Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

I hope that I'm wrong about what they're doing with one of the characters.

Spoiler: The Vulcan Hello

I hope Voq doesn't turn out to be the Albino.

 

Wouldn't be the first time a Starfleet officer was off by a century about historical events. (See also: Admiral Bennett and the Eugenics Wars.)

 

Spoiler: reply

Honestly, I'm not sure Voq would've survived being the Torchbearer. That beacon's light was as bright as a star, so the act of activating it would probably have been a suicide mission.

"Jim, the Enterprise is twenty years old!" This is why I tend not to take numbers in Trek too literally.


By the way, there was an overt nod to Trek Lit in the episode, though not to the modern novelverse -- the Black Fleet, the Klingon afterlife from The Final Reflection, is now canonically part of Klingon beliefs.

 

I liked it. I can rationalize all the visual discrepancies with previous Trek, though I really wish I didn’t have to. And I assume Desperate Hours will go a long way toward that as well. I can imagine a better Trek show, but there was some really great stuff there. I loved alot of the little easter eggs. Can’t wait til Tuesday!

Was it just me or is there no reason why these episodes couldn’t just as equally validly have been labeled Kelvin Timeline with no contradictions? I would have much preferred them doing that and leaving the Prime Timeline a closed canon.

 

Spoiler: Battle of the Binary Stars

T'Kuvma mentions Donatu V as an occasion where the Klingons failed to properly stick it to the Federation, so it looks like Starfleet just has fairly high standards as to what counts as an "encounter" with a Klingon.

 

I saw that reference and was very excited by it, yet it made me wonder if it had already been brought in by an episode I hadn't seen. Now, knowing that it's something that hasn't cropped up before...what a nifty nod to literary Trek! After all these years, The Final Reflection is still going the distance for inspiring the development of Klingon culture.

 

It was surreal to hear the Black Fleet, from a novel, be canonized. Though I'm also disappointed that Discovery did not canonize the practice of considering a corpse to be immaterial (I want to say KRAD's early 2000s novels established that?) in favor of having mummification and sarcophagi.

 

Might be some legalities involved. Kelvin is Paramount/Bad Robot, Discovery is CBS. Bad Robot doesn't seem to be good at sharing, judging by the lost Kelvinverse movels.

 

Haha, yep, I posted that first message much too soon, as it turns out (right before I started watching the second episode).

That, plus CBS would very likely have had to sign Bad Robot on as both producing-entity and physical production-pipeline for the show if they had gone that particular route, and ceded much greater ancillary legal controls over to them as well (which they first did back in 2007 with the reboot movies).

 

I'm sure fans have been saying that ever since TMP. We've always had to squint a little to fit different versions together.

I assume future episodes will establish that. And as others have said, this doesn't have Paramount or Bad Robot's involvement, so it couldn't feasibly have been Kelvin. They could've created a third continuity if they'd wanted, but Fuller's intention was to fill in a gap in Prime continuity, the same thing we do in the novels.

There was at least one TFR nod in DS9: Martok swore "By the hand of Kahless" in two episodes

TNG: "Heart of Glory" established that, in the same scene that established the "death scream" and opening of a corpse's eyes that we saw here. "It is only an empty shell now. Please treat it as such." But it makes sense that there would be cultural variations in how the faith is practiced.

 

They did. Unless they plan to explain why the old-in-2256 USS Shenzhou can project holograms and forcefields anywhere, yet the state-of-the-art in 2271 USS Voyager only had holographic emitters in sickbay.

I really like what I've seen so far of Discovery, but this goes way beyond "changing the desktop theme" of the Star Trek universe. They've made changes which render future events and limitations in that continuity nonsensical. It's as much a prequel to TOS as Gotham is to Batfleck. You know what's going to happen, but the details - and thus the continuity - is different.

 

Oh, come on. There's an obvious difference between a "hologram" that's just a translucent image projected in midair and a "hologram" that has solidity and can touch and manipulate things like a real person.

And it's no worse than the continuity conflicts that have existed between and within all prior incarnations of Trek. Fans have always had to squint and gloss over the differences of interpretation in order to pretend that these works of fiction created by different people with different ideas could represent a consistent reality. If you want to be that obsessively nitpicky, then you'll have to admit that "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is set in an alternate universe where Kirk has a different middle name, "Mudd's Women" is set an alternate universe where they use lithium instead of dilithium, most of TNG's first season is set in an alternate universe where Data used contractions and showed emotion, etc. Star Trek has never, ever, EVER been an actually consistent reality. We only choose to pretend it is by ignoring or rationalizing the hundreds and hundreds of contradictions it already contains. So either you're willing to suspend disbelief and play along with the pretense that there's a single universe, or you're not and you have to admit that there are countless mutually contradictory versions of Trek already. To claim that previous Trek is completely reconcilable but the newest thing is completely irreconcilable is a self-contradiction. Fandom went through this same crap when Enterprise came along, and I ran out of patience for it then.

