Finally Watching Discovery - Was I Supoosed to Hate This?

There was no World Wide Web, but there was internet. There was Usenet newsgroups and there was plenty of hatred for TNG from some hardcore TOS fans.

 

I remember those days. I couldn't wait for TNG to premiere.

 

Star Trek got away with avoiding truly improving humanity (yes i know it's a multi species federation, but at heart, the stories are about the human adventure) while claiming humanity had improved for a long time. So Picard sermonizes about not having money, and improving ourselves, while Barclay still suffers emotionally and uses the holodeck to get busy with reconstructions of female crew members. Over and over humanity has been shown to not be fundamentally very different from now, though with sometimes better ideals.

If part of Trek is how technology improves the lives of the people employing it, that Atomic Age dream from an Atomic Age show, why hasn't it actually improved people? I think GR wanted something like that, but his attempts at it were too Utopian to work from a story premise. That doesn't mean the idea of trans-humanism shouldn't be revisited and even embraced.

 

True. But, the meat thing strikes me as something that has been emphasized enough as part of the character and his culture that it would stand out more. But, I'm the guy who prefers the character stuff over the tech stuff. If someone went through and reedited all of TOS to fit a more DSC style aesthetic my enjoyment of the stories and characters would largely remain the same.

 

IMHO Iain Banks' Culture series is a much more realistic take on what a post-scarcity utopian multi-species Federation would look like. Of course, most of that revolves around their own Starfleet equivalent - Special Circumstances - mucking around with non-utopian races outside of The Culture. It's just boring to write about utopia after all.

 

Ultimately. Trek for me is about the stories - because it's as close as TV/movies have gotten to "real sci fi" (in the sense of the written works I enjoy - examining hypothetical scenarios as thought experiments or allegories). Honestly I'm not someone heavily into characters, although I understand I'm in the minority here. I absolutely don't give a crap about how things are depicted onscreen though. My issues with Discovery's "re-imagining" was more that in a lot of cases it seemed to serve no real purpose in terms of narrative, making things more confusing without deepening the story in any way.

 

I can kind of understand that, but for me, that's just part of Star Trek-at least in my experience.

I felt less confused and more just critical and how I would make certain changes.

That's me though.

 

And that's exactly what I find asinine. Fans who pick apart the years different ships were in service, that this character never mentioned that character, you name it. I love the minutiae too, but like I said, that used to be the FUN of Star Trek, not a reason to hate it.

 

Neither of those things a prohibitive.

Which is exactly Disco is and all Star Trek has ever been. All the 'canon violations' people complain about with Disco (or Ent) are on the micro level. All of them. All the macro-level stuff has remained completely intact.

Canon is intellectual clip art for writers to draw upon and borrow from, but no one should ever be beholden to it.

 

For me it all depends on if it's a macro change or a micro change. I don't get too upset about microchanges. As long as a character or object is consistent with the spirit of what came before, I can be forgiving of changes.

But macro changes would be a bigger deal. Spock suddenly eating a steak for instance I would consider a macro change. For years it has been depicted that Vulcans, including Spock, are vegetarians. That would change pretty much the entire Vulcan culture and that is something I would take issue with. Now I don't really expect Discovery to go off and do something like that.

So far my issues with Discovery have been some of the technology they have that doesn't make sense for that time period. If they have a spore drive that can take you instantaneously anywhere then why are ships 10 years, 100 years later still using traditional warp drive. You'd kind of think it would be perfected as the years went by. Hell, it even makes slipstream drives from the novels seem quaint (though I am still midway through season 1 so maybe there's some fatal flaw that they can't fix about it, but I haven't seen anything yet that a few years of perfecting the technology couldn't fix).

It's one of the reasons as I get further along in the series I view it more as a hard reboot, and am less and less viewing it as a true prequel to the original series. I find I enjoy it a bit more if I view it as a separate continuity.

 

Remember when Ron Moore willfully disregarded continuity when he wrote that scene in Generations with Scotty seeing Kirk die? He knew it would create a plot hole but said "eh so what" because it didn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

 

And that's how it's supposed to work.

 

Yeah I remember that. That's a good example of a micro change. It's pretty easy to explain away. After all on the Jenolen he was trapped in the transporter buffer for decades. It's not unreasonable to think when he was reenergized that he may have been somewhat disoriented. So it was never a big deal for me.

To be honest I didn't even think of it until several years later when I just realized the discrepancy one day. But I pretty easily dismissed it as disorientation. Very simple. And a lot of micro stuff is. It can frequently be explained away, or it's just so minor as to not really matter. That's why I don't sweat that sort of thing too much.

 

Pretty much this.

 

I've changed my signature because I've gotten frustrated with people using "Canon" as a weapon against Discovery and its existence, but I'm going to reiterate what it now says: Canon is meaningless and irrelevant unless you're one of the people responsible for creating Star Trek, be it Discovery or otherwise.

 

As one who likens canon debates to ice picks in the brain, I find this statement to be entirely dismissive and reductive.

 

Agreed, I wouldn't say it's irrelevant, just not worth getting worked up over.

 

Again, it just comes down to immersion level. Enough "micro-changes" can be just as damaging as a "macro-change".

YMMV.

 

That's the thing-audiences feel responsible for canon, so such an argument is going to seem rather petty as they are basing it upon their emotional reaction.

 

You are right. I stand corrected.