Star Trek Online and Countdown Graphic Novel Continuities

[Ayelbourne]

According to the episode of TNG called "Parallels", which JJ's team mentioned in pre-publicity interviews, there would be an infinite number of Neros and Spocks running around.

Yes, but there aren't! So what happened to those guys?

But in the end we still have one Spock and one Nero who we're supposed to believe to have come from both the STO-timeline and the book timeline (and by extension all the other timelines that adhere to canon).

Knowing that, in Trek, people from different realities are in fact seperate beings, this doesn't make any sense.

Oh well...I guess it's more of a metafictional issue anyway. It depends on how you view all this non canon stuff.

 

[F. King Daniel]

According to the episode of TNG called "Parallels", which JJ's team mentioned in pre-publicity interviews, there would be an infinite number of Neros and Spocks running around.

Exactly. But there aren't! So what happened to those guys?

They wouldn't have all gone to the same universe. Each individual universe would split the same way the prime and alt ones did in STXI.

Let the arguments over "which Nero" it was in STXI begin now! Was it the (probably to be written in a few years time) TrekLit one or the Countdown guy?

 

[Therin of Andor]

Exactly. But there aren't! So what happened to those guys?

You think just because we didn't *see* them they don't exist?

 

[Dayton Ward]

The books are bound by canon, so everything in the movie that Spock said happened in the original timeline has to still happen in the original timeline.

That might be a problem though, if we see all those non canon continuities as parallel realities (something I've been doing for a while now).
Nero and Spock couldn't have come from both the STO- and the novel timeline.

The Nero and Spock everybody's concerned with came from the film. The books and the game are/will be bound by the events of the film, not to each other. They're free to chart different courses, which is a good thing. There are (by my rough estimate) already more than 10x people signed up to play STO than those who purchased the best-ever selling Trek novel, with more coming into the game every day. The game doesn't need to be hamstrung by the continuity established by another licensee for stories told via a different medium and an audience that doesn't necessarily overlap to any significant degree....and vice versa.

Trek and let Trek, as one might say

 

[Christopher]

^Right. Ultimately, all the licensees are doing their own individual variations on a work of fiction, charting their own separate paths because it makes creative and business sense to do so. If anyone wants to concoct some way of reconciling these different fictional extrapolations into a single "multiverse," that's left as an exercise for the reader.

 

[ronny]

I have it on good authority that there's at least one player operating under the alias "Diego Reyes."

"Darrah Mace", too...

Last couple of mmorpg's I've played healing types, until some clothy type unloads on on a group of mobs and gets pissed because I couldn't keep him alive, so I poked around memory beta until I found Meldok. We'll see how much grief I get until I switch to an engineering type, I just don't get into tanks.

 

[seigezunt]

Last couple of mmorpg's I've played healing types, until some clothy type unloads on on a group of mobs and gets pissed because I couldn't keep him alive, so I poked around memory beta until I found Meldok.

I feel like I'm reading A Clockwork Orange.

 

[TheAlmanac]

Including characters from the existing novels (and, in turn, releasing a novel set in its own continuity) is already more than I expected to happen with Star Trek Online in relation to TrekLit, so I think the books will ultimately win out.

I'm sure there'll be some overlap from people looking up an NPC they've encountered and discovering that (for example) Calhoun is the star of his own series of novels...by the time those people figure out there's a continuity issue, they'll have already been hooked.

 

[Sci]

The books are bound by canon, so everything in the movie that Spock said happened in the original timeline has to still happen in the original timeline.

That's IF it is ultimately determined that the events older Spock describes took place within the original reality that we know from TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT

It's been done by virtue of the fact that the owners of Star Trek -- Paramount and CBS -- say it happened in that continuity.

ST09 is canon. Period.

ETA:

That might be a problem though, if we see all those non canon continuities as parallel realities

If there are infinite parallel realities, there is no problem.

There is. Nero and Spock came from one specific timeline/reality.
Right now, STO claims to be that timeline.
Some years from now, the books will have to claim that as well.
But as with Highlander, there can be only one. *ahem*
They can't be from both realities at the same time.

It's fiction. There can be more than one. Star Trek Online and the ST Litverse simply contradict one-another and that's all there is to it. They're not in continuity with one-another, and as such there's no need to reconcile their contradictions any more than one must reconcile the contradictions between Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon and T.H. White's The Once and Future King.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

Last couple of mmorpg's I've played healing types, until some clothy type unloads on on a group of mobs and gets pissed because I couldn't keep him alive, so I poked around memory beta until I found Meldok.

I feel like I'm reading A Clockwork Orange.

 

[Christopher]

It's fiction. There can be more than one. Star Trek Online and the ST Litverse simply contradict one-another and that's all there is to it. They're not in continuity with one-another, and as such there's no need to reconcile their contradictions any more than one must reconcile the contradictions between Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon and T.H. White's The Once and Future King.

