Elements of TOS which contradict later series

I don't think we saw physical interaction there, just shooting.

 

A different universe as I've already said!
JB

 

Any writer for a third season episode or for TAS could have used TMST as a resource. And maybe some did.

Presumably only a few starfleet ships used "holodecks" in the era of Discoery, TOS, & TAs, and Starfleet later discontinued that experiment, deciding it was too dangerous, while it was probably too expensive for widespread civilian use. Thus Riker had no experience with holdecks until boarding one of the new Galaxy class starships.

Perhaps Riker and Janeway came from slightly different social circles in the diverse Federation society and Riker never used holographic entertainment like Janeway did. And Janeway might have used a much more limited projection technology than the Voyager's holodeck to experience similar or identical Flotter & Trevis stories. She might have had an handheld or wearable projector which projected images of characters around her but depicted only a small section of their surroundings and left the rest to her imagination.

Maybe Sulu was planning on skinny-dipping, maybe he expected to wear hologragphic swimsuits, maybe he was planning to swim or wade or surf in their uniforms or underwear. Throughout history people have go to the beach and swimming wearing everything from nothing at all to much heavier clothing than a Starfleet uniform.

 

Not for the third season. Remember, it takes months to write and produce a TV episode. Nearly all the story outlines for TOS's third season were submitted before TMoST came out in September 1968.

And any book can be used as a resource for a writer, but that doesn't make every book a series bible. A series bible is meant for professional writers who want to work on a specific show; it's sort of like an employee handbook for new hires. TMoST was written for the general public as a work of entertainment and to teach about the basics of TV production.

Expensive? It's a post-scarcity society by Riker's time. Everything is free.

 

What I meant by TMOST being a writer's bible on steroids is the contents, not the intended audience. I believe it was the writer's bible for most of the books published over the years. Unlike a normal writer's bible that just lists the details, TMOST goes into the background, more detail, and examples.

But I think you will find that some of the episodes that violate the official writer's guide the most were done by staff writers.

 

Exactly, they can't even keep their own continuity straight.

 

Again, there's nothing to "violate," because it's not a lawbook, it's a palette. It's letting them know what colors they have to paint with. How and whether they use those colors, or mix different ones of their own, is up to them. The purpose of a writers' bible is to encourage people to use their own imagination and creativity, so it's getting it backward to think it's meant to say "You have to do it this way or else."

 

When you read the content of the Star Trek writers Bible oh, it's pretty clear that they're open to do a lot of things. But what I meant is that it provides a clear guide for what the series is supposed to be. I think you'll find that the people who stick to it are the ones from the outside. Look at Harlan Ellison's script for City on the Edge of Forever. Well he didn't really get some aspects of the series, nothing he did violated the writers Bible. The staff writers did an amazing job of molding every story to fit the characters as they were being portrayed. But it is the regulars who wrote the stories (plus the staff writers who edited them) where a lot of these questions arise. They wanted good stories that were true to character and they weren't concerned with the level of continuity for the series that we have come to expect of the later series. They didn't have a fandom to answer to, only the network and ratings.

 

Yes, of course. That's the point, to let freelancers know the basics of the characters and the world so they can tell stories that fit into it and won't get the characters or the ground rules wrong. Naturally the creators of a work are going to be free to change it as much as they want, since it's their creation to begin with, but outsiders will try to follow the creators' lead as much as they can.

There is no "continuity" issue when talking about a series bible, because continuity is about what's on the screen. The writers' guide is not part of the actual show, just a tool used in making the show. The hammers and saws used to build your house are not part of your house. Only the finished product itself actually counts. So continuity is only about what is actually in the aired episodes. Anything in the bible that isn't onscreen is not part of the show's continuity. It's just a suggestion, a possibility, a proposal of something that might potentially be used in continuity at some later point, if some writer wants to use it. So there is no "contradiction" if an episode ends up going in a different direction from the bible. It's just a choice not to go with the initial suggestion.

 

Star Trek 2 was the beginning of the metamorphosis of Trek. The thing that struck me (and I've never gotten over, and never will, because it's so dumb) is that ships now engage in space combat at ranges of less than a mile, at speeds of about 20 miles per hour.

Yes, in TOS, there were some instances of ships shown close to the Enterprise, namely The Enterprise Incident and The Tholian Web, but during space combat, ranges were explicitly (and more plausibly) in the ranges of 10s of thousands of kilometers.

The TOS movies also started the trend of making Trek's tech *worse* than before. Not only did ships have to get within slingshot range to fire, but phasers that once could destroy shielded ships at lunar range now can barely cripple an unshielded ship at frisbee distance.TUC brought back galleys. In first season TNG, The Naked Now, Data is MANUALLY searching the database for references to people showering with their clothes on. Back in TOS, the computer was excellent at collating data almost instantly -- viz. Conscience of the King and Wolf in the Fold.

By the way, Wolf in the Fold does not get enough credit. There, the computer just googles the answer in a way that is utterly prescient. The computer would never be as smart again, even 80 years later.

Luckily, I live 55 years ago, and I get to enjoy TOS fandom all over again with just the original shows and a lot of fan ingenuity!

 

TNG holodeck tech is something beyond. You can have sentient beings in there.

And this is something that never made sense in the show -- if you can carbon copy your most brilliant people with holo tech, why bother to send people out? It makes more sense to have a zillion tiny ships, all crewed by virtual people, rather than the U.S.S. Love Boat with a thousand crew and their families.

