Tales Of The Federation - Akiva Goldsman wants anthology series with classic characters

Disagree. It's an opportunity to explore the world in a whole new way.

*breaks out in to song*

 

Yes, but fiction is mutable. Things can be added (and subtracted) to reflect the times and expand the characters/universe. Fiction had always been so. It doesn't have to be locked in amber. In this day and age the old versions are there to enjoy. They don't die with the teller.

 

I think people locked it in steel the way fiction is treated. By this logic ROTJ is completely invalid because Leia was clearly not intended to be Luke's sister in ANH and ESB.

 

To a degree, but when you take on something like Strange New Worlds, you are locking yourself into a certain set of events. I can't kill Uhura because I have a great story to tell, I'm locked into her future. From whatever she is in Strange New Worlds, she has to end up as "Captain, I'm frightened" five from now in SNW's future.

 

The stories are always evolving. Especially long term franchises. Be it Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Star Wars or Superman.

 

5 years is a long time. Might as well have fun with it.

Not that I ever expect Uhura to die anyway, so that's an unreasonable expectation.

Exactly.

 

It's the journey, not the destination.

 

Why lock yourself into a destination when you really don't have too? I'll never understand why a multi-verse is so hard for Trek fans to embrace.

 

I've no problem with a Trek multiverse. More Kelvin please. Coloring within the lines is something that creatives working on other people's IPs have to deal with. It often means being more creative.

 

I like the idea. Finally a chance to see my long wanted Bashir/Garak, My Dinner with Andre story were the whole story is about them just having dinner and talking about life.

 

that could be interesting. I guess they could easily set it like 20 years later to account for the actors having aged.

 

I've seen enough fictional universes now to know from experience that I much prefer it if there's one main consistent core continuity, and that everything that happened happened. Separate literary continuities and audio book universes are cool, Kelvin timeline movies are fine etc. But these stories work so much better for me if the TV episodes are generally filling in gaps of a larger story. Connections are satisfying, contradictions are jarring.

I mean I'm a DC comics fan, or at least I've tried to be. But they just kept retconning and rebooting their universe with crisis after crisis until all my emotional connection to the characters was lost. I don't know their history anymore, I can't keep track of who they are, and it all feels meaningless to me as a result. I don't want that to ever happen to Star Trek.

 

I can understand this, I'd definitely prefer if the Enterprise looked like the Enterprise I grew up with.

But there comes a point where you begin to build walls with audiences and the lore becomes so dense that it keeps people from sampling your wares. Star Trek can succeed for a while as a niche product, but I don't think that it can survive only catering to the hardcore. Some point, they will have to rip that band aid off.

 

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I literally grew up with the TOS Enterprise, but I think the TMP version is better.

 

Maybe? But I actually still watch TOS and find it pretty much superior in most ways to what Paramount+ is pumping out.

 

Agreed.

same here. However in a long-running franchise with a lot of iterations and many writers this kind of situation is kinda inevitable: contradictions keep piling up and eventually someone will decide to clear them out in a single sweep with some kind of reboot. I think this WILL happen to Star Trek as well, although it could happen in a few years or several decades.

 

Continuity resets can work (Battlestar Galactica pulled it off for instance), but the more lore that builds up the harder it gets. You can't wipe the slate clean, not really, you can only add new contradictory lore on top of what everyone remembers from the previous iteration. It makes things more complicated, not less.

If the Star Trek writers actually wanted to tell a story without dealing with lore it'd be very easy. It's X years in the future, we're following the starship USS Tempest on a mission in the Andromeda Galaxy, out of contact with everyone back in the Milky Way. Everyone our heroes meet is new, there's no history anyone needs to know about.

 

Or you can just do a multiverse, where all the lore exists but in different dimensions. I've treated Trek like that for a pretty long time now.

 

I do a combination of the two. The events and characters happen but not strictly literally as appears on screen. There is dramatic interpretation of the events, like Dragnet. The characters are more important than the color of the uniform, in my humble opinion.

 

Yes. No. Maybe? I think Trek set a certain expectation for a really long time about how its history was presented. They created the expectation of how certain periods should look. For me? That look is actually part of the presentation. It would be like changing the ship and bridge in TNG during what would be its TV run. I've watched a lot of TNG over the years and it would instantly stand out as "wrong" (much like the past stands out as "wrong" in "All Good Things"). Much like what they've did to the Enterprise in Discovery stood out as "wrong".

I don't think it trumps the story, but if the story is badly constructed, it stands out that much more as "wrong".

YMMV.