Which 23rd Century is canon?
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I guess I had a brainfart and mixed up his rank with TOS Kyle. Looking at some episode transcripts, they refer to him as "Chief," so that's still a step up from nameless assistant with no dialogue in The Cage.
Kor
As for Chief Pitcairn's assistant in The Cage, I doubt it's supposed to be Kyle.
Kyle looks to be in his early twenties right now (2260) which would mean he'd have been about 15 or 16 in The Cage (2253), and the guy from that ep looked older than that.
FWIW the novelverse calls him Sam Yamata. I know that's not canon, but I don't care.
Kyle looks to be in his early twenties right now (2260) which would mean he'd have been about 15 or 16 in The Cage (2253), and the guy from that ep looked older than that.
FWIW the novelverse calls him Sam Yamata. I know that's not canon, but I don't care.
And yet they didn’t make Pike Asian, or Uhura white, or Spock blonde.
To me, the head-scratcher with Khan's followers in TWOK is their age. Assuming that these genetically-engineered superhumans age similarly to baseline humans, they are too old to have been born in Khan and co.'s colony on Ceti Alpha V. But they aren't old enough to have been among the adults who helped Khan in Space Seed. And there wasn't any indication that there were any kids on the Botany Bay in the episode.
Kor
Kor
I can't tell if you're trying to complain about the existence of multiple versions of a story or if you're under the mistaken impression that the Joker's appearance in later films somehow contradicts the events of Batman (1989). If it's the latter: The Joker has never reappeared in a film series after being killed. Joker (2019), Suicide Squad (2016), and The Dark Knight (2008) are each separate adaptations of the Batman mythos from one-another and from Batman (1989), just as Batman (1989) was a separate adaptation of the Batman mythos from Batman: The Movie (1966). The Joker who appears in Batman: The Movie (1966) is a separate version of the character from the one who appears in Batman (1989). Both are separate versions from the one that appears in The Dark Knight (2008), and each is a separate version from the ones that appear in Suicide Squad (2016) and Joker (2019).
If you're trying to say that you don't like the presence of multiple versions of the characters:
Is that really any different from there being different versions of Sherlock Holmes, or different versions of Robin Hood, or different versions of Peter Pan, or different versions of King Arthur?
I'm sorry, but The Dark Knight (2008) is genuinely one of the greatest films ever made.
Star Trek's continuity is no more messed up than it has ever been since S1 of TOS.
You do realize that the current seasons of DIS and PIC have both moved far beyond the darkness these shows started in, right? This makes as much sense as complaining that Dante's Divine Comedy is about Hell when Dante leaves the Inferno and spends the latter two-thirds of the trilogy in Purgatory and then Heaven.
The fact that you don't like a question of design aesthetics does not make it "bad."
Again, the show only has two seasons so far, and only the first half of S1 is "doom-and-gloom." S1 is literally all about moving away from doom-and-gloom back into hope and optimism, and hope and optimism are firmly in place throughout S2. This is like complaining that the characters are all single in Love Actually even though they are in fact all paired up by the end of the film.
Well, yes, it is a sitcom -- you're not supposed to take it too seriously.
I mean, if it doesn't connect with you, that's a perfectly legitimate reaction. But that doesn't mean it lacks artistic purpose.
It's fine; no worries.
If their goal is to create the illusion of an internally-consistent universe, yes, that is in general something they ought to do. However, they have to balance that against the need to tell good stories, and there can be stories that are good enough to justify breaking continuity. For example: "Where No Man Has Gone Before" established that Spock had a Human ancestor but did not experience "Earth emotions." A few episodes later, though, "The Naked Time" contradicted this by establishing that Spock is half-Human and that he experiences but tries to suppress emotions. This is a blatant violation of continuity -- and it was absolutely the correct creative decision, because it made the character far richer and more resonant. So the value of the story being told in "The Naked Time" far outweighed the value of maintaining verisimilitude by not contradicting "Where No Man Has Gone Before."
