Which 23rd Century is canon?

[fireproof78]

Has the movies and series makers of today lost the ability to come up with new, interesting charactesr?

Um, this is not new. Hollywood has done remakes for decades now.

still find it a bit unnecessary to create that scenario.

None of fiction is necessary. But, if there is an issue with multiple timelines I would suggest taking it up with TOS and TNG writers as well.

But all of a sudden we have a third version of Klingons, very bad ones too. And that in the 23th century.

The horror...

...oh, wait, no. Actually, ENT gives us a genetic engineering solution to that. So, that explains all variants of Klingons. So, not horrible at all. Just another variation that looks closer to TMP style than anything else.

Will the Romulans and Vulcans in such series or books be Romulcans, just as if characters like Vreenak, Tomalak, Tuvok, Vorik and other Romulans or Vulcans never existed or show up as totally different in looks and ways thanthey were in TNG, DS9 and VOY?

Here's the thing. They were totally different from TOS too. Why isn't that an issue? Why is the 24th century the gold standard for behavior? Culturals change and shift and adapt to new behaviors, especially after a horrific event or catastrophe. So, expecting them to behave like the above characters is nonsensical at best.

I know that. But it was better done than it is today.

Irrelevant.

Well, in that case it looks like that they realized that the "Turtles" look was a mistake.
So why did they come up with it in the first place?

To make them look more alien. The exact reason why they were changed for no reason in TMP.

 

[Greg Cox]

Meanwhile, only DISCO is set in the 32nd century, so we can still use old-school Vulcans and Romulans on PICARD, SNW, LOWER DECKS, PRODIGY and (in prose) all the earlier Trek series: TOS, TNG, DS9, etc.

 

[Cr0sis21]

So, I've skimmed most of this, and I'd like to just throw in a few things:
1) never cared about the Robert April casting in SNW. TAS was, until recently, only tangentially considered canon anyway. It sends like one of the most minor continuity changes to get upset about. Certainly less egregious than the Klingons in TMP, or women having always been on the bridge and in command

2) Discovery's future can still be changed. Just like the ones we saw in All Good Things, The Visitor, Endgame, Timeless, and so on. So right now I just see it as an amusing "What If".

3) I don't blame Fuller for wanting to make the Klingons look more intimidating. They were not very menacing on DS9 season 4-5. But I also didn't think they looked that different. Once they threw hair on those bad boys in season 2, they looked a lot more like normal Klingons to me.

 

[The Wormhole]

Discovery's future can still be changed. Just like the ones we saw in All Good Things, The Visitor, Endgame, Timeless, and so on.

Eh? The 32nd century on Disco is the actual Prime Timeline, not an alternate future with an inevitable reset bound to happen.

 

[Cr0sis21]

Eh? The 32nd century on Disco is the actual Prime Timeline, not an alternate future with an inevitable reset bound to happen.

What I mean by that is, it's still time-travel shenanigans. Everything that's happened in season 3, 4 and soon 5 is pretty neatly encapsulated. Should future writers decide they don't want to utilize that particular future, it certainly wouldn't be hard, narratively, to conveniently hand-wave it away

 

[The Wormhole]

What I mean by that is, it's still time-travel shenanigans. Everything that's happened in season 3, 4 and soon 5 is pretty neatly encapsulated. Should future writers decide they don't want to utilize that particular future, it certainly wouldn't be hard, narratively, to conveniently hand-wave it away

No, it is the canonical future. To think a future writer can ignore it would be like saying in the late 1980s that the TOS movies are free to ignore TNG. Or since you're playing the time travel card, it's like saying because of the TCW, Enterprise would have been able to ignore all the other shows.

This simply is now how shit works.

 

[Cr0sis21]

No, it is the canonical future. To think a future writer can ignore it would be like saying in the late 1980s that the TOS movies are free to ignore TNG. Or since you're playing the time travel card, it's like saying because of the TCW, Enterprise would have been able to ignore all the other shows.

This simply is now how shit works.

Its the canonical future for now. And maybe it will stay that way. Who knows?
And actually, the TOS movies could have very easily done that. Although the only TOS films that came out during TNG were 5 and 6. But if they'd decided to just ignore what was happening in the struggling TV show with barely any connection to the original series, well, they could have.
And yeah, the TCW could have enabled the creators to completely ignore continuity on Enterprise. And that's essentially the premise of the Kelvin timeline, to boot.
It can be done, it has been done, and it might be done again.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I remember reading people insisting TNG was only one possible future stemming off from TOS and the classic movies

 

[fireproof78]

I remember reading people insisting TNG was only one possible future stemming off from TOS and the classic movies

Well, that's true...from a certain point of view.

 

[Cr0sis21]

I remember reading people insisting TNG was only one possible future stemming off from TOS and the classic movies

And how quickly we forget, lol. But it's all good. Maybe they'll change things, maybe not. But 900+ years is a lot of time to play with.

 

[Greg Cox]

Okay, fine. The 23rd Century. I look at it like comic books. That wasn't what the creators originally set out to do, but that's what it's become over time, whether they intended for it or not. I think all of it is Canon (as in this is a collection of a body of work), but not all of it is in Active Continuity. I think things stay in active continuity until they're contradicted by something later. As far as how the 23rd Century looks in the current live-action series versus the animated series? Different artists have different ideas. Again, like comic books.

The short of it is, TOS wasn't made with a decades-spanning franchise in mind. It wasn't meant to be the beginning of what we have now.

The only other thing we can compare Star Trek to is Doctor Who, as far as long-running sci-fi/fantasy franchises that span decades and have live-action TV as the main format. Even though I'm not a fan of DW, and don't know it as well as other people do, I have to imagine they've made some changes and adjustments too.

Nicely put. That's pretty much my attitude, too.

