Elements of TOS which contradict later series

It was an essay in About Time.

 

And at the time, I also thought it was so awesome and forward-thinking that the Enterprise-A had this advanced engine room just like the one that would be on the Enterprise-D decades later.

Kor

 

Oh please - they stopped caring at TNG when GR went on a retcon rampage to try and erase TOS (which he had sold to Paramount and thus had no further royalty or merchandising stake in). Hell, you should have seen his original concept for 'New Trek' and TNG which involved a Generation ship that had long left the Milkyway Galaxy behind and would even have zero mention of any previous Star trek races like Vulcans, Klingon, Romulans, etc.
^^^
He had to be talked back from that big time; and ultimately was, but it didn't stop him from trying to dump everything previous to the new TNG series into the dumpster.

 

The thing to start with is to remember that this is a TV series (or several). Each one had a writers bible to go by. If you look at that it answers a lot of these issues. A lot of times in Television (and the further back you go the worse it is) they ignore the bible to tell a good tale. The writer's bible for TOS established a lot of parameters that a lot of episodes broke. When you compare the writers bibles there aren't a lot of differences. In most cases the issues stem from straying from the writer's bible. And for TOS, TMOST is like a writer's bible on steroids. And for a lot of these things, TNG, DS9, and VOY basically had the same writer's bible.

I don't find the Klingons change at all from Kor to Worf. What I do find is that the government goals of the Empire have changed. And when you look at human history, that is something that frequently changes. And as someone else pointed out earlier, the Romulans in TOS were about as honorable as Harry Mudd. All the TOS Romulan stories had the Romulans given over to passion and their society was full of Roman style intrigue (and if you study much about that it includes poisonings and other forms of assassination and a lot of political games).

As someone who knew TOS backward and forward before TNG, I never saw anything about how the 24th century played out that contradicted how the 23rd century played out. And I didn't really see anything in Enterprise other than a series that was setting up where TOS would be so I see the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th century treks to be relatively consistent on most things. One of the great truths of reality is that things change so having some things change over that 200 year span does not break continuity. TOS broke its own continuity greater than that.

 

Ironically, Shatner and Doohan later reprised their roles in a UK commerical, using that engine room set, but the makers of the commercial moved a few things around and made it look sufficiently different while obviously still kinda recognisable.

 

Right. The problem with calling a writers' guide a "bible" is that it implies it's supposed to be followed strictly, but nothing is further from the truth. It's just meant to give freelancers (or potential new staffers, these days) a broad overview of the concepts and characters of the show so they know what they're working with. It's meant to prompt creativity, not restrict it. Anything it says that hasn't been onscreen is just a suggestion, something that can be used if it inspires a new writer to come up with a good story idea, but that can be ignored if they come up with something better.

Not really, since it's for the general public. But it does quote a lot from the bible.

 

Roddenberry was always moving forward with his creations. When TMP came out, TOS was retconned in-universe as a television producer's interpretation of Kirk's "real" missions (as per the novelisation penned by Gene himself). When TNG came out he planted his flag there, insisting it was his "true" vision of the future as everything before had had too much studio interference.

 

I'd say, rather, that the novel offered that as a conceit for the sake of Roddenberry's introduction. It's only mentioned in the prefaces rather than the body of the story, so it's not really "in-universe." Sometimes a narrative conceit is just that, a stylistic choice for how the story is narrated. Like, Sunset Boulevard is narrated by a dead man, but we're not supposed to believe we're literally watching a ghost story -- it's just a stylistic conceit for presenting the narration in an interesting way.

But yes, Roddenberry did refine his ideas for how best to present the story called Star Trek when he got the chance to go back to it. Each time, he tried to do it better, to get closer to how he envisioned it and distance himself from the compromises and flaws of its earlier iterations.

 

A show bible is just another name for a Writer's Guide, and is meant to be a guideline, not a list of edicts etched into stone by some burning bush.

 

Yes I've always felt that the writers and producers of the later Treks were embarrassed with TOS and wanted to forget about it and brush it under the carpet! But I thought that was Rick Berman's own initiative and not Gene Roddenberry's!!!
JB

 

Not quite TOS, but TAS (and now Discovery) have holographic tech in the 23rd century at least visually on-par with the 24th, yet Riker in "Encounter at Farpoint" and others are amazed at it's existence in early TNG.

 

Yeah, like I said. Except you said it better

The only thing I will add is that what he envisioned as "Star Trek" in 1987 was not the same as in 1964, with his thoughts having been moulded by years of college lecture tours espousing the "Roddenberry philosophy". He was changing his "ultimate vision" as he went along. So, even if he had been given unrestricted freedom to produce "Star Trek" in 1964 exactly how he wished, it wouldn't have resembled what he finally developed in 1987 which is when he arguably had the most creative freedom of all.

 

That continuity error was compounded in Voyager, when Captain Janeway -- a member of the same Academy class as Will Riker -- said she'd played Flotter & Trevis holoprograms as a child.

Anyway, I've always chosen to interpret Riker's amazement not at the technology itself, but at its inclusion on a Starfleet vessel rather than a ground facility. It'd be like getting assigned to an aircraft carrier and discovering it had an amusement park inside it.