Sometimes, breaking continuity is justified by the quality of the story. And the creators just have to be the judge of when to do that.
I mean, I would prefer if there were only one or two Starfleet uniforms myself, but in the real world, military forces often employ a large variety of uniform designs. So it's not unrealistic.
Which TNG uniforms? The S1-2 uniforms? The S3 uniforms? Or the S4-7 uniforms?
Anyway, I strongly prefer the First Contact/DS9 S5-7 uniforms.
No, it's really not. I'm describing how Star Trek went from having two corporate owners (CBS Inc. and Viacom) back to having only one (Paramount Global). I'm literally describing a reduction in the number of cooks in the kitchen.
Sci said:
I know that.
I just brought up those books since I've been critical to the development of the Star Trek books too and now I'm happy to discover some books I really like!
You know, I can actually be very nice sometimes, especially when it comes to thoser who surprise me and make me happy with something I consider excellent!
As I said, neither DIS nor PIC are doom-and-gloom in their current seasons. And then there's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which was designed from Day One to replicate the hope and optimism of TOS and which has gotten rave reviews for it. You should definitely give that one a shot.
I don't find it any more confusing than remembering that, say, Kenneth Branaugh's two Hercule Poirot films (Murder on the Orient Express [2017] and Death on the Nile [2022]) are not set in the same continuity as David Suchet's ITV series Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989-2013), or remembering that the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films (Sherlock Holmes [2009] and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows [2011]) are separate from the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock series (2010-2017) and from the Johnny Lee Miller/Lucy Liu series Elementary (2012-2019). It's just different versions of the story.
Anyway, there are only three movies set in the Kelvin Timeline and only a handful of episodes set in the Mirror Universe. The overwhelming majority of Star Trek is set in the Prime Timeline.
And isn't Discovery creating its own timeline where the Klingons have been conquered by the Mutant Ninja Turtles who pose as "Klingons"?
You know, I probably would not have chosen that particular makeup design for the Klingons if I had been a producer on Discovery, but I also respect their decision. I do agree that the Berman-era Klingon makeup design had become too familiar and wasn't sufficiently alien enough for Klingons to feel as threatening and intimidating and alien as the story of DIS S1 needed them to be. I probably would have gone for something closer to the design used in Star Trek Into Darkness, but I respect the DIS producers' willingness to try something radically different. Going for something radically different is often necessary if a work of art is going to evolve and survive, even if it doesn't work out every single time. Their decision deserves more respect than it gets.
No. Absolutely not, and your decision to attack the character of these artists just because you happen not to enjoy their creative decisions is actually really inappropriate. You don't have to like their creative decisions, but the fact that you have different aesthetics does not mean they have egos. These people are just trying to tell a good story. Maybe it works for you or maybe it doesn't, but you can dislike a creative decision without attacking their character.
First off, destroying Vulcan in the Kelvin Timeline does no damage whatsoever to the Prime Timeline.
Secondly, what makes you think they gave no thought to how destroying Vulcan would affect storytelling possibilities? You have no evidence of that whatsoever.
Thirdly, you are not acknowledging that making fundamental changes to the status quo of the Star Trek Universe opens just as many doors for storytelling as it closes. Yes, we'll never get to see Vulcan in the Kelvin Timeline films -- but now we get to see a version of Spock who has to wrestle with the question of what it means to be a Vulcan in an entirely new way than we ever saw previously, who has to wonder where the boundaries are between duty and self-fulfillment, who has to question what kinds of relationships he should have. If the filmmakers so chose, we could see entirely new stories about the Vulcan people -- how do you cope with the loss of your world? What kinds of decisions do you make as a society to survive? How do you rebuild on a new world? What kinds of vales do you unite around, or does such a major change open up new schisms in your society? Will Vulcans become more homogeneous or more heterogeneous?
