I think some people would feel Star Fleet needs a technological Augment virus.
Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
- Thread starter Annorax849
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That would help. (FIY; I don't all all new designs as problematic. The new ships, for the most part don't need explaining, except for may hologram and cloaking tech.)
That's what I'm observing from the discussion on this thread.
That doesn't need explanation either, it's less advanced the later tech.
One of the writers brought it up on twitter explaining how it was.
If something needs a tweet to try and explain how it fits, it's a fail.
The only reason it needed a tweet is because so many people refused to just put the pieces together themselves. There's easily dozens of people on this forum who said the same thing as the writer. Or you could just watch the show; they went out of their way to make it visually different/inferior to previously-seen-but-chronologically-later holograms. Or you can say "fail" and be mad, up to you I guess.
This. I'm really tired of the constant assumptions that are made that everything must be explained on screen or it automatically "doesn't fit" and "isn't Prime."
I understand the universe is infinite and in Star Trek the universe is overflowing with alien species and in any given episode we can only expect to be exposed to a couple but WHY HAVEN'T WE SEEN KELPIANS BEFORE #NOTMYSTARTREK
My favorite complaint was from whoever it was in this forum that thought a character eating a burrito did not fit in with Star Trek and was just a way of pandering to younger audiences.
A burrito.
A burrito.
The only food in the TOS era are brightly colored marshmallows. By the TNG era, they'd added chocolate ice cream and coffee. Everything else is not canon.
EDIT: Also there's no such thing as popular music in Star Trek. Except space hippies, Spock's harp thing, and Klingon opera.
In other words: Dentistry is a booming industry in Star Trek.
When the DS9 crew were ordering raktajinos in K-7 the waitress should have replied "sorry, that's not canon here".
Are you pulling our legs here? Do you seriously mean to suggest that in your interpretation of things, TOS is simply not in the same reality with TNG and its spinoffs? I mean, you're entitled to an opinion... but you can't just throw something like that out there as if it's self-evident, when all kinds of cross-references in Trek canon say (and show) otherwise, and the very existence of the term "prime timeline" underscores it.
(I don't even know what you mean by the term "expanded universe" here. AFAIK that's a term that only has meaning as applied to Star Wars.)
I don't see what it is you don't see. It's nothing special about Trek per se. Non-diegetic music is consistently treated as not internal to the story, in all kinds of shows and films. Indeed, that's pretty much intrinsic to the definition of the term.
Whoop-dee-fucking-do. Nobody has claimed otherwise... because that context is literally not what this conversation is about, from the OP through the last 70+ pages of posts.
I can't tell if you genuinely believe this astoundingly minimalist interpretation of filmed storytelling, or if you're just playing devil's advocate for some inscrutable reason. According to you, everything that makes this filmed storytelling is purely optional, symbolic, malleable... not to be taken either literally or seriously. It's all just "presentation," and presentation is irrelevant. We could be just as entertained by sitting around reading the shooting scripts.
To each his own, I guess. Just don't expect any critical mass of fans to go along with you on this. Obviously you've never spent much time hanging out in the Trek Tech forum!...
First of all, not only is this hardly a commonplace interpretation of filmed entertainment (Trek or otherwise), but I don't recall anyone ever even broaching such an idea until DSC started diverging rather drastically from previously established visual aspects of its setting.
Second, all that aside, you're ignoring that the concerns that have been raised about DSC's inconsistencies with that setting are not by any means limited to visuals. A number of them have in fact concerned the narrative.
I think what you're both missing here, and what makes that particular fanwank explanation (whether from actual fans or a writer's Tweets) less than satisfactory, is that the comparison people are making is not to the holograms used over a century "chronologically-later" in universe. It's to TOS, which is all of a decade later, in which holographic comms simply aren't used, period, in any way, shape, or form.
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There could be an explanation for this. I doubt there will be one.
Why should there be an explanation? Is there a TOS episode I missed where a character states that holo-communication doesn't exist? I'd like to see that.
Yes.
There is only ONE reality -- the real world -- and that Star Trek is not part of it. The extent to which the various Star Trek related stories are connected to one another is ENTIRELY at the discretion of the storyteller.
Because the TNG spinoffs had the same collection of people telling those stories, they tended to fit together pretty closely. They fit together not so closely with TOS, or with the movies, or with the Kelvinverse films, or with Discovery. This is because different production teams in different time periods tell different types of stories.
And that's the operative word there: it's not internal to the story. The makeup designs of various aliens -- and random changes thereof -- also are not internal to the story 99% of the time. This is why nobody comments on the changes in Worf's appearance, or the upgrades to Geordi's visor, or the complete change in the appearance of the Trill or the Bajorans.
As I mentioned in the examples of Saavik or Jennifer McFly: the unexplained change in appearance has no impact on the NARRATIVE and is therefore treated as irrelevant.
Indeed. And yet it is the only context that MATTERS in terms of storytelling.
