Are people really this fixed on things like the Bell Riots?

[Greg Cox]

Sounds like something one might find on TVTropes.

And we kept having these exchanges over and over:

CE: "The DCE says she lost her powers."
Me: "She got better."

CE: "The DCE says he's reformed and isn't a villain anymore."
Me: "It didn't take."

Seriously, in all honesty, there was a time, back in my teens, when I took comic-book continuity VERY seriously. (This was not an issue with Star Trek since, back then, STAR TREK wasn't an ongoing franchise; just the original 79 tv episodes being rerun over and over. The latter-day series weren't a thing yet.)

So, yes, I would get indignant if Electro had his powers back (with no explanation!) in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #135 after losing them in MARVEL TEAM-UP #72 just a few months earlier. But then the first Crisis on Infinite Earths (and its aftermath) completely messed up DC's continuity -- but you know what? The comics themselves were suddenly more interesting than they had been in years. You had this huge burst of creativity and reinvention that, to my mind, justified whatever "damage" had been done to "canon."

In hindsight, I think that's when I first realized that, while a decent respect for continuity is a virtue, it's not the only virtue -- or even necessarily the most important one.

And that applies to comics, monster movies, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Doctor Who, Zorro, Sinbad, Godzilla, etc.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Just last night, I was checking an internal continuity point in my novel, only to find that it was a non-issue. But in the process, I found a potential continuity issue with a short story set in the same milieu.

 

[Greg Cox]

There’s only so far that can go, though.

If we reach a point at which we’ve colonized the Solar System, have enhanced ourselves far beyond the Augments, have nanotechnology and artificial intelligence far more advanced and ubiquitous than the Federation’s, and have indefinite lifespans, how might we then reset Star Trek?

I suppose Discovery took a very small step in that direction with 32nd century technology.

Somehow I suspect that, If and when we reach a point where civilization and indeed humanity itself has been completely reinvented, nobody is going to be too worried about retconning a vintage TV franchise.

Just to put things in perspective.

If we're okay with transforming the vary nature of humanity, why balk at retconning a tv series?

 

[HotRod]

You can't pull off continuity call backs or foreshadowing if the past is an unreliable narrator.

And yet Discovery proved this notion to be incorrect when they called back to The Cage in the episode If Memory Serves. They even showed clips from the episode and it all managed to work perfectly together.

 

[cooleddie74]

And under the same production umbrella we see a faithful TOS-style Connie at the Fleet Museum in PIC Season 3, a series made by many of the same people who changed how the Connies look for DSC and SNW. They're all canon looks and all fit if you're flexible enough and don't be too slavish in regards to a ship class having to look a very specific way throughout the whole TOS Era.

 

[James Cole]

I watched both Back to the Future, Part II and Blade Runner in the theaters this year, thanks to Special Screenings. I should've first seen BTTF II in the theater when I was 10 instead of on VHS, but stupidly didn't, and I finally corrected that mistake. But anyway...

This post is very timely, being Black Friday and all. Made be remember I bought the Blu-ray of the BTTF trilogy on a Black Friday over a decade ago, and never got around to watching it. Gotta get that in before the end of the year.

While we're at it, even as ugly as politics are right now, I don't think we'll have a Second Civil War in the United States like SNW said. That line's going to age poorly.

Not to open that whole can of worms, but there's a plot point in PICARD season 2 that would have played very differently had they set the season in 2025 and not 2024, and handled it slightly differently.

Even The Expanse is unrealistically cishumanist: halfway through the 24th century, humanity still has no significant genetic engineering, nanotechnology, cyborgization, neurointerface, simulated reality, teleoperation, artificial superintelligence, healthspan and lifespan extension, or biostasis. The only exceptions are the protomolecule and stargates built by the ancient civilization which apparently descended to the final level of the Barrow scale.

One of the scariest scenarios from Star Trek is that you can go from primitive nukes to Warp Drive within 125 years. Yet most warp capable species turn out to at worst be just a little imperialist / colonialist in the 19th century sense.

Aaaaand... gotta advance ALTERED CARBON in my Netflix queue.

 

[Greg Cox]

And under the same production umbrella we see a faithful TOS-style Connie at the Fleet Museum in PIC Season 3, a series made by many of the same people who changed how the Connies look for DSC and SNW. They're all canon looks and all fit if you're flexible enough and don't be too slavish in regards to a ship class having to look a very specific way throughout the whole TOS Era.

Exactly. It's no different than an actor being recast or a comic-book character being drawn by different artists.

If don't we expect Robin Curtis to look exactly like Kirstie Alley, why expect the Enterprise to look exactly the same even when it' s being portrayed by a different model?


Again, this is theater. A certain degree of artistic license (and a willing suspension of disbelief) is just how theater has always worked, going all the way back to the Greeks at least.

 

[James Cole]

Oh, trust me, comics fans can be just as obsessed with "canon" and "continuity" as Trek fans. And there are no shortage of encyclopedias, wikis, handbooks, maps, blueprints, technical manuals, etc. (I have shelves of them for research purposes.)

Don't comics have the handwave though of constant timeline resets? Crisis, Zero Hour, and who knows how many since then?

If anything pre-Crisis Earth 1 / Earth 2 is the model that solves contemporary Star Trek continuity problems. And even JJ Abrams knew to go the multiverse route when taking on Star Trek.

 

[Lord Garth]

So, anyway. DS9. It's a series I've enjoyed re-watching. And there's only one version of it.

 

[Greg Cox]

Don't comics have the handwave though of constant timeline resets? Crisis, Zero Hour, and who knows how many since then?

If anything pre-Crisis Earth 1 / Earth 2 is the model that solves contemporary Star Trek continuity problems.

Depends. Sometimes they'll do that to effect some sweeping changes, but sometimes they just quietly update things and pretend things were always that away. (And this where I cop to novelizing both the INFINITE CRISIS and FINAL CRISIS for DC.)

Speaking very generally, DC is fond of big timeline-altering Crises, while Marvel tends to just kinda employ a "sliding timeline" that quietly resets itself without any fanfare or in-universe "explanation." Did Spider-Man go to high school in the sixties? The seventies? The eighties? The nineties? The timeline quietly moves forward in the background so that Peter Parker is not on Social Security these days.

And, of course, the ARCHIE gang have been in high school since 1942, but I'm guessing they don't mention Pearl Harbor much these days.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And yet Discovery proved this notion to be incorrect when they called back to The Cage in the episode If Memory Serves. They even showed clips from the episode and it all managed to work perfectly together.

It's been quite a while since I saw that episode, and even after reviewing the article on M𝜶, I still don't quite get what you're talking about. Could you please elaborate?

A certain degree of artistic license (and a willing suspension of disbelief) is just how theater has always worked, going all the way back to the Greeks at least.

For decades, I've preferred Tolkien's term, "literary belief."

 

[cooleddie74]

The two Darins on Bewitched. Both are literally the exact same character in the exact same sitcom continuity. Does the "real" Darin look like Dick York or does he look like Dick Sargent? Samantha Stephens knows. As do their family and friends and Larry Tate. The rest of us? Well, we just roll with it.

 

[Firebird]

And under the same production umbrella we see a faithful TOS-style Connie at the Fleet Museum in PIC Season 3, a series made by many of the same people who changed how the Connies look for DSC and SNW. They're all canon looks and all fit if you're flexible enough and don't be too slavish in regards to a ship class having to look a very specific way throughout the whole TOS Era.

Hell, even season 1 of Picard used the SNW version of the Connie, so it’s up to whomever is running the show to dictate visual continuity, which is quite different from story continuity.

 

[fireproof78]

The two Darins on Bewitched. Both are literally the exact same character in the exact same sitcom continuity. Does the "real" Darin look like Dick York or does he look like Dick Sargent? Samantha Stephens knows. As do their family and friends and Larry Tate. The rest of us? Well, we just roll with it.

I always thought it showed a confidence in the audience to be able to just roll with it.

 

[HotRod]

It's been quite a while since I saw that episode, and even after reviewing the article on M𝜶, I still don't quite get what you're talking about. Could you please elaborate?

Basically arguing against the idea that older Trek and newer Trek are somehow incompatible with eachother.

If Memory Serves proving that the two can be successfully paired together without any issues.

Pike, Spock, the Enterprise, etc. looking different than they looked in past had no negative effects on the plot or story compression.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

It looks like this thread is spiraling downward, so let me get a few thoughts out, playing off stuff @fireproof78 wrote.

The expectation should not be a slavish adherence to a given timeline. To some extent, Star Trek has benefitted from keeping it simple, limiting the number of alternative and altered timelines and parallel universes in its storytelling. This is in part what allows it to maintain social relevance.

The standard should be coherent, but elastic. If a war against the genetically engineered did not take place, we surely can appreciate the societies have not resolved the question of how political hierarchies won't be greatly exacerbated by genetic engineering. Conversely, while there have been many protests and riots, none have seen an attempt to take a different, more empathetic approach to poverty and mental health. What matters for the franchise is that DS9 proposed that positive social change would require an active attention to social problems: we weren't going to find peace in technology. I think that is arguably still true.

 

[Greg Cox]

The two Darins on Bewitched. Both are literally the exact same character in the exact same sitcom continuity. Does the "real" Darin look like Dick York or does he look like Dick Sargent? Samantha Stephens knows. As do their family and friends and Larry Tate. The rest of us? Well, we just roll with it.

See also the three different Marilyns on THE MUNSTERS, the three Catwomans on BATMAN, the three Mister Freezes on same, the three different Sinbads in the Ray Harryhausen movies, and the fact that, in the Bond movies, Felix Leiter and Blofeld were never played by the same actor twice in a row.

And you know what? We just rolled with it and didn't worry about which Marilyn was "canon" or demand some sort of contrived "in-universe" explanation for the switch. Nobody argued about whether THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD took place in the same "timeline" as THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD or SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER.

Granted, this may well be a generational thing. Those of us who grew up when Star Trek was just TOS, and when movies and tv shows and books and comics in general took a more laisez-faire approach to continuity found this perfectly normal -- and may find the modern obsession with "canon" somewhat bewildering.

(He says, channeling his inner curmudeon. "In my day, we didn't worry about any of this new-fangled 'canon' nonsense . . . . " )

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

And if Eartha's purrrrrfect Catwoman ain't canon, NOTHING is.

 

[Greg Cox]

And if Eartha's purrrrrfect Catwoman ain't canon, NOTHING is.

I'll cop to wondering why the "real" Catwoman (aka Julie Newmar) wasn't in the 1966 feature film.

Then again, I was six at the time.

 

[Firebird]

I lost count as to how many Nurse Ables, Bakers, and Cutlers popped up over the years on M*A*S*H, but we still went with it.

Nobody batted an eye when William Christopher took over the part of Father Mulcahy from George Morgan, either.

And Christmas also came to the M*A*S*H 4077th four times over the course of a three-year war with three true Christmas episodes and one Boxing Day episode in a season between them.