No, but the statement alone is enough to rile the canonistas.Novels aren't canon.
Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x01 - "The Vulcan Hello"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Unless part of that cloak is redirecting/tricking the sensor beam.
Excellent point. Also, a cloaked ship still would have a measurable displacement.
Sulu was initially the ship's botanist (I just rewatched Where No Man... a few days ago) but became the helmsman (his interest in botany nicely maintained in S1 of TOS). No reason why she can't have multiple interests/roles.
I am mostly a reader, not really a poster. I do a mostly pop culture podcast, which I won’t name, and I drop in from time to time to get the faithful’s perspective on all things Trek. I have read most of this thread, along with the others on Discovery, and as always, have appreciated the insights.
I view Star Trek as a framework for telling stories. Not unlike mythology. It’s the story’s that matter, not the small details. Within this framework there is a Federation, there are allies and adversaries, and there was, is, and/or will be a pair of guys named a Kirk and Spock.
If you recount a myth in 1965 it’s interpretation will be shaped by the tenor of the Times (ex: “women can’t be Starship Captains.”) If you tell that same story in 2016 it may evoke different emotions and touch upon different themes (ex: “Klingon Terror Raids”.)
I have watched, and yes, loved Trek since the sixties. I am going to give Discovery a shot. I will not nitpick the details, nor try to shoehorn it into a continuity which was created, in most cases, without any consideration beyond telling the story at hand.
We have had several incarnation’s of Trek that hung on a stalwart captain who makes the morally right choice regardless of its implications. We have seen that. I, for one, am willing to follow a flawed and conflicted protagonist through this universe for a change.
Yes, the uniforms are too sparkly, and the tech looks like the future from 2016 vs.1965, but I want this thing I love to survive, to grow, and to find new people to love it as well. That won’t happen if we try to faithfully recreate something that could not sustain the required viewership in 1968.
I have been to countless conventions, watched every minute of every worthwhile fan production, and even made the pilgrimage to Ticonderoga. Yet I know that the Trek I long to see, while it would make me very happy, could not hold the needed audience today. It is my hope that what Discovery ultimately becomes will make people think likewise about it in decades to come when they sit in their personal holo-spheres, and, fueled by nostalgic fervor, declare “whatever this is, it isn’t Star Trek.”
Go boldly,
Tod
The point of the cloak is that it cancels or conceals those normal emissions, so you can't see its mass or what little gravity it would put out, probably because of some destructive interference with artificial gravitons it puts out to conceal them. A scanning beam hitting it wouldn't be reflected back, but would be intercepted, curved around, and passed on, so it would look like nothing was there.
But in Trek, you have more than just EM waves to hide, so Spock was right - the cost would be enormous. Since Archer's time, we could see through most primitive forms of cloaking tech. TOS claims this was the case from most competing races (god-like races notwithstanding) until Balance of Terror.
Regardless of what you think of the tech, one thing is pretty clear - looking out a window or using a telescope would in no way help you see a cloaked ship, unless that telescope wasn't just a telescope, but some detector looking for things normal ship sensors couldn't detect. But I don't think they were trying to suggest that.
But in Trek, you have more than just EM waves to hide, so Spock was right - the cost would be enormous. Since Archer's time, we could see through most primitive forms of cloaking tech. TOS claims this was the case from most competing races (god-like races notwithstanding) until Balance of Terror.
Regardless of what you think of the tech, one thing is pretty clear - looking out a window or using a telescope would in no way help you see a cloaked ship, unless that telescope wasn't just a telescope, but some detector looking for things normal ship sensors couldn't detect. But I don't think they were trying to suggest that.
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To be ignorant of the details, or just ignore them, is not a little thing. One may not care, particularly if they are interested in the larger story or some social commentary, but I dare say getting the details right hardly ever would get in the way of the larger story or commentary. Getting the details wrong, however, often annoys those who follow the stories and don't just drop in to see one episode now and again.