People love to debate things that DON'T matter ad nauseam, and this is, of course, one of them.
Art design, costume design and makeup choices are FAR from "everything that makes this filmed storytelling." To be sure, narrative consistency is paramount, and that includes things like timing and setting, relative location, distance, and the significance of props, objects or characters. What any of those things ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE is only important to the extent that the narrative depends on their appearing a certain way (e.g. Inigo Montoya finally finds the six-fingered man; costume designers make him wear a glove that makes it look like he has a sixth finger).
The only thing necessary for the Klingons to be consistent with their previous incarnations is this: any Starfleet character needs to be able to identify a Klingon at first glance. Beyond that, what they specifically look like doesn't matter, so long as whatever they look like, anyone who looks at them knows that they are, in fact, Klingons.
Well, no, you don't recall STAR TREK ever deviating from "established visual aspects of its setting," probably because you're too young to remember the last time it did this (TMP). In other fields of science fiction, especially (and notoriously) in anime, comics, and live action adaptations of both, this happens literally all the time.
Another example off the top of my head: "Firefly" had the Mule as an ATV with a trailer hitch on the back of it. When they retooled for the movie, not only did they significantly redesign the sets and the design of the ship, they also retconned the Mule as a large four-person hovercraft.
Yes, Discovery has multiple problems with NARRATIVE inconsistencies. I've pointed out more than a few of those myself (the entire Klingon War is a complete narrative clusterfuck, IMO).
But those aren't the concerns YOU have raised so far, since you seem obsessed with the visual minutia that changes little or nothing about the story and neither adds to nor detracts from it. If you can suspend my disbelief long enough to remember that you are not watching a group of actors wearing foam rubber prosthetics, you can definitely suspend your disbelief long enough to imagine the costumes have always looked this way.
Sure they are. Just not on the Enterprise for some reason. Trelane used a shit ton of them, and the kill program from "That Which Survives" was a hologram in all but name.
Yeah, the people who have spasms of Nerdrage over eating a burrito are just out of their minds. Burritos will still be eaten about 250 years from now even if they're made by a synthesizer. To be fair, TOS did show some cooked meat and vegetable dishes and even showed the Starnes Expedition children eating ice cream in Season 3 so it wasn't all just colored Play Doh cubes on a tray.
Okay, now you're just taking the piss here. It cannot be that you are unfamiliar with the very concept of a fictional reality, nor that you take exception to the concept for some reason and have chosen this forum as the quixotic place to go tilting at windmills about it.
So why in heaven's name are you hanging around this thread? Just to feel superior to people who waste their time debating stuff you think doesn't matter? Except, wait, you're doing it too...
So by your lights, we may as well be tuning in to a radio show. Gotcha.
(You realize you're making a logically self-defeating argument, BTW? Your whole point is that the visuals don't matter; they're discretionary, optional, irrelevant. Viewers are silly to care about them. Yet if that were so, it's inexplicable why the studio would waste untold quantities of money and creative effort to change anything about those visuals in the first place. It would obviously have been far simpler and easier to use the existing designs. The only explanation for this is that the show's viewers (and creators!) do care about the visuals, quite a lot, and consider them an essential part of the setting, the storytelling, the whole Trek experience. Indeed, other posters have argued passionately that viewers care so much that they would allegedly have rejected a show that used familiar TOS-era designs. IOW, a defense of DSC's design choices that is literally 180 degrees opposed to the defense you yourself are offering.)
You are mistaken.
(The changes in TMP, however, were all explicable in-story. The one notable exception to that was the appearance of the Klingons... which, as has been discussed ad nauseam around here already, left fans wondering and speculating for 26 years before it was finally explained.)
I'm not a fan of anime, but I definitely am of comics. I have devoted countless hours to reconciling the fine points of the continuity of various comic-book realities. I care about that sort of thing, so I enjoy it. You apparently don't; instead you get your kicks from telling other people that what they enjoy is irrelevant.
Actually, I have raised those concerns (including that particular one) on more than one occasion, and discussed it at some length in various threads around these forums. Such things annoy me just as much as the visual changes. The difference is, I consider them of a kind with the visual changes, rather than engaging in sophistic special pleading to carve off the latter and claim it's irrelevant. As another poster has remarked: it's all part of the worldbuilding.
If the former is more important to you, though... well, that would be relevant to this thread as well. Why not comment about that yourself, rather than pissing and moaning about what other people see fit to comment about?
You just really don't get it. (Or at least, you're pretending not to.) You're talking about two completely different levels of suspension of disbelief. One involves disregarding non-diegetic elements of the presentation, in pretty much the same fashion as we do for any other show or movie we watch on screen. The other involves disregarding elements that were diegetic when we saw them, in order to pretend an in-story contradiction isn't one.
Perhaps. But DSC has bent over backwards to force viewers to wonder what that reason might be... when it could've avoided the whole question in the first place just by being consistent with past stories in the same setting. That's the point of this whole discussion.
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