Star Trek Online and Countdown Graphic Novel Continuities
- Thread starter The Super Brando
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Well, it's kinda hard to reconcile the Enterprise-A's being able to traverse half the galaxy to reach the galactic center in 2286 with the U.S.S. Voyager needing to take 75 years to traverse roughly three-fourths of the galaxy in 2371.
ST V's problems began when Shatner told Roddenberry he was doing a "search for God" storyline, after GR had spent over a decade trying to get "The God-Thing" working as a novel. Then Shatner declared that ST V would feature Spock's brother, and yet GR and DC Fontana had written memos in the 60s that Spock was a stronger, unique character if he had no surprise siblings turning up. Since GR no longer had a power of veto on the ST movies, no one at Paramount had to listen to him and so he was motivated to declare parts of the film "apocryphal".
But TNG didn't totally ignore ST V. Indeed, when the Cytherians in "The Nth Degree" were devised, the production team intended they be the same race as ST V's false god being.
The problem with referencing the destruction of Romulus and disappearance of Spock in 2387 is that it would then intrinsically bind the original universe to the new one, you know, the reality where the nuEnterprise is able to catch up with Nero before he destroys Earth despite the Narada having had a good couple hours headstart, and where undisciplined punks get shot straight from cadet to captain of the Federation flagship. Yes, I'm well aware that past Trek has had its share of oddities, but they were generally far easier to reconcile than the supreme oddness of Abrams' movie.
When Diane Duane wrote her Rihannsu novels in the 1980s, her depiction of the Romulan homeworlds and Earth-Romulan history was radically different from how the later TV shows and movies would depict them, yet she still carried on writing her saga even after Nemesis and ENTERPRISE totally contradicted her work - in other words, she just ignored it.
When Diane Duane wrote her Rihannsu novels in the 1980s, her depiction of the Romulan homeworlds and Earth-Romulan history was radically different from how the later TV shows and movies would depict them, yet she still carried on writing her saga even after Nemesis and ENTERPRISE totally contradicted her work - in other words, she just ignored it.
FWIW, I actually liked STV. It's silly fun in a TV-movie kind of way. And how is the Enterprise reaching the center of the galaxy any different to the NX01 reaching the Klingon world in a day or two, the nuEnt reaching Vulcan in 60 seconds or the rest? Star Trek ships move at the speed of plot, always have, always will.
Remember that the galaxy is 3-dimensional. We may be something like 20,000 light-years from the outer perimeter of the disk, but the disk itself is only a couple of thousand light-years thick at most. So the nearest edge of the galaxy is less than a thousand light-years away if you go perpendicular to the plane of the disk. It's nowhere near as distant as the galactic core.
Oh, hardly. We're just more accustomed to turning a blind eye to them. How do you reconcile how Omega IV could have written the Constitution of the United States and the post-1954 version of the US Pledge of Allegiance thousands of years in the past? Or how Planet 892-IV could not only have a duplicate of the Roman Empire, but actually speak and write 20th-century American English (as a plot point specifically called out in the story)? Or how Miri's planet could be an exact duplicate of Earth? Or how Dr. McCoy could be incapable of recognizing the difference between blindness and a closed nictitating membrane, or how he and Spock could forget that ultraviolet light is part of the EM spectrum? Or how Khan's people on Ceti Alpha V could be twentysomethings after being stranded as adults 15 years earlier? Or how they changed from multiethnic to all-white? Yes, the Abrams movie has its plot holes, but they're nothing compared to the absurdities we've been forgiving in TOS for decades.
The two problems you call out are hardly even the worst problems with the film. One ship catching up to another is easy enough to reconcile; it's likely that once Kirk officially took command, he instituted the proposals he made earlier about working to increase the engines' warp yield, and even so, Nero did reach his destination significantly before the Enterprise got there. Recall that it took hours at least for the Narada to drill to Vulcan's core. So what you're pointing out isn't actually a discrepancy at all.
As for the rapid promotion, I don't think that's any more unrealistic than the portrayal of the same command crew being assigned together to the same ship for nearly 30 years running. Or having a command crew consisting of three captains and four commanders on the same ship, as we saw at the end of TVH and in TFF. That's totally preposterous. But we're used to it. We've learned to live with it.
