I don't think it is. Prime Timeline is a marketing term, not an essential story element.
Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
- Thread starter Annorax849
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I don't find any of the events important. If you changed a couple of names, this show could just as easily be 25th century as 23rd.
If it was a book series, that would be a much stronger argument. I don't care for terms like "Prime timeline," probably because I get annoyed with any terms, acronyms, or catch phrases that are used so excessively, but I see all the previous series as one larger story, and the film world and Discovery world as something separated, and distinct. I can't help that. It is just the way my mind interpets it.
Who knows, maybe in ten years I will have assimilated the show into the rest. Time heals all.
Who knows, maybe in ten years I will have assimilated the show into the rest. Time heals all.
Because the events are important, not the larger aesthetic or every little detail or character moment.
Agree to disagree on that point.
Having lived through Enterprise on this board? Yeah, this won't even be a conversation at that point.
You're probably right, except there's always the random poster that comes around ranting about Ferengi pirates.
I was too young to see THE NEXT GENERATION be the whipping boy it was in 1987, but I definitely remember ENTERPRISE being so reviled when it was the new show that it's amusing to see fans now be more kind to it a decade later.
Today's heresy is tomorrow's tradition.
Except it wasn't marketing pushing the term.
When writers and producers tell people "This show is in X timeline, it's connected to such and such" that's marketing.
Can't say as I have. Seems to me the larger question would be how Craig's Bond in Skyfall could possibly have that car at all, given that his career only dates back to the Casino Royale reboot and he doesn't share the history of Sean Connery's Bond. But like I said, the Bond franchise has never been a model of any kind of coherent approach to continuity.
Clarification: He won the Aston Martin in a card game in Casino Royale. It's supposed to be the same car in Skyfall, but somehow the driver's seat switched sides.
This is what I'm saying: the stories in the same sandbox share the same world building; or, as you put it, the "entire fictional world." Same world = same visuals because visuals are part of the world. (again, excepting minor variations).
indeed,you contradicted yourself here. Before you conceded that stories in the same world should NOT be inconsistent.
No, it doesn't depend. I am talking about related stories. The names of the production company or the investors are not relevant to the nature of the stories.
Okay, but:
Generally, no. Same world = same PROGRESSION OF EVENTS. It doesn't matter as much if the characters or settings look the same across multiple stories, what matters is that characters in the next story reference events in the previous one as if it is part of their past.
No, I've said many times that stories in the same world can and usually ARE inconsistent with each other in terms of visuals, due to the practical limits of production design (recasting actors being the most obvious change). The story only needs to be consistent with ITSELF.
And lest you forget, what we're talking about in terms of "need" is for the bare minimum of integrity to make a believable narrative. Some properties can get away with a truly hilarious amount of inconsistency because the random and unexpected changes to the visuals are actually built right in to the narrative structure (Doctor Who's famous solution to the Recasting problem). That's yet another datapoint that visual consistency is entirely optional, only NARRATIVE consistency really matters.
Yes, so am I. It depends on how closely they're related.
Back to the Future II, for example, is a story in which half the events of the movie take place concurrent with its previous installment. So if you change the visuals for the 1955 scenes, the differences would be a lot more noticeable. A similar thing happens in Terminator Genisys, where the producers go out of their way to carefully recreate the setting, the look and even the atmosphere of the original "Terminator" film.
OTOH, Star Trek gave us an episode where part of the story was actually supposed to have taken place BETWEEN SCENES of a previous story, which also involved an attempt to faithfully reproduce the sets and props of the previous story...
... not entirely successfully.
That's pretty much the only thing that IS relevant. The people making the show are the people who control what the show looks like and how the story unfolds. If they do a terrible job of telling the story, it doesn't matter how consistent the visuals are (again, These Are The Voyages is a good example of this). If they tell a very good and engaging story, the visuals matter even less.
It kind of DOES matter considering all of those things you just mentioned described wildly different concepts.
