I must watch different shows than you
Not even going to touch the "fanwank" nonsense label.
Star Trek Discovery Writing Staff
- Thread starter The Habs Fan
- Start date
Not even going to touch the "fanwank" nonsense label.
I don't think the show has been terribly interesting storywise, but it's had some of the most gorgeous images for Trek Television. I'm just thinking of that shot on the hangar deck with the sun setting on the planet. You can say what you want about the quality of the writing, but the production values have been pretty top notch... which is what I expect from a show in 2018.
Because they don't have the rights to the Kelvinverse.
I forgot about that Klingon Thot. One of the most cringeworthy moments in the series IMO.
To be fair to Bill's point, they could easily have set a third timeline apart from Primeverse and Kelvinverse. Of course if storywise they were going to stick with the general parameters of Primeverse, why bother making a third at all?
To be honest, I have wondered if Fuller always intended the series to be a reboot, but at some point the studio execs came down (likely after his departure) and decreed it had to be marketed as part of the Prime Timeline, leaving the writing team to scramble to try to square the circle.
I don't think anyone is disputing they can do whatever they want - but to do that and still try to claim:
"Yes, It's in the TOS prime universe...it's not a reboot/retcon..."
and
"We know and respect Star Trek canon..."
Is just plain being dishonest WRT the longtime TOS fans who asked the question and got those replies.
Pretty much this. They are sticking to the "general parameters" in the broadest possible sense, knowing as they do that the details of 23rd century history are virtually non-existent before the movie era so they have a LOT of room to maneuver there. Rather than risk alienating fans by instituting a hard reboot, they just said "It's the prime timeline, not the Kelvin one" and moved from there.
That's plausible, but I still think that alot of the story ideas that seem to break continuity the most (cloaking devices, Klingons almost conquering Earth, L'Rell using an iPad to blackmail the entire Empire) were supposed to take place in alternate timelines Discovery was passing through during various spore drive misadventures.
They are honest answers, they're just not the answers you wanted.
Not the answers we needed, but the answers we deserved.
We know that Fuller was the one who insisted the Klingons be bald and extensively redesigned, which suggests that he wasn't tremendously concerned with hewing to established canon.
Since we deserve nothing but entertainment, I'd say even those answers are more than we deserve.
So nice of you to include 'Enterprise' in your continuity/canon argument as from 'Enterprise' here's how they showed a Prime Universe TOS era Starship/Constitution Class vessel:
^^^
Yep - the ST: D folks sure followed canon.
So nice of you to include 'Enterprise' in your continuity/canon argument as from 'Enterprise' here's how they showed a Prime Universe TOS era Starship/Constitution Class vessel:
^^^
Yep - the ST: D folks sure followed canon.
I think you need to reread the post of mine that you were quoting. I said DISCO has stuck fairly close to STORY canon, which is entirely separate from aesthetic canon. This is what the show is doing. If you can't understand that concept I'm not sure how to help you.
I think it is pretty amusing we're arguing "story canon" vs. "visual canon", honestly. The episodes were told with certain elements that made them what they were, both visual and story. If they decided Vulcans had square ears and dragon tails, but the stories were the same, would anyone buy that the show was part of the "Prime" timeline?
For me (and I can only speak for me), it is an all or nothing proposition. You can't have it both ways. The "look" defined TOS for me every bit as much as the stories did. I think it is poor form to try to brush away parts of it because they are inconvenient.
So our preferences are the same there. We both acknowledge past inconsistencies in this regard, and both wish Trek hadn't tried to reinvent its vision of "futurism" on the fly. Fair enough. It strikes me as odd, then, that you raised the need to do this as a defense of some of DSC's creative choices.
What's futuristic is subjective, granted, but either way, that doesn't mean Trek has to pretend to be portraying a vision of our particular future.
I realize that you were the author of the Eugenics Wars novels, for heaven's sake, and you did a nice job of re-imagining them as "covert" wars (not to mention of throwing in a lot of clever Easter eggs), but it struck me as quixotic in the first place to need to reimagine them. Why not just tell a story of the Eugenics Wars as an alternate history thing — as an open, global conflict, as they were (obviously) originally imagined in "Space Seed"? (Not a rhetorical question, BTW, I'm genuinely curious... was the choice of approach on those books originally your own idea, or Pocket's, or the licensors?...)
