Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
- Thread starter Annorax849
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(*HENRY CAVILLING INTENSIFIES*)
False dichotomy. What makes you imagine these things are mutually exclusive?
Careful... I think some posters around here might miss the sarcasm...Exactly. As soon as you give up on the notion of following some kind of "canon," your story will become good; and conversely, as soon as you try adhering to it, your story will become bad.
The fetters of good storytelling is having to share a universe.
Umm... not sure what you're trying to say here. TOS and TNG obviously share the same universe and always have.
What makes you imagine that that is what I meant?
They may not be mutually exclusive but they are definitely different things, sometimes they coincide, sometimes they do not. When they do not is when you need to set your priorities straight, IE which is more important.
I'd hate to think that some writer once said to himself: "This would be an interesting development but for the sake of canon I won't use it."
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS contradicted a lot of things from the previous films in many more ways than DISCOVERY ever has, but that doesn't make it a lesser film.
That's not to say DISCOVERY is on the same level as FIRST CLASS. I have issues with it, but stuff like viewscreen windows and different uniforms are so fucking trivial I couldn't care less. Besides, those uniforms are so nice looking I think they were worth it instead of reusing the old uniforms from the pilot.
That's not to say DISCOVERY is on the same level as FIRST CLASS. I have issues with it, but stuff like viewscreen windows and different uniforms are so fucking trivial I couldn't care less. Besides, those uniforms are so nice looking I think they were worth it instead of reusing the old uniforms from the pilot.
Okay, fair enough. If the goals aren't inherently opposed to one another, though, what reason do we have to give the benefit of the doubt to writers, producers, etc., that any particular change they may make in continuity (either deliberate or inadvertent) is in fact in service of a better story than they could tell otherwise?
After all, given the reasonable expectation that internal contradictions will undermine at least some viewers' willing suspension of disbelief and thereby make a story less enjoyable, when all else is equal we might expect such things should be avoided. Seems to me the burden of proof falls on the storytellers in such a case, to clarify why a story of the same quality couldn't be told congruently with continuity... or at least to tell a story that's so self-evidently of such high quality that its merits are self-evident and questions of continuity are rendered moot.
DSC and its creators pretty plainly haven't done that. It's fair to say the show has been, at best, very uneven. On these forums alone, criticism of the show has been wide-ranging even from fans who are entirely agnostic on matters of continuity, involving criteria from plotting to pacing to characterization to acting to special effects and more. As for specific matters of continuity that have arisen, we keep debating them so vociferously here precisely because they're not remotely self-justifying... whether we're talking about small matters like the casual use of intraship beaming, or larger plot points that contradict prior knowledge like the Klingons' use of cloaking devices, or matters of visual continuity like the radical redesign of the Klingons themselves along with their ships and everything else about them, it's really not clear that any of these things facilitated a better story than might have been told otherwise.
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Yet, I have no doubt that it has happened.
And this is my daily reminder that a lot of the toxic attitudes in Trek fandom is actually born from ignorance...
You do realize that writers have absolutely NO control over makeup design, right?
And expectations that may or may not be rational.
You're using a very odd definition of "internal" here.
Discovery has been VERY consistent with itself. It hasn't been consistent with previous productions, because it isn't being produced by the same creative team, or even (technically) by the same studio. Star Trek wasn't even that consistent with itself when it WAS being produced by an unbroken lineage of showrunners who mostly worked together for years on end. Why would you expect a new production run by totally different people to be exactly the same as its predecessors?
Why does Discovery use different background music from Voyager and Enterprise? And why doesn't the background music being different break your suspension of disbelief?
NOTHING in a TV show is ever self-justifying, which is why I think your definition of "internal continuity" is so weird. If you change something within the context of a story, you usually try to explain why the change happened. If you leave the change completely unexplained (I'm lookin at you, Robin Curtis!) then your audience is left to assume the change doesn't actually matter to the story.
Story, after all, is the main issue. Television, like novels, comics and stageplay, is a medium for TELLING STORIES. Set design, props, costumes and music are all artistic touches meant to draw the audience deeper into the story that is being told. Costumes and set design being "slightly off" doesn't break your suspension of disbelief unless it's telling a story about something you actually witnessed or has an actual historical record that lots of people are familiar with (e.g. a movie about the Civil Rights Movement in which all the members of SNCC are wearing wife beaters, doo-rags and thigh-level saggy jeans).
