Yes. My point is that the issue is simply not cut and dried, and when Star Trek as an entity—as opposed to individual episodes, movies, etc.—is not clear.
Assignment: Earth and its Status in Canon?
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The Twilight Zone is a similar media franchise, with numerous TV series, a movie, and endless tie-ins, and it's a good seven years older than Star Trek. Maybe we'll get a preview of ST in what happens with TZ.
It's not meaningless, but its meaning is less important than fans tend to think. Like I keep saying, the word isn't a declaration of value, merely a shorthand for a particular category, the stuff from the original creator/owner as opposed to outside creators. Canon vs. non-canon is not good vs. bad, it's more like land vs. water or animal vs. vegetable -- it's just saying which of two categories a thing belongs to. Calling something land or water doesn't make it that, it just describes what it already is. So it would be silly to get into an argument over whether something "should be" called land or water or whether a piece of land "should be" redesignated as water. It's just a description of what it already is by its inherent nature. It's the least important thing to contemplate about it.
Of course, land can be flooded or eroded away or subside under water, and then you have to change what you call it, but changing the label doesn't cause the thing itself to change. A story is removed from a series's continuity if later stories overtly contradict it, like Dallas did when it declared an entire season a dream. Nobody from Dallas's network or production staff issued a statement using the word "canon," because the word doesn't matter. What matters is what the stories actually do. The label just describes that after the fact.
It was his MOTHER'S love instructor.
Story trumps logic and sense, every single time. Say it with me. Every, single, time.
They were interested in telling a good story, not worrying about what people 50+ years later did or did not consider canon.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Mickey Mouse starts becoming public domain in the next couple years. Or maybe US law makers will suddenly declare that US copyright protection is for life plus infinity.
Personally, I'm fine with those things having happened in the fictional Star Trek universe without it having to match-up with the universe I happen to be living in. It is unnecessary, IMO, to keep trying to retcon the Trek timeline to fit ours. YMMV.
Star Trek was intended to be a forward-looking show, a projection into our own future. If we refuse to update it, then we condemn it to become merely an exercise in nostalgia, something our children and grandchildren won't care about because it's trapped in the past. This is not about the personal preferences of any current fan; it's about what enables a franchise to remain viable and relevant for future generations. Fear of change is not the sentiment that Star Trek was intended to inspire in its viewers.
BS. That's like saying, for example, that the work of Robert Heinlein is "trapped in the past" or no longer relevant because of some the dated references it contains. Should we be revising Jules Verne to have his space travelers use a Saturn V to get to the moon rather than a really big cannon, or moving the timeline of the story to 1969 to match Apollo 11? Is HG Wells' War of the Worlds a lesser work or trapped in the past because we found out there aren't any martians? Nope, still a great piece of literature. I understand there are folks who need to be able to have Star Trek's reality lurking in the distant future to preserve their fantasy or whatever, but I'm okay with the realization that none of it will ever really happen and the future will likely in no way resemble the world Roddenberry made up. Is some of it a bit dated now? Sure. Does it lessen my enjoyment of it? Nope. It is bothersome that the Eugenics Wars didn't really happen in my 1990's. Nope. Is it okay that it still happened that way in Star Trek? Yup. And I'm still okay with Heinlein's ancient martians raising a young human survivor of a failed expedition to their planet and colonists having adventures in the humid swamps of Venus. Dismiss it as mere nostalgia if you want tom but when a story is good, it's good.
Exactly. Star Trek will end up just chasing it's tail and rewriting itself as real history inevitably varies from Star Trek History. It's an exercise in futility. Let's let Star Trek be what it is.
What happens in 44 years when Zefram Cochrane doesn't invent warp drive becasue he was too busy playing Fortnite as a kid? Are we just going to retcon Star Trek history AGAIN just to make it fit?
I say the cannon must stay canon!
You're just proving my point. All those writers are dead. Their series are over. Nobody is making new stories in those universes anymore. Yes, people sometimes make adaptations of their works, but they do that by making new versions in new continuities, reinterpreting the older works for new audiences. In other, cruder words, the only new versions of those stories are reboots.
Star Trek is an ongoing fictional franchise with multiple creators. Look at other such franchises -- Batman, Spider-Man, Godzilla, My Little Pony. They don't cling fanatically to past continuity; they reinvent their universes and keep them active. They preserve what matters -- the characters, the themes, the spirit of the work -- rather than just the superficial continuity details of the original version. And that lets them keep being made rather than just being old shows that have run their course. There's nothing wrong with something that's run its course and is no longer being made, but it would be sad if Star Trek ended up over and done with because its audience was too irrationally hostile to trying a new version of it. It's very bizarre to me that Trek fans are so threatened by the kind of multi-continuity approach that many other franchises use routinely and successfully.
It is completely and profoundly misunderstanding the point of science fiction to think it's meant to predict the actual future. No. It's not about superficial facts or events. It's about the message and themes of the work, the ideas and feelings it inspires in its audience. The point is, Star Trek was meant to feel futuristic rather than retro or nostalgic. It was meant to direct the audience's minds toward the future, to make them optimistic about scientific and social progress, to spark their imagination about what the future might hold and inspire them to work to build a better future in real life.
More importantly, it was also meant to be creatively innovative, to break new ground in TV science fiction and push the envelope beyond what had been attempted or achieved before. In its day, it was the most daring, ambitious, and experimental SF show on television. It pushed forward in every way. It was ahead of its time and that made it special. These days, though, it's fallen well behind the curve.