Consistency within itself is important for any fictional landscape. A violation, without apology or explanation, is a problem. How large a problem it is for you is your choice. As you say, it may not matter to you at all. But don't tell others it shouldn't matter to them, either. Seriously, telling a story but getting the details wrong may be acceptable or even still good, but telling a story and getting the details right is better. Sadly, most often when somebody gets the details wrong it appears to be from ignorance, laziness, or stupidity rather than any genuine need.
Consistency within itself is important for any fictional landscape. A violation, without apology or explanation, is a problem. How large a problem it is for you is your choice. As you say, it may not matter to you at all. But don't tell others it shouldn't matter to them, either. Seriously, telling a story but getting the details wrong may be acceptable or even still good, but telling a story and getting the details right is better. Sadly, most often when somebody gets the details wrong it appears to be from ignorance, laziness, or stupidity rather than any genuine need.
Yes, but... that was one of the most egregiously stupid things in "Broken Bow" (which is saying a lot), wildly at odds not just with Trek's entire history of Fed/Klingon relations but also with simple math, and it's fair to say that just about everyone has written it out of their head-canon.
I'm inclined to agree here (and it's also one of the things I didn't like about Abrams' version of Trek). Trek at its best was always about meeting challenges through cooperation, with violence as a last resort. (In the TNG era this sometimes got taken to absurd extremes, besting challenges through the process of "tedious committee meetings =>> deus ex machine of the week", but never mind that.) People weren't perfect, but they aspired to live up to their highest ideals. I'm not thrilled about the notion that STD's entire first season will be dedicated to a war between the Federation and the Klingons — not only is it pointless, as we know in advance that it'll end without any decisive victory and leave them in a cold-war stalemate a decade later, but it's thematically tricky to pull off. I was disconcerted by the subtext in the premier ep(s) implying that it was naive for Georgiou and the Admiral to even think of meeting the Klingons with diplomacy rather than violence. It smacks of cultural essentialism and a somewhat neoconservative, clash-of-civilizations worldview. I can only hope that this was a feint to set things in motion, and that the rest of the season will develop its themes in more sophisticated ways.
It's interesting that you say this, inasmuch as I see almost nothing by way of Trek-like visual elements. Aside from the delta symbol and ships with nacelles, what have you got? It could be almost any SF show. There are story elements that mark it much more clearly as Trek, but the production design is IMHO a disappointment so far.
I've heard people say that there are sequels to The Matrix, too. Scurrilous rumors. ;-)
You're still misinterpreting me.
JANICE LESTER says Starfleet doesn't allow women to be captains. I agree with you that it doesn't make sense... to us, 50 years later. But it may have made sense to the person who wrote that episode, so that's why that dialogue was written for Janice and Kirk.
Janice wanted to be a captain, didn't make it for whatever reason (failed her exams? failed a psych evaluation? ran up against a sexist instructor who told her to go home, get married, and have babies? was passed over for a male candidate and their qualifications were so similar that she thought it must be sexism? We just don't know, but have a pretty good clue by how BS!C Janice behaves, that it's a psychological issue that prevented her from attaining a captaincy), and blamed Kirk.
That's something else that people overlook - why blame Kirk? Sure, there are fanfic stories that explain that they were lovers, both in command training, but Janice just wasn't prepared to put in the same hard work and dedication that Kirk was, and so when he made it and she didn't, she blamed him out of jealousy rather than herself for laziness or not acknowledging that it really wasn't something she was suited for.
But while that story gives a satisfactory explanation, it's not canon. Canon says that up until the end of "Turnabout Intruder" there were no female starship captains. Canon doesn't have Kirk correcting her, if there actually were.
I agree that it doesn't make sense that there weren't any female starship captains, and I really wish people would stop throwing the Saratoga, etc. in my face, because they are irrelevant to this discussion. The Saratoga's captain is from a time decades later than the time frame of both Discovery and the TOS TV series.
I really wish Kirk hadn't been given that sexist speech at the end of "Turnabout Intruder" that basically said women could have lives that were rich enough without being a captain. That just reinforces the idea that Janice might have been right.
Instead, his dialogue should have reinforced what he said (in Janice's body, during the court-martial), that Janice didn't merit a captaincy due to her temperament and training (implying that she was neither psychologically fit nor adequately trained - but not that she didn't merit a captaincy due to being female).
