• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

News Star Trek: Discovery – Adhering To Canon

Honestly, most interconnected shows end up boring me. The Man in the High Castle, Mad Men and The Handmaid's Tale didn't need to be part of bigger universes to be entertaining.
Sure. And there are great scifi films that are not part of Star Trek canon, they're just not Star Trek films. If one does not care about the setting of Star Trek, then why do Star Trek then? Do something else.
 
That isn't what I'm referring to.

Then what are you referring to? Because that is continuity. Stories lining up with the details of prior stories.

Which Star Trek never did all that well with at all.
 
The shows should be good in their own right. Not dependent on outside material.

Honestly, most interconnected shows end up boring me. The Man in the High Castle, Mad Men and The Handmaid's Tale didn't need to be part of bigger universes to be entertaining.
A more relevant example:

The Flash, Gotham, Smallville and the forthcoming Justice League movie don't need to be part of the same continuity to be entertaining.
 
A more relevant example:

The Flash, Gotham, Smallville and the forthcoming Justice League movie don't need to be part of the same continuity to be entertaining.

Yep. DC has three different universes running right now. One on FOX, one on CW and one on the big screen.
 
The only requirement that I put on any TV show or movie is that it entertains me. Nothing else matters.
 
Then what are you referring to? Because that is continuity. Stories lining up with the details of prior stories.

Which Star Trek never did all that well with at all.

That's a bunch of crap. Star Trek Discovery is the worst at Continuity out of ALL the Treks. It has pretty much ignored everything that has came before. Enterprise was the biggest offender of Continuity errors before this...BUT THAT SHOW AT LEAST TRIED...they didn't go overboard on the ships aesthetics and tech and they actually fixed the Klingon discrepancy which Discovery has now completely opened up again.. Discovery makes Enterprise look like a polished gem now...
 
Some people love extensive world building, some do not care about it. Personally I find that if used well it can add scope and verisimilitude to the story; make the setting feel somehow more 'real', to have tangible history via the past events having an effect. Tolkien's Middle Earth is one of my favourite settings and that is a prime example of extensive world building.

That being said, with a setting like Star Trek that is a collaborative work of hundreds of people over decades I'd not worry about small details or throwaway lines.
 
A more relevant example:

The Flash, Gotham, Smallville and the forthcoming Justice League movie don't need to be part of the same continuity to be entertaining.

But Star Trek isn't like that. The conscious choice was made in the early 80s to have a consistent in-universe franchise, and by TNG it was firmly established.

It's meaningless to point out how other things don't need to follow canon, because that's just not the direction Trek chose to go. Hell, even when they DID have the chance at a clean reboot with ST09, they still opted to link it to the prime universe continuity.
 
The only requirement that I put on any TV show or movie is that it entertains me. Nothing else matters.
That's all well and good. But many viewers find some adherence to prior Canon entertaining. When it's not at least done in a respectful way it's no longer entertaining.
 
Some people love extensive world building, some do not care about it. Personally I find that if used well it can add scope and verisimilitude to the story; make the setting feel somehow more 'real', to have tangible history via the past events having an effect.

It can, I agree. If that is what it sets out to do from the beginning, but Star Trek didn't. They had no plans of having series after series bolted onto it for fifty years. They just set out to make entertaining TV.

Discovery was a golden opportunity to start over, and if they wanted, to build an extended universe that made sense in lore, style and visuals.
 
But Star Trek isn't like that. The conscious choice was made in the early 80s to have a consistent in-universe franchise, and by TNG it was firmly established.

I don't think so. Because in early TNG, it was obvious they were still winging it. From the refit being shown for an adventure the original 1701 had, to a hole in space that no one had ever encountered anything like before. I don't think they really decided to have it all be one continuity until they started planning DS9 and how it would connect to TNG.
 
That's all well and good. But many viewers find some adherence to prior Canon entertaining. When it's not at least done in a respectful way it's no longer entertaining.

Did Starbuck being a female bother you?
 
But Star Trek isn't like that. The conscious choice was made in the early 80s to have a consistent in-universe franchise, and by TNG it was firmly established.

It's meaningless to point out how other things don't need to follow canon, because that's just not the direction Trek chose to go. Hell, even when they DID have the chance at a clean reboot with ST09, they still opted to link it to the prime universe continuity.
Well the DC continuities are all probably part of the same multiverse, even if we'll never see them cross over.

As a long time Trek novel reader, I'm very used to books, or entire series' of books being rendered obsolete by new and contradictory canon.

Before the Star Trek Chronology in 1993, there was the Spaceflight Chronology in 1980, which dates events from TOS and before quite differently to what is commonly accepted today (i.e. TOS takes place at the start of the 23rd century). Dozens of novels treated at as more modern ones do the current continuity. And now a dozen more novels have been rendered moot by DSC's claim of no Klingon contact for a century.

Same ship, different day.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top