Which one? They're not the same thing.
How do you figure?
I've never thought that sense was particularly common, but to the extent that people have it, "don't multiply hyptheses, stick with the most parsimonious solution" is definitely a part of it.
Common sense tells us that "D7" isn't a Klingon designation because Klingons don't use the English alphabet or numerical system and Occam's Razor would suggest that we're just wrong about what the D7 really looks like.
Common sense tells us that who came up with the designation doesn't matter to the question at hand, and Occam's Razor tells us that if 99 out of 100 ships we've seen identified as Klingon D7s have one recognizable look (or at least something close to it), while this one is Completely Different, then this one was probably misidentified.
The only way I judge Discovery is how it is presented on screen. I don't judge it specially because "Star Trek" or other shows. I refuse to compare it to other shows currently, largely because, every production is different. ... So, my personal effort is to take a production on its own merits, not as a TV show being compared against other TV shows, and not as a Star Trek show. Just as art.
Okay, then, I misunderstood what you were saying. It's not just DSC or Trek, you try to approach
everything that way.
I can't begin to fathom
how you could do that, though. After all, shows and movies don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in a context of other shows and movies, going back beyond our lifetimes, and the people who make them are influenced by that context just as much as the people who watch them. It's how we identify genre; it's how we understand narrative devices (even things as simple as cuts, fades, establishing shots, and theme music); it's how we recognize tropes; it's how we have any standards at all to evaluate acting, dialogue, cinematography, or anything else. You can't approach something as if you're a child or an alien who's never watched a show before. The only way to
assess the merits of any given production is by comparing it to others. Do you discount a professional critic's review of a film if he compares it to something else with the same actors or director?
My friends can compare all they want. I don't square them, because that's their choice. I don't see a disconnect.
Well, sure. Tastes vary. But if I recommend something to friends, I expect the first questions I'll be asked will be about what makes it interesting, and why I think they'll like it. Kinda hard to answer that if I can't compare it to something else they've actually seen, particularly something I know they like (or, ideally, that we both like).
They're comparable in that the same principal is at play here -- call it "interpretive symbolism." The musical number is a device that is used to tell the audience what is going on with the characters.
Yes, of course. But it's not pertinent to what we're actually discussing here, because (as I said)
the rules are different. The rules of the contract between show and audience vary by genre and format and medium. You might as well ask why DSC doesn't have a laugh track. It's as if this discussion were about a soccer match, and I were saying "Wait, he can't just hold the ball in his hands and run downfield with it like that!," and you objected "Why not? Football players do it all the time!"
It's not the same game.
You're not supposed to take any of those things literally, it's there to represent what you're really looking at. As with novels, opera, musicals, radio shows, and now with television and movies -- all mediums of fiction -- it's understood that the audience will supply their own imagination and meet the actors/writers/musicians halfway when they follow the story.
Actually, yeah, you're supposed to take
some of these things literally. What and how and why, though, depends on the details. The exact nature of the bargain between creators and audience — where that "meeting in the middle" takes place — varies (of course) according to the kind of material involved.
Because THAT is how fiction works. It's not a simulated reality that tricks you into thinking the images you're seeing are real. It's a STORY that someone is telling that you PRETEND is real from the moment it begins until the moment it ends.
Yes, it
is a simulated reality, for heaven's sake. From cavemen telling stories around the campfire, to Shakespeare's plays on stage at the Globe, to the latest summer blockbuster in the multiplex,
that is how fiction works, and always has been. The fidelity of the simulation and the extent to which one has to "pretend" in order to suspend disbelief, again, vary widely... but that doesn't change the fact that it
is a simulation. It presents an imaginary reality, in some fashion that simulates aspects of lived experience without completely capturing the whole thing. That is exactly what fiction is and does. It's not credible to claim otherwise.
It's why nobody in TNG can tell the difference between the 4 foot model and the 6 foot model even though they look totally different...
I swear, I remain baffled at why people keep mentioning this. Whatever this difference is, I have legitimately
never noticed it. It's clearly something a lot less drastic than the difference between DSC's version of the
Enterprise and the original.
...and why the visual inconsistencies in Discovery don't matter in the context of the show itself compared to any other production.
Of course they matter, just as much as the narrative inconsistencies. Your continued insistence that the two aren't intertwined is getting really frustrating. They are
both part and parcel of how the story is presented.
However the statements:
Judge the show strictly on its own merits, and don't compare it to any other production
and
Accept the show as part of the same narrative setting you already know and love, not a reboot, not a remake.
Are entirely compatible.
No, they're not. (And they're completely equivalent to the paraphrases I offered.) One of these says that the Work we're watching is Star Trek, taken as a whole, including everything in its "prime timeline," and this is just a new chapter. The other says that the Work we're watching is just
Discovery, the series
qua series, to be taken in isolation. Those are not compatible statements; they make different claims about the scope of the fictional world we're entering. Trying to hold them in one's mind simultaneously causes cognitive dissonance.
I judge the show on its own merits without comparing it to other productions, even knowing that it is part of the same narrative setting, and not a reboot or a remake. This is probably because almost every other scifi franchise I have ever enjoyed since I was old enough to see over the top of the kitchen counter has already forced me to do this on a regular basis...
I can only conclude that you watch TV and film with a
very different sensibility than I do, and than most other people do (so far as I can infer from reading criticism, and from kinds of choices storytellers make). You draw the line between diegetic and non-diegetic elements in a very iconoclastic way, and you really don't seem to give a damn about continuity.
For me, continuity matters. A lot. I don't expect everything in any given show or film to be diegetic, of course — when I watch
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Bill Murray and see tiny figures moving around in a cutaway version of the submarine, I don't take that literally. I understand symbolism and surrealism. But I don't treat everything on screen as such, if that's not how it's presented. If it's presented as realistic, as literal rather than figurative, as something that's believable to the eye and tangible for the characters, then I
treat it as realistic — i.e., as part of the narrative, and something that needs to be handled consistently for the production to have continuity. When I watch
Wolf with Jack Nicholson, and the movie has a narrative that proceeds unbroken from day to day, yet the plot depends on full moons that (by that narrative progression) occur only two weeks apart, that's it — the illusion is broken, and the movie is ruined for me. I can't and don't treat the moon as just "symbolic," any more than I do the progression of time in the story; they're both equally important, and they're at odds, and that's a crime against continuity.
