There's another cool nod to the fans that I couldn't really mention because I didn't remember the context. The number 47 is mentioned.
Hah, the 47 Society rears its head!
The Abrams 47 people make the Trek 47 people look like agnostics by comparison.
Anyway, a lot of the angst mentioned around here (at least when it comes to the plot) highlights the problematic issues that stem from doing a prequel. People always have preconceived notions as to how past "events" played out and many go nuts when these notions are contradicted in the prequel.
Take Star Wars for example. After Episodes 4, 5, and 6 (too lazy to type out the full titles), everyone assumed they knew what happened. Anakin Skywalker fell to the dark side and became the cyborg Sith Lord Darth Vader, though they didn't know exactly what happened. Along the way, he got some woman pregnant with Luke and Leia. The Clone Wars happened and many assumed based on the name the clones were the bad guys, which is true from a certain point of view. The Republic fell and Palapatine became emperor while the Jedi Knights were exterminated save Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. That was pretty much it going into the prequel trilogy.
So then decades later Episodes 1, 2, and 3 came out. What did we see? Anakin starts off as a whiney kid who chafes at authority figures (namely Obi-Wan). He fell in love with a Leia-like figure, secretly got married, and was on the verge of becoming a proud papa before he was turned to the dark side because of his overriding desire to save her, exploited to full effect by Palaptine, who turned out to be the Number One Sith Lord in the galaxy. The Clone Wars were fought, but the clones turned out to be the soldiers fighting on the side of the Republic; the precursors to stormtroopers. Palpatine manipulated the events of all three movies by playing both the Separatists and the Republic against each other in order to assume absolute power over the galaxy. The Jedi were wiped out. It all fit together, and yet people complained because (aside from poor acting and dialogue, overuse of CG effects, and a few other concepts best left unmentioned) what they believed would happen in the movies didn't turn out that way.
But was anything really contradicted? Anakin ended up being a lot like Luke was in Episode 4; the younger Skywalker whined in the first five minutes he was on screen, and he rebelled against his authority figures (Uncle Owen, Obi-Wan, and Yoda). Anakin's fall was very much like how Vader tried to turn his son in Episode 5. Recall that before Luke took off to Cloud City, Obi-Wan warned him that he didn't want to lose Luke "the way I lost Vader," namely Luke becoming so obsessed with saving his loved ones that he's tempted over to the dark side. We knew nothing of Luke and Leia's mother, so the story of Anakin and Padme was a blank slate as far as the movies were concerned, never mind the fact that the love story was so poorly portrayed. Since the exact nature of the Clone Wars wasn't mentioned, we didn't have a lot of reason to complain about how it was shown in the films. As I said, from a certain point of view, the clones were bad since they helped Palpatine and Vader destroy the Jedi and take over the Republic.
Of course, there were one or two continuity nits, such as Obi-Wan apparently being unaware of Leia in Episode 5 (but was in Episode 6 and witnessed her birth in Episode 3) and Leia somehow remembering what Padme looked like even though her mother died less than a minute after she was born and Luke was right there when it happened though remembered nothing about her. But, in the end, it all tied together, warts and all.
Now, what does that mean for the Star Trek prequel? We're making a lot of hay over text descriptions of four scenes, but I'll give it a shot. The first clip implies that Sulu and Uhura are already members of Starfleet Academy and Kirk is just some punk kid who gets into a brawl after hitting on Uhura. Nothing in TOS ever said that Kirk entered the academy after they did, it was only implied by his rank and people's assumption over their ages (the original actors are fairly close in age, moreso than the non-canon assumptions). Additionally, some are raising eyebrows over Uhura ordering Cardassian ale, again assuming that the Federation had zero contact with them up until the 24th Century. The fact that she's ordering said drink doesn't necessarily mean that the Federation's run into them yet; after all, an Orion once served Archer a Gorn beverage a century before Kirk first encountered them in "Arena." Plus, there is the mention from DS9 of a Cardassian living on Vulcan a century before TOS, so the reference doesn't constitute a canon violation. What might is Pike meeting Kirk at the end of the scene, which comes into conflict with with the aforementioned line from "The Menagerie." The line states that Kirk met Pike when the latter was promoted to fleet captain (whether its a rank or billet has been debated before); it could very well be that this is that meeting and Kirk was telling Mendez the first time he met him rather than the only time.
