I've met George twice, he is a decent and intelligent human being, your dump of hateful comments here and elsewhere in other threads (all in your first day) highly suggests you aren't.
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Poll Is Star Trek: Khan khanon?
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
So is George Takei.
If I'm not mistaken I think this was originally even supposed to be a live action thing, before it got downsized to audio.
Telling someone you’re putting them on ignore is considered trolling here.
Thank you for telling me. I deleted that from my comment. I've seen similar comments elsewhere that led me to think it was okay, I won't do that again.
Except certain characters, character traits, or elements (events, et al) become iconic and concrete for fair reason. Subtle changes that don't detract from their core unique traits seem to fare better when it comes to the inevitable longevity of canon. Making huge changes need to be really compelling if the brand is to become the metaphorical equivalent to an "Etch a Sketch". Otherwise, why bother trying to make Khan sound like Khan and not, say, Mr Rogers?
That's a creative reimagining, right? Now how about someone else, like Julia Child because, why not? I can't think of any other tv show personality for the moment, apart from maybe Gene Rayburn or Charo?
Well, no to either of them for multiple obvious reasons. Either which way, they'd all just as relevant as a new incarnation of Khan (e.g. none at all.) I don't think too many people would buy into those whiplash character changes, unless we saw a big swirly portal that goes to a parallel dimension to spell it out. And then some audiences would be confused because it's a different dimension where they're no longer the same characters they're used to, with no emotional attachment built up, so why would they care. Or reverse it: Show the new versions to new audiences then sit 'em down, but not Clockwork Orange style, to look at the... what's the expression nowadays... oh yeah, "the OG version", and see the whiplash lashwhip in turn. Hell, even "Sliders" (the parallel dimension show that critics never understood or took literally at the time) had a lead actor change for the 5th season and fans didn't get used it. Good grief, now show 'em "Doctor Who" and really watch 'em squirm. That said, a story as a whole is far more than just how characters act. We already had some major altered origins with STID and that was a mixed bag too...
But, yeah, multiple alternative imaginings and everything else, the core issue remains: Getting the audience to attach to the character to love or hate or anything else regarding them. Gotta have an anchor and gravitas somewhere.
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Nowadays I kind of pick and choose what I think is and isn’t canon, based pretty much on whether I like it or not! Well, that’s actually not entirely true—I do see it all as canon if it’s officially released, but I don’t see it all as the same universe. If I feel discrepancies I just shrug and in my head canon see it as belonging in an alternate Trek universe.
Fisticuffs involved?
Except that tie-ins that are purported to be "canonical," like various Star Wars productions and the Legendary MonsterVerse comics, usually get ignored and contradicted by subsequent screen canon. Calling a tie-in canonical is an empty promise, almost always. It's only canon until it isn't. Jeri Taylor considered her Voyager novels Mosaic and Pathways canonical while she was VGR's showrunner, but once she left the show, her successors ignored the character backstories from the novels and contradicted them repeatedly.
Even screen canons contradict themselves all the time. Spock was willing to die to avoid telling his best friend about pon farr in "Amok Time," but in "The Cloud Minders" he chatted about it openly with a complete stranger. Data used contractions until suddenly he couldn't. TNG: "Peak Performance" in season 2 showed a Federation at peace for so long that Picard considered war games a useless atavism, but "The Wounded" in season 4 retconned in a decades-long Cardassian war that had only ended a year before.
So it doesn't matter if a story is canonical or not. It just matters if it's a good story. If it's enjoyable, who cares if it's not the only version of the same event? There isn't going to be a test.
So? How is that any different from a future on-screen tv show contradicting elements from a past on-screen tv show? This isn’t about what things contradict. It’s about what the people currently in charge of the Star Trek IP consider to be part of the canon or not.
Which, as I said, is not meaningful. Jeri Taylor considered Mosaic and Pathways part of the canon while she was showrunner (and she used elements from Mosaic in the episode "Coda"), but her successors did not.
Besides, how is it ever likely to matter? What are the odds that we'll see anything pertinent to Khan's experiences on Ceti Alpha V depicted onscreen again? The whole reason this is an audio side project is that it's probably never going to be relevant onscreen. So the question of whether it's binding on anything else is probably moot.
Not to mention that it is now canonical, thanks to "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," that there's more than one version of Khan's life, thanks to temporal shenanigans rewriting it. If the Eugenics Wars can happen both in the 1990s and in the 2020s, if both are counted as part of the mutable history of the Prime Universe, then maybe there's more than one "true" version of what happened on Ceti Alpha V too. If it's now established screen canon that the canon itself is multivalued, then doesn't that render all canon arguments irrelevant?
The question was whether the Khan audio is going to be considered canon or not, and the relevant answer was that that is entirely up to the people who currently hold the Star Trek IP. I’m not sure what more needs to be said about the subject, as things contradicting each other has nothing to do with what makes something canon or not.
Also, what Jeri Taylor thought was irrelevant, because she didn’t own the Star Trek IP at the time; Paramount did.
And as I said, when tie-ins are declared to be canonical, it usually turns out to be meaningless, because even "canonical" tie-ins routinely get contradicted by later productions just as freely as the "apocryphal" ones do. It's a label that has zero real-world significance, so it's pointless to worry about it.
Which seems to be saying that it doesn't matter if something is canon or not. Which is basically what I'm saying. Then why even ask the question?
She was the showrunner, the person who decided what stories were told. Thus, while she was showrunner, she decided what stories were canonical to Voyager continuity. Once she was no longer showrunner, other people made that decision. The "owners of the IP" don't care about continuity; it's all just a piece of merchandise to them, so as long as they can make a profit from it, they don't care if the stories fit together. Only the showrunners and staffs decide whether a new story acknowledges an earlier story or not.
When it comes to the shows themselves, they are canon automatically, by definition, because "canon" is merely a nickname we use to refer to the complete, authoritative body of works. The only cases where anything is "officially declared" to be canonical are tie-in works, since they're not automatically canonical the way the core work is by definition. Yet, again, the declaration that a tie-in is canonical usually only holds until new canon decides to contradict it. Yes, you can choose to believe that a nominally "canonical" work is true in-universe as long as it hasn't been contradicted yet, but you know what? You can do exactly the same with any tie-in whether it has that label or not. So the label is meaningless.
It’s not a tie-in. It’s an official CBS/Paramount production. The question about canonicity arose because in the past, TPTB had always said that only on-screen material (TV shows, movies) was considered canon. This would be the first time that a non-on-screen work could have that distinction.
Thank you, Digits, and welcome to all the members who don’t usually visit here.
This is certainly new ground for us in this forum. Usually our canon discussions are much more straightforward.
“Is [random book or comic] canon?”
“No.”
“But [some counter-argument].”
“Yeah, still no.”
But anyway, enjoy the discussion!
This is certainly new ground for us in this forum. Usually our canon discussions are much more straightforward.
“Is [random book or comic] canon?”
“No.”
“But [some counter-argument].”
“Yeah, still no.”
But anyway, enjoy the discussion!
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