"Choose Your Pain" Klingon ship (Visual spoilers?)
- Thread starter Cranston
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Of course it is. It's a reboot of the universe where Nero never shows up and Vulcan never gets destroyed. Though in that sense, strictly speaking it would only be a reboot of TOS and not necessarily the whole franchise; it would, theoretically, only replace the events and technological conventions of TOS itself while still effectively being a prequel to TMP.
Casual fans don't know the Shocker either, but that doesn't stop the MCU from rebooting him as some asshole with a glorified taser.
Like I said, I realize you won't like the answer, but the answer is "To facilitate the reboot." In the same way that Iron Man 3 completely re imagined Mandarin as being a sort of Islamist-style terror boss who turns out to be nothing more than Killian's coked-out sockpuppet, the D7 is being redesigned as an insect-style manta ray thing.
It's the famous issue in "Balance of Terror" where Spock implies that a "practical invisibility screen" is something they've never seen before. The Klingons never use it in all of TOS even at times when they damn well SHOULD have, and it's also heavily implied the cloak is a Romulan technology.
This depiction in Discovery is a massive retcon AT BEST. But it's also probably a sign of this show actually being a reboot in all but name.
That's exactly the point: "Something modern" is, by definition, NOT going to connect with the designs of the original. Because the designs of the original were not, by any stretch of the imagination, modern, or even modern-looking.
The closest thing we have that fits the bill is the redesigns we got from TMP and Wrath of Khan, both of which were JUST good enough to be credible in 1980s prime time television (with a little modification, of course) but would still seem somewhat anachronistic by today's standards already. At this point, the closest thing we're going to get to "the designs of the original" would be a re-textured and updated CG model of the Constitution Refit and something resembling the TFF/TUC bridge. Which WOULD actually be pretty cool to see if they could pull it off.
But running back to the original TOS designs? That's just not going to work. TOS even stopped replicating those designs as soon as they had a budget to do something better.
Then the change still sucks and nothing alters that.
Although to be fair there isn't a single line in canon that states that the Romulan Star Empire did not have any cloaking technology whatsoever in the 22nd century, even experimental devices that weren't very old and had just recently been introduced into service. We only know that Kirk's crew in 2266 is unfamiliar with Romulan invisibility screens and cloaking technology since their records have no listing of Romulan vessels equipped with such devices. This does not preclude the United Earth and then early Federation Starfleet classifying a great deal of information about Romulan weapons and technology in the aftermath of a bloody interstellar war that killed untold millions.
It's only a retcon if you believe that Romulans had no cloaks whatsoever prior to the mid-23rd century, and there's no canonical evidence in dialogue or onscreen graphics that confirms this conjecture to be in-universe fact.
Trek fans apparently don't. There are many different scifi/fantasy IPs that revise the look of their title character/vehicles twice or thrice in a generation with multiple continuities running side by side that otherwise aren't even slightly related. It's a new and scary thing for Star Trek, but it's nothing unusual for science fiction in general.
And for those of you too lazy to hit google:
The "Begins" Batmobile is by far my favorite. But I gotta say, I wasn't even SLIGHTLY confused by the fact that it doesn't look anything like the batmobile from the Michael Keaton version.
That only makes it non-Kelvin. If they reboot it is not Prime. Or if it is Prime, then the old continuity isn't... I mean if they're two different things we need two different terms for them. Prime1, and Prime2, or whatever.
Yes, I realise that this is what they're probably doing, I just think it is not a good idea. This has never done in Trek before, not like this. There has always been some fig leaf that has been thrown there for those people who care about these things. In this case it could have been calling this ship something else.
You can stop explaining what a reboot is. We know what it is. Some of us just don't want it.
Thus, it's a reboot.
Why? Controversy is good for ratings. The more fans argue about it, the more likely we are to tune in next week hoping for an explanation.
And just because younger, "hipper" viewers may want one because classic Trek is square and uncool doesn't mean we should get one.
I'm sorry, but that is some Orwellian doublespeak.
To illustrate:
"We rebooted the universe from the big bang, Mars was replaced in it's orbit by planet Athena, but it's still the same universe because Hitler wasn't assassinated."
That would be a new setting, by definition - not a prime timeline.
I know Trek has had it's share of discrepancies, but in general, they aren't quite so on the nose and spectacularly badly received. The biggest one was probably the cloaking thing in ENT, and we all know how much people hated that.
G
Gonzo
Guest
Yes the Romulans had it much earlier but the Klingons didn't get the technology from the Romulans until the mid/late 2260's as shown in TOS when the two Empires shared technologies.
About the same time as the Romulans started being encountered in their own D7's they received in exchange from the Klingons.
No, it's standard practice in film and television. Star Trek is actually the oddball here in that it (or rather, fandom) twists itself into knots trying to justify rectons and reboots IN UNIVERSE. Nobody else does that, because it's understood that you may be watching a totally different version of the exact same story told with slightly different actors, sets, props and scenery.
Reboots do not create alternate timelines, that's just not how that works. Reboots go back to a point in the existing timeline and retell the entire story from that point, erasing everything that came after and most of what came before.
No, that would be the NEW prime timeline, by definition. Because when you rebooted the universe, the old timeline ceased to exist.
This is why the Kelvinverse films are NOT considered to be a true reboot: because they left the original timeline fully intact. they are thus "alternate versions" and not an actual erasure of the existing continuity.
Discovery does not appear to be making that mistake. It seems they really ARE rebooting the Prime Universe, which means they aren't creating an alternate timeline that preserves the original canon in place.
They used the alternate reality trope as an excuse to be a reboot.
I'm aware of that. Big West did basically the same thing (though not in-universe at all) when they excommunicated Macross-II from that series' canon. They called it an "alternate universe" and abolished it, even though 30 years later they still haven't caught up with the era in which Macross-II supposedly takes place. Of course there's NO official explanation for what "Robotech" is supposed to be in that context; it's basically an alternate timeline that inexplicably diverges historically at some arbitrary point for no obvious reason.
Or, you know, you could just leave a D7 battle cruiser looking the way it has more or less always looked over the past forty-nine years and not pander to every young viewer in a key demographic who thinks that any TV or movie spaceship older than they are is a cheesy piece of junk and laughable because "it doesn't look like the ships in the video games I play." I'm sorry, but redesigning everything from scratch just because some of your audience has the attention span of a jar of pickles doesn't make it a good idea.