Nostalgia is fine. Some things do well with nostalgia as their foundation, like Star Wars or steampunk. But the original driving vision of Star Trek was the exact opposite of nostalgia -- it was the message that the future will be better than the past, that we should eagerly look forward and embrace the new and different rather than clinging to the old and familiar. That's a vision we still need, today more than ever.
Aside for All Our Yesterdays which is a different form of time travel, Assignment: Earth was the last time travel episode (production order 55) for the Enterprise in TOS, so, why mention it in the remaining non-time travel episodes?
- The Naked Time (production order #7 or ep. 1x04)
- Tomorrow is Yesterday (production order #21 or ep. 1x19)
- The City on the Edge of Forever (production order #28 or ep. 1x28)
- Assignment: Earth (production order #55 or ep. 2x26)
- All Our Yesterdays (production order #78 or ep. 3x23)
And I think Trek can do that without having to eat it's own tail in regard to established continuity.
As I said, I don't understand why allowing there to be mulitple continuities is remotely a bad thing. There are many different Batman continuities in comics, animation, and live action. I'm a big fan of several of them, even though they're in completely separate realities and take radically different approaches with the material. That diversity of interpretations is a good thing for the franchise and for the audience. Star Trek is supposed to teach us to celebrate diversity, not recoil from it in disgust. It's supposed to instill us with curiosity and a love of novelty and adventure. So why the hell are so many so-called Trek fans so fanatically hostile to the idea of a reinvention, a fresh and different start? What is so horrible about the thought of just trying something new? Why is it so evil for Trek when it works so well for Batman, or Spider-Man, or Sherlock Holmes, or Dracula, or any of a hundred other long-lived franchises?
Seriously, it's like trying to get 8-year-old me to try spinach. (Which I now utterly love.)
My own two quatloos:
I understand what Christopher is saying, but one of the things I fondly recall is reading the 1976 Star Trek Concordance and enjoying the way there was a whole universe that could be presented as an encyclopedic reference work. I similarly enjoyed similar works covering the worlds of Tolkien, Lewis, etc. and the various wikis online. While I realize the need to keep Trek fresh and forward looking, I like the idea of universe-building and feel something is lost when continuity is deliberately done away with.
I understand what Christopher is saying, but one of the things I fondly recall is reading the 1976 Star Trek Concordance and enjoying the way there was a whole universe that could be presented as an encyclopedic reference work. I similarly enjoyed similar works covering the worlds of Tolkien, Lewis, etc. and the various wikis online. While I realize the need to keep Trek fresh and forward looking, I like the idea of universe-building and feel something is lost when continuity is deliberately done away with.
Yeah, but it's not an either-or choice. The detailed continuity of one version of a fictional universe isn't erased if alternative versions exist alongside it. For instance, the Marvel Comics universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe both have intricate, interlaced continuities within themselves but are distinct from each other. The creation of the movies didn't erase the comics continuity from existence.
So why can't it be both? Having multiple Trek continuities in existence would not be a threat to people who like the original continuity. It'd just be an alternative. It's good for creative works to explore different variations on a single theme. They can coexist alongside each other. The Trek universe is already so huge that it can still be appreciated as a vast interconnected creation even if a distinct, separate version of it is started up someday.
That's an excellent observation and I wonder why. Part of me wants to take the easy road and just say that its easier to make money revising an established franchise than creating a new branch of it.
The problem with Star Trek is that Star Trek never was that. We handled the ongoing approaching by expanding upon the existing universe rather than rehashing existing stories. You could say this Started with TMP or even TAS. When given the chance to completely start over the creators chose instead to continue the story. Even with TNG they chose to continue in the same universe rather than reinvent the existing one. The reason why Trek fans are opposed to multiple continuities is becasue that's not what tar Trek was built on. Just as much as Star Trek is a projection into our own future it's also a universe of ONE continuity.
But see that's just it. You can have ALL of that WITHOUT reinventing the wheel or retconning the wheel. Having the Eugenics wars in the 1990's doesn't make stories set in the 24rth century any less good.
I kind of feel that's meaning less reason. Embracing that which is new and different are such broad words. Having a reboot with Captain Kirk as a reptilian wearing a poop emoji on his head is both new and different, but that doesn't make it good.
So why can't it be both? Having multiple Trek continuities in existence would not be a threat to people who like the original continuity.
That's fine as long as the producers are respectful and honest about having separate continuities and don't claim that they all share the same one.
That's fine as long as the producers are respectful and honest about having separate continuities and don't claim that they all share the same one.
That's my bug. I have no interest in the current PTB rewriting TOS to fit whatever they want to do now. They weren't there, they had no hand in the creation of those stories. If they want to do new stories with established characters and set pieces, do it in a new continuity.
So why can't it start? Again, how is this hostility to trying anything new reconcilable with Star Trek's spirit of actively seeking out the strange and new?
Multiple continuities are not an evil to be condemned. Variations on a theme are the essence of creativity. They're fun and interesting to explore.
Don't you dare claim you speak for all Trek fans. I've been a passionate Trek fan for over 45 years, I write Trek fiction professionally, and I don't share your fear of experimentation. I would love to see a version of Trek that reinvented it from the ground up, because variations on a theme are fascinating and enriching. I love it that Batman fiction includes Adam West, Kevin Conroy, and Christian Bale. I love it that there are nine canonical Godzilla continuities in Japan alone. That diversity is good, just as Star Trek has always taught that diversity is good. Your kneejerk rejection of the new does not make you a better Trek fan than I am.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having multiple completely separate continuities, like Batman has, like Sherlock Holmes has, like so many franchises are free to embrace and enjoy and experiment with. Star Trek would be richer if it had the freedom to experiment in the same way. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, remember?
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