The decision to destroy Romulus in the Prime Timeline opened up a lot of new storytelling opportunities. Instead of the same old Romulan Star Empire we've always had, now we have the Romulan Free State -- a society that seems to be undergoing an internal conflict between its more liberal and reactionary factions. There's no more Romulan Neutral Zone! There are other independent Romulan governments also operating in what used to be the Star Empire! There are factions of Romulan society like the Qowat Milat! And as DIS S3 established...
.... eventually, it led to Spock's dream of Vulcan and Romulan reunification coming true! The Romulan people emigrated to Vulcan en masse, and Vulcan society has fundamentally changed. The planet is now known as Ni'Var (a name that came from 1970s ST Vulcan fandom, referring to the unity of two halves). Romulans have broadly become more liberal and tolerant, and are much more pro-Federation -- while Vulcans have become a little bit less stoic but also more reactionary and more skeptical of the Federation.
Change opens up just as many storytelling doors as it closes.
In that case, why not destroy Earth too? That would really be appropriate in this decade filled with doom-and-gloom, gore and dystopian scenarios in each and every movie and series. Then they can create a new timeline, especially named after the producer who came up with the brilliant idea and have a devastated humanity settled on Errathea in the Alpha Centauri system, the planet were humans lived before escaping a planet-wide disaster by migrating to Earth a long, long, long time ago. Now wouldn't htat be a splendid idea for creative ideas and radical changes, or...................?
The problem with that idea is that it violates the fundamental ethos of Star Trek in a way that destroying Vulcan or Romulus does not. For better or worse, Star Trek is at its core about the idea of Earth surviving and sending its people out into the stars. Earth matters to the Star Trek narrative in a way Vulcan and Romulus just do not.
Absolutely. And they have also done plenty of that. But that doesn't make destroying Vulcan or Romulus an illegitimate creative decision, either -- any more than it was somehow a bad creative decision for DS9 to show the Dominion genociding Cardassia at the end of its run!
If copyright expires, there's no such thing as "snapping up the rights to it." The franchise would become public domain in the same way that, like, Robin Hood is public domain, or Jane Austin novels are public domain.
Well, yes, but if Star Trek as an I.P. became public domain, the new stories based on it would still be protected by copyright and owned by someone. Jane Austin's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice is public domain, but the 1995 television miniseries based upon the novel is copyrighted to the BBC, and the 2005 film is, IIRC, copyrighted to Working Title Films. So, yes, there are three different "canons" at play here -- the Jane Austin canon, the BBC canon, and the Working Title Films.
Similarly, if Star Trek: The Original Series became public domain because copyright expired, and three different production companies made three different TV series based on TOS, then there would be four different canons -- the original canon (the only one that currently exists), and the canon of each new series.
That's a really good way to think about it all.
I mean, to be honest, I don't think the character of Khan, conceptually, really works in our modern era. He's Sikh and has a Sikh name, but he doesn't wear a turban or a beard and he's played by a Mexican actor of European descent, or by a white English guy? The character as depicted in TOS just reeks of white writers creating a generically brown enemy for the white hero to fight.
Which is why I don't think Cumberbatch's character in Star Trek Into Darkness should have been Khan.
Maybe in a world where we have actual racial equality, that would be fine. But we don't. We still live in a very white-dominated society, and as long as that is the case, it is both morally acceptable for white characters to be recast as POC and morally unacceptable for POC characters to be recast as white.
I don't know what corners of the Internet you hang out in, but I know of plenty of people who think that that was a fundamentally racist casting decision on the part of the TOS producers and who care if the Sikh community finds it offensive. It is, as I have outlined above, part of why I think the character of Khan fundamentally doesn't work in an era where we don't assume that "white" is the default setting for American and that the feelings of minority communities matter.
If they do bring Khan back again somehow, I think he should be played by a Sikh actor in a manner that is not offensive to the Sikh community -- preferably against a hero figure who is also a POC. It's the sort of thing that would have to be done very, very carefully. And even thing, I'm not convinced it would even be worth it. After all -- how can you do any better than the great Ricardo Montalbán?
