Oh, I completely forgot about her.
Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
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Okay, I see what you mean: "Why is this such a sticking point and not something else?" with Control being an example. Fair enough. I guess, since the novels have a smaller audience and the TV shows do not need to conform with them the way they "have" to with each other, it's not a great comparison. Milage may vary.
In regards to the Section 31 novels, DS9 did state and show that Section 31 was a top secret conspiracy for centuries, so irregardless of the novels, DSC will "have" to address that if they don't want to leave plot holes from their show to the previous ones.
I know I stated as much in a post somewhere on the forum. As to why this one is getting so much attention, it could be because it's the most blatant difference that you can't really rationalize away on paper. It's also pretty new, so it's the new thing. Bet in several months, the talk will die down the way the season 1 DSC Klingon makeup did after everyone had a chance to vent their spleens on the subject.
Sure, but why not do that in a way that make sense?
Err, this is the "Discovery and the Novelverse" thread in the Trek Literature forum, so I thought we all understood that the topic here was the show's impact on novel continuity.
While "Inquisition" certainly implies that, I think there's wiggle room. When Bashir asks Sloan, "But that was two hundred years ago. Are you telling me you've been working on your own ever since? Without specific orders? Accountable to nobody but yourselves?" Sloan merely replies, "You make it sound so ominous." So it's not explicitly confirmed. True, it's hard to believe a genius like Bashir could be unaware that S31 was once an openly operating branch of Starfleet Intelligence, so it's an imperfect fit, but there are worse inconsistencies in Trek canon.
Of course you can. We've suggested multiple rationalizations already. It's a different character named Yeoman Colt. It's Colt's alien wife. It's Colt in prosthetics from an undercover mission she just got back from. It's Colt after some sort of transformation in the 4 years since we last saw her. It's usually easy to resolve these things if you apply your energy to thinking of fixes rather than just complaining about the problem.
Sorry, kinda forgot what thread it was (beyond DSC discussion) and don't even really remember how I originally found this. Fair enough.
I'll take it. (Sure makes Bashier's statement that he's not a historian in the DS9 Tribbles episode more then a joke.)
Poor word choice on my part (esp. since I've been of the opinion its a different character with the same name, if that, given that I'm not sure the credits should be hard and fast for these sorts of things). I guess what I'm getting at is that it's kind of a mind-boggling decision, given that all the other returning characters have been cast with people who resemble the original actors and there doesn't seem to be any logic to the decision if it's indeed supposed to be the original Colt (it's not like people who saw the pilot are going to recognize her and be excited for the cameo or anything.)
Openly operating Section 31 also means that Odo is tremendously bad at googling things: "If he's right and Section 31 has existed since the birth of the Federation, they've learned to cover their tracks very well."
I'm still not entirely convinced it's not a miscommunication somehow, but if that is what they did, I can see the logic of it. TOS was pretty human-centric, and DSC is trying to portray a more multispecies Starfleet. So I can see how that desire could lead to reinterpreting a human character as alien, sort of like how comic-book adaptations these days often change the race or gender of originally white male characters to increase diversity. It's odd to do it with Colt, though.
Yeah, but Trek is full of other instances where you have to ignore the exact words in order to reconcile two things. Like in "Where Silence Has Lease," when they encounter a zone of darkness almost exactly like the one in "The Immunity Syndrome" and Data says no Starfleet vessel has ever encountered anything even remotely similar to it.
I think Section 31 is just good at covering their tracks, per Odo. I'm of the belief that they're still a "secret organisation" (as in, their existence is top secret), and they were just more embedded into Starfleet Intelligence in the 23rd century. Captains, as a matter of course, were informed of their existence and it was a used asset (and others were told too, depending on clearance level and mission necessity).
The show sorta supports this, in that Stone and Psycho have never seen a "black badge" before in Season 1 and Burnham doesn't acknowledge its meaning, but knows full well what it means in Season 2. In my mind, she knew all along but understood it was not to be shared.
Tyler, or his successor or whomever, goes into alot of work to wipe Section 31 from the history books, and it could be that the term is kept off of records even of a classified nature. Odo, as an agent of a foreign power (Bajoran government) operating with some leeway towards Starfleet wouldn't have access to the most classified records, and Starfleet doesn't have the equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act.
In the novelverse, we can assume that Uraei-Control removed all records of the Section, and that Dax was just not involved with Starfleet matters during the brief period (2240s-2250s) when they operated more brazenly.
It might be even briefer than that. There was a reference in one of the episodes to S31 ramping up its efforts during and after the war. Which fits with what I've always assumed, that S31 spends most of its time dormant in order to remain hidden, and only becomes more active in times of great crisis such as wars. Of course, they were engaged in time travel research in the 2230s, apparently, but they could still have been more clandestine than they became during and after the Klingon War.
As for Dax, that would've been when Emony was the host, so it makes sense that a gymnast wouldn't have been involved with Starfleet (she was briefly involved with Leonard McCoy, but before he became a doctor or an officer).