Star Trek, however, is fictional. No one currently alive lived through the 23rd century and none of its audience is intimately aware of the details of what the 23rd century was like.
tldr: going to remind you again that Star Trek Discovery is not a period piece, that you are not enough of an expert on 23rd century architecture, fashion, technology or culture to find any of their artistic choices all that alarming.
I'm using the definition that has characterized this entire thread: it means "within the Prime Timeline of Trek continuity."
Well, that's the whole issue under contention, isn't it?
I honestly can't tell if you're being facetious here. In case this is a sincere question, the answer is that the background music is non-diegetic. It doesn't exist within the story. Whole different set of rules and audience understandings.
Well, yes, generally you do. That was my point. (Although DSC hasn't really made that effort.) And for the purposes of this particular discussion, the "context of the story" here encompasses "everything we know about the Prime Timeline."
Beyond that "generally"? By "self-justifying," I merely meant "so overwhelmingly great that no one is going to be bothered by inconsistencies with details of stories that preceded it in the same continuity." It's a high bar to get over, obviously. Still, a few retcons here and there offer examples. For instance, Tolkien's recharacterization of the One Ring and actual rewriting of how Bilbo got it in The Hobbit... given that it created the potential for the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, no reasonable person objects. Or on TV... the spinoff Frasier contradicted an earlier statement by the title character (in Cheers) that his father was dead, but the relationship with Martin Crane in the later show more than justified it.
Well, cast changes are kind of a special category... something that audiences really have no choice but to handwave away as an intrinsic aspect of using human actors, even if the change is unpopular. Probably more often a bug than a feature, but it just can't be helped. The classic example is, of course, the two Darrens on Bewitched.
I'm inclined to disagree with you here... at least, I think you're sweeping too many things together. Non-diegetic music is a special case, as noted above. Comics are hand-drawn, stageplays are spatially constrained, and novels have no visuals at all, so as such the parameters of the audience's suspension of disbelief are different in each case when it comes to the degree of artistic license that will break the illusion. TV and film, though, are more visually immersive experiences, and the implicit compact with the audience has always been that "seeing is believing" — a handful of impressionistic stories notwithstanding, ordinarily the visuals (sets, props, costumes) are typically meant to be taken as "real," at least within the constraints of the available technology. Were it not so, productions wouldn't devote so much time, energy, and money to the visuals in the first place.
Their choices for what to change/violate in the canon are interesting.
Like, they've said they won't do a Romulan episode because of Balance of Terror saying there had been no contact with the Romulans for a while, but then ignore everything about the cloaking device in that same episode. (yes I know Enterprise had an episode with a cloak)
Like, they've said they won't do a Romulan episode because of Balance of Terror saying there had been no contact with the Romulans for a while, but then ignore everything about the cloaking device in that same episode. (yes I know Enterprise had an episode with a cloak)
Which is not the same thing as "internal consistency." Star Trek overall is not a comprehensive expanded universe. The spinoff series (TNG, Voyager, DS9) were, mainly because they were all being produced by the same studio and/or branches of that studio, by the same creative team around the same time. Enterprise was, to a far lesser degree.
But even in that sense, internal consistency and EXPANDED UNIVERSE consistency do not mean the same things, even in the case that we actually HAVE an expanded universe that is attempting to be consistent, which in this case we do not.
I don't see how. None of the characters seem to comment on the fact that their phasers make an audible sound in the vacuum of space, nor do they comment on the sounds their phasers make in atmosphere. For that matter, every time Michal Burnham sees a Klingon she doesn't seem to notice that she is, in fact, looking at an actor wearing a foam rubber mask and $150 worth of stage makeup. To this day, we're not even sure why phaser beams are even visible in the vacuum of space, and so little has been said about this incongruity that some of us theorize that... well, maybe they're NOT visible and the producers just draw them into the frame to make the battles more exciting?
All of which is artistic presentation, which goes into set design, sound design, prop design, costume design, makeup, staging, etc. This is why things like, say, TOS-R or the Star Wars "Special Edition" revisions can be accomplished so easily (or, hell, even the cool fan edits of "A New Hope"), because a difference in presentation makes very little difference in the story being told. It's why nobody seemed to notice the Bird of Prey getting a totally new bridge between "Search for Spock" and "Voyage Home" and why the revisions to the Enterprise-D bridge in "Generations" didn't get so much as a half-assed mention. The characters within the story are unaware that anything has changed, because in the context of the STORY, nothing actually has.