1) Nothing about Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact is "hippie"-like.
2) The reconceptualization of Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact is a prime example of a good creative decision even if it is not in strict adherence to continuity. The version of Cochrane from First Contact is a better version from an artistic standpoint, because he is more complex, dynamic, deeper, and more fallible.
I am a viewer, and I can believe the noble man seen in the 1967 episode is the same person as the sambling, asshole-ish mess of far different motivations seen in the TNG movie. Why? Because the experience of travelling to space and encountering aliens fundamentally changed him. I love that! I find beauty and inspiration in the idea that the worst version of ourselves -- and we are all different versions of ourselves at different points of our lives with different people -- can change and become so much better if we expand our horizons and build relationships that are bigger than us as individuals. Which is what Cochrane did when he shook that Vulcan captain's hand.
No. They absolutely made the right decision with their depiction of Cochrane. It made the film better, and it makes "Metamorphosis" a better episode by adding a level of complexity to the Cochrane character that had not previously been part of the episode's text.
Such a weird line. Like, who looks at a group of people and feels the need to remark upon the fact that it's a multi-racial group like that's unusual?
First off, I think that they could have made Pike Asian if they had wanted to. He wasn't a truly iconic character before DIS S2 and SNW. The Bruce Greenwood version of Pike certainly rescued him from TOS guest star obscurity in the 2009 film, but he still wasn't as iconic a character as he became with DIS S2. Anson Mount has made Pike iconic. But if the DIS producers had wanted to, I think they could have made Pike Asian or otherwise reimagined him.
Making Uhura white or Spock blonde are fundamentally different things from making Kyle Asian, because these characters are absolutely iconic and have been for decades. In Uhura's case, her identity as a black woman is fundamental to the character, because she is there to represent people of African descent in the 23rd Century. Spock is also iconic as a direct result of Leonard Nimoy's performance -- and is arguably coded as Ashkenazi Jewish, I might add. So reconceptualizing either of these characters would be offensive, both because of their iconic status, and because their original actors' ethnic identities are baked into the characters. Reconceptualizing Uhura as non-black would be actively offensive because it would undermine black representation. Reconceptualizing Spock as blonde would almost literally be "Aryianizing" a character played by a Jewish actor only twenty years removed from the Holocaust.
That's a very, very different thing from reconceptualizing an obscure, two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a character that happened to be played by a white actor as a POC character. Kyle is not iconic. And, once again, reconceptualizing a white character as POC in a film or TV show produced by a white-dominated culture (like the Anglosphere) is almost always morally acceptable because doing so undermines the idea that "white" is the default setting of the human race.
I can't tell if you're trying to complain about the existence of multiple versions of a story or if you're under the mistaken impression that the Joker's appearance in later films somehow contradicts the events of Batman (1989). If it's the latter: The Joker has never reappeared in a film series after being killed. Joker (2019), Suicide Squad (2016), and The Dark Knight (2008) are each separate adaptations of the Batman mythos from one-another and from Batman (1989), just as Batman (1989) was a separate adaptation of the Batman mythos from Batman: The Movie (1966). The Joker who appears in Batman: The Movie (1966) is a separate version of the character from the one who appears in Batman (1989). Both are separate versions from the one that appears in The Dark Knight (2008), and each is a separate version from the ones that appear in Suicide Squad (2016) and Joker (2019).
If you're trying to say that you don't like the presence of multiple versions of the characters:
Is that really any different from there being different versions of Sherlock Holmes, or different versions of Robin Hood, or different versions of Peter Pan, or different versions of King Arthur?
I'm sorry, but The Dark Knight (2008) is genuinely one of the greatest films ever made.
Star Trek's continuity is no more messed up than it has ever been since S1 of TOS.
You do realize that the current seasons of DIS and PIC have both moved far beyond the darkness these shows started in, right? This makes as much sense as complaining that Dante's Divine Comedy is about Hell when Dante leaves the Inferno and spends the latter two-thirds of the trilogy in Purgatory and then Heaven.
