How can these episodes (from TNG, DS9, and ENT) be canon any longer?

Star Trek Discovery: The Enterprise War by John Jackson Miller, coming out next month. And, yes, the DISCO Enterprise is on the cover.

 

It is canon as long as the studio (Viacom) wishes it, but it was a missed opportunity to make DISCO a prequel to the movie Star Trek so audiences didn't have to make comparisons to what was done a lot better in 1960's.

 

And TOS sticks out like a sore compared to the rest of canon, though it gets a lot better through the movie era. In fact, IMO, scaling not withstanding, IMO the Discoprise/Eavesprise looks a lot more like a credible intermediate step between the NX-class and the Miranda and Excelsiors of the movie era than the original Jeffriesprise does, while still being a more faithful update than the Abramsprise/Churchprise.

 

Miller is a great writer. He bowled a strike with Kenobi a few years ago. I was hoping Disney had their eye on it for script treatment but it seems like they've backed off one-offs for the time being.

 

There’s a small difference with those examples, though. None of them to my knowledge were trying to be in the same continuity as what came
before it. The Nolan Batman films are not in continuity with the Burton films or the ‘60’s TV show. That Dracula film with Wynona Ryder is not in the same continuity as a Bela Lugosi film. That crappy Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick is not in the same continuity as the original Japanese films. Et cetera, et cetera.

But honestly, that’s all beside the point. To me, people are needlessly arguing over the canonicity of DSC when it’s unarguably canon. The real misunderstanding here is what CBS means when they use the buzzword ‘prime.’ It was meant as a term to differentiate it from the Kelvin universe films. That’s it.

 

Ok. It's Prime, canon and in continuity with ENT, TOS, and TMP forward.

Glad to clear that up

 

Exactly. Despite certain youtube commentators attempts to convince viewers otherwise. That seem to work...

 

It’s Prime if all ‘Prime’ means is that it’s not in the same continuity as the Kelvin films.

It’s canon because it’s part of the body of work that is Star Trek as a whole.

It’s in continuity with ENT (but then so are the Kelvin films), but not so much with TOS forward.

 

You guys...I swear sometimes.

 

Agree to disagree, which I'll bet you expected.

 

Yes, but in comic books, where Batman originated and has been steadily published since 1939, his continuity has been a steady evolution, with only a couple instances of reboots in an 80-year history. The same Batman who fought vampires and Monster Men in the 30s and 40s is the same Batman who dealt with Bat-Mite and went to outer space in the 50s and is the same Batman who went through the Carmine Infantino "New Look" and Adam West-style campiness in the 60s and is the same Batman who underwent a darker reinvention in the 70s in the stories of Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams and Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers. It was all on a continuum, and you occasionally had references in the late 70s to stuff that happened decades before, like in 1977, when Englehart & Rogers brought Professor Hugo Strange back for the first time since December 1940's Detective Comics #46 or brought Deadshot back for the first time since 1950's Batman #59.

So yes, it's more than possible to have multiple interpretations of a property within one continuity. It's easy. All you have to do is keep using or reinterpreting the bits you want to keep, and stop referring to the stuff you'd rather forget.

And hell, Trek fans are doing that already, even if they don't realize it. When's the last time you saw Trek refer to "Spock's Brain," Star Trek V, "Masks," or "Threshold" within the show itself? You haven't. So even though those episodes/movies are still technically canonical, they are widely considered unsuccessful and best left forgotten. They haven't been officially thrown out of continuity, but they may as well have been.

 

I actually included a reference to Englehart & Rogers' classic "Laughing Fish" story in my most recent BATMAN novel, which also picks up directly from the "Court of Owls" storyline of only a few years ago. To be honest, I half-expected somebody at DC to object to me referencing a Bronze Age story in a "modern" Batman book, but I didn't hear a peep. And not a single reviewer has objected either.

It's possible to get too hung up on which stories are "canon" or whatever, regardless of whether you're talking Batman or Star Trek or Josie & the Pussycats.

 

Even if one is very much into the visual details, I’d argue there is no need to worry greatly about DSC’s artistic license. After all, who will try to slot a 442m Enterprise between the NX at 225m and the TMP version at 305m? It just wouldn’t work without “recasting” all the other ships to match, and we can be fairly sure that won’t happen at least. The redesign is likely to be remembered as U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 (Star Trek: Discovery). Use it for tie-in purposes, but otherwise it’s Jefferies and the original vision.

 

Benny who?

Well, it is supposed to be a more enlightened future...

There's nothing to "excuse." The producers made a subjective aesthetic choice with their intellectual property, which they had every right to do, and anyone who doesn't like that can die mad about it.

 

Who’s mad? I simply have a different point of view.

 

That's about the only way to handle continuity on a show that spans over five decades of filming with numerous time travel episodes. The timeline is basically spaghetti code at this point. We can embrace it and pick our own continuities. If its on screen, it's canon. That's about it. There are larger constructs within that, like MU, KU, Prime, etc, but those are not monolithic and have numerous changes within them as well. I don't have to get hung up about it to watch it. If anything, it makes it a little more interesting.

Mignogna and others have done that, though I never heard of any of them being anything but supportive of the new shows as well. STC was a CBSAA affiliate website. I am not sure if it still is. .

 

Fan films are illegal, and besides it’s nonsense to claim one must be able to perform a service in order to evaluate someone else’s. There is nothing technical about reimagining legacy elements to manage risk and ensure a minimum audience, rather than dismantle as much of the safety net as possible.

 

They aren't. And for a long time, CBS had no issue with fans making them and even raising a little cash to cover costs. Then Axanar happened...