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Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

I think these shout outs are red herrings so that the more drastic deviations from tie-in works will be overlooked. :whistle: Basically, "Yeah we aged Pike by 17 years so that he can have a hip line about drinking with Georgiou at the Academy, but, uh--Hey look! FASA coordinates!" ;)

How you know they didn't contradict season 1 and just made Georgiou younger?

Anyway's Pike's exact age isn't canon.
 
How you know they didn't contradict season 1 and just made Georgiou younger?

Anyway's Pike's exact age isn't canon.
Georgiou's age was canonized in a personnel file.

In any case, I have a strong suspicion after the revelation in the recent episode that Pike's age was changed to match Leland, not Georgiou if
Leland really killed Burnham's parents

That way, Pike can go toe to toe with Leland in a way he couldn't do if he were only a kid when Leland did the deed.
 
It's really interesting that when Discovery has chosen to incorporate (as opposed to contradict) tie-ins lately, the series has leaned heavily towards old-school sources: The Final Reflection, the Star Fleet Technical Manual, and now FASA. I wonder what inspires this particular preference when newer TOS tie-ins could (also) be referenced the same way.
I suspect they're just numbers that cropped on on Memory Alpha's "apocrypha" section or on Memory Beta.

That said, I do love spotting such references. Deep, deep Trek lore.
 
It's really interesting that when Discovery has chosen to incorporate (as opposed to contradict) tie-ins lately, the series has leaned heavily towards old-school sources: The Final Reflection, the Star Fleet Technical Manual, and now FASA. I wonder what inspires this particular preference when newer TOS tie-ins could (also) be referenced the same way.
I suspect they're just numbers that cropped on on Memory Alpha's "apocrypha" section or on Memory Beta.
That was my first thought, too ("they're pulling these from the wikis"), but those sites also have more recent references which could be included but aren't. It's obviously not a personal memory thing--at least two of the writers were born after TNG premiered, and most of them have talked about having to familiarise themselves with the franchise's details after being hired--so there must be something else at work.

Could the older tie-ins be perceived as being more "pure" TOS because they wouldn't be influenced by any of the later series?

That said, I do love spotting such references. Deep, deep Trek lore.
Absolutely! I never thought I'd see a FASA reference in a television episode, but at this point, we're two steps away from alluding to a Bantam novel or a Gold Key comic. ;)
 
Could the older tie-ins be perceived as being more "pure" TOS because they wouldn't be influenced by any of the later series?

I doubt there's any such consideration, given that DSC's writers are freely mining ideas from throughout the franchise, for instance, referencing ENT's "In a Mirror, Darkly" in the Mirror Universe arc. And creators are rarely as obsessed with "purity" as fans are, because creators see the backstage mess that goes into making these things, all the ideas that are tossed into the mix and reworked and rethought and rejected and replaced and so forth. There's nothing "pure" about any of it.
 
That doesn't meant they can't retcon it.
I suppose it's possible. If they instead lowered Georgiou's age to match the earlier assumed birth year of Pike from the novels, 2219, that would mean she was a 20 year old Lieutenant (who graduated the Academy early and got promoted early) on finding Saru in 2239 and a 30 year old captain of the Shenzhou in 2249 (making her one of the youngest if not the youngest captain in Starfleet).

Michelle Yeoh on the show looks a lot older than a 30ish woman, but I suppose it could fit (and Mirror Georgiou could have been born earlier or had her looks affected by a hard partying lifestyle). Besides we've had far worse with 56 year old James Cromwell playing a canonically 31 year old Zefram Cochrane.
 
I suppose it's possible. If they instead lowered Georgiou's age to match the earlier assumed birth year of Pike from the novels, 2219, that would mean she was a 20 year old Lieutenant (who graduated the Academy early and got promoted early) on finding Saru in 2239 and a 30 year old captain of the Shenzhou in 2249 (making her one of the youngest if not the youngest captain in Starfleet).