The fact that you don't like a question of design aesthetics does not make it "bad."
Again, the show only has two seasons so far, and only the first half of S1 is "doom-and-gloom." S1 is literally all about moving away from doom-and-gloom back into hope and optimism, and hope and optimism are firmly in place throughout S2. This is like complaining that the characters are all single in Love Actually even though they are in fact all paired up by the end of the film.
Well, yes, it is a sitcom -- you're not supposed to take it too seriously.
I mean, if it doesn't connect with you, that's a perfectly legitimate reaction. But that doesn't mean it lacks artistic purpose.
It's fine; no worries.
If their goal is to create the illusion of an internally-consistent universe, yes, that is in general something they ought to do. However, they have to balance that against the need to tell good stories, and there can be stories that are good enough to justify breaking continuity. For example: "Where No Man Has Gone Before" established that Spock had a Human ancestor but did not experience "Earth emotions." A few episodes later, though, "The Naked Time" contradicted this by establishing that Spock is half-Human and that he experiences but tries to suppress emotions. This is a blatant violation of continuity -- and it was absolutely the correct creative decision, because it made the character far richer and more resonant. So the value of the story being told in "The Naked Time" far outweighed the value of maintaining verisimilitude by not contradicting "Where No Man Has Gone Before."
Sometimes, breaking continuity is justified by the quality of the story. And the creators just have to be the judge of when to do that.
I mean, I would prefer if there were only one or two Starfleet uniforms myself, but in the real world, military forces often employ a large variety of uniform designs. So it's not unrealistic.
Which TNG uniforms? The S1-2 uniforms? The S3 uniforms? Or the S4-7 uniforms?
Anyway, I strongly prefer the First Contact/DS9 S5-7 uniforms.
No, it's really not. I'm describing how Star Trek went from having two corporate owners (CBS Inc. and Viacom) back to having only one (Paramount Global). I'm literally describing a reduction in the number of cooks in the kitchen.
As I said, neither DIS nor PIC are doom-and-gloom in their current seasons. And then there's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which was designed from Day One to replicate the hope and optimism of TOS and which has gotten rave reviews for it. You should definitely give that one a shot.
I don't find it any more confusing than remembering that, say, Kenneth Branaugh's two Hercule Poirot films (Murder on the Orient Express [2017] and Death on the Nile [2022]) are not set in the same continuity as David Suchet's ITV series Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989-2013), or remembering that the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films (Sherlock Holmes [2009] and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows [2011]) are separate from the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock series (2010-2017) and from the Johnny Lee Miller/Lucy Liu series Elementary (2012-2019). It's just different versions of the story.
Anyway, there are only three movies set in the Kelvin Timeline and only a handful of episodes set in the Mirror Universe. The overwhelming majority of Star Trek is set in the Prime Timeline.
You know, I probably would not have chosen that particular makeup design for the Klingons if I had been a producer on Discovery, but I also respect their decision. I do agree that the Berman-era Klingon makeup design had become too familiar and wasn't sufficiently alien enough for Klingons to feel as threatening and intimidating and alien as the story of DIS S1 needed them to be. I probably would have gone for something closer to the design used in Star Trek Into Darkness, but I respect the DIS producers' willingness to try something radically different. Going for something radically different is often necessary if a work of art is going to evolve and survive, even if it doesn't work out every single time. Their decision deserves more respect than it gets.
No. Absolutely not, and your decision to attack the character of these artists just because you happen not to enjoy their creative decisions is actually really inappropriate. You don't have to like their creative decisions, but the fact that you have different aesthetics does not mean they have egos. These people are just trying to tell a good story. Maybe it works for you or maybe it doesn't, but you can dislike a creative decision without attacking their character.
First off, destroying Vulcan in the Kelvin Timeline does no damage whatsoever to the Prime Timeline.
