The One Thing You Could Change, TOS Edition...

Alrighty then.

 

Some take place even later. Such as "Squire of Gothos."

They say so in the episodes.

You know why that happened?

Because it was a bunch of stories they made up as they went along. None of it took place, ever.

Next.

 

Back in the late 60s, I don't think anyone was so anally retentive that they gave a stuff about the canon of entertainment fluff. We appear to have developed that obsession later on, probably due to the ability to spout forth almost in real time on the Internet about anything, whether important or unimportant. We appear to have just have too much time on our hands in the early 21st century. In two hundred years time, historians and psychologists will probably write huge tomes analysing this phenomenon.

Oh, and the one thing I would change would be to have a script editor establish consistent dating within the show to avoid endless tedious discussion 50 years in the future...

 

Roddenberry claimed that he was deliberately vague about when the show took place. That was the right call IMO.

 

De Forest Research generally kept track of such details, but their input was sometimes ignored.

 

holy shit. you actually “actuallied” twice before going balls to the wall with that word vomit. I am impressed.

 

So what? You can't follow "there are possible interpretations" with "would make it certain" - in the very same sentence - without allowing that everything which follows is nothing but hypothesizing and conjecture.

There are "possible interpretations" - like examining all the actual references in the series in context, you know - that make it certain that it's impossible to authoritatively establish a single time-frame for the series.

Scratch "possible interpretations," there - it should actually read "there are facts."

 

Even from 35,000 feet I can't see your entire post at once. TL;DR squared.

 

The code in The Matrix was more decipherable than that.

 

Thats what we do here.
I find if I'm not interested in the discussion, I just look at another thread or start my own "important" thread.

 

Controversial idea: I would get rid of (or severely limit) the transporter.

Too many ST plots over the years had to produce rather contrived excuses for why the transporter couldn't be used to simply beam characters out of danger (or enemies into danger, or the brig). If the transporter was more limited (ie reduced accuracy, or requiring a transporter pad at both ends of the journey) then this would be avoided. By limiting it or removing it, this issue with the writing would be avoided.

 

Blake's 7 treated transporters as much a hindrance as a help. In Miri it should have been child's play (pun intended) to beam down fresh communicators. Time was of the essence. You would have thought the ship would become concerned quite quickly.

 

Interesting, how so? It's a long time since I've watched Blake's 7.

 

Yeah, the Blake's 7 teleport could not pick up anything without one of the teleport bracelets being involved, and all it did was teleport to and from the ship. It was never used as a magic box to create duplicates or decontaminate or whatever other "Tech the Tech" bullshit Trek shows fell into.

 

As Spock would say, "I must differ with you."

- Jaeger's hasty assessment of Trelane's period decor is influenced by knowing that we encountered Gothos 900 light years from Earth. Jaeger wouldn't know one century's decor from another; he simply jumps to conclusions and figures that the Earth period being imitated must line up with the distance in light years. But it doesn't.

- The planet Gothos is Trelane's toy. He flies it through space at will— it can even outrun and corner the Enterprise. Trelane can go anywhere he wants to. He probably studied the Earth up close at various times over the centuries, saw a crazy quilt of mixed-period references, and then flew off to distant reaches of the galaxy.

Gothos just happened to be 900 light years from Earth when the Enterprise ran across it. That tells us nothing about what century Kirk is in.

 

Transporting people from a long distance away without a local dna scanner should never have been a thing. Implanting trackers and beaming down communicators to those locations should have been a thing.

 

The main reasons we are so obsessed with canon is because the writers of the newer shows aren't! Our favourite episodes and quirks from them have been ignored or changed in order for their versions to be accepted! And sometimes for no other reason than it sounds good!
JB

 

Re the transporter, in the recent films, it just got ridiculous.

"OK, we can beam you down, but we can't beam you up, and we can only beam one person..."

Half expected them to add "...and you have to wear lime green and be playing a trumpet" given how arbitrary those limitations are!

 

Yes once we learned that they could just scan for Vulcans and transport him up (in the Enterprise Incident), why didn't they do that for every lost landing party? Scan for Spock and they'd find the landing party.
Once they could intraship beam, beam straight onto the bridge(TNG) they had to invent lame reasons why they couldn't do it all the time to fix a problem?
Blakes 7. Why can't they show it on TV? I heard someone bought the rights and what is it going to dies with them? It is because the quality of the shows are too bad?
And yes the bracelets made the transport more sensible and dramatic and if they lost the bracelets then they were really stuck.

 

The special effects on Blakes 7 were never anything to write home about sadly but the stories of an oppressive Terran regime taking over planets and enslaving the populations of said planets is always interesting especially with the black suited, nifty helmeted storm troopers helping the transition of power and eliminating the rebels!
JB