I can't help that you insist on using words you don't understand to describe concepts you know very little about.
The operative word there is "depiction." In any storytelling medium, it doesn't make sense to expect the visual depiction to remain consistent, mainly because -- across the broader context of filmed television and motion pictures -- this almost never happens.
Did you think we were discussing hypotheticals? It's not a reasonable thing to expect because it's not a thing that normally happens. In fact, it happens so rarely that a successful reproduction of an old set often attracts attention and praise from film critics; that's really going the extra mile for visual consistency in a medium that doesn't usually need it.
There are many reasons, but the most important is this: the audience for any particular story is only "present" for the story that is being told. You don't write your story on the assumption that your readers/viewers/audience is binge-watching an entire fifty part installment and will have it fresh in their memories; if they have to go back to the previous installment to know what the hell you're talking about, then you've already failed to do your job. So the visuals and the depictions thereof need to be consistent from the time your audience comes in to the time your audience leaves.
For a television series, that's basically from the season premier to the season finale.
Yes, and broad strokes of similarity more than suffice for this. Especially for Star Trek, whose variation on visuals has been pretty extreme in the past even within episodes in the same series.
Which is why you're not supposed to notice.
Because the first episode of Discovery doesn't overlap chrnologically with the last episode of Enterprise. Nor does the last episode of Discovery overlap chronologically with the first episode of TOS. Thus they are not connected: there's a significant gap before and after the story. Despite the presence of the Enterprise at the end of season 1, there's also a significant difference in setting as well. Different ships, different characters, different planets, different missions.
This is an ironic statement from you, considering you seem unaware that the constraints and expectations of television and film audiences are largely inconsistent with YOUR expectations for a Star Trek series.
Interesting. I think this is the first time you've brought up this particular proviso, or at least the first time I've seen it. It prompts a couple of thoughts...
First of all, why set the bar so low? Surely there's some better standard to aspire to than a "bare minimum" of narrative integrity?
Second, what do you mean by "believable" here? The term is hardly self-defining, and it can encompass a lot of assumptions. In a real-world sense, obviously nothing about Star Trek is "believable," even as fiction; it's chock-full of outright scientific impossibilities. I think the sense that's more relevant here, though, would be one that conceptualizes "believability" in terms of what facilitates an audience member's "willing suspension of disbelief," to once again quote the oft-used phrase from Coleridge. In that sense its inverse, naturally, would be things that disrupt that suspension of disbelief.
And in that sense, it's really implausible to draw the distinction you keep insisting on between narrative and visuals. Both of them really are part of the worldbuilding, part of the overall sensory experience, at least in a visual medium like film or TV. Perhaps you can easily handwave the visual elements away without stepping outside the story — "sure, X looks completely different, but at least the reference to past event Y was consistent" — but that's just not how most people operate when they're watching something.
Yes, they are. Nobody has contested that; it's a given. That's why it's irrelevant here: the discussion is not about who controls the show's creative choices. The discussion is about how to interpret the show's creative choices.
Or the Borg episode. Or Romulan cloaking devices.
Haven't you heard? We aren't allowed to interpret the material. It is blasphemy.
You know, I'm not sure why I keep treating you with a reasonable level of civility. You're obviously not interested in reciprocating that.
I think this is a ridiculous and frankly unsupportable claim. I would say that it almost always happens.
You do if you're working in a shared universe. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons for working in a shared universe: to get the attention of an audience that is familiar with most or all of the other material set in that universe, and therefore predisposed to be favorably inclined toward your new additions thereto. You especially do if you're working in a shared universe in the present day, where streaming services and the Internet exist, and everything that's broadcast is available to re-watch at a moment's notice, dissected and screen-capped within hours, and documented permanently online.
There is negligible common ground between "broad strokes of similarity" and "as consistent as it's feasible to be." I can't imagine why you're trying to claim otherwise.
This is your definition of what it means for shows to be "connected"? I swear you're being deliberately obtuse here.
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