Also, the two different kinds of holography we've seen in the 23rd century both fall short of the holodeck version, as I mentioned recently in another thread. Discovery-era holograms are translucent and intangible, able to simulate living beings visually but not to the touch. As for "The Practical Joker" rec room's holograms, I've rethought what I said before; they seemed to be lifelike and tangible, but it's hard to say for sure. Since we only saw a hand-painted representation of them, we don't know how photorealistic they would've been in-story. And we don't know if they were tangible either. The only physical interaction we saw McCoy, Sulu, and Uhura have with the rec room was falling into the pit and climbing out again. That pit might have been an actual physical recess in the floor; maybe the floor was designed to be configurable to represent different terrains, with the holograms merely a surface facade projected on top of them. On the other hand, Sulu's first suggestion was a swim at the beach, suggesting that the holographic ocean was more than just an image. (Also, where would they have gotten swimsuits? Or was Sulu planning on skinny-dipping?)

Yes, of course. That's another reason you can't expect any long-running work of fiction to be perfectly consistent. It's the creation of human beings, and human beings change and grow (or regress) over time. Many of us would hardly recognize our younger selves if we met them. An ongoing series is a living thing too, and so it also evolves over time.

I'll disagree about your last clause, though. Roddenberry didn't have unfettered creative freedom on TNG; indeed, he was talked down from a great many things he wanted to do (as Noname Given said in post #63) and talked into a lot of things he was reluctant to do (like casting Patrick Stewart and having a regular Klingon character). The series where Roddenberry did have absolute, unfettered creative freedom was TAS. I read a while back that part of the deal that convinced him to make the animated show was that he'd be given total creative control without being answerable to network notes -- a level of freedom unmatched by just about any other TV show until The Simpsons. But what he wanted to do at the time was just more of what he'd done on TOS, albeit with more freedom to depict exotic aliens and fantastic settings and situations. Also, rather than taking full advantage of that absolute creative freedom, he just handed the responsiblity off to D.C. Fontana, though he still had final approval over the choices she and Filmation made. Which made it a real jerk move later in life when he started saying that TAS wasn't "real Trek" as he envisioned it. His younger self had been smart enough to delegate and trust others; by TNG, he'd bought too much into his own hype, that he was this great visionary whose ideas were superior to everyone else's.

 

Thing is that Romulans only appear in two episodes of TOS (Balance of Terror and The Enterprise Incident (and are mentioned in The Deadly Years but with no Rom characters on-screen, IIRC). Are two on-screen appearances of Romulans really enough to get a full/valid sense of what these guys are about? Don't think so.
(And there are only seven appearances, IIRC, of Klingons in TOS so we get a somewhat broader depiction of them)

 

Well I did say "the most freedom" (comparatively) rather than unfettered but I had completely forgotten about the TAS situation - probably because GR farmed it out to to DCF!
So, TAS is 100% Gene's vision made real, eh? Take that, canon police!

 

On the broader topic of continuity errors, former Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat once wrote a great short story featuring Sylvester McCoy's incarnation of the Time Lord, explicitly titled "Continuity Errors", in which our hero uses his time travel abilities to gradually and subtlely rewrite events to go in his favour. The title comes from the story relying on the conceit that it continually contradicts itself and it's characters as it unfolds, and perhaps a reader won't notice until a second read through exactly what is going on. It's one of my favourite pieces of official Who fiction, as well as being a hilarious use of continuity errors themselves as a fictional construct.

 

By the way, I just finished reading "Star Trek: The Official Guide To the Animated Series". I loved it. Especially the artwork, background interviews and interesting tidbits on every episode. Highly recommended. I'm quickly becoming a TAS canon fan...(with limitations.)

 

That was Moffat's first professional Doctor Who work, and it inspired elements of two later Moffat stories on the show -- "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" (the planet-sized library) and "A Christmas Carol" (the Doctor altering an antagonistic person's past to make them happier and more receptive to helping him).

Every Trek series has "limitations" in how thoroughly it fits into later continuity, as I pointed out in my quoted comments in that book. But no sequel series is more of a direct, authentic continuation of TOS than the animated show was. I'm very happy this book exists, and I hope it furthers the rehabilitation of TAS's reputation.

 

...but they were the face--or most important Romulans placed on the front lines to either test the enemy against their new weapon, or assert their territorial authority. Between the two on-screen appearances, we see a mix of character similar to mankind: some honor, some resentment, some treachery, ambition and regret. Those two episodes went a long way in painting a strong picture of who the species were compared to the heroes, and it was a powerful springboard for others (whether in novels or comics in the two decades after TOS' last Romulan episode aired) to add to their story, but it was not a blank slate by any means.

After more than a half century of the franchise, its says much that the commander from "Balance of Terror" is still one of the central faces/portrayals of what a Romulan should be.

 

They're solid and look perfect when in "mirror" mode and also when Lorca and Tyler were in the simulated Klingon ship environment.

So while you can suggest the AI wasn't up to TNG standards because we don't see any holograms talk or act, or maybe they weren't solid (although there is evidence they are, it's possible that's unintentional), visually the quality is indistinguishable from TNG era unless it's a communication.