I don't disagree that it makes no sense that there weren't any female starship captains. But in that case, somebody should have told her, "Now, Janice, you know that's not true; there have been women starship captains, but you didn't get to be one because you're simply not qualified, and it's wrong to blame Kirk for that."
It's more than a handful. You don't honestly think that the only people on the planet who agree with me are all posting right here, do you?
And keep in mind that you don't get to define what an "objectively true" opinion is. There are objectively true facts, but an opinion is an opinion. You and I have different opinions. Neither of us will change those opinions. So at this point I think it's best to agree to disagree.
All of these attempted-"gotcha" posts are getting really tedious. I have no idea who Erika Hernandez is. I assume that's a character from the Enterprise series? I haven't seen more than a handful of that series, and I can barely even name the series regulars, let alone be able to identify all of them by looking at a cast photo.
My personal view of Enterprise is that it's not really a prequel to TOS. There are enough elements of TNG in it that it seemed more like a prequel to that show, instead of TOS, and pretty much ignored TOS. FFS, there were Borg and Soong Augments as part of the series, weren't there? At least that's what I heard, and it flies in the face of the FACT that these series elements were first introduced in TNG.
As for throwing Georgiou in my face... as I've said, I'm of the view that this is a reboot, not a prequel. Or at the very least, it's a sequel to Enterprise, which I don't regard as a prequel to TOS.
Therefore, it is my view that it's reasonable to think that Number One could have been the first starship captain. After all, Pike has his own little sexist speech about not being used to having a woman on the Bridge, then hastily and ham-handedly apologizing to Number One ("I didn't mean you") when she gave him a less-than-pleased look.
If women captains were a normal thing, would Pike have made that speech? It doesn't seem so.
Please try to understand this: I, Timewalker, am not saying that Starfleet bars women from becoming captains. Janice Lester said that. I think that Kirk's speech at the end of that episode was horribly sexist, and he should have just told her that she was wrong to blame Starfleet and him for her own shortcomings that prevented her from attaining a captaincy.
Nope.
Kevin J. Anderson once asked me why I continued to read his nuDune books if I hated them so much (talk about canon violations; his drivel is practically nothing but canon violations). I told him, "Because I keep hoping they'll improve, and so far you keep disappointing me."You seem to be awfully concerned about this show, down to timeline nitpicks, for someone who claims to not like and won't be watching it.
I really don't care what the "official" position is. If the "official" position doesn't make any sense, I feel free to disregard it.
As for the shenanigans of TOS and the edge and center of the galaxy, I put that down to willful ignorance of basic astronomy/astrophysics. The plot called for the crew to go there, and to hell with any science advisor saying, "But that's not how it really works, and while most people probably wouldn't know the difference, there are enough viewers who are smart enough that they do know the difference."
See, one of the ways that a series can alienate me thisfast (or at the very least give my eyes a lot of exercise as I roll them) is to assume that I, along with the rest of the audience, am stupid. That applies not only to historical dramas (Rome is a prime offender), but also to SF and the speed of light, relativity, whether or not a well-known star is going to live long enough to support planets with intelligent life (most of the stars referenced in TOS aren't), what really happens when a star goes supernova (the Beta Niobe situation is ridiculously wrong from a scientific pov), and so on.
The one reason that I forgive TOS for most of its mistakes is because a lot less was known about such things in the mid-'60s than it is now. But enough was known in the '80s that there's no damned excuse whatsoever for that ridiculous trip to the middle of the galaxy.
People mock Voyager for a lot of reasons; some are valid and some aren't. Whatever its faults (and I say this as a Voyager fan who prefers that show to all the other post-TOS series), at least it was more reasonable about just how big the galaxy is. Voyager's premise of needing a whole year to travel 1000 light-years (assuming no wormholes or other boosts or obstacles) is more reasonable than the TOS position of "70,000 light-years? Pfft, we can be home by Tuesday."
I sit corrected. Yes, both of those are real stars. Mintaka is a multiple-star system consisting of stars that seem rather large and bright to be suitable for the planet shown in the episode. Fun fact: Mintaka is 1200 light-years from Earth, and if TNG uses the same warp drive scale as Voyager, it should take over a year to get from Earth to Mintaka.