Michelle Yeoh on the show looks a lot older than a 30ish woman, but I suppose it could fit (and Mirror Georgiou could have been born earlier or had her looks affected by a hard partying lifestyle). Besides we've had far worse with 56 year old James Cromwell playing a canonically 31 year old Zefram Cochrane.

Probably a compromise would work best, with what we know about Leland's age. Have them all born circa 2210. Graduating circa 2232, that gives Pike a 13-year career before becoming XO under April and gives Georgiou at most 17 years (probably a few less) to make Captain.

Leland is recruited as a Section 31 double agent early on, and already doing their dirty work when Doctari Alpha happens (sometime before 2236).
 
it's kind of sad that nothing in any version of Trek is above retconning.

It never has been. Dilithium is a retcon. The Federation is a retcon. Data's lack of emotion (and contractions) is a retcon.

Fiction is not something that springs into being in completed form like Athena from the head of Zeus. It's the result of a turbulent process of experimentation and rethinking in which a rough, imperfect idea is slowly wrestled into something better (albeit still imperfect). That's not "sad." That's how creativity works. That's how everything worthwhile has ever been made.
 
It never has been. Dilithium is a retcon. The Federation is a retcon. Data's lack of emotion (and contractions) is a retcon.

Fiction is not something that springs into being in completed form like Athena from the head of Zeus. It's the result of a turbulent process of experimentation and rethinking in which a rough, imperfect idea is slowly wrestled into something better (albeit still imperfect). That's not "sad." That's how creativity works. That's how everything worthwhile has ever been made.
I disagree. I think when you chip away from the original (and yes I'm aware the originals rewrite themselves, but never to the degree current Trek is regarding TOS), take away the visuals, the tech, adjust the characterisations, you eventually lose the point of tying into the original in the first place. It's gone beyond retconning to being a de facto reboot, since so little of the original exists anymore.
 
Compare a modern Spider-Man or Fantastic Four issue to a 1963 issue. A great deal has been "chipped away" and transformed. Because fiction is not a static, immutable thing, but something that grows and changes along with its audience and its culture. If you can't accept the change, okay, but that's just your personal taste. Don't pretend it's some cosmic absolute.
 
Compare a modern Spider-Man or Fantastic Four issue to a 1963 issue. A great deal has been "chipped away" and transformed. Because fiction is not a static, immutable thing, but something that grows and changes along with its audience and its culture. If you can't accept the change, okay, but that's just your personal taste. Don't pretend it's some cosmic absolute.
Are those 1963 comics meant to be the same continuity as the current ones? Or have they been rebooted several times in the interim? Because reboots can change whatever they want, but the Discovery method of retconning everything so nothing about the show you loved counts anymore...
 
Compare a modern Spider-Man or Fantastic Four issue to a 1963 issue. A great deal has been "chipped away" and transformed. Because fiction is not a static, immutable thing, but something that grows and changes along with its audience and its culture. If you can't accept the change, okay, but that's just your personal taste. Don't pretend it's some cosmic absolute.

I wonder though, do you ever get to the point that so much has changed that it ceases to be Star Trek. I'm not saying we've reached that point yet. But is there some core to Star Trek that once changed it just becomes another show? Can you get to the point where it's just an action sci-fi show that just happens to have the name Star Trek slapped on it but otherwise is so far removed that it is unrecognizable?

I don't consider myself a purist personally. But I do like some consistency. I do think there is a difference. A purist would want Discovery to look and feel like how "The Cage" looked and felt. Consistency I do think allows for some freedom to reimage things. That's more my philosophy. I always thought Enterprise struck a good balance between reimaging and consistency. I wish that Discovery had taken more of that philosophy. I have a real difficult time thinking of Discovery as 10 years pre-original series.
 
I wonder though, do you ever get to the point that so much has changed that it ceases to be Star Trek. I'm not saying we've reached that point yet. But is there some core to Star Trek that once changed it just becomes another show? Can you get to the point where it's just an action sci-fi show that just happens to have the name Star Trek slapped on it but otherwise is so far removed that it is unrecognizable?

