Ethan Peck cast as DSC's Spock
- Thread starter Lawrence B
- Start date
Same with Kirk. One would assume so. But many fans seem to say that the Kelvin changes rippled through the past of the Kelvin-verse as well. Hence why Pike was aged up significantly.
Either way, the guise of an 'alternate reality' is the perfect way to account for discrepancies.
Likeness is overrated. Look at the 80 or so people who've portrayed Churchill over the years between film, tv, and theatre. Some have looked just like him; some didn't look like him at all. Yet the only thing anyone ever remembers but the portrayal is the performance. No one cares how much the actor looks like him. And this is for the guy who might be the single most important human of the 20th century - not some made-up aliens on a space fantasy show.
We would still have to account for recastings within prime, like Valeris (or the opposite case, Tom paris and Locarno), so it makes more sense to me to assume that these recastings are supposed to look the same as previous apperances in-universe. (Or differently in the Paris/Locarno case).
You're not wrong to think that way. Like I said, eventually the Nimoy Spock will fade away and become irrelevant as older Trek fan generations die off.
The Spock brand, however, will likely continue. It's most central to Star Trek and how it's marketed. And more Spock actors will likely take on the role in future decades.
It undermines the whole passing the torch thing from Nimoy to Quinto... but meh, studios want their money.
TNG had McCoy, an Enterprise, a Klingon in every episode, an obviously modernized Spock stand-in and an obviously modernized Kirk stand-in, and it straight up remade a popular TOS episode for its second outing, complete with a shout-out to Kirk and crew. These elements may not have been felt as deeply over the course of the season as they were in (some of) the other shows, but that's far more to do with it being the most heavily episodic of all the spin-offs.
Also... Enterprise didn't really re-use anything in its first season except the ship name, a single sentence appearance of Zefram Cochrane, Vulcans in general, a few short Klingon appearances and a single Ferengi episode. Are we now counting Enterprise as the most successful Star Trek series?
I can accept secondary minor characters like that getting recastings and having slightly different appearances.
Paris and Locarno could have been related for all we know.
Anyway, I'm still perplexed why they cast Anson Mount...who is so perfectly cast as a modern Jeffrey Hunter Pike... and cast someone so visually different as Speck compared to Nimoy's iconic look. Perhaps Spock is just a much harder role to cast, at least now it is... while Nimoy's shadow still looms heavily over the character.
The Naked Now shares a concept, but was not a remake.
McCoy was intentionally not named on sceeen...he’s an Easter Egg.
The show is in continuity with TOS and shares a universe, so Klingons happen. Even the Roddenberry was against it for a long time.
The other things are start grasping...Spockalike? Data? Nah. Kirkalike? Riker...I guess...but even more nah.
There is a difference between a cameo, and an outright shared parent.
Different circumstances though.
They need STD to pull in massive subscriptions for CBS All Access, to keep it afloat.
So digging up Spock, Pike, Mudd, 1701, the Mirror Universe, Picard and more will keep the Trekkies paying.
Things that Star Trek fans are already emotionally attached to.
Well, I wouldn't exactly call Saavik (Sorry, I mixed her up with Valeris in my previous post) a "minor secondary" character, except in STIV.
Well, considering that they look exactly alike they would have to be twins, which raises multiple of questions like why they have different names (Since Tom shares his last name with his father Locarno would have had to marry someone before or during his Academy and taken their name which I also think is rather unlikely considering how prestigeous the Paris name is in Starfleet) or (assuming they entered Academy at roughly the same time) how Paris made it from cadet to ensign to lieutenant junior grade to a dishonorable discharge to Maquis member to inmate of a penalty colony in about two and a half years. ("The First Duty" was more than halfway through 2368, Voyager started in early 2371) Especially Harry Kim wants to know
Maybe they just casted for their acting abilities or for how well they work with other cast members rather than pure physical resemblence and Mount just happened to resemble Hunter more closely than Peck resembles Nimoy.
I bring up Klingons because people constantly bring up the Klingons in DSC as part of Discovery's derivativeness. TNG's first season leaned on them almost as much as DSC's, and more than any other series.
The Naked Now is 100% a remake (with a different cast of characters). Right down to the theoretically perfectly manageable situation which suddenly becomes life-threatening because no one is doing their jobs, the out of left field romantic enounter between two random characters and the Engineering section being commandeered by a member of the crew.
Spock and Data are both outsiders in relation to humanity with difficulty understanding human emotion, an extreme scientific capability and a strong tendency towards overly formal speech. They're not the same character, but the one was VERY clearly inspired by the other. If TNG had been pitched as an indepedant sci-fi outside the Trek brand, Data probably wouldn't exist.
Riker is actually the one that's more of a stretch because Kirk is not actually the womanizing horndog he's remembered as. Riker is more inspired by the popular image of Kirk than the actual original character. But the inspiration is still clear enough that I've seen lots of people talk about it. Just recently posters on this board were praising it as a brilliant move on early TNG's part to help people get used to the new Star Trek by providing a familiar element to bridge the gap from the old one.
And named on screen or not, it's clearly McCoy. Yes, it is indeed a cameo. It is also a much longer and more noticeable cameo than Zefram Cochrane, who is the only named character to be brought back for ENT's first season, so I say again, the show with the fewest connections to previous canon in its first season was not TNG.
Script reuse was pretty common back then. See how many Bonanza episodes you can find hidden and redone with Little House characters, sometime. Gunsmoke was on so freaking long it just reused its own scripts on occasion. Sometimes an idea is reused, like TMP from the original TOS episode it was taken from (and the Phase II script it sprang out of) but sometimes it's a lot more obvious like Naked Now. Soaps have been doing it since the radio era.
I think people had lower expectations on quality in general at the time, so it was often ok. But by the time TNG came out, VCR's were common. People were taping things, re-watching, looking for errors and would have counted threads on uniform fabric if their screens had had the resolution. Why is Zoe Saldana's skin pore count different from Nichols? What does this tell us about the difference between Abramsverse and Prime?! Let us discuss for thousands of pages and be assets to this burgeoning world civilization. I digress. I think people were ready for new Trek, as TNG promised and Naked Now was just a big annoying turd on the screen.
They even used a screen cap or publicity photo of Locarno as a picture of Paris on his Father's desk in one episode of Voyager.
Because no one remembers Karloff's Monster...
Bingo. We don't need to come up with elaborate in-universe explanations about "time ripples" or whatever to explain why a recast character looks somewhat different from the previous actor. The explanation is . . . different actors look differently. Same thing with actors playing multiple roles in the same franchise.. (Hi, Mark Lenard, David Warner, Majel Barrett, Suzie Plakson, etc.)
But you're still here.Good stories would've kept me around.
Maybe he isn't actually here. Maybe this is actually mirror BillJ!