Wolf 359 is interesting for a different reason. It's much closer to Earth, and is a red dwarf that's so small that it's barely large enough to actually be a star. It has no planets, so I hope the TNG writers didn't give it any (it's been ages since I saw "Best of Both Worlds", so I don't recall).
"Officially" can go fly a kite. If they want me to believe it, they'll have to do a hell of a lot better than they've done so far.
You might want to check out the articles in the Best of Trek books by Mark Andrew Golding. He made extremely detailed and meticulous lists of every single inconsistency in TOS, and said that IF you take each inconsistency as meaning that the episode took place in a separate universe, that would mean that the entirety of TOS happens in several dozen separate universes.
I remember thinking that this was a bit of an extreme pov, as some of the inconsistencies were easily explained. And obviously BillJ isn't saying that absolutely every inconsistency means it's a new timeline.
Of course it's an interesting possibility that a fanfic writer could do something with, but the basic situation here is that there are enough significant inconsistencies in the Discovery pilot episode to make some of us doubt that this show actually does take place in the same universe as TOS/TAS.
That whole "goshwow, this is so cool" attitude just really annoyed me. Please, don't have yet another series in which the female anthropologist comes off looking like a ditz. Honestly, I majored in anthropology in RL college, and "Wow!" is not a technical term we were taught. If she's really that good (and apparently she's good at a wide variety of things to the point where her superiors gush about her - just like any good little Mary Sue character - then surely she should be able to muster up a proper report of what she's found.
That's what Phone-A-Friends are supposed to do. Apparently Spock Prime didn't have anything better to do than wait around for nuSpock to call him, either.
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Oh I'm sure it will. More and more people are moving back to antennas. I did about 3 years ago and never looked back. If free content does go away, I will probably go away with it.
No it doesn't. As you pointed out, it is canon that Janice Lester said that the world of starship captains doesn't admit women. That doesn't make it factually true in universe that there are not female captains of starships. It only makes it true that she said that line. If women can be first officers over a decade before, it makes no sense whatsoever that they can't be captains. It does make perfect sense that Janice Lester was mad, and wasn't accurate in her assertion. As has been pointed out, plenty of TOS characters made ludicrous comments that weren't challenged but we quietly ignore. This should be no different.
But your argument is that we must accept at face value that what is presented in canon is true. The second warp 5 ship was therefore canonically captained by a woman. Actual visual evidence of female captains has to trump a comment made by a mad woman bent on taking someone else's life?
Nobody is 'throwing anything in your face'. They are presenting counterpoints to your assertions. The Saratoga is relevant because it presents a female Captain of a starship in the TOS Movie era and in order to reconcile it with the interpretation that Janice was correct, you must somehow accept that 60s sexism persists in Starfleet for all that time and then just disappears for no reason allowing female captains from then on. It seems infinitely more logical that Janice was just wrong. And that Kirk was a sexist ass, for which there is a whole body of evidence.
We have to conclude that Lester in a nut job. We saw a woman XO, someone who may have to captain the ship for weeks, months or years depending on the circumstance, if something happens to the captain.
Perhaps, like captain Merik said, it wasn't just a spaceship but a starship. There were, after all, only 12 in the fleet like her (so 13?), and the fact none of those had yet had a female captain is not that surprising.
Maybe Janice felt the boys' club was the reason (when it's pretty clear she probably failed a psych exam), and if she and Kirk were together and that was the only thing, she might have blamed Kirk for not defending her or sticking up for her since she wouldn't accept it, confident in her belief the fault wasn't with her, but the glass ceiling for Starship captains. Anything less than a ship of the line, a Constitution class starship, wasn't enough since that's what she and Kirk both wanted. He got it. She didn't. He didn't fight for her or demand she get a command, or who knows?
That she said no women were allowed to captain a starship might not have been a blanket statement or belief no woman could be a captain of a space ship, but none were of a starship, and Jim agreed - none were - so far - ever made a captain of a Constitution Class Starship.
