Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?

[Tuskin38]

• The look of the Klingons

• The look of the Klingon ships

• The look of the Starfleet ships

• The Starfleet uniforms

• The ease of intraship beaming

• The widespread use of a cloaking device

• The Treknological implications of the spore drive

• The use of Vulcan telepathy at interstellar distances

• The egregiously contrived way Voq-Tyler was said to have been created

• The tech level of the Mirror Universe

• The changed appearance of the Enterprise

1. Visual re-imagining
2. Visual re-imagining
3. visual re-imagining
4. We saw what appeared to be 'The Cage' looking uniforms in the finale, so we know they exist.
5. Discovery is more advanced then the enterprise
6. Not going to bother, been explained dozens of times on the forum.
7. What implications?
8. Happened and explained in Enterprise first
9. Explained by the show
10. I'm not seeing the problem here?
11. Visual re-imagining

 

[nightwind1]

If we accept the idea that different tone, writing style, worldview, aesthetics etc makes for a different parallel universe, then Star Trek's 'prime' timeline is already a multiverse. The many worlds theory of Star Trek as I see it:

1. The TOSverse - ST:TOS, ST:TAS - primary coloured, sharp angled sets, episodic, vague and changeable on background details, we are a small fleet of identical ships on a Wagon Train to the Stars type exploratory mission. Sixties fashions, sexism and sledgehammer metaphors abound. The late 20th Century of this universe is a spacefaring and dangerous place, wracked by war. Most aliens look human but some have some basic additions like body paint and antenna.

2. The Motionless Universe - ST:TMP - we are now in a grey, brown and beige parallel world where the Enterprise is different, we are Earth based and the UFP and Starfleet have solidified into a kind of future UN of the Stars, the tone is completely different, slow paced, long lingering reaction shots, the Klingons are totally different, and Spock is like a brand new character.

3. The Marooniverse - ST:II-VI - A lot has changed again - beige and grey are out and bright red and the famous 'off' colours are in with a complex rank and division system we'll never see before or since. Now we are Horatio Hornblower riding a submarine in space. Anachronistic retro spaceship universe, with 'right full rudder' and ship's cooks, labels on everything, and the truest military Starfleet has ever been. The Klingons have changed once more. The Vulcans have immortal souls like for realz. Other aliens also look a lot more... alien.

4. The 24th Centuriverse - TNG, DS9, VOY, the TNG movies - We are in a shiny new future with a whole new look, skintight catsuit costumes and a pretentious utopian vision which slowly fades from the writing as this universe progresses. We don't have countries, money, flags, or a sense of humour, and our society has stoically refused to be changed by the revolutionary invention of the replicator. Writing is quite stilted and precise, and there is little conflict between characters. The 20th Century of this universe more closely resembles ours, but the 21st is a time of great destruction and governmental collapse, leading to First Contact and humanity reaching to the stars. If there's one thing the humans of this universe are sure of, it's that they've left all the bad stuff like war and disease behind them. Except they seem to constantly start wars and contract weird diseases.

5. The Discoverse - DSC - This universe is blue. Very blue. Humans have some pretty high and mighty ideas but don't seem to actually live up to them all that much. Space is dangerous and violent, and yet contains only a handful of people. The tone now is 'EPIC AF' and the writing grandiose and expository. Big sets, big plots, and a different type of character than the other universes. Oh, and the Klingons have changed again.

As for ENT, for all the stick it gets for being the red headed stepchild, fits broadly well as a prequel to any of the above universes, and indeed the Kelvin timeline, but probably sits least well in the TOSverse. It is best suited perhaps in the 24th Centuriverse, which it seems the most direct prequel to.




So exactly like TNG, then, really. That show too took what it liked from the original, threw in some stuff from its contemporary movie series which didn't actually fit in all that well, redesigned other stuff indiscriminately, and made up some aspects and features from whole cloth, some that should have changed the whole setting but didn't, and others that don't really fit with what went before but will be broadly ignored.


Cart before the horse. Trek 2009 could have just presented a different version of TOS without explanation, but knowing what fans are like, JJ decided to explicitly explain it in the movie to try to keep the hoards at bay. He didn't cause the issue, he was trying to deal with it.

 

[lawman]

1. Visual re-imagining
2. Visual re-imagining
3. visual re-imagining
4. We saw what appeared to be 'The Cage' looking uniforms in the finale, so we know they exist.
5. Discovery is more advanced then the enterprise
6. Not going to bother, been explained dozens of times on the forum.
7. What implications?
8. Happened and explained in Enterprise first
9. Explained by the show
10. I'm not seeing the problem here?
11. Visual re-imagining

Look, you said "Discovery is very, very easy to reconcile with the rest of Trek." That implies some sort of logical, in-universe explanations for apparent discrepancies. The phrase "visual reimagining" is not an in-universe explanation for anything. It doesn't "reconcile" anything in the slightest; it simply says "this is a fictional construct and we'll do what we want with it, so suck it up."

