ST canon is inconsistent and contradictory.

That's all.

 

Makes me wonder why they were there at all, just to show off the new makeup?
Kinda reminds me of the Duras Sisters who were kinda just...there...in Generations and got killed off rather unceremoniously.

 

Yes, I did.

 

Yup. It was a big expensive cinematic event. Of course new make up.

 

Never to be seen again. Though I assume if Gene had been in charge of STII we might have seen the design again.

 

Beyond The Final Reflection, another novel establishes that the pure-bred Klingons initially avoided contact with humans due to the risk of infection to human disease that could kill them, and once a vaccine had been developed started to make direct contact, ah, conflict.

 

I remember them being one of the driving elements of the plot. Soran wasn't going to get much done without them, and they were the reason the Enterprise D was destroyed.

B'Etor painting Soran's face with her own blood is one of my favorite scenes.

Maybe I saw a different cut of the movie.

 

Is there any canon of a franchise, that isn't inconstistent and contradictory on some levels?

 

I think Babylon 5 comes closest. JMS did backflips to make everything as consistent as possible, despite unexpected personnel losses.

 

It's certainly the most expansive series that does, which IMO is helped by it being ~84% written by a single writer (JMS) and (unusually?) strict guidelines were apparently issued to the small cadre of writers that wrote episodes in the 1st, 2nd and 5th seasons and the spin-offs.

 

As strong as my love for B5 is... I'm not sure, if I would count it as a real 'franchise'. Basically, it is one series including some extra movies with an early-cancelled spin-off and a few books. Maybe it is something, that become a fully-grown franchise in a better parallel universe, but in this universe, it was cut off just at the jump to the franchise status...

 

It's a small franchise, but it's still a franchise, because it went from a TV series to a few movies to a few books and a comic series. In fact, I believe there was a second series, Crusade, that didn't go very far.

 

It depends on how minor of changes you want to include in your "on some level."

 

Plus an additional 125-odd hours of canonical animation (248 half hour episodes and a 90-minute movie). Of course, even adding that to the tally, Star Trek still comes out with more than twice as much content.

 

He's done no such thing. The previous 57 years of canon were more inconsistent and contradictory than Star Trek's, and this particular retcon adds further backstory to the central character that actually sits pretty well with certain things previously established over the decades - certainly more than the revelations in The War Games sat with what had gone before. I can see why it wouldn't sit well with some (I had similar feelings about The Rise of Skywalker) but I don't think it re-contextualises what came before too heavily, and certainly far less than previous retcons. As for whether you'd find it bothersome, only watching it can reveal that.

 

Sure it can. Especially when, as in the case of so much trivia like Shatner's mare having a foal or the combination to Kirk's safe, it's not relevant to telling a good story. Trivia is not more important than story.

 

I know very little about Dr Who, but I thought there was no real canon over the 50 years or so - sorta like James Bond, in that sense.

 

Tons of Who canon.

 

Yep. But Who has a built in mechanism for being inconsistent: ongoing changes to the timeline.

Trek has that, too, but to a lesser extent. And for some reason the show makers resist calling on it at all. I mean, it would get annoying if it was constantly their excuse, but the changes/alternate timeline created from ST:FC would have been a perfect excuse for the changes in the Enterprise and the Kelvin universe stuff.

 

Doctor Who has a canon, just no one gives a shit about staying consistent with it. One of the franchise's most renowned producers is quoted saying "Continuity is only whatever I can remember."

Everyone always says that, but it's not really accurate. For the most part, time travel is just a means of transportation in Doctor Who. Very few stories are actually about time travel itself and the implications associated with it. Indeed, it's only the Steven Moffat era of 2010-2017 where that was a regular thing for the show.

At the very least, Terrance Dicks, who was the producer with the quote about continuity only being what he can remember ran the show in the 1970s during a period where the show in fact gave up time travel with the Doctor being stuck on Earth in a vaguely defined "near future." And even that they couldn't stay consistent about with it quickly being forgotten that it was supposed to be the future and not present day, which has turned into one of the franchise's more infamous in-jokes these days.