This is why Star Trek needs to be completely rebooted. A throwaway line completely eliminates an entire avenue of exploration or requires so much pedantic sidestepping that it might as well throw out the whole thing.
The Forgotten Enterprise (Pre-1701 - Robert April)
- Thread starter PixelMagic
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Not really. Star Trek has been freely contradicting such throwaway lines for half a century now, and fandom has spent half a century concocting handwaves to rationalize the inconsistencies. The old Trek Magazine and the Best of Trek books collecting its articles had a regular feature called "Star Trek Mysteries Solved" that attempted to explain away the inconsistencies. Even with only TOS and TAS to contend with, it was a long-running feature. And countless other inconsistencies have been added since then, both between different series and within any single series.
I certainly wouldn't be averse to a reboot, of course; by this point, so many of Trek's core historical, scientific, and cultural assumptions are outdated that it could really benefit from a fresh start. But little continuity glitches like the one about the number of Enterprises are comparatively trivial. The reason for a reboot isn't such niggling little continuity details, but the bigger-picture concern of updating the worldbuilding based on more modern insights and understandings, as well as avoiding inevitable obsolescence as the real calendar catches up with Trek history. For instance, a full reboot of TOS would allow making the main cast more diverse -- say, have a black McCoy, a gender-swapped Chekov, that sort of thing. It would allow pushing things like the Eugenics Wars or the invention of warp drive a few more generations into the future. It would allow treating things like nanotechnology and genetic modification as standardized human technologies rather than things used only by aliens or villains. And so on.
Seriously, the fact that there can't be another ship named Enterprise between the NX-01 and the 1701 is grounds enough for a wholesale reboot?
They called that CAPRICA, so...
I don't really know that you can do nu-Trek anymore without some of the old mythos. The way things are going--it's all cyberpunk.
How odd to single that out as a sole example of things that are commonplace in most science fiction and have been for decades. I was actually thinking more along the lines of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, which was (in its early seasons when Robert Hewitt Wolfe was showrunner, before the studio fired him and dumbed it down immensely) a pretty good example of a Trek-like universe with a more up-to-date approach to concepts like AI, nanotech, and human genetic enhancement.
Keep in mind that TV/movie sci-fi is usually a couple of decades behind the state of the art in prose SF. What I'm pointing out is that TOS is rooted in the assumptions of the pulp sci-fi of the '50s and '60s, and in some ways even the '40s. Science fiction has evolved a very long way since then, and there are countless possible ways to reinterpret the basic ideas, characters, and themes of Trek through a more modern set of concepts.
Huh? Of course there would be "some of the old mythos" -- that's how an update works, by blending the old and the new, by filtering the classic ideas through a new interpretation that makes them fresh. That's part of the potential of a new interpretation -- the freedom to remix things, to take different facets of the original and blend them together to create new possibilities. Like what Elementary did with Irene Adler and Moriarty, say.
Cyberpunk's peak was a generation ago in literature, and nearly that long ago in mass media. It's been over a decade a half since The Matrix. I'm sure it's still around, but it's just one thread out of many.
More like a desire for a slavish adherence to decades of "canon" largely built on throwaway lines or clumsy plot contrivances. People savaged Enterprise's premiere because of a throwaway line about first contact with the Klingons being disastrous.
Never mind that "first contact" could refer to a decades-long period the way we were refer to Columbus's discovery of the Americas.
Also because Picard never actually said it was humanity's first contact with the Klingons that led to decades of conflict. People just jump to that conclusion. He just said it was a first contact. I asserted in (IIRC) my first Rise of the Federation novel that it was actually Vulcan's first contact with the Klingons that Picard had been referring to.
Or we can just ignore the offending throwaway line(s). Saying "screw it, reboot the whole thing" over throwaway lines really is a silly overreaction.
Most of the time we just go, "well technically this isn't a 'Federation starship', but more a Earth Exploration Vessel, or an Andorian Imperial Guard ship on load to the United Earth Space Probe Agency for the duration. They renamed it Enterprise because no human would effectively pronounce the original name. It happens to be similar to human designs because it was built at a human contracted yard for the Andorian fleet because they won the bid.
