Umm...that's pretty messed up. I guess visuals really aren't canon after all?
Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
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And just like that, they prove that they are actually a reboot afterall....
It might have been declassified by the 25th century, who knows.
I thought only what was said on screen was considered canon?
No one on in the show ever says her name, or even talks to that character.
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Well, there's nothing preventing two logical sounding characters from existing on the same ship. Voyager did it with Tuvok and Seven of Nine.
I wonder if JJM was told that Colt is now a spiky alien for his upcoming Pike Enterprise War novel... :O
Which, strictly speaking, she should've been all along, since "Uhuru" is an actual Swahili surname (or given name), while "Uhura" was a linguistically nonsensical attempt to force the Swahili name to conform to Romance-language gender suffixes.
Hey, here's another idea: Maybe Spiky Colt is the original Yeoman Colt's wife, so they have the same surname.
Unlikely. TOS Colt doesn’t swing that way.Hey, here's another idea: Maybe Spiky Colt is the original Yeoman Colt's wife, so they have the same surname.
In any case, that’s not what Michelle Paradise said. She says they are literally the same character.
So how do we explain THAT? Logically, Colt can’t be both alien and human. So who’s right?
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True, but you'd need to differentiate them now, the way Tuvok was stiffer and more formal, not to mention more reliably Starfleet, than Seven, who had an edgier, more aggressive energy.
The Spock we know and love from TOS was basically Number One 2.0, which means they need to flesh Una (hah!) out in a different direction at this late date.
The actress is listed in the credits as playing Yeoman Colt. But if credits are not canon, then I guess Gul Madred is just Cardassian torturer.
Can you tell it's that actress through the makeup?
Her face seems roughly the same ship as the Klingon the actress played on Boreth.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nicole_Dickinson
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nicole_Dickinson
It was confirmed by a showrunner that Colt is the alien http://trekcore.com/blog/2019/04/interview-star-trek-discovery-season-finale-michelle-paradise/
TREKCORE: Was she the alien character with the spiked face? In the original pilot, she was a human…
PARADISE: Yes, I believe that was her. Amin was at the helm, Mann and Nicola was a bit further back, so yes, that would have been Yeoman Colt.
We're talking about what was seen on screen, not producer comments. She may have been wrong after all.
Yeah I can see it.
It's in the credits, and the producer identifies that actress as playing Colt, so the credits are on the screen.
Again, "canon" is not about isolated details, and it's not some formal word-of-law policy. A canon is just a set of stories. When multiple stories are told by multiple people, details can differ from one installment to another. What matters is the overall narrative and the significance a detail plays in it. "The Cage"'s Colt (who wasn't named in onscreen dialogue either, just called "Yeoman") and Gul Madred are significant characters with dialogue and story significance. We need a way to refer to them, and there's no reason not to use their credited names, because there's nothing contradicting them. But this is a detail about an insignificant bit player weighed against a detail about a significant speaking part, so it should be a matter of simple common sense which one takes precedence.
And the "everything onscreen is canon" myth is getting the cause and effect backward. Being onscreen doesn't make something canon. When people say that the Star Trek canon is the onscreen material, that doesn't mean every individual word and image, since a lot of those contradict each other. It just means that Star Trek is a franchise whose original, primary incarnation is as a TV and movie series, so its canonical works -- the shows and movies -- are onscreen, while its derivative works like novels and comics are not (although computer games and fan films are, and those obviously aren't part of the canon). By contrast, the canon of Sherlock Holmes is in print and the various films and TV shows based on it are non-canonical. But that doesn't mean every single printed word about Sherlock Holmes is inviolable "fact," because there are a lot of words in the canonical stories that contradict each other, like the ones about where Watson's war wound is and what his first name is. Canon is not the granular details, it's just the overall set of stories that pretends to be a consistent whole even when individual details within it are contradictory. Canon is climate, not weather.
Apparently, she was always an alien. The Cage only specified that she's "an Earth woman" ("Look, I'll make a deal with you. You and your life for the lives of these two Earth women." - Pike referring to Number One and Colt). I guess we can hypothesize that Colt went through some larval stage where she molted her more humanoid face, or something. Maybe Pike's problem wasn't with women on the bridge, but alien women on the bridge. That's not really any better, though.
This is a really interesting situation. The show and this season has gone to great lengths to supposedly "right the ship" and mesh everything with The Original Series. Then they drop this bombshell, almost nonchalantly ("I think that one's supposed to be Colt," says next season's showrunner, unassuredly).
There are a multitude of possibilities, as provided by the many authors here, and rest assured, this *will* be answered, in some manner, by Kurtzman or Dickinson or Paradise in the coming days, and the answer will probably be after-the-fact and not very satisying.
And maybe they'll change their mind and a different explanation will be given in the Pike show.
I would've preferred they switched the names of Mann and Colt. Or maybe just make Colt into an enhanced cyborg like Airiam. But c'est la vie. It doesn't really take away from my enjoyment of the show or anticipation of more Pike-like adventures now that we know that Colt was an alien this whole time.
All this argument, jumping through hoops, when really, the simplest answer is that the BTS staff goofed, mislabeled a character, and hey, we just treat them as two separate entities anyway. I mean, the novels already did that with the mention of Captain Shelby in DS9, how the writers had said they thought it was the same Shelby from BoBW after having given the novels permission to put her in the cast of New Feontier.
Hell, if anything, it’s as easy to ignore the words in an interview and call spikey lady something else entirely, since, as has been pointed out, there’s plenty of reason to think they’re not the same person. Or, hell, maybe they’ve decided the human “Colt” is no longer her name - the name Colt only appeared in the script for The Cage, they could change her name as easily as anything else (I doubt they will, given the lengths this finale went to in order to appease the “BUT CONTINUITY!” crowd, but they COULD).
Hell, if anything, it’s as easy to ignore the words in an interview and call spikey lady something else entirely, since, as has been pointed out, there’s plenty of reason to think they’re not the same person. Or, hell, maybe they’ve decided the human “Colt” is no longer her name - the name Colt only appeared in the script for The Cage, they could change her name as easily as anything else (I doubt they will, given the lengths this finale went to in order to appease the “BUT CONTINUITY!” crowd, but they COULD).
Can't we just ignore the "women on the bridge" line? It wasn't even in the aired version ("The Menagerie"), so it's arguable whether it even counts as canon. And there are plenty of other sexist lines in TOS that we ignore or gloss over today.
Does it matter? It's a bit player in the background. It's not a story point. It has zero impact on the actual narrative. So it's hardly a "bombshell."