As an alternative, if someone has a great story to tell that doesn't fit into continuity, don't call it Star Trek. They could call it anything they like, but calling it Star Trek is just an attempt to make it fit somewhere it won't fit.
So how important is canon, then?
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As an alternative, if someone has a great story to tell that doesn't fit into continuity, don't call it Star Trek. They could call it anything they like, but calling it Star Trek is just an attempt to make it fit somewhere it won't fit.
Generally agree with this sentiment. I am in the middle of a re-read of The Dresden Files, which takes place primarily in Chicago. And while there are fictional locations in his stories, he never effing moves the Field Museum or the Shedd Aquarium just to make the storytelling easier. IOW, it maybe Dresden's Chicago but it is Chicago.
How so? It's not like TOS ceases to be..
Exactly. What if Kirk is human in the TOS reboot, but by the TNG reboot he becomes a Gorn. There's still a character named Kirk, who was still the Captain of the Enterprise. Close enough?
Now we're talking! See story continuity only matters to that story universe and then even there maybe not as much as you think. I want my 20 feet talk mech warrior Borg who shoot lasers out of their hands. Maybe there were three other Enterprises before NCC-1701 and the next one was NCC-2515 commanded by Commodore Uhura. You could have Kirk go the Jim Phelps route and betray the Federation by selling secrets to the Klingons and it's up to his protege Commander Jean Luc Picard to rally a new crew to save the day.
Sounds like one of those very nebulous definitions. What's enough for one may not be enough for another.
To piggyback on a comment I've made elsewhere, for instance, just how many previously unheard of siblings does Spock have? And we're supposed to believe that this has never come up in decades of relationships? I don't buy it. I don't hate Discovery like a lot of people; I found it entertaining, if not as deep as it seemed to think it was. That said, I think they could have told a story that was every bit as good and made Michael Burnham a ward of Sarek's, Amanda's, and Spock's next door neighbor, so she and Spock could still have interacted. Or a ward of a colleague of Sarek's. Or a fellow student at the Vulcan Elementary School, where both were bullied for being human. Or...or...or...
This is why I call the idea that stories which break continuity are required for creativity lazy thinking. In a minute I came up with three relatively workable alternatives. I have no proof, but I'm willing to bet that the people behind the "Burnham is Spock's sister" idea never even tried to make it believable. They just wanted to tell a story with a character who was Spock's sister, perhaps with a dash of CBS saying "For God's sake, tie it in to TOS somehow!"
I mean there are scenarios were he could feasibly become a Gorn, just use some technobabble to have his brain end up in a Gorn's body.
To me broad strokes would be more than enough. They can change the ethnicity and gender of any character they like, add characters, drop characters, however they want.
They were fused in a transporter accident and now call themselves Gork.
I'll grant you that's true. I think the clear intent of my post, however, was that, without explanation of any kind, the hypothetical TNG reboot made him a Gorn (with pink skin and four eyes) with the conceit that he had always been a Gorn. The TNG reboot and the TOS reboot are then in conflict with one another. Does that matter?
Not to some people! XD
Although by 2019 when they brought the Enterprise onto Disco, they basically backtracked on all of that. The design lineage and aesthetic for the starship interiors established in the first season of Disco were replaced with something more obviously influenced by TOS, we had more TOS-ish uniforms, they even went out of their way to establish Pike hates holograms and has thus ordered to remove all the Enterprise's holographic communicators, and reinforced this fact at every turn.
Even with the Klingons, most of their ship designs from the first season (including the falsely identified D-7) were removed and replaced with a more accurate looking D-7 and the Klingons themselves had their new look altered to be more similar to the "traditional" style.
So, yeah, they tried to make everything look new, but very quickly ran back to old familiar. Though for some reason they turned Yeoman Colt into an alien.
If it's a reboot, they can do whatever the hell they want and change whatever they want. That's the basic definition of "reboot."
This is called slippery slope.
Not Girk? Or Kork?
I mean if you look at the two shows right now, the original versions of TOS and TNG are already in conflict with one another in many aspects, so I wouldn't mind if some hypothetical reboot versions would contradict each other.
I know you selected a deliberately egregious example to illustrate your point, but I doubt they'd go as far as the four eyed, pink always-been-a-Gorn Kirk.
That being said I wouldn't mind if they designed some of the alien races to look more alien, like they have done with the Klingons (several times already) And I'd be on board with them redesigning *any* alien species, even my favorites such as Bajorans and Betazoids.
Nah. A lot franchises existed with little to no continuity.
That's not canon. That's just stuff you like.
They just gave it an upgrade and a new paint job. As you said, Kirk's adventures still exist. They just have non static screens now.
The horror...I mean, I need those static screens now!
You need static screens stat!
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