Visual continuity not lore
Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
- Thread starter Annorax849
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From what I understand, Discovery's approach isn't to exclusively build off of TOS but rather all of Trek that we've come to see. This is something ENTERPRISE did. For example, I'm perfectly fine with Archer having his own ready room on the NX-01, despite the fact that Kirk's ship never had one. Surely, if we were to be very strict about canon, we'd assume that ready rooms were only a fixture introduced in the 24th century. But for the purposes of drama and practicality, it makes sense to give the captain his own personal office right next to the bridge for when he needs a private discussion but needs to be close to the bridge. It always seemed rather inconvenient that Kirk would need to walk all the way to his personal quarters in some part of the saucer section just to have a personal chat, like we saw in TMP when wanting to talk privately with Decker. Of course in the context of all canon, it now seems like an oddity that the ready room would be a concept dropped during the 23rd century. What's the in-universe explanation? I don't really need one. It was just something the creators never really thought of until TNG and from that point on it became a fixture.
It would be amusing if the Discovery Enterprise remains largely true to the classic layout that at one point a very anxious Pike says on the bridge "at some point I'm going to contact the designer, Jeffries, about why he thought it was a good idea to get rid of the captain's ready room on these ships".
And you haven't addressed the fact that we have always had to do that.
So pure that even GR wanted to change it as soon as he could and ignore facets of it in TNG? He changed the look of everything the moment he could, without an explanation.
With respect, I disagree. For me, Star Trek isn't just the visuals, or the names, but also that optimism regarding humanity, that humanity can survive and do better. It was neither a perfect world, nor utopian in its scope. And, I think that world is large enough to allow for variation in design.
That said, would I prefer a look closer to TOS? Yes. But, I also respect the fact that, like GR, Nick Meyer, and others, the production team is crafting a visual language that will set their product apart. It isn't a historical piece were wearing jean shorts in 1870s France is anachronistic. This is still an imagined world that has no problem with reusing sets, props and other things. Did Constitution class ships have identical interiors to Galaxy class?
Or, it's another universe, and meant to entertain. Star Trek was meant to entertain first and foremost as well, not be hung up on the technical details.
Never to the extent that every single thing needs a headcanon wankaround in order to fit with what's long established.
Nor have we had examples where the people behind the show acknowledge that what they're creating is being made deliberately to not fit with TOS, TNG and the rest but their unique version of Star Trek.
It doesn't matter how many (dozens, scores, hundreds of) times people post this; no one has yet offered a coherent explanation for how these two intimately intertwined aspects of the Trekverse can be extricated from one another. (Much less why they should be.)
It's not a novel or a stageplay. The visuals are an essential part of the storytelling, just as much as in Star Wars or 2001 or Blade Runner or for that matter any historical epic you care to name. More so, even. The look of Star Trek is iconic.
(Plus, there have been lots of discontinuities with the "lore" as well, as many people have described at length. Even if we were to accept a disconnect between visuals and story content that wouldn't explain those. Saying "Trek has retconned this or that before" is not a justification.)
David Mack touched on that exact question in his DSC novel Desperate Hours, as it happens.
Nearly a century had passed in-story. The explanation is self-evident. It would have been perplexing if things didn't look different. They did, however, look like a logical extrapolation of what had come before.
Me too.
Keep in mind, though, that the hypothetical WebLurker was responding to wasn't just about accepting a few visual retcons... it was positing the wholesale retconning-out of TOS in its entirety, in favor of its latter-day spinoffs.
Well, it's definitely setting it apart, pretty vividly. If it weren't, this thread wouldn't exist.
It would be nice if it were not just setting it apart but improving on it. That's a whole different level of challenge, of course, and I think there's a pretty strong argument that it hasn't been met.
When Bennett and Meyer oversaw the fairly drastic overhaul of the TMP look in TWOK, for instance — over just a decade of story time — they did it so brilliantly that few people had any cause for complaint. They left alone what worked (the ship exterior), changed what didn't (the interiors, uniforms, etc.), and crafted a new look that instantly became iconic in its own right. DSC hasn't pulled that off. The new aesthetic is, to say the least, controversial.
They had to update the designs for modern TV but they wanted to keep it in the same universe.
There simple. It isn't hard at all.