 

Look at the links in my sig. I know.

But I genuinely believe this time, it's too much of a change to plausibly reconcile. This is not a knock on the quality of the show - which I love so far - just CBS' bizarre repeated claims that this is the same world where Spock will summon a paper printout report on Talos IV, or that Chief O'Brien will crow about a new holographic communicator on the USS Defiant when apparently they were doing it commonplace long before.

Elsewhere, someone said Discovery is as much the same continuity as TOS as Superman Returns is the same continuity as the old Christopher Reeve-starring Superman movies. I think that's a good comparison. The strokes are broader than ever before.

 

That is what fans have said every single goddamn time a new series or movie comes along, and I am sick to death of hearing it. The newest inconsistencies always seem bigger because we haven't had time to rationalize them away in our minds work. That's not about the shows themselves, it's about human neurology and the way our memories process information, gradually rewriting our memories to fit the narratives we construct and smoothing over the bits that don't fit. It's an illusion and it shouldn't be trusted.

There is no "world." These aren't broadcasts from a parallel universe, they're works of fiction interpreting a conjectural reality. There are differences in the interpretations, but Roddenberry's own view was that the newer interpretations were more accurate than the old ones and should supersede them. If they'd had the knowledge and technology and budget to give the ship holographic displays instead of paper printouts in 1964, then they would have.

I think eventually we're going to have to accept that TOS is the odd one out, the rough draft whose futurism was just too primitive in terms of technology, gender values, etc. Each new version manages to improve on the futurism of previous versions, to be a better approximation.

I'd say it's more like how modern Doctor Who is in the same continuity as the 1960s episodes with their rickety sets and vacuum tubes in the TARDIS.

 

Which for the purposes of this conversation I refer to as the "world" of Star Trek. And it's my belief that Discovery hasn't just changed the look of that world, but how the characters inside it interact with it - which is a step up from previous changes which were mostly aesthetic. Thus rendering it incompatible with previous incarnations and thus not the same continuity.

Again, that's okay. I'm enjoying Discovery just fine as a new take on the Trek universe.

Modern Who has established (admittedly via retcon) that the look of the TARDIS to be entirely fantastical. None of the technology we see has any concrete function, those vacuum tubes change to something entirely different with the change of the "desktop theme". When the Doctor tinkers with a vacuum tube, he's not really tinkering with a vacuum tube but some magical TARDIS technology currently masquerading as a vacuum tube.

 

Though CBS isn't treating it as such.

 

It makes no difference whether you think it's the same continuity, because you don't dictate what happens in future episodes or productions. The producers and the studio decide that. And they intend it to be in the Prime continuity, and all future series and movies and novels and comics from now on will treat it as part of the Prime continuity. Good grief, David Mack just wrote a whole book that reconciles DSC with the Prime continuity as we know it, and apparently even acknowledges the novel continuity along the way. At least give Dave a chance to convince you before you jump to conclusions. Or have you suddenly stopped trusting us novelists to be able to reconcile inconsistencies in Trek canon?

I guess that's why I see it differently from many fans. When I see an inconsistency in Trek, my reaction isn't "OMG this is unprecedented it breaks the universe it's impossible to resolve!" -- it's "Oh, there's one more thing I have to reconcile... Let's see, I guess I could explain it this way or that way or..." What's a dealbreaker for you is just another creative challenge for me. Dealing with this stuff is literally my job.

Yeah, but that's just the point -- that it is possible to invent a rationalization for any discrepancy, no matter how blatant it may seem at first blush. The discrepancies in DSC just seem huger to you because you're on the "before" end of the rationalization process instead of the "after" end. I bet once you read Desperate Hours and see how Dave fits it all together -- or once you've watched to the end of the season and see how it justifies certain things -- you'll feel it fits better than you do right now. Adjustment takes time. Just be patient.

 

^ Yeah, like Christopher says, I'm viewing any seeming inconsistencies in the show as an interesting, even exciting, intellectual exercise, and I'm quite enjoying mulling over what we learned last night in my head while at school today (and I've even in the last couple of hours discussed the premiere in class with a couple of my students who watched it last night, too).

For that same reason, I'm very much impatient now to pick up David's novel tomorrow at the bookstore and snag further insights into the continuity while only two episodes in, etc.

 

Spoiler

Also, despite supposedly there being no contact with the Klingons for a century, Michael's parents were killed in a Klingon attack when she was a child. Fairly certain that would have less than a century earlier.

 

What they actually said was "No one's seen a Klingon in 100 years," so maybe it was like the Romulan War, with ship-to-ship battles and terror attacks but no face-to-face contact or communication.