Eh, I just interpret it as stylized differences in the telling of the story.
Alex Kurtzman on the Fine Line Between Adding to, and Staying True to, Star Trek's Canon
- Thread starter Danja
- Start date
Here's what makes it super easy for me: the TOS Enterprise and the DISCO Enterprise are the exact same ship, just seen under different lenses of TV presentation. A different sheen. Because it's all god damned make believe. I can't treat the Trek universe like it's some realistic tangible consistent reality because it never was. That's how I was able to reconcile the difference between Klingons in TOS and TMP: The latter had a better budget! And that was long before ENTERPRISE went onto unnecessarily explain the ridge thing.
You are free to interpret DSC similar to the way we don’t accept an animation style literally, but blanket statements such as this one don’t lead to mutual understanding. It was, between 1986 and 2016 if not longer, because those in charge were that reverent of TOS on the rare occasions when they chose to revisit the show. Their original solution for outdated elements was to boldly go forward into the future rather than treat the 23rd century as a definitive era for the franchise; this would then unravel with ENT, TOS-R, the Abramsverse and finally DSC (which will hopefully reverse the trend in S3).
Last edited:
I agree with you in theory; the only proviso I have is that if you’re going to change something, there should be a reason why the change is necessary (even if it’s just that there’s a bigger budget even if it makes things look different). Like most people, I never had a problem with updating the Klingon look for TMP because there was more money to do so. I didn’t have a problem with the TOS Enterprise being changed to the TMP Enterprise because in-universe, it got a logical refit. I don’t have a problem that they used a white British actor to portray a character who was Middle Eastern, because they made it clear he had plastic surgery. I don’t even care that DSC’s Klingons are so radically different looking because they wanted to hide the fact that one actor was playing dual roles.
But when it came to the DSC Enterprise, I felt that that the changes that were made to it were just superficial and completely unnecessary. Budget had nothing to do with it, and in-universe story reasons had nothing to do with it. It was just change for the sake of change. The Enterprise isn’t the hero ship of Star Trek: Discovery. The U.S.S. Discovery is. So why change it when it’s for all intents and purposes just a guest ship?
The reasoning for why the DSC Enterprise looks different is so it doesn’t look like a 60s TV set. I’m fine with that, I can roll with that, I’m not going to put my fist in the air and scream “you ruined canon!!!”, but you’re free to.
As usual, this back-and-forth misses the underlying point that the original look and feel was a reason to stay away from that era (the occasional celebration aside) and boldly go forward, astonishing audiences with new kinds of stories in updated environments from later centuries. Star Trek should never be about weaving between the established and giving fans what they know they want. You may be fine with a 23rd-century refresh, but are you fine with what that means for storytelling? Are you fine with not getting the kind of story that would make you forget about the 23rd century altogether?
I understand your point, I’m just trying to explain mine, which is simply: I don’t care. To me the 23rd century having a revamped look is no different than seeing the same character played by a different actor (Saavik). I’ve made peace with that, but I can understand if you want visual consistency for ALL Trek then it makes sense that DISCO changing the look of the 23rd century would bother you.
I would suggest it's far more than just a look though: The classic Enterprise never had the TNG-style forcefields of Discovery-Trek, or a fleet of fighter shuttles and drones on the Enterprise. Given any real thought, the new technology retconned into the pre-TOS era would hugely alter TOS episodes and movies.
They've pretty much rebooted the 23rd century portion of the franchise, IMHO it doesn't really matter much but I can see how it would upset some.
The existence of onboard shuttlecraft renders the entire subplot of The Enemy Within nonsensical but that didn't stop the writers of TOS from adding them in anyway.
We expect a lot more from serialized television in 2019 than we did anthology-ish standalone episodes in 1966. These shows are now designed to be binge watched and rewatching is expected.
That's really not relevant at all. The complaint is about dsc being inconsistent with tos, not with itself. DSC obviously isn't designed to be part of a TOS bingewatch.
DSC is designed to be watched by Trekkies, who know TOS inside out and upside down.
Is it? And do they really?