"Eliminates an entire avenue of exploration"? Isn't that the same as saying that it's a bad thing we can't have Kirk's long-lost brother suddenly appear out of nowhere (because he had one and we met him and he didn't move a lot)?
It sounds to me like a damn good thing the Trek universe piles up bits and pieces that keep others from popping up with their mounting weight. It's not as if we could ever have enough of those to really stop Sam Kirk from being mysteriously resurrected and renamed Bob. But we can always hope.
Timo Saloniemi
It's because people can't ignore the throwaway lines that it gets tiresome. I thoroughly enjoyed most of Enterprise but it was painfully tedious to watch people tear it apart based on bits and pieces of information. The Okudas are awesome and compiled a lot of those into the Star Trek Chronology but that was always meant as extrapolation and thought exercise, not hard and fast rules. Same with Sternbach and the technical manual.
Things that affect the plot are certainly part of world-building and worth remembering. That's why I'll grudgingly accept that the Romulans having cloaking devices in the Enterprise era is questionable. Although I also find many of the conceits in Balance of Terror to be clumsy ways for the episode to more closely emulate Das Boot.
I don't think so because it takes "world building" and puts it in a little bottle. A lot if things in TNG and TOS weren't meant to establish events but to put a benchmark for how the audience should accept them. By the time DS9 and Voyager came around, there was a greater appreciation for "If a character says this, it effectively means we can't change it."
So, if Enterprise wants to tell a story about something that happened and was mentioned in TOS--or, now, Discovery--it has to not just tiptoe around specific details of that event (like humans never seeing a Romulan) but possibly contemporaneous events that have no bearing on the main story or the story at hand.
I can't help but use the Picard line about first contact with the Klingons. It was a throwaway line that became enmeshed in "canon" and stood in the way of telling several very good stories.
This is also a great approach! I like your method
To be honest, a lot of the problems people had with Enterprise was that it just wasn't that good a show. The writing was second-rate, and there were a large number of episodes which were largely rehashes of things from previous Treks. The continuity complaints stem from that mostly, if the show had been better written fandom would probably gloss over them. The truth is, Enterprise's continuity isn't much worse than the other Treks, it's just magnified because people were unsatisfied with the show overall and continuity seemed an easy target.
Although, that said, some of the things where they played fast and loose with the continuity did just seem lazy. After all, it's set 100 years prior to TOS, and they've already established plenty of fertile story ground with world-building stuff like the conflict between the Vulcans and Andorians, the "space boomer" lifestyle on the space freighters, and even the Temporal Cold War and it's related arc about the aliens who were putting civilian Suliban in internment camps. But rather than addressing any of those storylines, let's bring the Ferengi in for an episode.
I'm afraid I really don't see what story ideas that prevented.
No such thing as what "people" can do. Some people yes, other people no. I daresay the majority of viewers don't obsess over the nitpicky details the way a few tend to do. It's just that those few make a lot more noise about it.
There have been countless cloaking-device inconsistencies over the franchise. "Enterprise Incident" cloaks were completely undetectable, but ST III cloaks had a visual distortion. That distortion was gone by ST VI, and the cloaks could be detected by their ships' gas exhaust. But by TNG some seven decades later, cloaked ships were completely undetectable again. The Mirror Universe Klingons had cloaks in "Crossover" but none in "The Emperor's New Cloak." And so on.
The only way it makes sense is if you assume that cloaking devices aren't one technology but many. Logically, there would be an ongoing arms race between stealth and detection, just like in real life. Every time a new stealth technology is developed, eventually new detection methods are devised to penetrate it, and that particular type of cloak becomes obsolete, but then a different cloaking approach is devised to block the new detection methods, and it goes back and forth and back and forth. Not only does that resolve the inconsistencies, but it just plain makes sense in its own right. It would actually be completely nonsensical for all cloaking devices over the course of centuries to be the exact same unchanging technology, because of course everyone would be constantly inventing new ways to pierce cloaks.
