I'm going to tackle commenting on this thread page-by-page, so as not to make it too long at once. I haven't read page 2 and beyond yet, so please don't be annoyed if something I bring up has been discussed/refuted later on in the thread.
Heh, I'm reminded of a Voyager fanfic I read recently, in which Janeway and Chakotay happily danced the night away in a disco holodeck program. The music of choice was ABBA.
Vulcan has no moon. Mentioned once. Well, so was "Vulcan was conquered." Nobody cites that one. And we saw a Vulcan moon in both Yesteryear AND Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It's also a charming plot point in several books. (NOT CANON! UNCLEAN!)
What we saw was Vulcan's twin planet - two planets that revolve around a common center of gravity in the same orbit.
Does Star Trek have money? Yep. I can point to several places in TOS and TNG. But wait! In Star Trek: The Voyage Home they talk about NOT having money! Does that one reference later reinforced by later TNG examples override TOS?
I interpret this whole mess to mean that "we don't use money" was a lazy way of saying "we have an economy that exists, but the Federation worlds do not use physical currency." This may have come into effect between TOS and TVH; the only TOS episode in which physical currency might have exchanged hands is "The Trouble With Tribbles". But since Cyrano Jones gave Uhura a tribble instead of her having to buy it, we'll never know if she would have made an electronic transaction or if she had real credits tucked away in a very tiny purse somewhere. As for TVH, Kirk could hardly access a bank account that wouldn't exist for another 300 years.
We do know that Beverly uses some sort of electronic currency. She had to buy that hideous cloth
somehow, and clearly said to charge it to her account on the Enterprise.
Here's one that's going to be super relevant: Woman can't command starships. Mentioned as part of the plot in a terrible (TERRIBLE) episode. And we've since seen LOTS of women captains in Starfleet. (First seen in the same movie that gave us "No money" as it happens.)
I took that to be merely Janice Lester's perception of Starfleet. She wanted to be a captain, went as far as she could in Starfleet, and at some point she failed. She didn't take it well and latched on to the idea that the reason for her failure was because she was a woman, not because there was some other reason she hadn't succeeded.
James R. Kirk: Stop. Just please stop.
Gary was forgetful? Maybe "R." stood for some nickname Gary had for Kirk. Who knows?
Internal consistency is absolutely essential to any kind of world-building. That's what makes fantasy worlds work, you contradicting established lore makes the world less believable. The problem is Trek contradicts itself A LOT. As pointed out above a lot of it can be rationalized if you're twisting yourself into mental contortions to figure it out, but a lot can't be. TOS has so many contradictions to the rest of the franchise it should almost all be disregarded as Canon where it disagrees with other Canon. And sometimes that's what happens e.g. Spock quotes 37 million dead from WWIII, which is revised to 600 million in TNG and 600 million is repeated in Voyager.
I remember reading a
Best of Trek essay a long time ago, in which the author did a meticulous breakdown of every inconsistency in TOS (this was pre-TNG), and said that if you take every inconsistency as evidence that the episode in question had taken place in an alternate universe, then TOS had taken place in several dozen different alternate universes.
I think I probably write the same thing every time this comes up. But my feelings are that, while there should be, at least, marginal respect paid towards what has come before - both narrative and aesthetically - we shouldn't expect 100% adherence to canon. You can't expect CBS to finance a show where the sets, uniforms, and story telling match what was the norm in the 60's. At the end of the day, good story telling is what will keep the franchise alive.
The Star Trek Continues fan film people have managed to do exactly that - granted, they slip up on a few things now and then, but the majority of their episodes have the same look and feel as a 1960s episode.
They also do it as a shot facing Spock looking at the city with the moon behind him. Then they do a reverse and it looks like: THERE'S ANOTHER MOON.
