Well, in this case at least one version of the script was supposed to include Saavik on the Bozeman bridge.
I just looked up the script on the TNG Companion CD. All it says is that Bateson looks to “his FIRST OFFICER “, and there’s no hint as to whether the FO is suppose to be male or female.
Still, there's the bit about the Typhon Expanse being an unexplored region of space in Picard's time, and the Bozeman crew seeming to be fairly relaxed and not, you know, on fire. And the more glaring continuity error in SotL, referring to "Best of Both Worlds" happening after "Chain of Command." You don't even need the actual scripts for that one.
Plus, authors could get tapes loaned to them by the publisher for research purposes. I remember when I got a broadcast-quality Voyager videotape sent to me for researching "Brief Candle." Due to the limitations of my local UPN affiliate, it was the first time I'd seen the show with that kind of image and sound quality, and it was a revelation.
That’s inexcusable. Given the number of drafts and the number of people involved that should have been picked up.
You have your own Betacam SP VCR? Or 3/4" SP? M2? D2? I'm guessing the tape wasn't a reel of 2" quad.
It was a commercial format, but it was still a damn sight higher in quality than the signal from the low-power UPN affiliate we had. But that's not the point here. The point is, writers are not exclusively dependent on publicly available research materials. Everything's available to buy or look up online now, but even before that was the case, the studio would provide videos, scripts, etc. to the tie-in editors, who would send them to the writers on request.
I don't recognise SotL novel as canon, either visual or book. Considering that there was only one Sovereign-class starship at Sector 001 in "First Contact", I still believe the Bozeman is the old Soyuz class.
The Soyuz class had still been decommissioned nearly a century before, so it's likely that the Bozeman during First Contact would have been another class, just not another Sovereign (since I agree, we saw no other Sovereign class on the screen at the time, and I realize that's out-of-universe preservation of the Enterprise's uniqueness, it's still the facts we're working with). Maybe an Akira class, since it probably fulfills many of the same duties one would expect a Soyuz to have done back in the day.
I'm sure they would've just changed the year to something other than 2278. Or, actually, since the Star Trek Chronology didn't come out until the next year, the entire Trek dating system as we know it would be totally different based on that additional data-point.
I generally use TV tropes here. Broad Strokes My view is that none of the Star Trek expanded universe novels are "purely" canon. I consider them stories in the universe and like all stories are prone to some imbellishments and inaccuraries. I even occasionally apply this to the "canon" works like the inaccuracies of how physics works in The Final Frontier or Dear Doctor where I can't reconcile my interpretation of the characters with what's on screen. Edit: An example of this would be Number One from the Enterprise who we have multiple origins for. Specifically, I was introduced to her as Morgan Primus by New Frontier which is as far from a personality as well as origin as the one in Desperate Hours as you can possibly get. Yet, honestly, "both" exist in my Star Trek universe. How do I resolve it? Eh, somehow.
I know officially only what is on screen is considered "canon." However, I'm an avid novel reader and am happy to consider them part of the continuing story. Especially the relaunches. After all, it's pretty much nil that we will ever see TNG, DS9, etc. on screen again, so those are probably safe with those stories. The authors do a very good job these days of trying to keep their stories internally consistent, you'll even read in acknowledgments about how they work together to make sure they don't contradict each other. Christopher Bennett, for instance, noting how he was in touch with David Mack since their two stories touched on Section 31 to make sure his story stayed consistent with Mack's. I loved the earlier novels from the 80's and 90's of course, but it could be frustrating sometimes when their was no consistency.
Yeah, true. I try to usually just read the older novels as single, self contained stories as a result. While the current original series books are usually not linked, there seems to be an effort these days even with those to avoid contradictions. Clearly with the relaunches the editors, and even writers themselves, seem to work together to an extent to maintain continuity.
The irony of the Bozeman scene, onscreen, is that the producers actually toyed with the idea of asking Kirstie Alley to reprise Saavik as the first officer, alongside her "Cheers" costar, Kelsey Grammer. It was odd that Diane Carey opted for no women on the bridge.
Carey is big on the age of sail, and one aspect of that is all male crews. She tends to write her Trek books with lots of sailing flavor. Knowing her style, I completely get why she chose to go with an all male bridge crew, even though I think it was a terrible choice.
I'm not sure that explanation works, considering that Carey had personally served on the crews of sailing ships for quite a few years before and after writing Ship of the Line. According to her interview in Voyages of the Imagination, she was inspired to write about Picard's loss of his ship because she'd recently lost a ship that she'd served on for years, the schooner Alexandria, to which she wrote a poem that's printed at the end of SotL. So the book was very much based on her own personal experience as a member of a ship's crew, and thus it doesn't make sense that she'd feel the need to exclude women for an authentic experience. (Also, her most nautical book aside from SotL was probably The Captain's Table: Fire Ship, told from Kathryn Janeway's first-person perspective and probably also drawing heavily on Carey's firsthand experience.) Given how personal the book was to Carey, I always sort of suspected that the Bozeman characters in SotL were based on her own crewmates. That could be why the crew was so male-dominated.