I don't consider myself a purist personally. But I do like some consistency. I do think there is a difference. A purist would want Discovery to look and feel like how "The Cage" looked and felt. Consistency I do think allows for some freedom to reimage things. That's more my philosophy. I always thought Enterprise struck a good balance between reimaging and consistency. I wish that Discovery had taken more of that philosophy. I have a real difficult time thinking of Discovery as 10 years pre-original series.
I wouldn't say enough has changed that it's no longer Star Trek, but I'd certainly say enough has changed that it's no longer the TOS continuity. Does "The Galileo Seven" make sense in a world where Spock was raised with a human sibling?
 
Are those 1963 comics meant to be the same continuity as the current ones?

Yes, they are. That's the point. DC has rebooted its continuity many times over the decades, but Marvel has always pretended that its universe has been a single continuous whole. Rather than doing discrete reboots to periodically replace or transform the continuity, they just incrementally update the timeframe -- the famous "sliding timescale" -- so that the original stories written in the 1960s are still considered part of the canon even though the period-specific details of them have been replaced and updated. They pretend it's a single continuous whole despite the inconsistencies of detail.

There is no one single way to handle continuity. Different franchises handle it differently. And they rarely treat it as a rigid, all-or-nothing affair. "Reboots" are a fairly modern concept; most long-running franchises have just snuck in continuity changes gradually and expected audiences to either not notice the incremental adjustments or just suspend disbelief about them and play along.


I wonder though, do you ever get to the point that so much has changed that it ceases to be Star Trek. I'm not saying we've reached that point yet. But is there some core to Star Trek that once changed it just becomes another show?

By whose standards? The creators' or a given audience member's? Those are two different conversations. Over the decades, there have always been fans who declared every new incarnation of Trek to be "not Trek anymore." People said it about the movies. They said it loudly and frequently about TNG for years. And so on. But conversely, there are always going to be new fans who didn't see the earlier versions, people for whom the newer version is "real Trek" and the older versions are quaint, inaccessible antiques. It's meaningless to even try to ask that question about the audience in general.

The only question that can be asked objectively is, will the creators of future Trek productions treat a given series as part of the same shared reality as everything else? And to date, the answer has always pretty much been yes. New Trek productions freely draw on elements from every prior Trek production and treat them as sharing a common history, despite their inconsistencies in detail. Kelvin is explicitly an alternate timeline, but one that purports to be branched off of the established Prime continuity and that has drawn on elements from all of it (for instance, Beyond drew heavily on Enterprise as part of its backstory). So it stands to reason that future Trek productions will treat Discovery as part of the same continuity as everything else, no matter what an individual fan may think of it. Spectators don't call the plays.


Does "The Galileo Seven" make sense in a world where Spock was raised with a human sibling?

Does it make sense in a world where he had a human mother, spent at least 4 years at the Academy working alongside humans, and served for over 11 years with other humans on Pike's Enterprise? Spock's rejection of human perspectives is not a matter of unfamiliarity with humans, but a matter of choice. He's always been exposed to human points of view but has chosen to reject them as unsuitable for him.
 
They said it loudly and frequently about TNG for years. And so on. But conversely, there are always going to be new fans who didn't see the earlier versions, people for whom the newer version is "real Trek" and the older versions are quaint, inaccessible antiques. It's meaningless to even try to ask that question about the audience in general..

And not just TNG. I still remember a lifelong Trekkie friend of mine insisting that "DS9 is good, sure, but it's not STAR TREK." And you can still find plenty of fans who feel strongly that DS9's darker tone violates Roddenberry's "utopian" vision and all that.

DISCO can never stop being STAR TREK, because all of us have different ideas as to what makes Star Trek "Star Trek."
 
DISCO can never stop being STAR TREK, because all of us have different ideas as to what makes Star Trek "Star Trek."

Right. This is a franchise that celebrates diversity and novelty as its core mission statement. Its strength has always been that it has appeal to many different audiences. The gatekeepers who claim to be defending its "purity" are the ones who have the least understanding of what makes it worthwhile.
 