Anyway, as to viewscreens, frankly the concept of instant visual communication across interstellar distances still seems pretty darn futuristic! And they still make sense in-story. Holographic communication, OTOH, actually takes me out of the story. It makes me wonder what advantage the characters see in it. What's the point? How does it improve the actual communication process in any way? A holographic starmap above a conference table, sure, I can see the value of something like that... but for the purposes of a quick chat, what's the problem with looking at someone on-screen? Indeed I'd think it would be preferable to both parties — it lets them know where to focus their attention, whereas with holos, your interlocutors' eyes could be anywhere.
Now, you want to talk about something that's not futuristic, so much so that it also yanks me out of the story? How about a giant picture window on the bridge? Heck, this was so important to Trek's creators that fifty years ago, they put it right in the writers' guide: "The viewscreen is not a window." Either in-story or from the POV of current audiences, I can't imagine the rationale for changing that.
I actually think it has a pretty significant impact on the actual story of "Balance of Terror," but YMMV. Either way, granting that ENT introduced this conflict first, IMHO that was a mistake, and not one DSC needed to double down on. ENT's "Minefield" was a fairly forgettable story, and as a general rule, when something else in Trek conflicts with TOS, my default position is to stand with TOS, unless the "something else" is so unreservedly awesome as to make the retcon worthwhile.
I agree with everything in this paragraph. (Well, except for the part about Star Wars evoking cozy nostalgia.) As you acknowledge, and as I said to Greg just above, nothing about that requires Trek to be set in our particular future. But here's where we part ways:
What's to update, if it's clearly not predicting our "own" future? Indeed, that it wasn't has been pretty clear since the beginning (unless the US was launching nuclear weapons platforms into orbit in 1968 and managed to keep it completely secret!)... and frankly trying to do periodic "soft reboots" to maintain some illusion that it is does more to undermine its capacity to offer optimistic allegories than anything else, by undermining the show's internal integrity. It's not as if nuBSG needed to be set in a plausible future (or past) to tell effective stories with allegorical messages about our present. It's not as if 2001 or Blade Runner are any less impressive just because our present hasn't turned out like the "future" they imagined.
We'll have to agree to disagree about this, too. The "franchise," as the very word underscores, is a business enterprise... and I honestly, sincerely don't care whether CBS continues to profit from new iterations of it or not, because I have no financial stake in CBS. Nor am I Trek's creator, so I have no emotional stake in whether it lives on after me. I appreciate Trek to the extent that it resonates with me — which isn't unreasonable; indeed I think that's the approach most of us take to most of our entertainment, especially in today's media-saturated world where we have to pick and choose. To the extent that new versions of Trek don't resonate with me, I honestly couldn't care less whether they resonate with somebody else. (The entire seven seasons of VOY could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, for instance, and I wouldn't bat an eye.)
Yes. That makes perfect sense. Except for the very first time it was encountered, prior to which any version of it was only possible "in theory," per Spock's words.
Well, like I said above... all else equal, if I have to choose between a moment from a spinoff show and a moment from TOS, I'll choose TOS, and let the other thing be the outlier.
TOS is the wellspring from which all later incarnations of Trek draw their sustenance. The attitude among some fans today that TOS is somehow hard to watch or outdated or inadequate compared to what came later irks me to no end.
Well, that's precisely the problem with DSC, isn't it? If (to tie things back into this thread's ostensible topic) the folks in the writers' room had done a better job of telling a season of stories that knocked my socks off, that engaged me completely, I wouldn't be so distracted by nitpicking matters of continuity. They failed at that. Instead, what they put on screen was wildly uneven, and ended badly, and leaves lots of uncertainty about what they have to offer next.
Have you checked out the "Visual effects in Discovery" thread? A lot of people disagree on this point, including people with some serious FX background, offering insights about ways the show has cut corners or just make quixotic creative choices.
How would that have alienated fans any more than the cherry-picking soft-reboot approach they've actually taken? Serious question. I find it hard to imagine.
Last edited:
Same here.
To be fair, they walked back the Romulan cloak in the season four arc, and acknowledged the original appearance as a mistake.
The problem with considering TOS to be the "gold standard" for canon is TOS wasn't concerned with internal consistency at all. Hell, it's not even entirely clear in the first half of Season 1 if the Federation exists, or if the Enterprise is just an Earth vessel that Spock happens to have chose to serve upon. Aside from Mudd and Pike, I think TOS only referenced the events of a prior episode once. It wasn't until TAS, the movies, and early TNG that it was decided that Trek would build on what came before rather than endlessly come up with new one-off ideas.