Star Trek and Cannon... darned confusing!

Whether or not a new show or movie looks or feels like it can fit into the illusion of the "ongoing saga of Star Trek" is not something that troubles me, and never has. I find it odd that it troubles so many people, though...and I was wondering about it recently.

I actually think perceptions like these are a matter of when and how you were "raised" in the franchise, to be honest.

I was "raised" as a Trek fan on the early TOS movies, for example. Yes, I started out as a small child watching TOS re-runs in the late 70's, but the movies (particularly I, II, and III) and the premier of TNG were the big hitters during my formative years. That's what really fired me up about Star Trek and solidified me as a fan. And, since TMP and TWOK were both essentially visual and tonal reboots of TOS, and TNG was a totally different animal... I'm just used to that and it doesn't bother me one bit when it happens now. It's just expected and business as usual for me.

But, if you were "raised" on TOS right from the start in the 60's or (and I think even more powerfully) if you were "raised" on Trek in the 90's, where everything was written and designed by the same people over 4 whole series, you may have an extremely hard time swallowing changes.

 

This might be a good thing to consider. TOS and the films were my first introduction to those changes, and so Star Trek (to me) was pretty fluid. Even TNG to DS9 was a change, including with uniforms. So, for me, change in Star Trek is pretty much part of the experience. But, I am coming to find that it is not always the experience of others.

 

@Vger23 You've put into words what I was feeling, and struggling to express. This. All of This.

I was brought up on season 4 on DS9 & VOY... and I'm rewatching Discovery at the moment and I don't even care about the tonal and cosmetic changes - they're not taking me out of the story. It truly is a response to the times - darker, edgier, goreier is the name of the game if you want to cut through.

 

That's kinda where I'm coming from, too, and not just with regards to STAR TREK. Pushing sixty as I am, I'm used to seeing beloved pop-culture properties get makeovers every other decade or so. It's standard operating procedure, whether we're talking movies, TV shows, comics, theater, etc. Everything changes and that's fine. Why should STAR TREK be any different?

So, no, I don't come to DISCO expecting it to look or feel like TOS, or the 90s stuff, or the various different cycles of TREK movies. There is no one "definitive" version or continuity of anything. It's all fluid as you say.

 

I am no purist when it comes to "cannon". I like the idea that the stories are set in a defined space and time with an agreed upon history. But that should not be a set of handcuffs for the writers. Things change and evolve. If they had the CGI and Tech we have now on TOS they would have used it.

When ENT was on and the did the Xindi arc everyone was upset by this "new" war and species because it had never been mentioned before. How much do you personally know about the Spanish-American War? The war of 1812? I'm a history buff and my personal knowledge is very limited. I just look at new stuff in that vein.

 

Heck, "The Wounded" on TNG introduced a whole Cardassian war we had never heard about before. I admit that bugged me at the time, but the Cardassians turned out to be a great addition to the universe, so it all worked out okay.

And, yes, I sometimes go months at a time without ever mentioning the French or Indian Wars or the sinking of the Lusitania . . .

 

I do occasionally reference the sinking of the Bismarck or the Red Baron.

But, yeah, my thinking is similar in that Star Trek is a huge, galaxy spanning realm of events and somehow every character must know everything that happened in their history? O_o I find that a tad unreasonable.

And, when people discuss Discovery's tone I find myself thinking about episodes like "The Wounded" where a Starfleet officer (you know-those paragons of virtue who would never behave like Burnham or Cornwell) goes on a one ship mission to destroy the Cardassians, and experiences space PTSD.

It's just so weird, isn't it?

 

I love "The Wounded" because it ends on a morally ambiguous note (turns out the "crazy" captain was right all along) and portrays flesh-and-blood human beings with emotional scars and baggage, not "evolved" paragons of virtue. One of my favorite TNG episodes--even if the Cardassians came out of left field.

 

Also one of Picard's best character moments at the end - he knows Maxwell's suspicions were true, but for the good of the peace, he knows it's his duty to keep to the official story (except for telling off the Cardy in a most satisfying way).

 

“I’m not going to win this one, am I, Chief?”

I hear so much about how bland and smug TNG was, but there episodes like this that still choke me up. Morally ambiguous: no heroes or villains, just minstrel boys trying to find their way home.

At its best, TNG could make me think in a way that TOS approaches, but never quite made it.

 

yes exactly especially the movies (especially I, II and III) and the prime minister of TNG were the hitters of my youth it's my favorite movies in all time

 

Dammit! Right you are. It’s not in the Kindle version of the novelization, which I have just searched. That’s what I get for relying on my memory. I wonder where I got that from? Maybe from the old thread referred to above?