When I say I've read proposed explanations for the look of the Klingons, for instance, I'm talking about things like the proposition that they look this way because of the side-effects of genetic engineering attempts to reverse or modify the effects of the Augment virus. That's actually a pretty plausible explanation. It would be a lot more plausible in-universe, though, if the show had actually shown us other styles of Klingons (even in the background!) consistent with other eras of Trek history and the whole Augment-virus context.

Beyond that...

• We saw tiny, blurry background images that appear to slightly resemble "Cage"-era uniforms. At best, then, we can infer that something like them exists. This is a far cry from an explanation for why all the uniforms we've seen up-close are radically different. David Mack took a shot at offering an explanation in his novel Desperate Hours, but even that was something of a stretch plausibility-wise (why would Connie-class crews have uniforms different from everyone else?), and we have yet to see if that'll be incorporated into canon.
• Intraship beaming: the transporter tech on board Discovery is more advanced than what the Enterprise has ten years later? Even though we've been told (canonically, in both TOS and DSC) that the Connie-class ships are the prestigious ones to serve on? How does that make sense?
• Cloaking device: yes, it's been discussed a lot on these forums (that was kind of my point), but any way you slice it, whatever contrivance you come up with, it still undermines what we saw and heard about the shocking "theoretical possibility" of cloaking in "Balance of Terror" a decade later.
• The implications of the spore drive have also been discussed at length (Eschaton in particular has articulated them quite eloquently), so I'm not sure how you've missed those discussions.
• The Voq-Tyler surgery and mind-implant was not "explained by the show" in any way that makes sense. This has also been discussed at length.
• A Mirror Universe that's had a century to reverse-engineer and weaponize the Defiant, and has ships the scale of the Charon, is implicitly pretty different from the one that was an exact match for TOS tech in "Mirror Mirror." This has also been discussed at length.

So, yes, potential explanations for all of this stuff have been discussed. (Again: that was my point.) But not all of those explanations are equally plausible, and none of them have been presented in-story. I'd be the first to agree that fan speculation about continuity is often a lot of fun, but what you find "very, very easy" about taking the exercise to this kind of extreme, I honestly don't see.

 

[Tuskin38]

The phrase "visual reimagining" is not an in-universe explanation for anything.

You don't need an in-universe explanation for a visual re-imagining, as it hasn't technically changed in-universe.

 

[ozzfloyd]

Lawman always be litigating.

 

[Annorax849]

And yet all it did was show some Klingons becoming smooth-headed. And a cure was developed in the very next episode. And that episode ends (more or less) on a joke about plastic surgery. There are three possible "outs" introduced in "Divergence" alone, not to mention any potential "outs" introduced in non-canon sources (such as "Judgement Rites"' implication that the Klingons engaged in multiple waves of genetic manipulation), let alone one Discovery may introduce in the future.

The only reason it doesn't compute is because you refuse to look at all of the data.

Pretty much the only way I would accept this is:
-Augment virus is quickly cured
-There's a reason the DIS Klingons look the way the they do, possibly involving the virus cure
-The previous rule of "just assume they always had ridges in TOS" now applies to the Discovery look
-There's a reason they change from the DIS look to the traditional look

That's me though, people can see it different ways of course.

 

[Nerys Myk]

3. The Marooniverse - ST:II-VI - A lot has changed again - beige and grey are out and bright red and the famous 'off' colours are in with a complex rank and division system we'll never see before or since. Now we are Horatio Hornblower riding a submarine in space. Lots of ship classes about. Anachronistic retro spaceship universe, with pockets, big tricorders, 'right full rudder' and ship's cooks, labels on everything, and the truest military Starfleet has ever been. The Klingons have changed once more. The Vulcans have immortal souls like for realz. Other aliens also look a lot more... alien.

There's also Marooniverse 2.0 where Saavik has a different face and is morevVulcanish and command of Starfleet vessels are given to near incompetents.

 

[Tim Thomason]

There is no visual re-imagining or visual reboot or whatever you want to call it. The Cage and Discovery exist in the same universe exactly as portrayed (there was a visual "remaster" some years back though, if that makes it more palatable.)

The show just shows us more of the 2250s, and forces us to come face-to-face with a dichotomy of technologies and expands our knowledge and forces us to rethink our preconceptions, to the nth degree (much like Enterprise, and TNG before it).

Why the Enterprise changed designs, I don't know. But it must've, because we see it is different. We see different Klingons, we see more classes of starships, we see another set of uniforms. All this happened and always happened ten years before TOS.