I don't think that's entirely clear cut. And regardless, it doesn't make your statement any more relevant. Inconsistencies with tos wouldn't have any less (or more) impact on anyone if the show were entirely episodic and not designed for binge watching.
Prequels and inconsistencies go hand in hand. With the shuttle example, it was shown in ENT that starships had shuttlecraft 100 years before TOS’s “The Enemy Within,” so the plot of that episode was already made nonsensical even before DSC S2 and the Enterprise’s fleet of shuttles.
I see @Boris Skrbic ‘s point. A prequel to a ‘60’s science fiction show that is produced in 2019 will invariably show more advanced technology than that ‘60’s show did, so you might as well just make sequels if that’s the case, because all your prequel is going to do is invalidate the show that it’s a prequel of.
I see @Boris Skrbic ‘s point. A prequel to a ‘60’s science fiction show that is produced in 2019 will invariably show more advanced technology than that ‘60’s show did, so you might as well just make sequels if that’s the case, because all your prequel is going to do is invalidate the show that it’s a prequel of.
The Enemy Within subplot wasn't invalidated by ENT. It was invalidated by the Galileo Seven which came out like 10 episodes later. Or by the Menagerie even earlier. Maybe even another episode, I don't recall every instance of a shuttle showing up in a TOS episode.
This is my point. These inconsistencies are not 'hand in hand' with prequels, they're hand in hand with Star Trek. And pretty much every other decades long-running franchise. They're an inevitable result of asking new groups of writers to keep the same story alive in wildly different media landscapes, especially when the foundation of that story was never consistent to start with. And the issues aren't any better with sequels, either. TNG, DS9 and VOY have more than their fair share of inconsistencies with TOS as well.
I never said that inconsistencies weren’t a staple of Star Trek in general. I said that when a prequel is made decades after the fact, the technology shown will always invalidate the show it is a prequel to, so why bother making the prequel in the first place?
Let’s face it: the only reason why Rick Berman decided to make a 100-years-before-TOS prequel after Voyager ended was because he had run out of ideas for a new premise to a Star Trek show, and that prequels were all the rage at the time because of Star Wars. But ENT consistently showed a level of technology right on par with Voyager, not TOS or even a century before TOS (or at the very least, the production values were exactly the same.)
Because the technology level isn't the only consideration worth making. And the inevitable modernization of technology in new iterations of a franchise only matters if you obsess over it instead of just accepting that it's a fictional franchise which has never been consistent in the first place. (The existence of ENT and DSC in no way invalidates TOS for me. No moreso than the existence of any other inconsistency invalidates any other part of the franchise I like.)
And because straight sequels also have their own similar pitfalls, anyway. Plenty of people that get irritated at the apparent lack of progress between TOS and TNG eras, too, and of course any attempt to fix that issue by showing a truly wondrous and alien future will always run the risk of alienating the audience by being completely unrelatable. Moving forward or backward is fundamentally a balancing act, not something with an irrefutable right answer for all situations.
You’re correct that it’s all a matter of how any one individual chooses to interpret this fictional universe. But there will always be fans (like myself) who value consistency in a show that they love, even knowing that they will not always get it.
Not invariably (as demonstrated by Star Wars) and it’s not that I care so much about a visual overwrite (or an alternate universe / artistic license / whatever it ends up being in the end) — the root issue is that “reimagining” encourages the Batman kind of storytelling where successive productions remain close to a set of core elements, riffing on them, weaving between them and wedging themselves into an era.
As for Grendelsbayne’s relatability argument, I’m not seeing it since we could presumably relate to characters from 2379 (by which time Roddenberry’s vision of evolved humanity had been reduced to just an ideal), so why not PIC’s 2399? There is no need for massive time jumps, only gradual updates as our own society and technology changes, but within such an ongoing timeline we’d still have four quadrants and the entire universe beyond. A production must be confident enough to believe they’ll outdo all that came before, not just use them for a passing get-together.
Last edited:
They had more primitive consoles, engines, weapons, no shields, more submarine and less hotel interiors (compared to the D), a more clunky warp core, speed limits of a fraction of voyager's, barely any force fields, barely any universal translators, and just started beaming people.
Similar threads