ETA: Bwahaha! That was me in 2009, spreading the same disinformation. Sorry about that, chief!

 

It happens. I recently rewatched an old movie, WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH, for the first time in probably forty years and discovered that I had somewhat garbled the plot in my mind, conflating parts of it with bits from ONE MILLION YEARS B.C., which came out around the same time . ...

 

Most fans of TV and other series, especially big fans, like to pretend it's real, or at least realistic-enough to be consistent with itself, and producers/showrunners Berman, Piller, Taylor, Braga did have the intention of making the new stuff pretty consistent with what had come before (which, increasingly, was what they had themselves produced).

Because the makers of the other shows intended them to be follow-ups, continuations of it, even if loose and with some inconsistencies, and a fair amount of effort was made by Paramount to have it be understood as and try to work as one continuing timeline. Fans can and do differ but a lot do see the later shows as continuations, I think they rarely if ever were referred to as reboots until the last decade.

 

The "apparatus" consisted essentially of a glowing doorframe, just as in DSC and every other series set after ENT (where forcefield tech was explicitly still being perfected):











The only time we see anything more elaborate (and not by much, merely with surprise "pop out" articulation) is in "Charlie X" (TOS), and that was supposed to be something they'd rigged up specially to catch him in his quarters, since they doubted he'd allow himself to be led into the brig, though this point remains unspoken in the final cut:



The Enterprise-A's brig in TFF has similarly retractable horizontal bars in addition to the traditional glowing frame, but that is explicitly one of novel design with extra security features:

Sure did...

HARRIMAN: Damage report, Ensign!
DEMORA: There's some buckling on the starboard nacelle. We've also got a hull breach in engineering section. Emergency forcefields in place and holding...​

A singularly odd and faulty conclusion to jump to, considering such would still be a standard launch procedure on Voyager. See for example "Threshold" (cue "or don't" jokes) and "Innocence" (VGR), where Janeway's order of the day rings out loud and clear: "depressurize the shuttlebay and open the space doors."

If we want to speculate upon potential reasons, it could well be that it's considered safer, because forcefields can be finicky, prone to failure if power should be suddenly interrupted for whatever weird reason of the week, say the effect of a previously-unknown phenomenon, a sneak attack by an unknown or undetected adversary, or what have you. By the same token, if other captains serving alongside Kirk and Janeway didn't always run their ships the same way, that could well be down to commanding officer's discretion, with any number of circumstances influencing the judgment call in any given situation. Maybe it depends on "space weather" or other local conditions, or perhaps on how long it's been since the last maintenance check, or latest system upgrade, etc. The possibilities are endless...

To equate something not being specifically conceived of behind the scenes before a certain point in real life with it not existing in the Trekverse before the corresponding time within the fictional history is very often the height of fallacy. (As indeed can be the converse, sometimes.)

No sign of decompression resulting from any of the extensive damage to either Enterprise or Reliant in TWOK; quite the opposite, as fumes/flames/smoke invariably threaten to fill every compartment hit, growing progressively more concentrated in the atmosphere, rather than blowing out into vacuum. (And not only during the nebula sequence, but in the earlier open space scenes as well...so it's not just fantastically dense Mutara gasses rushing in from outside the ship, either.) The iconic big door comes down to seal off sections surrounding the warp core, just like it still does on the Enterprise-D in GEN:




-MMoM

 

I like to think that there's a sane middle ground between "we must maintain 100% perfect continuity at all costs" and "anything goes."

 

The Enterprise was of a different era when it was built; by TOS era it was already 20 years old. The shuttlebay did not have an atmosphere forcefield when it was built. The older design still worked, it was safe, and with proper maintenance, there was no reason to redesign it. I assume much of the ship's infrastructure is the same story. If it was not broke, why fix it? In its 18 month refit, the ship was redesigned into the TMP era Enterprise, and it finally got the forcefield.

Discovery is a new ship, and ~10 years newer than Enterprise, so, it benefited from the newer forcefield developments, not only in the shuttlebay but also throughout the ship. I don't think any of the ships in any era run their ships all the time with just the forcefields up, rather they close the bay doors.

I'm waiting for a ship to use nothing but forcefields to replace all the solid materials in a ship. "WONDER WOMAN!" Remember in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, Bele's ship was invisible and just turned into nothing when it hit the Enterprise.

 

And I'd love to know where that door came from, since that was the very top deck of the secondary hull.