What Has Discovery Added To Star Trek Lore?

Ka-CHING!

 

So did we ever get back to the topic or is this thread still just another whine-fest? Someone let me know if the last 70 posts or so are worth reading.

 

Exactly.

"Adding to" Star Trek lore means presenting brand-new information that can plausibly fit with the existing information. That brand-new information does not need to be directly derivative of the old existing information, but only not directly contradict the existing.

I'd argue that it's even better when the new information is not a direct derivative of the existing, but rather takes the existing in brand new -- but non-contradictory -- directions.

 

what has Discovery added to trek lore?

A great deal of confusion.

 

So more of the same, then?

 

I'd call it Conflation.
We just have to take the time to adjust our prior thinking about what we thought was going on during this time period based on limited information.

 

When I was a kid I worked in a bookstore that was put out of business by a chain and then I went to work for the chain.

And eventually I was in management (briefly; I fled within months) and sent off to the Midwest for training and one of the first things they told us was "We have a problem with our employees that doesn't exist with all retailers, and that's 'love of product.' Our salespeople have opinions about which products* are good and which are bad, and we don't want them sharing those opinions with customers. All products are good."

CBS has that problem with Trekkies - love of product. Talking about STD adding "a great deal of confusion" is only true if a viewer is deeply invested in the whole history, continuity, etc. of the franchise.

That doesn't really work for CBS, who would like to expand the audience for the thing without alienating the hard core. They've waffled a lot on this, in the last couple of years - STD was initially going to be something daring, modern and different but since early in production and up to this point has undergone significant retrenchment to try to mollify long-timers who judging from last year's reviews and aggregators have not been carriers of enthusiastic word-of-mouth.

Of course, that's their problem.

*I.e., books.

 

Interesting. While we aren't employees tasked with selling the product, we Trekkies do tend to want to be "gatekeepers" when it comes to non-Trekkies getting interested in Trek.

Kor

 

Yes. And some people consider "prior thinking" on an unspecified matter to be gospel. But in reality, if something is unspecified, there is plenty of room for that prior thinking to be revised. That is, it isn't unalterable gospel.

For example (I'll choose an obvious example), just because Spock never specifically said his parents had a human foster child under their care, that doesn't mean that there isn't room to add that human ward to the prior thinking concerning Spock's family.

 

That's one particular case in my mind, that has actually added a whole lot of interesting info to the reasoning/thought process' behind the Spock/Sarek Family tiff.
I rather like where They went with it by adding Burnham to the mix.

 

The Klingons in DSC are pretty consistent culturally to the previous series.

 

I think so too. And any differences can be explained as normal variations within the culture(s) of a whole planet, especially over the course of time.

It doesn't make them less hideous, though.

Kor

 

This. Was glad to see the variation, both in cultural stylings and phenotype.

 

The only thing that felt off was reclaiming corpses, otherwise they pretty much behaved like Klingons as we've learned of them up to ENT. Just because TOS didn't feature them having bat'leths and speak an alien language doesn't mean those never happened around TOS.

 

Well it doesn't contradict canon completely, a Klingon Mummification Glyph is mentioned in Star Trek 4, so it did occur at some point in their history.

 

Very limited information at that. TOS was the least fleshed out of all time periods with the greatest opportunity for filling it out. What many people think of as "what was" in this period are really just long-standing fan theories, not things that were ever actually presented in TOS, but people have forgotten how to differentiate between those. The amount of attention given to this limited information over the years also gives the illusion that those small pieces were more substantial than they were, leading to the type of criticism that follows the basic form of "it wasn't shown in TOS, therefore it can't exist".

Re: Klingon corpses, I wouldn't think this is really even worth considering as a new take on Klingon culture, until we see other examples of it outside of T'Kuvma and his followers. They were shown to be outcasts, and the reclaimed corpses were the main feature of the ship of the dead after all - I always thought this was meant to be one of the things that differentiated them from common Klingons.

 

This. It amazes me the assumptions that are made regarding TOS era when there is very limited information for that era, especially as it relates to Starfleet as a whole, Klingon culture overall, who the history of the Federation.

 

We've had 50+ years of fanon, liton* and gamon** that some folks can't let go of.

* Books
**Games

 

I've never indulged in any books, games, or any other medium of Trek beyond the shows and films. There's already more than enough to digest in those two mediums, I don't need to add a whole bunch of other stuff on top of that when there's so much else outside of Trekdom.

 

This and this strongly indicates what I said is correct. But we can play the denial game for a few more days.