Secondly, what makes you think they gave no thought to how destroying Vulcan would affect storytelling possibilities? You have no evidence of that whatsoever.
Thirdly, you are not acknowledging that making fundamental changes to the status quo of the Star Trek Universe opens just as many doors for storytelling as it closes. Yes, we'll never get to see Vulcan in the Kelvin Timeline films -- but now we get to see a version of Spock who has to wrestle with the question of what it means to be a Vulcan in an entirely new way than we ever saw previously, who has to wonder where the boundaries are between duty and self-fulfillment, who has to question what kinds of relationships he should have. If the filmmakers so chose, we could see entirely new stories about the Vulcan people -- how do you cope with the loss of your world? What kinds of decisions do you make as a society to survive? How do you rebuild on a new world? What kinds of vales do you unite around, or does such a major change open up new schisms in your society? Will Vulcans become more homogeneous or more heterogeneous?
The decision to destroy Romulus in the Prime Timeline opened up a lot of new storytelling opportunities. Instead of the same old Romulan Star Empire we've always had, now we have the Romulan Free State -- a society that seems to be undergoing an internal conflict between its more liberal and reactionary factions. There's no more Romulan Neutral Zone! There are other independent Romulan governments also operating in what used to be the Star Empire! There are factions of Romulan society like the Qowat Milat! And as DIS S3 established...
.... eventually, it led to Spock's dream of Vulcan and Romulan reunification coming true! The Romulan people emigrated to Vulcan en masse, and Vulcan society has fundamentally changed. The planet is now known as Ni'Var (a name that came from 1970s ST Vulcan fandom, referring to the unity of two halves). Romulans have broadly become more liberal and tolerant, and are much more pro-Federation -- while Vulcans have become a little bit less stoic but also more reactionary and more skeptical of the Federation.
Change opens up just as many storytelling doors as it closes.
The problem with that idea is that it violates the fundamental ethos of Star Trek in a way that destroying Vulcan or Romulus does not. For better or worse, Star Trek is at its core about the idea of Earth surviving and sending its people out into the stars. Earth matters to the Star Trek narrative in a way Vulcan and Romulus just do not.
Absolutely. And they have also done plenty of that. But that doesn't make destroying Vulcan or Romulus an illegitimate creative decision, either -- any more than it was somehow a bad creative decision for DS9 to show the Dominion genociding Cardassia at the end of its run!
If copyright expires, there's no such thing as "snapping up the rights to it." The franchise would become public domain in the same way that, like, Robin Hood is public domain, or Jane Austin novels are public domain.
Well, yes, but if Star Trek as an I.P. became public domain, the new stories based on it would still be protected by copyright and owned by someone. Jane Austin's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice is public domain, but the 1995 television miniseries based upon the novel is copyrighted to the BBC, and the 2005 film is, IIRC, copyrighted to Working Title Films. So, yes, there are three different "canons" at play here -- the Jane Austin canon, the BBC canon, and the Working Title Films.
Similarly, if Star Trek: The Original Series became public domain because copyright expired, and three different production companies made three different TV series based on TOS, then there would be four different canons -- the original canon (the only one that currently exists), and the canon of each new series.
That's a really good way to think about it all.
I mean, to be honest, I don't think the character of Khan, conceptually, really works in our modern era. He's Sikh and has a Sikh name, but he doesn't wear a turban or a beard and he's played by a Mexican actor of European descent, or by a white English guy? The character as depicted in TOS just reeks of white writers creating a generically brown enemy for the white hero to fight.
Which is why I don't think Cumberbatch's character in Star Trek Into Darkness should have been Khan.
Maybe in a world where we have actual racial equality, that would be fine. But we don't. We still live in a very white-dominated society, and as long as that is the case, it is both morally acceptable for white characters to be recast as POC and morally unacceptable for POC characters to be recast as white.
