…is there anywhere that it’s not John? (My memories of the stories are hazy.)
Poll Is Star Trek: Khan khanon?
- Thread starter dahj
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His wife Mary calls him James in one story.
Ah. Thanks.
Which led to Dorothy L. Sayers offering a very clever theory that John H. Watson's middle name is Hamish, and Mary was using its English equivalent James as a nickname. I've seen a number of modern works accept Hamish as Watson's middle name, including the BBC Sherlock and the CBS Watson.
For me another one of the most inconsistent "canons" would have to be the M*A*S*H* TV series. Hawkeye went from having a telling his dad to say hi to his mom and sister, and his family vacationing Crabapple Cove Maine, to spending how whole life in Crabapple Cove and being an only child whose mother died when he was a young kid. How many kids Potter had and what sex they were was also kind of inconsistent, but it was a little more ambiguous than the blatant contradictions with Hawkeye. I'm pretty sure there were contradictions with other characters too, but those are the two that stood out in my mind.
The big one is how the date references got up to early 1953, but then they realized the show was too big a hit to be likely to end anytime soon, so they retconned it back to 1951 while still acknowledging all the character history and cast changes that had come before. Also just generally taking 11 years to chronicle a 3-year war.
When I rewatched the Alien Nation TV series for my Patreon a while back, I was startled by how much the series contradicted itself within the course of a single season. In the pilot movie, the Overseers who'd ruled over the alien refugees on their slave ship before it crashed on Earth had been a deep dark secret because the slaves had been drugged and kept docile aboard the ship, so nobody remembered them and their existence was the shocking revelation at the climax. But later in the season, it was assumed that their existence had been common knowledge all along. Then there was an episode saying that the Overseers couldn't be tried in the US for crimes that happened in outer space, but one of the revival TV movies a few years later said they had been tried but funneled into an Operation Paperclip-like project to develop technology for the government. Not to mention the other continuity changes between the series and the revival movies, like retconning the dates the series took place. Not to mention decanonizing the entire cliffhanger finale episode of the series, since the child actors were four years older so they couldn't just pick up where they'd left off, so they ignored the finale and started over with a standalone version of the cliffhanger event. And then there was the movie establishing that humans needed to take a weeks-long course to learn how to have sex with Newcomers without injuring themselves, contradicting an early episode about Newcomer prostitutes. (All that on top of pretending to be a sequel to the original feature film, but changing so many details that it was always an alternate continuity from the start.)
Just out of morbid curiosity, 3/4" , 3/4" SP, or Betacam SP?
Well, they were VHS, so maybe not full broadcast quality, but better than I'd ever seen or heard the episodes before (the audio in particular was beautifully clear compared to what I got on TV).
I'm aware of all that. The reason fandom changed the definition of canon to mean consistency is because "official body of work" doesn't really mean anything. Every Star Trek work that was licensed by Paramount or CBS is "official". What sets the shows and movies apart from everything else?
Well, first of all, Allyn is incorrect; as you say, all licensed tie-ins and merchandise are official, since the word just means that the copyright owners allow the product to be created and sold in exchange for a share of the profits. It's a term of business and law and has no relevance to the narrative content of the work.
At its most basic, a fictional canon is the body of works by the original creator, as opposed to apocrypha by other creators. Doyle's 60 Sherlock Holmes works are the canon, everything else is apocryphal. It gets complicated when a series has multiple creators, but generally the studio that produces the work is considered the original author, since the various creators are working on its behalf.
When it comes to continuity, canon is merely a matter of feasibility, not some kind of formal stamp of approval from on high. It's more practical for a single creator to maintain a consistent continuity than for multiple creators working in parallel. That's why the first set of Babylon 5 novels from Dell, published during the run of the series when J. Michael Straczynski was too busy to supervise them closely, tried to be canonical but failed (with two exceptions), while the post-series Del Rey novels that JMS supervised directly are still considered canonical. Ditto for the non-canon Buffy and Angel comics published during the shows' runs vs. the canonical ones that Joss Whedon personally "showran." Similarly, the evidently canonical Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra comics are overseen by the shows' creators. (Although it remains to be seen if the new Buffy and Avatar sequel series and movies treat them as canonical, since "canon" tie-ins are usually ignored by revivals. I fully expect the new Buffy to ignore the comics, though I think there's a better chance the new Avatar productions will keep their comics in canon, at least approximately.)