That's not correct. Once the later TV shows took the Romulans in their own direction, there were no more Duane Rihannsu books for a very long time. But then editor John Ordover decided to revive the series with a disclaimer specifically stating that it represented an alternative view of Trek continuity, one that was now known to be "unreal" but was still well-loved and worth continuing because of its literary value. The sort of thing that in comics would be called an "imaginary story."
And yet despite that, the latter-day Rihannsu volumes do include references to ideas from TNG-era Trek, so it's certainly not true that Duane "ignored" what came later.
And she kinda re-wrote what blatantly contradicted later stuff in the omnibus....
What is it with this thread and discussions going off topic all the time?
Nice little tidbit from STO: Worf eventually married Grilka.
Nice little tidbit from STO: Worf eventually married Grilka.
To a certain extent. There was some big timing stuff that was ignored like the crew still wearing red/yellow/blue in the movie era in the updated My Enemy, My Ally.
I've always wondered if that was the case, but I've never seen it confirmed anywhere. Can you remember where you got that tidbit?
Nice little tidbit from STO: Worf eventually married Grilka.
And fathers a son with her.
To a certain extent. There was some big timing stuff that was ignored like the crew still wearing red/yellow/blue in the movie era in the updated My Enemy, My Ally.
Yes...but the book is set after TMP, but before TWOK. While the colors of the uniforms in that era were, indeed, more "pale-pastel" than "bold-color", they were still Yellow(ish), Blue(ish), and Red (armor).
Well, eventually. But during the reign of Richard Arnold overseering the ST tie-ins, there was no continuation of her ongoing saga. She wasn't ignoring TNG because she wasn't writing more of the saga at the time.
When Duane finally did get contracted to do another two volumes, her conclusion was running very late and so her one completed manuscript was hastily split into two parts to fill the otherwise-vacant slot. Books 3 and 4 even came with an editor's note, IIRC, pointing out that these novels were tie-ins to TOS but not necessarily the way that TNG prortrayed Romulans.
Actually, the point of Book 5, "The Empty Chair" (2006), was to reconcile some of the aspects to what had occurred in the 24th century canon with Romulans. The physical depiction of Remus in "Nemesis" (2002) is the only snag.
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Richard Arnold annual slide presentation at Conquest, Brisbane - but i did see it mentioned in an interview with the SPFX guys after that.
You need to watch the movie again. The Enterprise's journey from Earth to Vulcan couldn't have taken more than a few hours, two at the most (In order to make this work, we have to assume that there's some kind of transwarp conduit between the Sol and Vulcan systems allowing for quicker travel). So logically, the Narada's journey to Earth would have taken the same amount of time. But then Spock has Kirk ejected onto Delta Vega and warps off to the Laurentian system; Kirk then wanders around Delta Vega for a while before running into Spock Prime who takes the time to tell him why he's there; then they travel to the Federation outpost to meet Scotty; Kirk and Scotty then beam onto the Enterprise which is quite a way from Delta Vega by this point. It's only then that Kirk orders them to reverse course and go after Nero. So now they have to go back the same distance they've just come, which will most likely cover a few hours, and then it will take another few hours for them to reach the Sol system. When the Federation fleet set off for Vulcan, Nero couldn't have been there much more than half an hour or so, and when the fleet arrived Vulcan was already in pretty dire straits from Nero's drilling. Logically, then, the Enterprise should not have gotten back in time to save Earth. There's simply no getting around this.
Yes there is. Nero doesn't have access to Federation maps of the transwarp conduits in this timeline.
But then Nero's journey would take days, and Enterprise could go through the transwarp conduit in time to warn Earth in hours.
Or... the storyline could have ended with Earth destroyed as well.
What happened happened. Adding a lengthy scientifically accurate explanation might please you, but would risk boring the general audiences who flocked to see this movie. Are we not capable of adding our own technobabble explanations, as we did in the days of the regular "The Best of Trek" article series, "Star Trek Mysteries... Solved!"?
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