Not the point. The point is that Discovery has indisputably changed the look of Trek, and thus we don't know what the nacelles of it's version of NX-01 looked like.
John Eaves Trek Art Book Out Now
- Thread starter JD
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Which. Is. Exactly. What. Some. Fans. Said. About. TMP. 39. Years. Ago. Every single time a new Trek production comes along, the same predictable overreactions arise. And every time, the fans who think that way insist that this time is fundamentally different from all the others.
No previous Trek has ever replaced visuals like Discovery. It is a first. The Enterprise is Discovery is not a refit or earlier version of the TOS vessel, it is a replacement.
Thus nothing in any prior Trek can be guarenteed as looking the same as it did, at least when viewed through the unique lens of Discovery's designers.
TOS Remastered replaced quite a few visuals, including complete replacements of the designs of ships, stations, ground facilities, and planets. TNG Remastered replaced the appearance of many planets as well. And earlier productions may not have "replaced" ship designs, but they did it with alien designs (Klingons, Andorians, Tellarites, Gorn, etc.), character appearances (Saavik, Ziyal, Cochrane, the TAS versions of Kor and Koloth, Worf's total forehead replacement after season 1, etc.), transporter and phaser effects, and so forth.
Why would you think that? The episode in which it appears is set is 2257, three years after "The Cage" and eight years before "Where No Man Has Gone Before." If you can accept that the Enterprise was refit during the three-year gap between TAS and TMP, why are you unable to assume the exact same thing about the three-year gap between "The Cage" and DSC?
It seems pretty silly to imagine the Enterprise was refit to a new look after "The Cage" and then refit back to its original design in time for "Where No Man." Though I'm sure S&S will gladly publish a novel that explains it, given other retcons they have published.
So they refit the Enterprise after "The Cage", also scaled it up from 289m to 430m, and then after Star Trek: Discovery they undid all their refits and shrank the ship back to how everything was before.
You're smarter than that.
I'm surprised that that never caused a similar kurfuffle. It basically forked the continuity, and even Ex-Astris lists the affected elements twice, one with a "REMASTERED" tag on it.
I think what Kind Daniel is getting at is that we're seeing an increasing amount of changes and alterations to Trek continuity with less and less of an acceptable "out" to explain it, i.e. it's 4 years later and this totally new starship is the same one just "refit." It's getting really hard to handwave away the alterations at this point, and the problem will keep getting worse as we get more Trek productions over the next decades that will inevitably reinvent the look again. At what point to we decide there just is no reconciling it and admit these things are reboots?
There's absolutely no call for personal insults. Obviously this is all just made-up stuff that shouldn't be taken too literally. But that's exactly why I don't see any reason to throw out past information because of a new interpretation. Like I said, fans have invented ways to rationalize or gloss over discrepancies before.
Like I said, there were people who assumed TMP and TWOK were reboots because they looked different. Changes in appearance are not enough to justify that, because appearance is just artistic interpretation. Saavik didn't get plastic surgery after Spock's funeral, nor was the Robin Curtis Saavik from a different reality than the Kirstie Alley Saavik; it's just that the dramatic interpretation of the events replaced an actress in the role. The character herself was meant to remain unchanged. Canon is not about anything as superficial as the way things look onscreen. Canon is story. It's the overall events that occur in the putative universe, regardless of discrepancies in how they're dramatized. Different works of fiction can make radically different aesthetic choices while still having their stories be in continuity with each other. If we can accept that James Cromwell grew up to be Glenn Corbett, or that the simplified cartoon characters in TAS are the same people as the live actors we saw in TOS, then it shouldn't be so impossible to accept that two different onscreen designs of a starship represent the same continuous ship in the underlying reality.
There is simply no reason to perceive a different artistic interpretation as a different universe. As long as the plots and character arcs and underlying worldbuilding maintain continuity with each other, then that's all that matters. The Kelvin Timeline isn't a separate reality because the actors are recast or the ships are redesigned, but because the events and backstory were changed -- Kirk's father was killed at his birth, he grew up more rebellious and entered Starfleet years later, Vulcan was destroyed, etc. Even if the visual designs had been exactly the same, it would be a separate reality because of the different events that occurred in the universe. By the same token, as long as the portrayal of the events is the same, as long as the known facts surrounding the backstory of Sarek or Spock or Pike or whoever are not substantially altered (at least to a greater degree than the many continuity glitches that already exist within the franchise), then it's narratively the same universe, no matter how much the look is altered.
Ah. You're one of the "visual reboot" sorts. King Daniel definitely is not, and I think that's where the head-butting is coming from.
You're taking this in the wrong direction and moving the goalposts. This is not about them making changes being right or wrong, there are countless threads for that. My original point is that if the USS Enterprise NCC-1701's design can be swapped out for something else, if the Klingons and their ships be replaced similarly, then Enterprise NX-01's design can too - and thus the design of the NX-01 itself and it's round nacelles are no more set in stone than anything else is in the Discoverse.
So it's entirely possible that in Discovery's version of Trek (which is visually distinct if nothing else, and deliberately so), round nacelles may well be a new thing on the Enterprise 1701.
