One thing I noted a few years back with CBS-Trek was that most characters played by actors of Asian heritage were getting completely Western names including their surnames: Georgiou, Landry, Rhys, Tyler. And now we have this again with Kyle. What's the deal here? The one exception seems to be the SNW character with that weird Roddenberryan construct "Noonien-Singh." Kor
Very true. That said, the only reason they use the names Star Trek, Uhura and Enterprise, and say that the shows ARE in the same continuity (when they're clearly not) is to get more people to watch the show. If they had to start without a built-in audience then the current level of talent behind the scenes would be screwed. I just accept that they're only faintly related to the real show and hope they can manage (this time) to tell a good story with interesting characters. If Uhura turns out to be someone like Uhura, then that's a score for us.
I think it is clear that this new Uhura isn’t the same as the original. The original clearly wasn’t a linguistic phenom in the vein of this version. See: Star Trek VI.
That's true but it does feel like a natural retcon and not something that feels forced like saying Burnham is a sister to Spock.
Agreed, and bad choice of phrasing on my part. What I should have said is something more like "Make it believable that whatever original characters we see have a clear and reasonable path to becoming the characters we saw in TOS." Mind you, they won't do that.
I recall reading a while back that the Chinese are requiring a huge chunk of their citizens who routinely interact with Westerners to go by Western names. This fits with my experience working in Saudi Arabia, where the company I was working for had partnered with China. This consequently led to a large number of Chinese nationals on the camp. One young lady's name was Rua (roughly transcribed), and most Westerners there found it difficult to pronounce properly, so for our purposes she was "Sandy".
Hate to tell you this but yes they are. That was the whole point of the ending, that everything was cyclic. I eat the audience can infer that far off in the universe there were survivors of 12 planets who were looking for members of their race who had migrated to Earth. Doesn't matter if it happened before or after the events depicted in Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica; the universe is such that one cycle of this story will be as depicted in BSG1978.
Personally I don't care too much about continuity. Star Trek has always played fast and loose with such things. I'll do what I did for Enterprise, Discovery and the Kelvin timeline movies. Watch and enjoy it now, worry about where it fits into the bigger picture later.
They should only do so if they're honest. If they're dishonest, they can go in any direction they please.
Sorry, honesty or dishonesty has nothing to do with this. And trying to assert some moral high ground in matters of differing taste with respect to pop culture is a non- starter. They're making a television series half a century after the series it's based on. The two will not match. Any expectation to the contrary is not reasonable, and in fact is foolish. Most people recognize this.
The sliver of fans who demand extreme fidelity to TOS can't carry the subscription load for the streaming service. This isn't clear to everyone?
It is not. It is a facet of fandom that there is a bigger base than actually is there. Also, that the real world rules don't apply to said favorite franchise, i.e budget limits, time constraints, etc.
They couldn't carry the Gizmoplex streaming app. Half a century. That's amazing in all kinds of ways, and I don't think fans often appreciate how much so. BTW, take a look at an Iron Man or Avengers comic - or even X-Men - comic from the early 1960s (slightly before Star Trek) and compare them to the MCU. Different mediums? Well, 1960s network television and television today are very different mediums. The production tools are very different, although production itself may be the aspect that's most unchanged. The supporting technology is completely different. The means of delivery, the business model(s), and the ways in which people pay for the product have all changed almost entirely. The story formats have consequently changed considerably. The values and size of the audience has changed, and so on and so on. Not "somewhat" - in most significant areas, the changes have been drastic and almost complete. Including the output devices you consume it on. Oh, you want this to look and sound like that? Nope.
I'm one of the people who's keen on them to make this match up to TOS as much as they can, and... they have in a lot of ways. The props all look like they could be earlier versions of the TOS props, the uniforms could be an earlier version, even the bridge would greatly resemble the original TOS bridge if they took all the Tron lighting out of it. All I really want is for it to be plausible that this could lead into TOS, without obvious contradictions, and I don't think that's an impossible dream because they've already come close to pulling it off.
Except that it's going to lead into a new version of Kirk and Spock aboard the Enterprise, not the TOS version. And that new version will not match the show produced in the 1960s, either.