By whose standards? The creators' or a given audience member's?

True, I agree a large part of it is subjective. As you and Greg both point out, there are fans for whom Star Trek ended with the TV series, some after the shows branched off from the original crew (that is after TUC). And for various reasons.

It's probably almost impossible to measure. So far for me, even though I feel Discovery is more naturally a reboot than a continuation, it still 'feels' enough like Star Trek that having Star Trek in the title feels natural. Despite my issues with it's continuity, it doesn't feel to me like it should be something other than a Star Trek show.

I guess probably the only way to determine if it's lost it's Trekkieness overall is if a substantial number of fans turn their back on a Star Trek show saying, 'this isn't Star Trek' and the show tanks as a result.

But otherwise you're probably right. It's probably subjective to a viewer. You, me, Greg, King Daniel, everyone here probably has a different level of that essence of Star Trek, that point that where it feels so alien from Star Trek that it's unrecognizable as a Star Trek show. That will differ from fan to fan.

And not just TNG. I still remember a lifelong Trekkie friend of mine insisting that "DS9 is good, sure, but it's not STAR TREK." And you can still find plenty of fans who feel strongly that DS9's darker tone violates Roddenberry's "utopian" vision and all that.

Yeah, DS9 is probably the most unusual Star Trek show. At first I wasn't sure I was going to like it. Star Trek....on a space station, are you kidding? But it won me over and ended up being an excellent show. And I think ultimately it fit with Star Trek for me (though as I noted above, I never felt Discovery wasn't Star Trek either--well at least the 1st season which is all I've seen thus far). And I liked how DS9 added a bit of reality to the Federation---I viewed it as a government and Starfleet run by mortals who aren't perfect. They generally move in a positive direction but they make mistakes. They usually take 2 steps forward but sometimes take a step back. I liked that about DS9. It actually made things more realistic. The Federation are still the good guys, but sometimes they screw up too.
 
It's probably almost impossible to measure. So far for me, even though I feel Discovery is more naturally a reboot than a continuation, it still 'feels' enough like Star Trek that having Star Trek in the title feels natural. Despite my issues with it's continuity, it doesn't feel to me like it should be something other than a Star Trek show.

The thing is, I've been through this many times before. The way I saw the Trek universe in, say, 1978 was very different from the way I saw it in 1998, which was different from how I saw it in 2008, which was different from how I saw it in 2018. Each new incarnation has reinterpreted the universe, transformed how it was portrayed and presented in some ways. The earlier stories were still presumed to have happened basically as shown, but a number of their specific details or assumptions had to be revised in light of the new portrayal. It's never been a fixed, immutable thing, not since they first brought it back to life in the movies, and it's disingenuous to pretend that it has been or that DSC is the first show ever to change it (which is a rehash of the exact same disingenuous argument that the purists trotted out against Enterprise).

But I never thought of those changes as making it "not Star Trek anymore." They forced me to reinterpret my own personal view of Trek continuity and history -- heck, the moment they said in "The Neutral Zone" that the year was 2364, I had to throw out and redraft my entire pencil-and-paper chronology -- but I didn't think there was anything wrong with that, because after all this was a work of fiction, a story that people made up as they went, and part of creativity is reinterpretation. If anything, I enjoyed the mental exercise of periodically having to rework my personal chronology when new episodes or movies forced me to rethink my assumptions or reassess which books and comics could fit in with canon. The changes let me continue to use my imagination, to keep my mind open to novelty and change, and that's healthy. A living thing is a growing, changing thing. Without openness to change, there is only stagnation.


I guess probably the only way to determine if it's lost it's Trekkieness overall is if a substantial number of fans turn their back on a Star Trek show saying, 'this isn't Star Trek' and the show tanks as a result.

Enterprise "tanked," but its additions to Trek continuity have still been acknowledged in subsequent productions. Reality is not a matter of opinion or like or dislike. The objective reality is whether the events and concepts of one television series are acknowledged in later television series and movies. That's the only thing that meaningfully, concretely defines what "counts" as Trek.
 
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