Still, it's not like it's a reboot or anything, like how the original Marvel 616 universe Nick Fury was a white character, but the Ultimate Universe version was black. Heck, when Marvel wanted to get the black Samuel L. Jackson Fury into 616, rather then just making the original black and ignoring the incongruity (and racial minefield that could've happened), they wrote in a new Nick Fury who fit the bill. I hate the whole "just make new diverse characters" thing and offense that online bully groups like Comicsgate take to efforts to increase diversity in fiction, since diversification needs to happen. However, I'm not sure that magically turning Colt from a human to an alien is the way for Star Trek to do that.
I don't have a problem with it being done with some character, but as I said, Colt is an odd choice, since "The Cage" specifically had the Talosians choose her as a possible breeding partner for their program to breed humans in captivity. Also, it would've been better to do a more subtle makeup, like Nhan's -- something that suggests "alien" while still being close enough to human that we can shrug off the visual difference. (Although there were probably people 40 years ago saying the same thing about TMP's Klingons.)
But all that is why I'm still wondering if this is just a miscommunication, the interviewed producer mixing up one character for another.
I doubt Paradise got it wrong in the interview. The actress credited as Colt is a regular Discovery stuntwoman and background player who always works on the show under heavy alien makeup (and even if she actually isn't the alien science officer and is playing a human deeper in the background, she doesn't have the biggest resemblance to the old Colt, especially compared to Hanneke Talbot's Lt. Mann, who wouldn't be a totally unreasonable recast of Colt).
I'd guess the miscommunication occurred during production. Maybe someone more familiar with "The Cage" decided they should cast a Colt-alike, they found the actress who played "Mann," then they decided the english accent was a dealbreaker and changed her name to another bridge background role, and someone who didn't know "The Cage," needing a credit for the now-nameless alien, just switched them without realizing "Yeoman Colt" was an established character and not a new name like the other three background bridge officers. DSC naming an alien "Mann" (or intending to) doesn't feel out of character to me.
I'd guess the miscommunication occurred during production. Maybe someone more familiar with "The Cage" decided they should cast a Colt-alike, they found the actress who played "Mann," then they decided the english accent was a dealbreaker and changed her name to another bridge background role, and someone who didn't know "The Cage," needing a credit for the now-nameless alien, just switched them without realizing "Yeoman Colt" was an established character and not a new name like the other three background bridge officers. DSC naming an alien "Mann" (or intending to) doesn't feel out of character to me.
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But that's an alternate-timeline Carol who grew up in London.
A better example might be Sarek and Amanda, since the original versions had the sort of "Mid-Atlantic" accent that was commonly affected by actors of their generation, while the DSC versions have more ordinary American accents. (And Kelvin Sarek went the other way with a full-on English accent.)
If true, and I suspect something like it is given the uncertain tone Ms. Paradise gives in the interview, is why even those who like Discovery have trouble trusting the writers. There's still no sufficient explanation for how a Section 31 suit can travel across great distances, stop a Kelpien massacre by the Ba'ul, etc. Everything feels haphazard.
Getting some ginger-haired actress to be Yeoman Colt, once they decided to add the character's name into the mix, shouldn't be hard you would think. Yet it seems they found a way to mess that up too.
Considering Michelle Paradise also wrote the episode, one would think she'd know who was cast to say the lines assigned to "Yeoman Colt" in the script. Although...
This is something I can see being the case. IIRC, in The Cage Colt wore the beige uniform that looked similar to command gold and was replaced with the red uniforms in the rest of TOS. Mann wears a red uniform, which is also consistent with the majority of the yeoman we saw in TOS. Granted, Mann wasn't really doing anything that would qualify as a yeoman specific duty either, though I imagine they only listed the character as Yeoman Colt to intentionally make it clear she's meant to be the character from The Cage, cut down on "is that Yeoman Colt or someone else named Colt?" And yeah, I can totally see Disco naming an alien character Mann.
If this story is true then it certainly makes things very ironic. Colt can't be English, so instead they make her alien.
Actually, if the accent was such a deal breaker, why didn't they just have the actress speak with an American accent? Looking over her IMDB, she's done plenty of work in the US and Canada, so it should be an accent she'd be familiar with.
She's one of three credited writers along with Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman. As the showrunner, Kurtzman would presumably have written the final draft. And producers have a lot more details to juggle in their minds than just what's in the script. As a prose writer, I only have the written word to keep in mind, and even so I still don't always exactly remember things from my own work. (I once misremembered an alien species's name from one story to the next, even though I re-read the first story before writing the second, and revised and edited the second story a bunch of times without catching the error.) TV producers have a thousand other concerns to remember on top of that. Which bit player said which incidental line of exposition in a bridge scene is not something I'd expect a producer to remember infallibly without going back and checking the script or other documents.
Right, but since that info was cut from the released movie (or at least the specific info about London, if not her mother's surname, which I guess could be inferred somewhat from her conversation with Spock), not too many casual fans would be aware of that bit of backstory, as opposed to the more ardent fans who've watched the deleted scenes on the Blu-Ray.
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I don't want to go too many levels deep speculating about speculation. While it's a reasonable explanation, there are still many other possibilities, ranging from it being intentional for some reason that has so far escaped us, or that the Colt name entered the hopper as a reference but was never attached to a specific character aside from the alien science officer (presumably by someone who didn't realize it was a reference), to whatever other wild-ass theories anyone would like to come up with.
Saw that. Thought it was a fair compromise until we can get concrete proof that J.M. Colt and this Colt are one and the same.