"They had to" isn't an explanation, it's an excuse. (And as excuses go, "we had to change it so we could keep it the same" is a pretty self-defeating one.)
"Modern TV" and FX tech has been around for a long time now, but no previous Trek series has found it necessary to change the iconic look of TOS... because, as has been pointed out ad nauseam now, production values are not the same thing as designs.
In fact, production values are much easier to segregate from design aesthetics than story content is.
Long story short, f you can't improve on something, you shouldn't screw around with it.
"Modern TV" and FX tech has been around for a long time now, but no previous Trek series has found it necessary to change the iconic look of TOS... because, as has been pointed out ad nauseam now, production values are not the same thing as designs.
In fact, production values are much easier to segregate from design aesthetics than story content is.
Long story short, f you can't improve on something, you shouldn't screw around with it.
Well, three fairly major movies did. And no, the destruction of the USS Kelvin does not explain all those changes. They just updated it as they wanted, and added a handwave.
Not quite what I was talking about. The look of ships and uniforms and whatnot in other time periods has been different, and that's just fine, and can be rationalized in-story. The look of TOS itself has remained consistent whenever it's been revisited.
Unless you're talking about the Abrams films. But (A) in my book those have just as many problems in story terms as in visual terms, so I'm content to disregard them entirely, and (B) even if one actually likes them, they are explicitly a reboot, which is a pretty easy umbrella to sweep things under. Unlike DSC, they never purported to be depicting the same reality.
Unless you're talking about the Abrams films. But (A) in my book those have just as many problems in story terms as in visual terms, so I'm content to disregard them entirely, and (B) even if one actually likes them, they are explicitly a reboot, which is a pretty easy umbrella to sweep things under. Unlike DSC, they never purported to be depicting the same reality.
Well I don't think we can dismiss the evidence against your point because you don't like them, and as I said, the only thing 'rebooty' about them is a change to the fate of the USS Kelvin which hardly explains all the changes we see in ST2009. We can accept the handwave, but it doesn't actually make any sense. It's just an update of TOS for the era in which those movies were made. They just decided to throw in something to the plot for fans to wave it away with, and Discovery has decided not to, as yet.
The new Enterprise is confirmed to be larger than the original. Back to my Encyclopedia comment earlier, here's the Enterprise page in the latest edition:
Discovery will have to be segregated similarly to the Kelvinverse in order to be catalogued alongside TOS, TNG and the rest. Thus, not the same universe. It's common sense.
Discovery will have to be segregated similarly to the Kelvinverse in order to be catalogued alongside TOS, TNG and the rest. Thus, not the same universe. It's common sense.
Nope because CBS.
Please explain to be how they can include DSC visuals without segregation or brain damaged doublethink.
105 pages in, I know I'm not the first person to bring this up, but I will again anyway: The Motion Picture. Roddenberry even wrote a whole novel explaining that THIS is what Star Trek actually looked like all along, that what everyone thought was "canon" was actually an in-universe dramatization. Every single thing in that movie needed a "headcanon wankaround" (calm down friend) and even the man in charge knew it.
The novelisation was somewhat different to the movie, featuring a microchipped Kirk getting instructions and a briefing from Starfleet downloaded into his brain. The novel isn't the same world as the movie.
And besides, Klingons aside, TMP was a sequel to TOS, with the "refit" handwave to explain the differences as upgrades. DSC directly visually contradicts the rougly concurrent "The Cage"
ST:E was exactly this. Like ALL THE TIME. We knew very little about the 23rd century from earlier dialog, but what little we do know was routinely contradicted in almost every episode.
The Lore remains perfectly intact, the only workarounds are for visual changes, which is pretty much inevitable when you revisit a TV series after 50 years of artistic and technological development. You don't need a workaround for the visuals, just the smallest amount of imagination.
Because most people don't think it's a big deal and can just suspend their disbelief or retcon it in their head?
God yes, this. Same as when I hear Kirk order Right Standard Rudder I just get over it. Trek can be weird and inconsistent. You just get over it.
Yes, a very good argument could be made that ENT has done the same.
No it doesn't. See my earlier post.
Because I was asking how one could possibly catalogue ships and events from Discovery in a Star Trek Encylopdedia without marking them as seperate from TOS (much like the Kelvinverse entries), which is somewhat more involved than simply suspending disbelief.
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