I would read some comics. I guess a novel could work, but the audience would be extremely niche.
Is there any interest in a Lower Decks book?
- Thread starter Leathco
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It could've been a quantum duplicate. According to a Star Trek Continues the Defiant got duplicated a'la Voyager in Deadlock: it could've been triplicated (or quadruplicated if you want to include the old comic book in which they try the same thing).
I mean, across various Trek media, books and comics, the Defiant has been “rescued” multiple times prior to “In A Mirror Darkly” being produced, and while I think they all treat their attempt as the only serious one made, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to imagine that something technobabble-y has led to multiple Defiants.
The "Star Trek Logs", ten volumes of the 22 Filmation animated Trek adventures of the 1970s, are fondly remembered by many Trek readers. Alan Dean Foster built up a lot of fans via the "Logs". They have been reprinted many times over the decades, and even collected in omnibuses and anniversary trade PBs with bonus material. If that's niche, it is still a well-respected niche.
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TAS is a poor example because unlike LDS, it’s not using the animated format as justification for the kind of irreverence that almost certainly wouldn’t be ported onto live action. Any novels would just have to maintain that same levity and allow for storylines that break suspension of disbelief to the point where one can easily question their existence in the shared continuity.
Starfleet has junior officers bunking in a corridor? Sure. They record fake Captain’s Logs, are play-attacked and hurt with a bat’leth? Why not. They distribute art supplies on Landru’s planet, where worship of the computer was temporarily restored? Of course.
^^How is the junior officers bunking in the corridor a problem? David Goodman's Kirk Autobiography had something similar for the first ship Kirk served on as an ensign, only there they stuck bunks wherever there was space on the ship. Kirk himself had to sleep in the ship's engine room.
But the reference point for the viewer can’t be a non-canon book showing one author’s idea of the kind of life Kirk might have led over a century earlier, but rather TNG and the movies, DS9, VGR and PIC. The closest I remember getting to this for officers were two-person bunks in actual quarters on a short-range ship as small as the Defiant, and even there it was usual to leave one bunk empty. I see mistreatment of Starfleet officers… and then auto-correct for the format of the show in a way that implies none of the events ‘happened’ even close to what we see, if at all.
This is from Voyager’s “Flashback”, which I haven’t watched in a while, but I believe it was shown that on the Excelsior junior officer’s were bunked up to 6 people in a room (the scene’s where Tuvok is making the tea for Sulu, I seem to recall seeing a couple of bunk beds, and at least 6 people running around finishing getting dressed when Rand walks in. Also it looked like they were segregating the junior officers by gender, as it looked like there were only male officers in the quarters).
That would just be an artifact of the movie Meyerverse from the previous century, while LDS is about the post-TNG era. Also, don’t forget the other spoiler-filled examples: it just doesn’t make sense that PIC writers, for example, would take them entirely seriously. Sure, they may insert ten odd references and import a character who would behave somewhat out of character, but the exact details really would have to be confined to LDS.
We also saw crew barracks in The Undiscovered Country. Although it's kind of silly given how huge the Enterprise is, an aircraft carrier-sized vessel with only 400-odd people aboard (500 for the refit per the Kimble blueprints), as opposed to several thousand for an actual aircraft carrier.
"How Much for Just the Planet?"
We know on the Enterprise D Ensigns had to share quarters with at least one other Ensign, as established in the TNG episode Lower Decks.
But everyone bunking in a corridor?
Or again, stopping restored Landru worship with someone saying they just bought a new scythe (IIRC), to be followed by officers selling art supplies? Or Deanna’s totally unprofessional comment to the ship’s first officer, which can be funny in that style, but not otherwise?
That’s all I’m asking: can you watch LDS and accept that from the POV of other iterations in the franchise, everything happened precisely as spoken and animated (to within the ability of live action to follow the animation), or do you simply accept the attempts at parody for what they are in that context while realizing that a lot of the stories would never be be imported into the shared continuity, at least not without extensive rewrites?
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Why not consider it a retcon? Which was the intent.
The show is as much canon as all the other series, how you interoperate it is up to you. Also Voyager had the MSD in a corridor hallway and used it as a map once IIRC.
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I'm sorry, is the MSD not to be used as a map?
What the F is it supposed to be for, then?
What the F is it supposed to be for, then?
Because I want to be able to accept both the SCE Defiant story and "In a Mirror, Darkly" in the same continuity. Alternate-timeline Defiants are a way to do that, and the insignia inconsistency fits neatly with that idea. It's not specifically about the insignias; that's just a convenient detail that can be taken as "evidence" for the handwave I already came up with to reconcile the two stories.
It was not an intentional retcon, more of an error. The makers of IaMD evidently weren't aware that the arrowhead insignias were visible on the Defiant uniforms. That didn't really get discovered until the HD remasters came out. Also, conventional wisdom for a long time was that every ship had its own distinct insignia; it was only a few years ago that a Bob Justman memo was unearthed revealing the intention that the arrowhead should be used for all Stafleet capital ships.
I’m not saying it cannot be used as a map, just that the prime-time animation format means LDS is looking for ways to be funny by going over the top with the fictional reality as portrayed in live action (and TAS for the most part). What would be silly in live action is fine in that context and the distinction should be made accordingly.
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