Granted, it's possible, maybe even likely, that if some circumstance arose so the NX-01 (or a known contemporary, like the Intrepid or the Warp Delta) was shown in new footage on DSC or a future show, it'd be redesigned to a casually notable extent, beyond whatever differences come from the fact that they'd have to build a new model (like, more than the difference between the three canon Enterprise-refit models, or the seven-ish Enterprise-D models). First, I don't think it's likely, because the square nacelles and flat ships dictates came from Bryan Fuller, who is long gone (though his influence may not be, given my understanding the decision to use the Enterprise came after his departure, and my biggest issue with the DSC version is how squat it is), never mind how likely it is for Enterprise to come up (though, believe me, I was as surprised as anyone for IAMD to be a major macguffin in DSC, or all of season 3 and 4 to be critical backstory for Beyond, so I might be underestimating that).
But, more importantly, I don't believe in borrowing trouble from the future. In the absence of any other information, the only reasonable assumption is that everything remains status quo unless specifically contradicted. I don't see the sense of figuring that since retcons (visual or otherwise) are likely or possible, we're prompted to throw out everything we know beyond the broad strokes, and fill in details with our own speculations.
Hell, why stop ourselves with the NX-01? Are you going to advocate that since DSC holds that round nacelles are the new hotness, the next time we see the movie-era Enterprise, or the -D or -E or Voyager, they'll have cigar-shaped nacelles with big, spherical red domes to show they're newer that the Binary Stars-vintage ships? (Of course, the round-nacelles-equals-most-advanced-tech-in-DSC's-art-style is already contra-indicated since a couple days ago, when we saw a regular round-engined DSC shuttle attached to an older ship in a 2230s-era flashback).
There are some similarities between the picture of the Defiant and the Enterprise as we see it in Discovery that aren't present in the TOS-R version, most notably the size and shape of the "neck". That suggests that the Defiant started out looking like the Enterprise in DSC did which would mean that the Defiant in its TOS apperance looked similar to the Enterprise as seen in Discovery. Alternatively it could also be part of the extensive modifications the Defiant was subjected to in the mirror universe. Either way the neck had to be modified, as there's a bit more of a bend in the upper half of it than in either prime universe versions.
One of these numbers isn't canon and the other barely is.
I just disregard that weird Defiant graphic as a production error. After all, the mirror Enterprise in "Mirror, Mirror" looked the same as the Defiant, so the idea that the Empire modified the design and then went back is implausible.
Frankly, I think the VFX design on Discovery is consistently poor and fraught with errors, like showing an O-type star as orange instead of blue-white and putting a planet in the shot behind the space station that was said to be 100 AU from Sol. So I tend to take a Doylist interpretation, that what we're being shown in DSC is not the objective in-universe "reality," but a fictional reconstruction whose creators take liberties with the details. As I've mentioned before around here, this is pretty much how Roddenberry approached all of Star Trek, as when he told TMP viewers to pretend that Klingons had always had bumpy heads, and when he pretended in the TMP novelization that TOS had been an "inaccurately larger-than-life" 23rd-century dramatization of Kirk's adventures and that TMP was more faithful and accurate, explaining the differences. Pretty much all the visual discrepancies, and many of the plot discrepancies, can be taken as differences in artistic interpretation. Generally I'd tend to favor the later version as the more "accurate" one, in the same way we favor dilithium over lithium, or Andorians with moving antennae over ones with static antennae. But the visuals on DSC (at least the CGI visuals) are just so problematical and error-prone that I tend to favor the classic designs where there's a conflict.
They however, are treating it all as retcon, at least within the context of their own show.
It's a deeply schizophrenic production, visually a reboot (although season 2 is reigning that in a little) but following some modernised and modified version of TOS continuity, leading to nonsensical things like Harry Mudd being given a slap on the wrist so he'll be around for TOS after committing horrific acts of violence. I'm hoping that with Alex Kurtzman as showrunner, season 2 will be a little more sane.
Yes, but so what? Continuity is a function of narrative. It's something that exists independent of appearance. There is continuity between the Saavik of TWOK and the Saavik of the later movies; she is narratively a single continuous character even though her appearance changes. There is continuity between the Koloth of "The Trouble with Tribbles" and the Koloth of "More Tribbles, More Troubles"; he is narratively a single continuous character even though one of them is a flesh-and-blood William Campbell and the other is a cartoon that sounds like James Doohan. Continuity is what happens when the story treats two things as the same, even when they aren't. That's why a change in design is not a change in the universe, any more than a change in casting is. Different stories may interpret certain aesthetic details differently, but they still pretend to represent the same continuous underlying reality.
That's what "retcon" literally means, though many fans abuse the word. A retcon, in proper usage, is a change that is consistent with what we knew before -- hence "retroactive continuity" rather than "retroactive discontinuity." It's filling in new information that may recontextualize what we thought we knew but doesn't contradict it. Revealing that Kirk had an estranged son all along is a retcon. Changing Kirk's life story so that he becomes captain of the Enterprise right out of the Academy is a reboot. They're not the same thing.
Since this debate started with supposing the Discoverse NX-01 might look different to how it did in ENT, I would say it matters. We are dealing with a visual medium after all, and a franchise which used to pride itself on it's continuity.
A visual medium that has never had a problem with recasting characters or redesigning aliens, planets, warp and transporter effects, etc. I just don't see why you're able to accept all those visual discontinuities but not the equivalent discontinuity in ship design.
I am. It was you who didn't like my supposition that the Discoverse NX-01 may have squared-off nacelles.
Pointing out the visual changes and speculating about more is NOT an condemnation of them.
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