I'll never understand the need to split hairs over continuity or "real Star Trek." Star Trek is alive and well and being demonstrated in new ways.
It is not, and was never intended to be, one long unified story. People got spoiled in the 90s with all the overlap that was produced by the same people. That ain't the reality of Star Trek though.
Yes, a decent respect for continuity can be a virtue, but Job One is not to preserve the sacred "Canon" at all costs--even though some folks seem to think it is. I get leery when I see new Trek getting judged first and foremost on continuity issues, often with a fundamentalist, all-or-nothing approach to "canon," in which we have to treat every line of every episode as gospel or the whole franchise is damaged. "Canon" is all very well and good, but let's not put the cart before horse here. Continuity is meant to serve STAR TREK, not the other way around.
ALL of the above.
I'd really prefer for the whole "Prime Universe" discussion to just go away, even though it won't. Before the Abrams movies, the term hadn't even been coined. Prime Universe really just means "everything else" besides those movies.
If I were making a ST series, I wouldn't even tell you what "timeline" it is. Fans would just have to watch (they will anyway). Eventually "something" in some episode would would clue you in, but I can promise it would be entirely accidental on my part. I wouldn't research all of ST just to get certain details right. Nick Meyer didn't. I would even be a little blunt about it during interviews when asked, perhaps even restating Orci's suggestion that "Don't worry; all your old your DVDs are still there." And you would hate me for it.
By my count there are no less than six different versions of ST:
-NBC/Classic (TOS and TAS)
-Roddenberry Trek (TOS pilots,
The Motion Picture and early TNG)
-Bennett/Meyer Trek (remaining TOS feature films)
-Berman Trek (remainder of TNG, DS9~ENT and TNG feature films)
-Kelvin movies (remains to be seen in Tarantino falls here or becomes a separate entity)
-CBS Trek (STD, whatever next)
Look how
messy that is. Classic contains material that isn't even "considered" canon. The Roddenberry and Berman phases lack a clear transition (Should I split them at the point when Michael Piller and Marvin Rush came onboard? Or after 'Unification' aired with Roddenberry's dedication? Or with the firing of TNG composer Ron Jones in late S4 -- which for me is a major turn that exemplifies, in uncomplimentary fashion, the direction of what would become Berman Trek?). Berman Trek is the most "fluid" version in dealing with Classic Trek ('Relics' etc), yet still respected many of the ways in which Roddenberry Trek
wouldn't acknowledge Classic. And Roddenberry Trek wore its open dismissal of Bennett Trek practically on its sleeve.
The Kelvin movies are merely yet another version of ST. They're less "fluid" than Berman Trek; they don't even try to "explain" their production design despite claiming to be set in a tangent continuity. What really separates these movies has almost nothing to do with continuity and more to do with politics/marketing. They are the ST movie franchise Paramount wanted and never had; even if they didn't diverge from the established chronology you can be sure Paramount (and probably CBS) still would've wanted them as far from the rest of "canon" as possible. Establishing a narrative link to "Prime" Trek at all probably hinged of getting Leonard Nimoy.
CBS is also under no obligation to acknowledge the Kelvin movies in return. They don't have to reciprocate (though I suppose they could); the intellectual property is theirs. The unnamed Picard series could end up directly contradicting the 2009 movie's backstory if it decides to (or more likely, if it just doesn't care). This hypothetically would make all discussion of "Prime" redundant (though I've no doubt discussion would continue regardless).
I've never believed there was a single continuity even before 2009. I can't pretend every galactic outpost of civilization (including the Klingons) obediently overhauled their hardware just because... because... because they all got the memo that a single Starfleet ship was being refitted (both inside and out, to the extent that there wasn't even a ship anymore after stripping it apart). TNG and TOS have always been a parallel world apart to me (Kirk, Scotty and Checkov crossed over when they began speaking TNG technobabble). Bennett/Meyer Trek watched all 79 of Classic's episodes and still got a number of things wrong (Neutral Zones, age of the ship, warp speed, klingon high council and interstellar law). And the Augments story arc remains a classic fan-service example of Couldn't Leave Well Enough Alone ("well enough" was Worf practically breaking the fourth wall in 'Tribble-ations' to admit that there are no real explanations).
TOS is full of premises that never got acknowledged again:
-"Gravity assist" time travel (the most popular TOS movie is nowhere to be found in Enterprise D's historical data banks)
-Galactic energy barriers that you can't or shouldn't cross
-Parallel Earths (I include 'Paradise Syndrome' here too because TNG had its own take on the Preservers)
Not to mention premises that got re-acknowledged
after being temporarily retconned out of existence:
-Mirror Universe (TNG offered up its own take on parallel universes before DS9 brought this back)
-1990 Eugenics War ("Post-atomic horror" mentioned in 'Farpoint' and
First Contact moves 3rd WW to mid-21st century; DS9 and ENT later revive EW while being unspecific as to when.
The Voyage Home and VOY 'Future's End' ignore -or more likely overlook- EW entirely because it's
not important to their respective stories. DS9 'Past Tense' ignores
everything in favor of its own dystopia, closer to what we're living right now. I even think we're due for a modernized re-interpretation of ST establishing climate change as what "really" almost did humans in -- only I would casually slip it in as "yet another" silent retcon rather than a reboot of any kind, and you would hate me for it).
"Messy" is beautiful. And familiarity (as much as I hate speaking in cliche) really does breed contempt.
I grew up on TNG. However the Harve Bennett movies quickly became my favorite period of ST. It took over a year to rent all four (at the time) on VHS. For the longest time I even missed a minute of
Wrath of Khan on ABC Thursday Night because the cat jumped up and sat on the remote (>>STOP>> click, click). TNG was pretty much "over" for me after
The Undiscovered Country, having already done and said pretty much everything, and even 'The Inner Light' felt overrated. DS9 brought TNG back in a strong way and vastly expanded on it (though not without replaying a lot of TNG formula). VOY and ENT on the other hand did very little for me, and I even came to loathe latter-day Berman Trek for not showing the flexibility in style and narrative that I loved about the earlier movies. VOY never stopped being the copy of a copy, and ENT mostly tried to make it new again by sprinkling fan-service on top of it.
ST for me is defined by being in a constant state of revision and change. And the most boring installments are the ones that resisted change. The 2009 movie was the freshest thing to happen to ST overall since
The Undiscovered Country, and
Discovery S1 (up until almost the last episode) the freshest thing ST's put on TV since DS9.
My hope for CBS is that they continue to improve, don't over-saturate (If I have concern about the Kurtzman deal it is this), learn from their mistakes, don't lean the
wrong lessons from their mistakes (DS9 not popular enough = we have to give fans more TNG), don't listen to the fans, don't back-peddle, and
please don't "explain" every time something on your show is different. Something's wrong with if it's
not different.
"Art is not a democracy."
-Nick Meyer
