Data being in the "Class of '78?" Picard seeing his elderly mother in WNOHGB? Alexander's age? Scotty thinking Kirk came to rescue him in Relics? The early Probert design of the Enterprise-C on the wall of the D's Observation Lounge?
Strange New Worlds' showrunners advise fans to write to Skydance and Paramount if they're interested in a "Year One" Kirk sequel series
- Thread starter Quinton
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I know it's been brought up before but Trill? Romulans? Eugenics Wars? Klingons as part of the Federation? Klingon home world name? "Warriors of Klingon!"
Are you trying to argue that any of this was a good thing and they should continue doing it?
You said retcons were "not a core feature," when that's manifestly untrue.
Contradictions and retcons are inevitable even in the most meticulously planned IPs. You can either accept that or complain about it, but the latter accomplishes nothing and just "leads to madness... and sweaty palms".
Not to mention "Yesterday's Enterprise" then establishing that a Starfleet vessel had been lost in combat with the Romulans only 22 years earlier, which certainly seems like contact.
Then there's "Peak Performance" in TNG season 2 showing a Starfleet at peace for so long that Picard considered war games a pointless atavism, and then "The Wounded" in season 4 saying that the Federation had been at war with Cardassia until a year before. Then there's Data clearly having real, if subdued, emotions in seasons 1-2 ("I think you should be destroyed"), until the new writers in season 3 saddled him with the hackneyed cliche of "robots can't have emotions."
We're arguing that it's disingenuous to pretend that Star Trek has ever had perfect continuity, and that it's unrealistic to expect any long-running work of fiction from multiple different creators to have perfect continuity, no matter how hard they try. It's not a value judgment or an endorsement, it's just facing reality. Continuity is an ideal worth striving for, yes, but ideals are never actually achieved, only approached.
Only that it is a feature on a bug and trying to exclude contradictory information is an exercise in futility. I'm not going to pretend newer Trek is lesser for something past Treks did and for some reason people stayed fans.
It's neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Sometimes the individual "ideas" can be bad, though. Some can be be bloody brilliant. So yes, please continue.
I remember one time during my early years on this forum I used the "Early Installment Weirdness" excuse, and back then everyone got pissed at me and said "you can't hide behind the early days excuse, you have to point out a canonical subspace anomaly to explain it." Yet now, Early Installment Weirdness is the Go To for everyone who wants to bitch modern continuity.
Well, one could turn their argument against them. Since the franchise is now over 60 years old counting from "The Cage," the entirety of TOS's 79 episodes can be considered an "early installment" compared to the subsequent 800-plus episodes and films, and therefore everything about TOS that conflicts with modern Trek can be handwaved as the inaccuracy of early installments that hadn't quite settled in on what the series would become.
I mean, really, it's generally understood that when a series is invented as it goes, later continuity outweighs earlier continuity. It's James T. instead of James R., Starfleet instead of UESPA, the retconned-in Cardassian war and Data's lack of emotion are definitive, and so on. So we don't get to turn that around and insist that the earlier version was more correct just because it's what we're used to.
Something that seems more to the point: All of these things, including the later ones, happened and are, in fact, therefore features of Star Trek. Whether or not particular chunks of the audience were keen on them or not is irrelevant, because that is true of every single significant development or change that has ever happened, and will ever happen, in the franchise.
That's one of those things that only contradicts our assumptions, not actual text. There's nothing in "Q Who" to establish that there wasn't information about the Borg already in Starfleet's database; they just cut right to Guinan being consulted about her (relatively) firsthand knowledge. And Generations had already established, years before the Hansens were created, that Guinan and her fellow El-Aurian refugees from the Borg had been rescued 78 years earlier -- so it stands to reason that they would've told the Federation about the Borg way back then.
But space is huge and there's just too much information for any one person or crew to be intimately familiar with all of it. So there's nothing implausible about the Enterprise crew being unfamiliar with known information about the Borg, since there's just too much stuff in the galaxy for them to know all of it. (Which is also how I reconcile Picard in "The Last Outpost" having never heard of the Tkon Empire even though he's later established as an archeology expert.)
I, for one, am not especially interested in a "Year One" Kirk sequel series. I think that's an area that's been covered very well in prose fiction.
That's not to say that I wouldn't watch it, if produced. It's not something I would actively avoid, like Section 31 (which had already been done ad nauseum before it turned up in DSC). There are simply too many other unexplored possibilities.
That's not to say that I wouldn't watch it, if produced. It's not something I would actively avoid, like Section 31 (which had already been done ad nauseum before it turned up in DSC). There are simply too many other unexplored possibilities.
While year one is a good descriptor for what the show is about, it's not a very good title, since it becomes immediately obsolete. Something like Star Trek: Five Year Mission could work, but you'd have to get assurances from the studio about your number of seasons ahead of time. They could take a page from SNW and pull from the monologue again for Star Trek: To Boldly Go. But I'd be tempted to just call it Star Trek, without a subtitle, but that could be confusing.
That's expanding the time, not compressing it.
Oops
I am.. and I'm not.
Sure I'll watch it if it pops up. But I'm already a bit edgy on SNW relying on stuff from TOS. Wanted it to do its own thing like TNG did. No references or barely any to TOS, its own stories.
Sure I'll watch it if it pops up. But I'm already a bit edgy on SNW relying on stuff from TOS. Wanted it to do its own thing like TNG did. No references or barely any to TOS, its own stories.
Xena fans had a name for such contraindications:
JAXA (Just Another Xena Anachronism)
Disco tried it.
Fans then screamed, "But what about cAnON?" So they brought in Pike and Spock.