Where the line is drawn between a space ship and a starship, however, I'm not sure.
Maybe Janice felt the boys' club was the reason (when it's pretty clear she probably failed a psych exam), and if she and Kirk were together and that was the only thing, she might have blamed Kirk for not defending her or sticking up for her since she wouldn't accept it, confident in her belief the fault wasn't with her, but the glass ceiling for Starship captains. Anything less than a ship of the line, a Constitution class starship, wasn't enough since that's what she and Kirk both wanted. He got it. She didn't. He didn't fight for her or demand she get a command, or who knows?
That she said no women were allowed to captain a starship might not have been a blanket statement or belief no woman could be a captain of a space ship, but none were of a starship, and Jim agreed - none were - so far - ever made a captain of a Constitution Class Starship.
Where the line is drawn between a space ship and a starship, however, I'm not sure.
I don't see why we should even assume that Lester is speaking about Starfleet at all.
Indeed, I'm far from convinced that even the writer intended Lester to be talking about Starfleet. She wasn't talking about Starfleet in the semantical sense, after all. Or about starships. She was talking about Kirk's world.
Kirk has a world. One feature of that world is that he's the captain of a starship. We see time and again that being captain of a starship precludes Kirk from having a woman. It doesn't follow that it would preclude Kirk from being a woman.
Significantly, there's no indication in the episode that Lester ever wanted to be the captain of a starship. She only wanted to have the captain of a starship, before he became one (thus essentially entering a monastery for good). Indeed, the exchange heavily suggests Lester only ever deigned to join Starfleet because of Kirk, and immediately dropped the career when Kirk ceased to be accessible through that route.
Timo Saloniemi
Indeed, I'm far from convinced that even the writer intended Lester to be talking about Starfleet. She wasn't talking about Starfleet in the semantical sense, after all. Or about starships. She was talking about Kirk's world.
Kirk has a world. One feature of that world is that he's the captain of a starship. We see time and again that being captain of a starship precludes Kirk from having a woman. It doesn't follow that it would preclude Kirk from being a woman.
Significantly, there's no indication in the episode that Lester ever wanted to be the captain of a starship. She only wanted to have the captain of a starship, before he became one (thus essentially entering a monastery for good). Indeed, the exchange heavily suggests Lester only ever deigned to join Starfleet because of Kirk, and immediately dropped the career when Kirk ceased to be accessible through that route.
Timo Saloniemi
What constitutes a reboot and what does not isn't a matter of opinion.
"Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle".
If he didn't start laughing at you, he should have.
You can disagree with someone and still be friendly about it.
Laughing is the friendliest response there could possibly be to a comment like what Timewalker says his response to KJA was, because that kind of comment and the attitude it represents is beyond silly.
...It's a bit suspect to argue about the definition of "reboot" when it's a made-up word specifically made up for the purpose of obfuscation. It doesn't really mean anything at all, except for the mildest hint of a work of fiction featuring some sort of a connection to a preceding work. For every example supporting a definition, a counterexample can be found (as the practice of creating fiction dependent on earlier fiction is sadly prevalent nowadays).
The playing field really is open for a round of Calvinball, then. The arguments won't be about whether something is a "reboot" or not, not really. They are about the degree of solidity in the connection from fictional past to fictional present, and whether more or less is preferable. This can be argued using many other sorts of terminology, too, as it just moves an indicator on the continuity-creativity axes to indicate a 2D point on that diagram.
IMHO, DSC isn't too close to the zero of the continuity axis so far. What sort of a curve it will draw on the diagram as the individual episodes establish their own creativity figures remains to be seen.
Timo Saloniemi
The playing field really is open for a round of Calvinball, then. The arguments won't be about whether something is a "reboot" or not, not really. They are about the degree of solidity in the connection from fictional past to fictional present, and whether more or less is preferable. This can be argued using many other sorts of terminology, too, as it just moves an indicator on the continuity-creativity axes to indicate a 2D point on that diagram.
IMHO, DSC isn't too close to the zero of the continuity axis so far. What sort of a curve it will draw on the diagram as the individual episodes establish their own creativity figures remains to be seen.
Timo Saloniemi
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