Again, it boils down to canon being a matter of authorship. Works can only really be in the same canon if they have creators in common -- or if they aren't being released at the same time. Parallel creators working on different production schedules can never stay completely current with each other and reconcile everything without miscommunications, because so many things get revised along the way, often too late for the tie-in authors to get the memo. The only tie-ins at no risk of being contradicted are those for series that are no longer in production.
James T or James R ?Maybe that story was set in an alternate timeline.
(ducks)
Does it matter anyway?
I’m more interested in if it will be any good or not.
I’m more interested in if it will be any good or not.
^^ at the end of the day, that is the ultimate reality. Even TOS shifted early on, back when its universe was new. After all, Spock's "distant relative" regarding his half-human heritage was... drumroll... his father. How much TOS started with and kept tight was genuinely impressive as the writers have said in interviews they were creating things as they went along because they had nothing to go on. Ever since then there's been more to go on, but plenty of fans like the Borg Queen and I'm on the fence (could have been better with one tiny script change as opposed to a big shoehorned retcon with woolly dialogue that doesn't fit with TBOBW at all...)
Spock may have grown as a character regarding pan fried thanks to noticing his fellow crewmembers weren't as "uptight", though the rest of his species does take it as a very private matter, so Droxine probably heard it as rumor. I wonder what the greater logic was that compelled Spock to share his secrets as, every 7 years, there's a great chance for enemies to exploit it. Sex and espionage go hand in hand, no pun intended... or it was later on in season 3 and nobody cared...
Great callout with season 2 vs season 4 - it's the best technical stickler, and TW handled the themes so well that Picard's mindslip didn't matter as much. Or he was being dismissive and not being pedantic, given how often he says "Thank you, Mister Data" as Data is the stickler. Amazed Data didn't chime in, but this was Pinocchio-Data and not Android-Data so him being "preoccupied" made more logistical sense and, despite remembering every fact he's exposed to, there was zero relevance for him to bring it up. Then again, I loved his recollection in GEN about the joke not told in "Encounter at Farpoint" that he just "got", proving that off-screen hints can fit without tripping over anything major (hi Borg Queen and human limited thinking!
) Plus, the series premiere was hinting at Ferengi being a warlike threat - but vague enough that it could go either way. The best part is, they didn't have the databases that could keep full track of continuity development like what we have now, even "Final Draft" and the ilk. Basic word processors to save on paper and that icky sticky liquid used ubiquitously in the 1960s as back then they only had typewriters...
Especially if it's a small point, or especially if it's done so well that any minutiae from the past doesn't matter. Been there on both sides. Talk about being bifocal...
Same. Like or dislike, fans will nitpick for plenty of reasons and not always "hate-watching" or "would the story be better, if", etc. Big books on nitpicking guides exist and it didn't stop those makers or the audience from still embracing and enjoying the show. Well, most of the audience.
Even modern-day technology and websites, beyond good transcript sites, might have an occasional flub too. Humans created it all and humans make mistakes by accident, applesauce happens. AI still gets some details wrong and, more to the point, after decades between each series, some info won't be known or will be forgotten. I'm pretty sure that Q saying "Don't drink with thine enemy" at Worf has a glaring contradiction in TOS where Kor in TOS is asking Kirk to go booze it up with him... and I'm sure TNG or DS9 tripped over that by having everyone booze it up too. Granted, there's also the possibility of characters lying on screen, Worf being an outsider and is more "book smart", and so on... yep, if the story is strong, a good story will survive anything, whether it be effects, continuity sneezes, etc.
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