I don't know what corners of the Internet you hang out in, but I know of plenty of people who think that that was a fundamentally racist casting decision on the part of the TOS producers and who care if the Sikh community finds it offensive. It is, as I have outlined above, part of why I think the character of Khan fundamentally doesn't work in an era where we don't assume that "white" is the default setting for American and that the feelings of minority communities matter.
If they do bring Khan back again somehow, I think he should be played by a Sikh actor in a manner that is not offensive to the Sikh community -- preferably against a hero figure who is also a POC. It's the sort of thing that would have to be done very, very carefully. And even thing, I'm not convinced it would even be worth it. After all -- how can you do any better than the great Ricardo Montalbán?
1) Nothing about Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact is "hippie"-like.
2) The reconceptualization of Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact is a prime example of a good creative decision even if it is not in strict adherence to continuity. The version of Cochrane from First Contact is a better version from an artistic standpoint, because he is more complex, dynamic, deeper, and more fallible.
I am a viewer, and I can believe the noble man seen in the 1967 episode is the same person as the sambling, asshole-ish mess of far different motivations seen in the TNG movie. Why? Because the experience of travelling to space and encountering aliens fundamentally changed him. I love that! I find beauty and inspiration in the idea that the worst version of ourselves -- and we are all different versions of ourselves at different points of our lives with different people -- can change and become so much better if we expand our horizons and build relationships that are bigger than us as individuals. Which is what Cochrane did when he shook that Vulcan captain's hand.
No. They absolutely made the right decision with their depiction of Cochrane. It made the film better, and it makes "Metamorphosis" a better episode by adding a level of complexity to the Cochrane character that had not previously been part of the episode's text.
Such a weird line. Like, who looks at a group of people and feels the need to remark upon the fact that it's a multi-racial group like that's unusual?
First off, I think that they could have made Pike Asian if they had wanted to. He wasn't a truly iconic character before DIS S2 and SNW. The Bruce Greenwood version of Pike certainly rescued him from TOS guest star obscurity in the 2009 film, but he still wasn't as iconic a character as he became with DIS S2. Anson Mount has made Pike iconic. But if the DIS producers had wanted to, I think they could have made Pike Asian or otherwise reimagined him.
Making Uhura white or Spock blonde are fundamentally different things from making Kyle Asian, because these characters are absolutely iconic and have been for decades. In Uhura's case, her identity as a black woman is fundamental to the character, because she is there to represent people of African descent in the 23rd Century. Spock is also iconic as a direct result of Leonard Nimoy's performance -- and is arguably coded as Ashkenazi Jewish, I might add. So reconceptualizing either of these characters would be offensive, both because of their iconic status, and because their original actors' ethnic identities are baked into the characters. Reconceptualizing Uhura as non-black would be actively offensive because it would undermine black representation. Reconceptualizing Spock as blonde would almost literally be "Aryianizing" a character played by a Jewish actor only twenty years removed from the Holocaust.
That's a very, very different thing from reconceptualizing an obscure, two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a character that happened to be played by a white actor as a POC character. Kyle is not iconic. And, once again, reconceptualizing a white character as POC in a film or TV show produced by a white-dominated culture (like the Anglosphere) is almost always morally acceptable because doing so undermines the idea that "white" is the default setting of the human race.
What the fuck?
I guess we know who will fill the void left by MAGolding…
Well it IS National Novel Writing month...
I understand what people are saying about changing April's skin color, I really do, but the optics of pushing against it don't make for a good look. Especially these days. Do you understand how other people might think it looks? Just let this one go.
What the fuck?
I guess we know who will fill the void left by MAGolding…
I've been posting on the TrekBBS for twenty years. I've always periodically done longass posts.
Not that it needs one, but here is a simple fix regarding April's skin color...
His appearance on TAS, the animators got the color coding wrong. (Which they did on several things, if I'm not mistaken.)
His appearance on TAS, the animators got the color coding wrong. (Which they did on several things, if I'm not mistaken.)
Nope.
But they didn't
But for those people who actually take issue, they can pretend.
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