That's right. The onscreen canon is what did happen in the Trek universe. The tie-ins, whether novels, comics, or games, are simply things that might have happened in that universe. They're conjectural tales, so they don't have to agree with each other; they only have to be consistent with what we know did happen, i.e. the canon.

As I said, if a fan wants to believe that the conjecture of the novels and the conjecture of the games are alternate timelines within the same multiverse, that is in itself a conjecture on the part of the fan, and it's up to the fan to figure out how to make it work.

 

[Rush Limborg]

^Oy...My head is spinning from all this "conjectural universe" madness....

 

[Ayelbourne]

I've recently started doing missions in the DS9 areas of space (Cardassia, Bajor, Badlands, etc.).
The main baddies in that region are followers of the "True Way" from Worlds of Deep Space Nine: Cardassia.

 

[ronny]

I've recently started doing missions in the DS9 areas of space (Cardassia, Bajor, Badlands, etc.).
The main baddies in that region are followers of the "True Way" from Worlds of Deep Space Nine: Cardassia.

I'm envious. You can actually play? I keep getting huge lag when I tried to log on all day Sunday and some of Saturday.

 

[Ayelbourne]

There's always lag, it seems. But it's never really bad enough to keep me from playing.

 

[James Swallow]

Semi-OT; you can hear me and Craig Zinkievich, Executive Producer at Cryptic Studios, chatting about Star Trek Online on BBC Radio 5 Live's Up All Night show as part of the Game On slot, with m'colleague and gamer mate Adam Rosser.

Player link Here; we're on at the 3:05 mark, and the show will be available via the BBC's Listen Again service for the next seven days.

 

[EJA]

The books are bound by canon, so everything in the movie that Spock said happened in the original timeline has to still happen in the original timeline.

That's IF it is ultimately determined that the events older Spock describes took place within the original reality that we know from TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT

It's been done by virtue of the fact that the owners of Star Trek -- Paramount and CBS -- say it happened in that continuity.

ST09 is canon. Period.

At the time it was made, Star Trek V would have been assumed to have taken place within the reality that everyone was familiar with from past TV episodes and movies. It didn't stop TPTB from pretending it never happened by totally contradicting it in later episodes of TNG, etc.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

That's IF it is ultimately determined that the events older Spock describes took place within the original reality that we know from TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT

It's been done by virtue of the fact that the owners of Star Trek -- Paramount and CBS -- say it happened in that continuity.

ST09 is canon. Period.

At the time it was made, Star Trek V would have been assumed to have taken place within the reality that everyone was familiar with from past TV episodes and movies. It didn't stop TPTB from pretending it never happened by totally contradicting it in later episodes of TNG, etc.

"I've never been a transwarp before" (The salamander episode you're imagining- DID NOT HAPPEN, NO SIR). They're flexible with these things, up to a point. Sci is right, though: Star Trek XI is definitely, inescapably canon. As he said, TPTB have stated it as definite. Which means bye-bye Romulus. I'll be forced to defend the destruction of Romulus as part of my defense of continuity. The sadists, eh?

 

[Christopher]

Canon is mutable. An ongoing series is a work in progress, and sometimes things are tried that just don't work out. So they end up getting retconned, glossed over, or just ignored.

However: despite the way some people feel about it, Abrams' Star Trek was the most successful and popular ST production in more than a decade. Now, me, I don't like The Wrath of Khan much. It played fast and loose with continuity (turning Khan's diverse superhumans into a band of blond Aryans, having their home and costumes decorated with movie-era tech and insignias rather than series-era), it was full of plot and logic holes (the Reliant crew not being able to count, the brilliant Khan being unable to penetrate the obvious "hours/days" code, Spock being the only one who could fix the engines despite there being plenty of engineers aboard), and the Genesis Device was a ridiculously fanciful concept that threw ST's credibility out the window and ran it over repeatedly with a truck. But my personal tastes aside, I know that the movie was immensely popular and there was never any chance that it would be disregarded as part of Trek history, despite its humongous continuity and credibility problems. ST V and "Threshold" got glossed over because they were widely recognized as failures and mistakes (even "Threshold"'s own writer disowned it). But a highly popular movie like TWOK or ST '09? Not a ghost of a chance. Whatever its plot or credibility problems, it's not going to be ignored by future creators or fans.

 

[Sci]

That's IF it is ultimately determined that the events older Spock describes took place within the original reality that we know from TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT

It's been done by virtue of the fact that the owners of Star Trek -- Paramount and CBS -- say it happened in that continuity.

ST09 is canon. Period.

At the time it was made, Star Trek V would have been assumed to have taken place within the reality that everyone was familiar with from past TV episodes and movies. It didn't stop TPTB from pretending it never happened by totally contradicting it in later episodes of TNG, etc.

Sure. And if the creators of Trek later change their mind, so be it.

But for now, Spock Prime's timeline is the traditional timeline of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT.