I reluctantly admit the mention in The Enterprise War of Colt having "changed a lot" got a chuckle from me...
2026 Novel Releases
- Thread starter The Wormhole
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And "Hamlet" in Arcturian dress and masks in TOS.
Arcturian mask by Ian McLean, on Flickr
Coincidentally(?), the mask used is not dissimilar to a TMP Arcturian.
There is at least one person on this forum that still has that opinion
There was an article in an old Best of Trek, where someone speculated that the Federation must have lost a war in order to explain the technological and other downgrades and changes between TMP and TWoK.
I can't agree. I wouldn't say that about the overlapping characters as actually shown onscreen in TOS and SNW, respectively, so I can't imagine it would be true of their corresponding litverse depictions.
Just one person's opinion, however.
Are you kidding? Nothing could be easier. SNW is currently set no later than 2260. TOS begins in 2266. Is it that hard to imagine that someone's personality could change in 6-10 years?
For that matter, SNW has developed Pike as a character with a relaxed, familial command style, while TOS, at least in season 1, portrayed Kirk as a more serious, disciplined commanding officer. It stands to reason that the members of the crew might have adapted their behavior accordingly. We also see them off-duty more often in SNW than we did in TOS, so that could account for the perceived differences
Although I really don't see what irreconcilable differences you're seeing. The only SNW character who's massively different from their TOS counterpart is Chapel, and SNW's Chapel is cooler than TOS's ever was, so I'm perfectly fine with the change.
I think this line of argument is a dead end. Unlike in the 80s, the show isn't popular enough that the traditionalist audience is going to be won over and the loyalist perspective isn't going to be swayed until or unless official word changes.
Yes, the shows could somehow be made to fit if they had to, but generally speaking, no one cares about the new series anyway.
(I actually started to remark to someone the other day that next year's tenth anniversary of Star Trek Beyond would mark the longest gap without any new Star Trek, then caught myself when I remembered—and I've actually watched Paramount+.)
Agreed with everything here. Strange New Worlds isn't contradicting anything from the original series, it's just adding context and new information that we didn't already have, and I haven't found any of it so jarringly contradictory that it becomes a deal breaker.
Over the years, I've found that a lot of the time, when fans complain that a new production has contradicted previous Trek canon, it really only contradicts widely held assumptions, things that fans have read between the lines. Generally, these things are consistent with the strict letter of the canonical text, they just interpret it or extrapolate beyond it in ways we haven't considered before. For instance, it never occurred to me that Chapel and Spock could've had a past relationship, but when I actually studied their dialogue in "The Naked Time," I realized it could actually be interpreted that way. We should never hesitate to question our own assumptions.
And yes, there are blatant contradictions here and there, but they're no worse than the contradictions within any given Trek series or between any two older series like TOS vs. TNG. The new contradictions just seem more flagrant because we've had years to gloss over and rationalize the old contradictions in our minds and convince ourselves that past canon is a more unified whole than it actually was.
@Christopher, you have just managed to summarize the Scientific Method in 9 words.
You must just hang with the wrong crowds...?
tries to agree with your generally reasonable statement
thinks of the SNW Gorn whom I despise
As I mentioned, SNW has established that their version of the Gorn evolve rapidly, so it's easy enough to assume the awful SNW Gorn are just some variant subspecies existing alongside the more familiar ones. It wouldn't be the first time that idea has been used to reconcile different portrayals of the Gorn, e.g. those from the Kelvin timeline computer game and related comic, or the way Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire asserted that the TOS and ENT versions of the Gorn were two different subspecies.
Speak for yourself, please. Many of us adore the new shows, and I say that as an OG fan from 1966.
Fandom doesn't speak with one voice -- and never has.
I actually meant that literally, not personally (my anecdote was just an example—like I said, I watched Paramount+).
While the enfranchised audience seems to have engaged with the shows,* the broader population hasn't.
This Google Trends chart compares Star Trek (yellow), The Next Generation (blue), Discovery (green), Picard** (purple), and Strange New Worlds (red), showing their traffic since 2004:
The Paramount+ series have fallen below Star Trek and TNG, which are now both trending well below their previously stable level. This is why I think this discussion is pointless—the audience that cares about the streaming series is small enough that they don't have meaningful mindshare (deservedly or not).
Frankly, I'm starting to worry about general interest in Star Trek. The decline is concerning, and Gen Z is young enough that most of them don't remember even the reboot movies.
(I'm a third-generation fan myself; both of my parents watched the original 1960s run with their parents. The "remember where we parked" scene in a repertory screening of The Voyage Home is one of my earliest memories.)
*I almost suspect that "Have you ever attended a Star Trek convention?" and "Did you purchase any Star Trek merchandise before 1994?" would be reasonably good proxy questions.
**"Star Trek: Picard" as a search term; the series wasn't an autocomplete option.
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Part of the problem there is that these shows have been exclusive to Paramount Plus, which is a relatively smaller streaming platform (if we consider the Big Three to be Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Plus, and Disney owns both of the latter two). Modern Trek shows are getting out to a more limited audience at the moment, as opposed to when they were on network television.
Which, honestly, is more a reflection of the flaws of the medium than the shows or audiences themselves.
Which, honestly, is more a reflection of the flaws of the medium than the shows or audiences themselves.
Agreed 100%. If Strange New Worlds achieved nothing else (and it certainly has achieved a tremendous lot), the fact that it's gotten me to genuinely care about Christine Chapel as a character is not much short of miraculous.
Exactly. With all due respect to Majel Barrett, who was stuck playing a thankless role, the new Chapel is a lot more fun.
As interesting as this discussion is, it seems to have lost any connection to the topic of 2026 novels. We have forums dedicated to discussing the shows where this kind of thing would be better served. Let's please try to keep our focus on the literature.