Discovery has explained all the changes it made within the context of its own story. With a few exceptions, nothing in Discovery's story requires its characters, ships or costumes to look a certain way. Those exceptions are:
1) Mirror Detmer doesn't have a prosthetic eye
2) Burnham (six months after going to prison) doesn't have a perm
3) Mirror Voq doesn't look like Lieutenant Ash Tyler
4) Mirror Shenzhou isn't shot full of holes
These are all explained in the context of the story itself. Nothing else NEEDS an explanation, because nothing else in the story actually impacts what happens to the characters in any meaningful way.
No, it really doesn't.
Because Discovery isn't about "The entire prime timeline." Discovery is about the crew of a starship called "USS Discovery" in the year 2257. They've explicitly referenced events from the overall timeline on this show (e.g. NX-01 visiting Kronos) but even those references do not require the artistic styling of those tie-in productions to remain consistent.
There are no inconsistencies in the details of the STORIES. Costumes, sound effects and background music, sure, but the STORIES remain highly consistent.
Only it's not. It's an artistic touch that enhances the presentation of the medium, but the medium itself is just a method of telling stories.
Put another way: You could do a George Lucas-style CGI overlay and change literally everything about Discovery and make it look like anything you wanted. You could make Michal Burnham a tall, heavyset Asian woman, you could turn Discovery into a flying soupspoon with three bright blue warp nacelles, you could make the Vulcans look like giant talking tree frogs, you could make the Kelpiens into four-legged four-armed bug things that have to talk through synthesizers attached to their heads. Hell, you could even make the Klingons look exactly like the TOS version so that they otherwise LOOK totally human except for a fu-manchu mustache and a really thick accent. The story would be exactly the same in all of those cases.
The one thing you COULDN'T do? Turn Michal Burnham into a man. The reason you can't do this is because Tilly tells Michal in "Context is for Kings" that she's only ever heard of one WOMAN named Michal and that's Michal Burnham. You also couldn't (plausibly, at least) replace Mirror Georgiou with someone who looks completely unlike Prime Georgiou, because her looking exactly like Prime Georgiou is a major plot point and Sarek even comments on this.
Story is not the same thing as presentation.
Because those new producers said that their new production would be consistent with the predecessors.
Which, apart from art design, it completely is.
The question is: why would you expect the ART DESIGN to be exactly the same, especially when they're not even telling the same story? This is like being mad about Roger Moore and Sean Connery having different hair colors.
Fine. The production designers, then. But my overall point still stands. If they're clever enough and competent they can acknowledge other types of Klingons that we know exist.
And it's not "toxic" to voice an opinion about established continuity in storytelling. What's toxic is the attempt by some fans to shut down debate by slapping the "toxic" label on conversations and opinions that they simply don't want to engage in because they have a one-sided view of a topic.
Keep the new look. Just acknowledge the others. It's not gene splicing. Unlike how Klingon Augments were created.
I don't expect exactness. But the art design is part of the world building, with all that implies. If a creator decides to set a story in a world with characteristic X, that author can't then portray characteristic X as significantly other than X and still expect the audience to maintain immersion in the story.
Sure they can. I've no problem with the changes they've made in make up and set design. I've managed to remain immersed without a problem. I've a feeling I'm not alone.
... and have the time, the budget, the inclination or a REASON to design three different types of makeup/costumes for a single species just to meet the expectations of the small, insular community of die hard fans who don't like change and can't use their imaginations?
This is at least the 4th time (that I have seen) you have accused the writers of being incompetent or lazy because they didn't do something you wanted them to do. Which, as I point out, is amazingly ironic since it's not even the WRITERS who have any say in those matters. And you're just one person.
When you hold people to poorly-defined standards and then heap abusive language at them when they fail to measure up to those standards, I would consider that toxic behavior, but that's just me.
I'm still upset that Star Trek has never explained why transporter effects always look different in shows and movies. Like, why did DS9 and VOY have totally different effects for Starfleet? Aren't they in the same time period?
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