people argue TMP is a failure because it's basically struck from canon by TWOK and never referred to. Which is untrue, particularly given how much TWOK inherited or reused. It's why I think it's unfair to talk about TWOK as a bigger success than TMP...of course it was, TMP had already done the heavy lifting by starting the whole shebang.
Still naff and irrelevant.
Khan's people changing from an older multi-ethnic group into younger blond Aryan types is the one that springs to mind. TMP being ignored is another. The visual style is different to. Some of the tech, like communicators ,seem to be a step backwards. Then you have the question of Saavik .
So, no cursing?
We just see a different set of Khan's followers. If you remember "Space Seed" didn't show us everyone.
Not a single event from TMP was changed or retconned.
The style and fashion of the '50's is different from the '60s. The '60s different from the '70s and so on. Does that mean that the real world got rebooted?
My cell phone from 10 years ago was a lot smaller than my current smartphone. That's not a step backwards though.
And what about all the rest of the tech, like the phasers, that was the same?
Saavik just got recasted. What about all the rest of the cast that remained the same? Those were a lot more!
Meyer did reboot a lot of the tech to make it more sailing ship like...photon torpedoes became less...advanced. People had visible fastenings on their clothes etc. It is all totally stylistic choices, but I don't think the implications for the wider universe were thought through. I think it's impossible to truthfully say TMP was ignored though, especially when the film reuses shots and models from that film directly. The Animated Series is more advanced technologically than TWOK...but the TWOK great leap backwards for federation tech sticks around.
We see this in the episode "First Contact" with the Malcorians.
If Starfleet determines that a world is about to achieve warp drive then they send in undercover operatives to approach the planet's leadership and ask if the world wants to join.
Which doesn't make a lot of sense. They want you to join, but don't want to share the technology with you.
^ Once a world joins, then the technology can be shared.
The episode "First Contact" doesn't make it sound that way...
First Contact said:
^ Picard says the technology wouldn't be given all at once. He doesn't say it would never be given at all.
Those are some nice rationalizations for the changes. Something we fans excel at.
You seem to be stuck on all or nothing reboots.
Again you're thinking a reboot has to be all or nothing. You can reboot and use the same cast. You can reboot and use some of the cast. You can recast and not reboot.
We see a line of superman and a hear "roll call" of names in Space Seed. The young and very white group we see in TWOK doesn't seem to include the types we saw and heard mention of in Space Seed. I think the "Aryan Youth" look was a deliberate change by Meyer and Bennett.
Well I said ignored. Which is retconned. Pretty much how they did it in the old days. Before you had to make a production out of the change.
In the real world the military doesn't change "fashion" that fast. They aren't looking to Milan, Paris, London and New York for the latest looks. Frankly, I don't care for th TWOK uniforms. I don't like the TMP ones either ( with a couple of exceptions) but they at least tried to be some "future fashion". The problem I have with both is there's no sense of evolution as with real word military uniforms. Like with the "Aryan Youth" the costuming in TMP and TWOK is deliberate departure that reflects the change of tone.
I assume your smart phone does more than your cell phone from 2006 did. The communicators in TWOK don't seem to do more that TOS communicators. They look like throwbacks to "The Cage"!
You seem to be stuck on all or nothing reboots.
Not referring to the recast. But on further thought I'm thinking of the behind the scenes info about Saavik. So forget that one.
Again you're thinking a reboot has to be all or nothing. You can reboot and use the same cast. You can reboot and use some of the cast. You can recast and not reboot.
I still find the style introduced with TWOK very grating. In a show that's changed quite a bit over time I'm somewhat hesitant to call it a reboot but to me the change from TMP to TWOK does look like quite the re-imagining.
From the 2001-like clean and very stylish high tech science fiction look (man, that set design was quite high concept at times!) and the genuinely SciFi plot of TMP...
...to that tedious "submarine warfare in space" feeling of TWOK with its "Navy in Space" feel, its dark and gritty look (because submarines! Clearly...) and the generic revenge plot that wasn't SciFi at all.
This is why I don't really want Nicholas Meyer involved in Discovery even though I like ST6 a lot. I'm just super-tired of the look.
From the 2001-like clean and very stylish high tech science fiction look (man, that set design was quite high concept at times!) and the genuinely SciFi plot of TMP...
...to that tedious "submarine warfare in space" feeling of TWOK with its "Navy in Space" feel, its dark and gritty look (because submarines! Clearly...) and the generic revenge plot that wasn't SciFi at all.
This is why I don't really want Nicholas Meyer involved in Discovery even though I like ST6 a lot. I'm just super-tired of the look.
In-universe TMP takes place in 2271 while TWOK takes place in 2285. That's a 14 year difference. A lot of things can happen and a lot can change in 14 years.
To be fair that whole "submarine-warfare-in-space" feeling in Trek began with the TOS episode "Balance of Terror" and not in TWOK. Nicholas Meyer didn't start it, he just re-surfaced it… (bad pun intended!)
I know but let's not pretend there are in-universe reasons behind the changes. It was a production decision.
Which is why I only mentioned that there's a big change from TMP to TWOK.
I'm aware of "Balance of Terror". Doesn't change that there was a huge shift from TMP to TWOK caused by the people who made the decisions for TWOK.
Of course, but everything is a production decision. It was a sound decision in my opinion because they couldn't have 51 year old Shatner portray 38-39 y.o. Kirk convincingly anymore. And with that age difference growing in each subsequent movie.
Also consistent with TOS. In TOS they had huge shifts from episode to episode from one week to the next. One week it was "submarine-warfare-in-space", the next it was (literary) "Alice-in-Wonderland-theme-planet", etc.
It was TMP that did the shift from TOS to 2001. Both in themes and visual style (sets, costumes, etc.) TWOK just regressed back to TOS forms IMHO.
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