Spock always had a sister. Just like he always had a brother, and his father was always the Vulcan ambassador, and his mother always human.

 

[Galaxy]

I want the option "Yes it still fits" I do not give a hoot about the official word. Lacking that I went with Option 1.

 

[Mudd]

There is no visual re-imagining or visual reboot or whatever you want to call it. The Cage and Discovery exist in the same universe exactly as portrayed (there was a visual "remaster" some years back though, if that makes it more palatable.)

The show just shows us more of the 2250s, and forces us to come face-to-face with a dichotomy of technologies and expands our knowledge and forces us to rethink our preconceptions, to the nth degree (much like Enterprise, and TNG before it).

Why the Enterprise changed designs, I don't know. But it must've, because we see it is different. We see different Klingons, we see more classes of starships, we see another set of uniforms. All this happened and always happened ten years before TOS.

Spock always had a sister. Just like he always had a brother, and his father was always the Vulcan ambassador, and his mother always human.

No.

In this TV series all of that is true.

In TOS none of that is true.

They're two different shows. You can accept them both, but you can't make them fit together.

 

[WebLurker]

Cloaking device: yes, it's been discussed a lot on these forums (that was kind of my point), but any way you slice it, whatever contrivance you come up with, it still undermines what we saw and heard about the shocking "theoretical possibility" of cloaking in "Balance of Terror" a decade later.

Well, ENT did already make hash of this one, so it's not like that point was true when DSC began production.

You don't need an in-universe explanation for a visual re-imagining, as it hasn't technically changed in-universe.

You do when the Powers That Be insist that they're following the rules that were set up from the get-go. (The show was sold as a continuation of the prime universe, not a reimagining with a similar backstory).

 

[fireproof78]

There is no visual re-imagining or visual reboot or whatever you want to call it. The Cage and Discovery exist in the same universe exactly as portrayed (there was a visual "remaster" some years back though, if that makes it more palatable.)

The show just shows us more of the 2250s, and forces us to come face-to-face with a dichotomy of technologies and expands our knowledge and forces us to rethink our preconceptions, to the nth degree (much like Enterprise, and TNG before it).

Why the Enterprise changed designs, I don't know. But it must've, because we see it is different. We see different Klingons, we see more classes of starships, we see another set of uniforms. All this happened and always happened ten years before TOS.

Spock always had a sister. Just like he always had a brother, and his father was always the Vulcan ambassador, and his mother always human.

Exactly.

 

[Tuskin38]

You do when the Powers That Be insist that they're following the rules that were set up from the get-go. (The show was sold as a continuation of the prime universe, not a reimagining with a similar backstory).

Continuation of the lore and the story, not the visuals.

 

[lawman]

It's a TV show, not a radio show or a novel or a stageplay. The visuals are part of the lore.

Prior to DSC, nobody would ever even have suggested otherwise. The degree of doublethink about this is really amazing to me.

 

[Dijeirusan]

It's a visually updated version of the Prime timeline. Perhaps they should call it "Co-Prime" or something along those lines, but the actual events that happen in this timeline happen in the Prime timeline. It just looks better here.

 

[WebLurker]

Continuation of the lore and the story, not the visuals.

Same difference.

 

[Emperor Norton]

It's a TV show, not a radio show or a novel or a stageplay. The visuals are part of the lore.

Prior to DSC, nobody would ever even have suggested otherwise. The degree of doublethink about this is really amazing to me.

Frustrating, ain't it?

 

[Mudd]

It's a visually updated version of the Prime timeline. Perhaps they should call it "Co-Prime" or something along those lines, but the actual events that happen in this timeline happen in the Prime timeline. It just looks better here.

That doesn't work either.

 

[Nerys Myk]

It's a TV show, not a radio show or a novel or a stageplay. The visuals are part of the lore.

Prior to DSC, nobody would ever even have suggested otherwise. The degree of doublethink about this is really amazing to me.

Visuals can change in fiction, even with in the continuity of that fiction. They are updated to make them relevant to modern times. Or because the people in charge have decided that what they want them to.

What's amazing to me is the resistance to change by fans of a Science Fiction show that in theory is about change.

Actually Gene Roddenberry suggested in the novelization of TMP that what we saw in TOS was a dramatization and not an accurate representation of what happened.

 

[Lord Garth]

It's a visually updated version of the Prime timeline. Perhaps they should call it "Co-Prime" or something along those lines, but the actual events that happen in this timeline happen in the Prime timeline. It just looks better here.

Exactly my take. In other threads I won't be calling it "Co-Prime" but, when I say "Prime" -- for the purposes of Discovery -- people should take that to be what I mean. "Prime Georgiou" just sounds better than "Co-Prime Georgiou".