A decent respect for continuity is a virtue, but we also need to allow for a certain amount of artistic license over time. As I like to joke, if we must treat Trek as a religion, can we at least not be too fundamentalist about it?

 

[fireproof78]

Nicely put. That's pretty much my attitude, too.

A decent respect for continuity is a virtue, but we also need to allow for a certain amount of artistic license over time. As I like to joke, if we must treat Trek as a religion, can we at least not be too fundamentalist about it?

Indeed. I know some religious people who are not as fundamentalist in their views as some with their Star Trek. It makes me laugh but if only to just shake my head at it all.

The thing about Star Trek and the canon fights that causes us to loose sight is what is the purpose of Star Trek? Is it to create these fights and determinations of who is right and who is wrong? Of what Trek "should" and "shouldn't" be? Is that all? A series that claims it celebrated diversity yet cannot tolerated differences in a ship design opinion between its fans?

 

[Nerys Myk]

I consider it ruining when two important species in the Star Trek history is squashed together in some half-a**ed, light-beer version of the previous species, especially the way it was done. If they had omitted the destruction of Romulus, I would have had at least some understanding for it.

I don't recall, what exactly happened in the millennium between the destruction of Romulus and the unification? I do recall that the Romulans, the Vulcans and the "hybrids" seem to retain a certain amount of cultural individualism.

Are they. I hot the impression from commente here that they and the Vulcans have become something in-between what they used to be

So you're commenting on something you only have second hand knowledge of?

OK, Bond is an agent. I have to correct myself there.
And I've seen all James Bond movies, have most of them on DVD, read many books and watched series about the 19th century Sherlock Holmes as well. Unfortunately, there is nothing in neither the books nor the series which inclined that Holmes can time -travel.

There is no time travel involved in Sherlock or Elementary. Both versions of Holmes were born and raised in the 2oth/21st Century. Though there is a cool "dream"" episode of Sherlock that takes place in the the 19th Century. Again, you seem to be commenting on things you have no first hand knowledge of.

As for Star Trek and it's comments on the politics of the 60's, at least it was well done. Not to mention that the 60's was a much more funny and optimistic time period than the dystopian 2020's.

Not sure if you lived through the 60's or where you lived if you did. But in my country, young men were being drafted to fight and die in an immoral war in a foreign country. Some fled the country to avoid service. Others protested against the war and were beaten, assaulted, arrested and killed for doing so. Others marched in support of equal rights and were also beaten, arrested and killed, often by those in charge of "keeping the peace". Our leaders were assassinated. And the man at the top compiled an "enemies list" and used the power of the government to strike at them Not mention the crimes he committed in the next decade. It was a violent decade marked by a sharp divide between young and old, black and white and left and right So take off the rose colored glasses and maybe take a history class or two
Star Trek took an anvil to the head approach to social commentary. It was rarely well done.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

1) never cared about the Robert April casting in SNW. TAS was, until recently, only tangentially considered canon anyway. It sends like one of the most minor continuity changes to get upset about. Certainly less egregious than the Klingons in TMP, or women having always been on the bridge and in command

Particularly as the "original" version of April seems to have been modelled on Gene Roddenberry himself (that's certainly the case in the Encyclopedia).

 

[fireproof78]

Star Trek took an anvil to the head approach to social commentary. It was rarely well done.

Indeed. The fact that it is doing it now in a way that people don't like is nothing new.

Case in point-the vaunted TNG:

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[Greg Cox]

Certainly less egregious than the Klingons in TMP, or women having always been on the bridge and in command

About ignoring the no women on the bridge or command thing, I'd call that "long overdue" rather than "egregious."

Thank God we've finally swept that under the rug and never have to acknowledge it again. The entire franchise should not be held hostage by a couple of stray lines here and there, let alone by "Turnabout Intruder" of all episodes.

 

[Orphalesion]

. Certainly less egregious than the Klingons in TMP, or women having always been on the bridge and in command

You can't have a modern scifi show that depicts a supposedly positive future and then not have women be able to be in the same positions as men. That bit of early 60s zeitgeist had to be removed so that Trek could keep any shred of credibility.
Same with the Klingons that were just people with shoe cream smeared in their faces and fu-manchu beards really.

Indeed. The fact that it is doing it now in a way that people don't like is nothing new.

Case in point-the vaunted TNG:

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I never quite got why people were so dismissive of that scene, depending on the drug in question it doesn't say anything wrong. And it's one of the few scenes that does something with Tasha's backstory on Mad Max murder world, and the only one that shows her planned bond with Wesley.
And well, Wesley would be naive about these things, he had a very sheltered upbringing.
Even Tasha's very negative view on drugs is understandable given the kind of society she escaped from.

 

[Lord Garth]

This is just painful. Lynx, you haven't seen DSC, except for the first three episodes, and you keep going on and on, acting as if you know the show. You don't, it shows, and you can't hold up your end of the argument.

You're way out of your lane. It's like talking about TNG in 1992, when you haven't seen anything past "The Naked Now".

 

[fireproof78]

I never quite got why people were so dismissive of that scene, depending on the drug in question it doesn't say anything wrong. And it's one of the few scenes that does something with Tasha's backstory on Mad Max murder world, and the only one that shows her planned bond with Wesley.
And well, Wesley would be naive about these things, he had a very sheltered upbringing.
Even Tasha's very negative view on drugs is understandable given the kind of society she escaped from.

I'm not dismissive so much as I find very on the nose, 80s style, PSA against drugs and it feels of its time.

 

[Orphalesion]

I'm not dismissive so much as I find very on the nose, 80s style, PSA against drugs and it feels of its time.

I didn't mean you specifically. But in general that scene is lampooned to hell and back by many people, and I don't really see a reason to treat it as the worst scene in a season that was constructed out of awkward scenes and bad dialogue.