That episode, yes. Not the whole series.
Discovery made under same licence as Kelvin Timeline?
- Thread starter Jefferies
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That episode, yes. Not the whole series.
Would you not say that the presence of the Borg from Star Trek: First Contact on Earth in Enterprise is proof of an alternate timeline? They weren't there in the original timeline - couldn't have been. (Then again, one *could* get around this by saying that NONE of what we've seen reflects the original unmanipulated timeline. 
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Would you not say that the presence of the Borg from Star Trek: First Contact on Earth in Enterprise is proof of an alternate timeline? They weren't there in the original timeline - couldn't have been. (Then again, one *could* get around this by saying that NONE of what we've seen reflects the original unmanipulated timeline.
I am constantly bewildered by the insistence of some fans on talking about a work of fiction exclusively as if it had actually happened, as if the writers were unable to do anything except observe and report on it. This is all just make-believe. The writers decide what happens. So talking about the writers' intentions overrides any discussion about what happened in-story.
Here's a secret: Virtually no time-travel story ever written makes any damn sense whatsoever. Any story that has anything to do with history being altered or overwritten is a fantasy full of logical contradictions. There is effectively no way to make any consistent sense of it. Time travel is a literary device, a metaphor that does whatever serves a given story. The only "rules" it follows are the demands of the plot. If the writers want it to alter the timeline, it will. If they want the same timeline to endure despite any apparent inconsistencies, then it will.
And the idea that Star Trek has ever had a uniform, consistent "timeline" is a fantasy. It's contradicted itself a thousand different ways without any time travel being involved -- James R. Kirk, lithium crystals, Vulcanians, UESPA, Data using contractions all the time until he suddenly couldn't, the Trill being completely reinvented between their first and second appearances, etc. The "single" timeline of the franchise is always, always changing, because it's fictional and doesn't work the same way as real life. So inconsistency doesn't prove an alternate reality, it just proves that fiction is the product of fallible, mutable human minds.
And they were hoping to do an episode in Season 5 where Susannah Thompson or Alice Krige appeared as a Med Technician on a Starfleet ship who got assimilated and ended up becoming the Borg Queen - so they clearly intended it to be the same or a similar timeline.
Yeah, Midnight's Edge is a load of garbage. They started out with the Sony leaks and now believe anything and everything negative about anything they don't want to see succeed. So tired of people using these videos as facts.
Whether or not their info comes from Fred and Doug, I'm not sure. But it sure sounds like stuff they'd say!
Whether or not their info comes from Fred and Doug, I'm not sure. But it sure sounds like stuff they'd say!
You know, I'll acknowledge that you may have had part of a point. One that probably could have been stated without the condescension you included with it. Yes, it's true. Trek was inconsistent from the start. How dare fans hope for quality in something that they care about? For writers to actually care enough about what we care about to not take the show's humbler origins as an excuse for lazy writing that disregards what came before, or worse, is just flat ignorant of it? But I get what you're saying - we started out eating garbage, so it's okay if that's our diet now: we deserve no better.
I almost never have a problem with a knowing decision to break with canon, if it's to tell a story worth telling. And I've even suggested myself here on this board in the past that Trek's "history" evolves to reflect being the future of our ever-changing present. But there is a decided difference between those two things, and lazy, phoning-it-in writing.
And here's a secret: there are good - even long-running, and even sci-fi - stories whose writers actually manage to show that they care about internal consistency. And, another one: time-travel stories can even be told in ways that are internally consistent - and can even include multiple, separate methods of time travel that each have their own internally consistent rules!
I hope that the people responsible for Discovery take more pride in the quality and consistency of what they're going to show us than you seem to be content to tell us is all Trek deserves.
How would a Starfleet med tech get assimilated? There were no more Borg. They were destroyed.
Okay, you're really missing my point. I'm just trying to clarify what Enterprise was meant to be. The creators' intention was that it was a prequel to TOS/TNG/etc., not an alternate timeline. Matters of fact have nothing to do with value judgments of quality. You can dislike something all you like, as long as you have an accurate understanding of what it is first. Value judgments, especially negative ones, should be based on the most informed understanding possible, as a matter of simple fairness.
Also, you missed the part where I said that every Trek series contains inconsistencies, both with what came before and within itself. TOS was the most inconsistent of all, because it was being made up as it went along. It's impossible for a body of work as gigantic as Star Trek, made by so many different people over such a great length of time, to be devoid of inconsistencies, no matter how much care is put into it.
Again -- massively missing my point. I'm not saying creators shouldn't try to keep things consistent. Heaven knows I go to great lengths to keep my own fiction consistent and plausible -- I often spend more time working on that than I do on the actual writing. As a writer, I'm a huge perfectionist. But as a fan, as a viewer or reader, I've learned to be more forgiving. Because the simple fact is, human beings cannot be infallible. Inconsistencies will happen from time to time no matter how hard we try, and the more gigantic a canon is, the more errors it will inevitably have. And audiences need to be able to understand and forgive that, and to have the willingness to play along with the imperfections that are part of any human creation. That's what willing suspension of disbelief means -- seeing the artifice but choosing to ignore it because you want to enjoy the story. I don't like it when a story I read or watch contains an error, no, but I accept that it's inevitably going to happen sometimes, and I can either whine uselessly about it or just roll with it and use my own imagination to reconcile it, or at worst just try not to think about it.
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