Frankly, I also expect a lot more virtual mutinies, a la Practical Joker (and later, Moriarty).

I get that there are a lot of problematic technologies in TOS whose impacts are never fully explored (e.g. time travel, the transporter), but TNG introduced a lot more and fumbled more, too.

I maintain that TOS is a great show with some bad episodes. TNG was a bad show with some great episodes.

 

Hardly. TOS itself underwent a lot of changes, especially in season 1. They didn't even invent the Federation or the Prime Directive until midway through the season; when the show started out, the Enterprise was strictly an Earth ship. They were making it up as they went, so its "metamorphosis" was ongoing.

And of course there were major changes in TMP as well -- the redesigned Klingons, the more diverse Starfleet/Federation, the total transformation of the visual design of Starfleet tech to the style that would persist throughout the 24th-century shows, and most of all, Spock's life-changing epiphany about emotion, leading to the more serene, self-assured personality that would define Spock's character all the way through Into Darkness.

Sometimes in TNG, ships were stated in dialogue to be thousands of kilometers apart while the FX shots showed them in naked-eye proximity. I feel that FX shots are not meant to be taken literally, but are just stylized representations for the audience's benefit, so that we can understand what's going on. Realistic depictions would be incomprehensible because they'd be just distant points of light whizzing past too fast to see.

 

No question, but synoptically, 1st Season TOS doesn't feel wholly different from 3rd Season TOS.

TMP takes place in TOS' future. Differences are expected and cool. The redesigned Klingons were a shock, but they also weren't on screen for very long. Spock's Kohlinar is a new (to the audience) concept, but not inconsistent with TOS.

Beg to differ. That's just lazy writing. And assumes the audience is stupid.

 

Even as a kid, I was frustrated that the battle scenes in original TOS were "lacking", usually only light blips on the view screen. Like the original (not R) TOS battle scenes in Balance of Terror, Journey to Babel, Arena (none shown but discussed since there is really nothing to see in space battles), Errand of Mercy, The Changeling, The Deadly Years, Obsession, Patterns of Force, The Ultimate Computer, and the rest...

The Doomsday Machine could be the odd man out, but it was miles long so showing it in the same FX shots could be okay. In the Constellation death dive, Sulu counts down (of course) the distances: 2,000 miles (not kilometers?), 1,500 miles, 1,000 miles, and 500 miles, while the ship and the head view of the DM are seen on the same shots. Even at 500 miles, the DM should have been a dot.

 

That's the point. A work of fiction doesn't have to be 100% consistent to feel like a continuous whole. Any human creation is a process of trial and error and refinement; every human achievement has a learning curve. Modern fandom is too inflexible about these things.

Huh? It's not writing at all. It's visual. And there's nothing stupid about dramatic license for the sake of a story. The reason for doing something in a work of creativity is not just about whether the audience can understand it, but about whether it's entertaining and appealing. A space battle where you never actually see the ships interact and need everything explained in dialogue might be comprehensible, but it's not as interesting to look at -- or as interesting to create if you're a VFX artist.

 

That's not something that was either evident or under discussion in "Encounter at Farpoint," when Riker, Data, and Wesley were collectively having their golly-gee-isn't-the-holodeck-so-amazing moment. It was all about how amazing the scenery and the simulation of extra space were, how the tech similar to the transporters was being used to make the material objects happen, etc.

 

It's absolutely writing.

The dialogue, the tension on the actors' faces, the dramatic pacing, the use of computer displays, these can all communicate the same thing more realistically, and they are, by and large subsumed under "writing", informed in and by the screenplay.

Good writing makes up for what you can't see. The dominance of gee whiz VFX has dumbed down our writing. Assumed that our audience is too dumb to understanding things like distance, computer targeting, automatic weaponry.

Das Boot is not made boring because you don't see CG destroyers whizzing two feet above the U Boat.

One can argue that TOS has these issues abounding, and I won't argue its flaws. I'll simply say that, for it's time, it's a quantum leap better than anything else that existed (I know -- I live back there!) and later Treks should have been an opportunity to refine the art rather than go for cheap thrills. JJTrek is the pinnacle of the devolution, the lowest common denominator.

(I'm not just here to bitch, by the way -- The Expanse is the newest TV SF there is, and their depiction of the universe is better than anything I've ever seen. It's also a great show teamed by wonderful people. "Best SF on TV since TOS", I say. And yes, they take some dramatic licenses. Only Firefly had the spoons to have soundlessness in space, for instance, but on the whole, it's orders of magnitude smarter than where Trek has been the last few decades.)

 

That's fair.

 

Fandom has not changed.

That said, while you are correct that 100% consistency is not required, there is some percentage of consistency below which it no longer feels like the same universe. That level is different for different people, but it's not a completely arbitrary number. The first Trek movies rewrote the universe, took liberties with the characters, and in general took the franchise in a lesser direction. But it's the JJ movies that really threw everything out the window.

What made TNG not work as Trek was not just its inconsistency with TOS but its frequent inconsistency with itself. That's why it was kind of a lousy show taken as a whole, but individual episodes would be triumphs of writing/direction/acting, etc. It's why First Contact was my favorite movie -- it essentially wasn't a TNG movie.

That last paragraph comprises personal opinion, of course. There are lots of TNG fans. Thankfully, this is the TOS forum.