ST canon is inconsistent and contradictory.

I don't know if this has been discussed before, so I'll mention it.

The other franchise is far more unified and integrated. To give one example, Rogue One has a similar feel to Star Wars: A New Hope, in terms of uniforms and fell. Our franchise, however is not, and, to give the most famous example, the Klingons look different, which leads to problems explaining why they look different. And, to give a second example, the Starfleet uniforms are also different.
Not only that, our stories tend to contradict each other, because, when TOS started, they were literally making it up as they went along. And, after that, they didn't bother to maintain a consistency. And let's not even talk about the reboot.

That may be because only one man owned it for decades, and, even now, there is a centralized story group of writers who tell that story. Ours, on the other hand, are owned by Paramount and CBS separately, with no central command to ensure consistency. And that detracts from our enjoyment of the stories.

Any thoughts?

 

That this started when the man who created it change things for no good reasons other that making a feature film and doesn't detract from the storytelling for me.

Mileage will vary.

 

This is brought up fairly often around here.

Kor

 

Yes!
ST canon should be shot out a cannon.

 

Discussed a billion times before, but I'll put in my 2 cents-

Star Trek needs to realize that it's not going to be our direct, direct future. It needs to square up and say 'This is an Alternate History now, starting with Apollo and so, we could had been flying interplanetary spaceships by the 90s if we wanted to' and go from there.

A problem I saw with VOY and DS9 a bit and ENT is that they go back to 90s USA, and it's the same as it's always been. There's little peep of the Eugenics Wars and now as we're approaching the 20s, the Bell Riots and the Reunitification of Ireland are both good guesses but unlikely to occur as they said they would.

Just...square up, ya know? While it won't fix everything in Canon, just hammering that out might go a long way. It prevents cringe-worthy moments like Musk being name-dropped in DIS. In the Star Trek I kinda know, Musk would be a nobody because we're already doing interplanetary missions and ships, even if they take years, so much that a third-world dictator had his own personal spaceship by the late 90s. (I know, I know, novels try to ram in a billion different explanations why).

Just do a sort of beefed up disney ala Star Wars and the Expanded Universe. It's not going to get much worse than now. Hell didn't Gene try to say OG ST was basically warped in-universe media to make up for a few inconsistencies on its own sake?

 

Star Trek operates on X-Men movieverse-level continuity, where the broad strokes just about match up but individual stories are free to reimagine/change whatever they want. There's also much, much more Star Trek content than there is for Star Wars. 750ish episodes and 13 movies.

Have some tongue-in-cheek videos I made on the subject, years ago:

 

I guess it didn't seem as much of an issue during the early days of Trek, but in hindsight they really should have set it later than the 23rd century. It leaves a lot of technological development to cram into 250-300 years, particularly if the idea was humanity bootstrapped itself instead of having been given technology by more advanced alien cultures. Of course, in the sixties where it had been less than 70 years from the Wright Brothers first slight to sending men to the moon, they can perhaps be forgiven that the pace of spaceflight didn't maintain that trajectory.

 

I have no issue with the technological progression. We could, by all rights, have interplanetary bases and ships. It was politics that got in the way, not technology, both domestic politics and international, followed by proliferation of that technology.

 

The gulf between movies and series, and how the 1960s didn't have home video could come into play as well as relative understanding of real science by audiences and writers and what the latter will do when the science is flakey to compensate. (e.g. "The Enemy Within" is so over the top but the exploration of a person's good vs evil, as shown by both Kirks, made up for it.)

Either which way as there are scores of reasons, not everyone is going to like/adore every offering/sequel/prequel/whatever and even stories within each offering/sequel/prequel/whatever. Even in stories disliked there may still be cool scenes. That's just how it is.

 

And that's why I'm happy to see each incarnation of ST as its own incarnation with the others being broad-strokes in-canon for them. And why I hate it when they try to make everything fit into a single canon, like that stupid augment virus idea.

I think the bigger problem is that in our universe there's no point in interplanetary bases and ships. Earth aside the whole solar system is an extremely hostile environment and things like colonising Mars are just not cost effective or worth the risk.
Especially since you can't handwave the various complications like you can in fiction.

 

As opposed to TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, DSC, PIC, where they were all secretly working from some master plan that outlined the next 50+ years of Star Trek?

Star Wars was also made up as it went along. George Lucas just liked to pretend that he wasn't flying by the seat of his pants for some reason.

 

That's correct. Just two instances of this include: Darth Vader wasn't Lukes father until (iirc) the second draft of The Empire Strikes Back and Luke's sister was supposed to be a new character to be introduced in a sequel to the Return of the Jedi. When it became clear that (at the time) there wod be no direct sequel to RotJ Princess Leia was given the role.
Or the many contradictions and inconsistencies between the Original and Prequel trilogies.
The only thing that happened was that some ideas from the early drafts of Star Wars were recycled for the prequel trilogy and that allowed for some Canon welding after the fact.

But let's face it, every larger work of fiction contradicts itself. Not even the Lord of the Rings is 100% consistent with itself, let alone the larger Middle Earth mythology.

 

And Mary had a little lamb. These are things we know.

 

The Eugenics Wars was a conflict that was comprised of nations in the Third World, hence no mention in the US of the conflict. It didn't matter to the average citizen at the time or they didn't know.

There was an attempt to create Sanctuary Districts for real when DS9 was airing. And there were areas of India that walled off the impoverished during President Trump’s recent visit to India, before the whole coronavirus outbreak. Which itself is supposed to have an effect on the global economy.

Brexit did happen, so who knows, really.

Let’s not try and inspire these events to become real, ok?

I do agree there are issues. That time stream in ENT S4 – while I thought it looked cool at the time as a teenager - was problematic for me, mainly because it opened key events and people in Star Trek.

- Sole photo of Khan Noonien Singh in the 1990s (TOS: “Space Seed”)
- Bell Riot/Storming of Sanctuary District Processing Center (DS9: “Past Tense, Pt 2”)
- Ares IV spacecraft (VOY: “One Small Step”)
- Earth-Saturn probe “First to Saturn” patch (TOS: “Tomorrow is Yesterday”/ ENT: “First Flight”)
- Charybdis mission patch (TNG: “The Royale”)
- The new space shuttle in the ENT intro
- Phoenix launch/First Contact
- Post atomic horror court room scene from “Encounter at Farpoint”
- Henry Archer (ENT: “Broken Bow”)
- USS Enterprise XCV-330 in the 602 Club
- NX-Alpha (ENT: “First Flight”)
- Emmette - type ship in the ENT intro

Surely, they had the rights to add these to the time stream, didn’t they?

EDIT: Here's the time stream in question.

 

Not so sure about that. With 60's technology, continuing on the Apollo program and successor programs would probably have been country-wrecking expensive. (In fact, the USSR collapsed economically under the cold war, even if not directly under the space race). Heck, even today, now that near-earth spaceflight is no longer the sole domain of the largest two or three countries on earth, but is gradually coming into reach of large companies (implying that a lot of the technologies required have become much cheaper in relative terms), setting up (say) a mars mission probably still would be horrendously expensive, for marginal gains (in the short run, at least).

 

Not yet

 

That isn't exactly canon.

 

Is that guy jumping out the window because he has no money, a crisis of faith, or is he avoiding military service?

 

How does jumping out of a window make you money?