Now, what has raised a few eyebrows is the
Enterprise and Pike's command of it in the film. Since the teaser was released, many have railed against the ship being constructed on Earth, however there's nothing in the canon that suggests that it could have been. The ship has been shown to manuever in an atmosphere before in TOS and while it can't land (as explicitly stated by Kirk in "A Piece of the Action"), that doesn't mean it couldn't have been launched from a planetside dock. The Apollo was launched from the Earth but couldn't land on Earth like the space shuttle orbiter does now. Then there's Pike and the apparent lack of Captain April. April's only appearance outside of reference books and novels was in the animated series, a production whose status in the canon has gone back and forth repeatedly in the eyes of the studio for years. If the animated series is no longer canon (and a lot of it runs up against later live action works), then so too goes April. Unfortunate, perhaps, but in the grand Trek pantheon, he was only a minor character on a show most people with a vague understanding of Trek never even watched, let alone heard of.
Let's move on to the next scene screened. From what the people writing these reports said (and its possible that they misheard or messed up the details) Kirk appparently didn't warrant a starship posting at this point in the film and needed McCoy's help to get aboard the
Enterprise. Some probably feel that this somehow shortchanges the character of Kirk. Everyone else got to be on the
Enterprise off the bat and he didn't? Well, did anything in the canon before state anything to the contrary? Possibly; there are conflicting references to Kirk's time before the
Enterprise. The first reference to Kirk's early days came in "Where No Man Has Gone Before," where Gary Mitchell strongly implied that as a lieutenant, Kirk was his instructor at the academy, apparently a walking bookstack, but that could have been his interpretation. The next was "Court Martial," where it was said he was an ensign on the
Republic. After that it gets a little hazy; "Obsession" said that he served aboard the
Farragut and that the ship's Captain Garrovick was Kirk's commanding officer from the day he left the academy. It wouldn't have contradicted "Court Martial" if they hadn't mentioned that Garrovick died when Kirk was a
lieutenant when it happened. People have tried to reconsile these references to decades with varying degrees of success and logic. Perhaps Garrovick commanded the
Republic and both he and Kirk later went to the
Farragut. Perhaps after Tycho IV, Kirk returned to the academy where he met Gary Mitchell and perhaps it was at this point Kirk got his old friend Bones to sneak him on the
Enterprise in this movie. The scene shown to the press sounded like it lacked a lot of context; who knows how much time transpired between the first scene and this one.
Next we have Chekov, who's time aboard the
Enterprise was thrown through a loop because of TWOK and Khan's remembrance of him even though he didn't arrive on the series until the subsequent season. Some write-ups today describe Chekov as a sort of wunderkind; so smart that he could have leap-frogged his way to a commission at an early age like how many gifted children today breeze through school and graduate college in their mid teens. Not too out of place and there's nothing in the canon of TOS that blatantly said he was just posted aboard the
Enterprise at the start of season two.
For the next scene, we have Kirk teaming with Old Spock to meet Scotty, who's on the outs with Starfleet for scrambling "Admiral Archer's beagle." No real continuity issues here, though aside from the throwaway ENT reference, it does add some interesting dynamics to later films, much as how Anakin Skywalker's fall to the darkside in the Star Wars prequel trilogy gives some dialogue in the original trilogy some added weight. First off, we have Kirk meeting a Spock from the future, who's apparently there to both save his life and save Vulcan from destruction. Assuming that all this time travel trickeration doesn't wipe the slate clean (which is the assumption I'm operating under for this piece), suddenly Spock's death in TWOK takes on a whole new dynamic. Kirk met a Spock from a century later; from Kirk's point of view, he shouldn't have died. Perhaps in addition to feeling sad over losing his best friend, he starts to wonder if somehow history (namely his and Vulcan's) has been screwed up. Also recall one of Kirk's lines to Spock in TSFS: "You'd have done the same for me." Definitely has a new spin on it now, doesn't it? Also, in what might be an homage to TVH, Old Spock teaches Scotty a transporter technique that he would have discovered eventually. Shades of Scotty giving the formula for transparent aluminum to Dr. Nichols in the 20th Century (Not now, Madeline!)? Maybe that's part of his justification for doing it when he says, "How do we know he didn't invent the thing?"
The fourth scene, being a heavy action piece, doesn't really have a lot in the way of background to it. The only real question is where it takes place in the movie in respect to the other three, which we don't know.
Of course, after spending an hour writing this, I believe I won't change any minds, just hopefully get them to think a little. Snipe away.