I'm bewildered by the assumption that just because a character says something, that means it must be taken as absolutely accurate and truthful. That's completely unrealistic. People are fallible. They make mistakes. They misstate things, they misremember things, they get things wrong, and sometimes they intentionally lie. There's a reason hearsay isn't admissible as evidence in court. What a person says doesn't prove anything except what they believe to be true, or what they want to convince their listeners is true. Without external corroboration, there's no guarantee that a personal anecdote or assertion is accurate or even honest.
So people who are concerned with fictional continuity make things far too hard on themselves by assuming that every single spoken word must be absolutely accurate. A lot of continuity errors are easy to brush off if you just assume they're misstatements or errors on the part of the speakers. And it's simply more realistic to allow fictional characters to be as fallible as real people are.
No, it didn't. On the contrary -- the makers of ENT totally ignored it and did what they wanted with the Klingons anyway. Fandom has this warped, deluded notion that "canon" is some kind of holy law imposed on the creators and tying their hands. That's totally backward and ridiculous. Canon is just a word for the stories the creators tell. They are the ones who dictate what canon does, not the other way around. The creators of fictional canons have always been and will always be perfectly free to rewrite their own universes as completely as they want -- like when the makers of Dallas retconned a whole season into a dream just so they could bring one character back from the dead when the actor agreed to return. Or like when Marvel had John Byrne give Spider-Man a new, "updated" origin story that was meant to be a canonical replacement for the original one, but it turned out so badly that later writers just quietly ignored it and went back to the old canon. The creators of canon decide what bits of old canon they want to keep and what bits they want to discard. What they create is the canon by definition, automatically, no matter what they do. And new canon overwrites old canon all the time.
The only people who are actually restricted by canon are people like me, writers of licensed tie-ins. We're just borrowing other people's toys, so we have to put them back the way we found them. But the people who own the toys can modify or reassemble them however they want. It's not history, just make-believe, so it can be changed.
It wasn't even that, really. The fact is, every new incarnation of Trek has garnered the exact same complaints and criticisms. Go back to the early '80s and you can find fan letters denouncing TMP and TWOK in exactly the same terms used to denounce ENT in the 2000s and the Kelvin films in the 2010s. A lot of fans -- and TOS actors -- didn't accept TNG as "real" Star Trek for years after it premiered; it wasn't fully accepted until "The Best of Both Worlds" happened and blew everyone away. So it's just some people's kneejerk rejection of anything new and different. Sure, the quality of the work can help overcome those objections for many people, but there are some who will never let go of their intolerance for change.
Unless the computer is alluding to PREVIOUS Federation ships named Enterprise (since Scotty did begin the request saying "I want to see my old ship."). So the five ships could be
1. NCC-688
2. NCC-1701
3. NCC-1701-A
4. NCC-1701-B
5. NCC-1701-C
2. NCC-1701
3. NCC-1701-A
4. NCC-1701-B
5. NCC-1701-C
Scotty specified NCC-1701 and the computer pretty much understood him at that point even as he drunkenly rattled off a further clarification.
Of course, Scotty actually served on THREE of those ships, and served on the TMP version of the Enterprise longer than he did the TOS version, so further clarification would have been needed anyway, don't you think?
NCC-688? What NCC-688? There's no Enterprise with a registry of NCC-688.
Scotty served on two Enterprises. The 1701 and the 1701-A.
Yet.
Some sadistic part of me is waiting to see the wailing and gnashing of teeth the first time Discovery commits some sort of major canon violation. A reference to an earlier version of the Enterprise with a different registry number would accomplish that nicely.
And the -B, for like a day and a half.
He was a guest on board the 1701-B not commissioned/stationed/serving there.
Until that happens though we are left with the canon that is already established. Not some hypothetical that you think might happen. Fact: The 1701-D was the fifth Federation ship named USS Enterprise.
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