Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

"The Cage" was 2254, so if the date information is correct, DSC would be about a year later.

Or maybe TOS was just a 1960 television production attempting to approximate the future but being limited in its ability to depict future technology. Why do we have to take every detail literally? Roddenberry himself essentially treated the show as a dramatization after the fact, like Dragnet. Or rather, a dramatization before the fact. I think it's best to assume that there's an underlying Platonic Trek universe that the various shows are merely interpreting, filtered through their own technological abilities and artistic styles.

 

Is there to be a novelization of the two-parter ?

 

It's fun?

 

I agree. It's fun to rationalize what we see. Headcanon makes me feel warm inside.

 

I like it too -- it's a large part of what I do for a living -- but it can be taken to excess. Sometimes it's better to just accept a Doylist interpretation and an inaccuracy in the telling of the story than it is to insist on treating every incidental detail as inviolable fact. And trying to rationalize the existence of 1960s technologies in a 23rd-century setting seems like it does more to undermine the credibility of the universe than to increase its consistency. I'm happier to pretend the tech was always as advanced as it can now be portrayed.

 

I don't disagree. I'm not saying that the above example HAS to be the reason why we see what we see. I was just pointing out that it's a pretty fun interpretation; a clever post from a clever poster.

 

Unless they specifically mention something? There's a difference between having a paper printout onscreen that is handed off and read much as a computer screen might be and having a character say, "Will you get me a paper copy of that report?" Is there s difference between dialog "inaccuracies" and shown "inaccuracies"?

If a child wears an obviously fake mustache in a play, we accept that their character's mustache grows from his face and is not taped on. But if that same child's character tells another character to " take my mustache off" and character two untapes it, clearly something different than just an obvious prop is at work.

 

I wish I could like this more than once.

 

Well, as I mentioned on the first page of the thread, I think Roddenberry basically approached ST as Dragnet in space -- not a verbatim depiction of actual events, but a work of fiction dramatizing those events after the fact, and possibly altering details "to protect the innocent" or for dramatic effect. I'm rather taken with that idea and its potential ramifications. What if, as with Dragnet, the various missions we saw the same characters undertaking were actually compiled from the mission logs of multiple different starships? I mean, realistically, no ship and crew are going to have two dozen life-threatening adventures in a single year -- most of their missions would probably be more routine, and there'd be weeks of travel time in between them. But a show dramatizing them could cherry-pick the most exciting incidents from all of Starfleet's ships and fictitiously assign them to the same cast of characters.

Heck, for all we know, Kirk and Spock and the rest could be composite characters, stand-ins for real-life counterparts. Well, the intro to Roddenberry's TMP novelization established that Kirk and Spock were real, but maybe their TV counterparts were embellished and the other characters around them might be unreal -- kinda like how Desilu's The Untouchables featured a fictionalized version of the real Eliot Ness, but surrounded him with otherwise imaginary team members. Certainly some of the more disreputable characters we saw -- Matt Decker, Ronald Tracey, R.M. Merik, Tristan Adams, Harry Mudd, etc. -- might have had their names changed to protect the real parties' reputations. Other characters might have had their names changed because they wouldn't give permission for their real names to be used. Something like the Guardian of Forever, which would probably be highly classified if it existed, might have been completely fictionalized, or altered heavily enough from reality to obscure the facts. (Maybe the "real" version is the massive city with giant speaking statues in Ellison's first draft.) Or maybe it's like Stargate SG-1's Wormhole X-treme, a fictionalized version of a classified project created to discredit leaks about the real thing.

Of course, as a Trek novelist, I'm obligated to treat the events shown onscreen as true, but I find it entertaining to contemplate the alternative possibility that what we saw was just a fictionalization, and to imagine just how far removed from reality it might have been. It's a whole new way of looking at Trek that I never considered before, and it's fun to imagine.

 

Sounds like an interesting idea, especially when you consider how it would perfectly throw our main characters into a sticky situation were the "official" accounts of an incident they're revisiting the site of be found by them to be untrue/generalized.

Sort of like a deliberate "Living Witness" unfaithful, exaggerated re-creation done to obscure/propagandize rather than simply based on lack of knowledge about what really happened...

 

I am suddenly reminded of the final episode of Roseanne and how it threw everything we knew into question.

 

No, that's not what I mean at all -- the premise GR put forth in his TMP novelization was that he was a 23rd-century TV (or equivalent) producer who'd made Star Trek as a work of fiction based on the adventures of Kirk and the Enterprise, like The Untouchables did with Eliot Ness or Stephen J. Cannell's Baa Baa Black Sheep did with "Pappy" Boyington and his Black Sheep Squadron. None of this would be passed off as reality or entered into official reports; it would be understood by the 23rd-century viewer as a fictionalized account based on actual events.

 

Historical fiction. Got it. Either would be interesting, though...

 

I'm pretty sure some other recent-ish Treklit (as in, in the current continuity) has referenced other ships on five-year missions, so it's definitely considered a valid assumption and dare I say it in continuity in the novelverse.

Although I personally really liked the idea from Into Darkness that the five-year mission of the Enterprise was a special thing, or at least the first of it's kind (I recall a Simon Pegg interview calling the Enterprise "the first of the NCC-17 deep space missions" which I loved the sound of)

 

I know of no such plan at this time.

 

I'm not surprised. Beyond didn't get one so...

Thanks David !

 

Once more: I have no objection to the idea that other 5-year missions could exist. I'm just saying we don't have enough actual data to form a conclusion one way or the other. I'm not even arguing Trek continuity here, I'm talking about the more fundamental question of how we formulate hypotheses based on evidence. In general, regardless of the subject matter, taking a single isolated example as proof of a universal pattern is irrational. There's no way of proving whether it's a standard example or an absolutely unique one or anything in between. Not without more data.

So the best response is to keep our minds open to every possibility. We shouldn't assume there weren't other 5-year missions, but neither should we assume that every starship mission in the 23rd century was a 5-year mission. Indeed, it makes no sense whatsoever for that to be the only mission profile in all of Starfleet. Logically, there must be other kinds of mission, and there's canonical evidence in support of that.

 

I don't usually like posts, but this one I did.

 

I think distinguishing between fanon and canon is seldom a bad thing.

(Ohmigod, I just used the c-word. Somebody shoot me now. )