Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

Or movie-era. There's still plenty of room for unchronicled Enterprise-E adventures set pre-Nemesis.

 

As well as "The Menagerie." Though I'm sure Young Kirk will have his memory of Pike wiped by a Time Crystal, or some damn thing.

 

Of course, "rumor has it" is statistically more likely to mean "somebody just made this up" than "this will actually occur."

 

This will pretty much wipe out all of the pre-Kirk TOS era books, but I'm willing to give them up for the show.
The Pike and Enterprise crew stuff was a highlight of Discovery Season 2, so I'm pretty excited to see them get their own show.

 

I don't think it'll necessarily do anything of the kind. After all, most Pike-era fiction in the tie-ins has clustered around "The Cage," either shortly before or shortly after it, whereas this show will probably take place after DSC season 2, putting it at least 4 years after "The Cage." So any inconsistencies could probably be explained by personnel transfers over the years.

The only Pike tie-in material I know of that contain anything set later than that are a few scattered flashbacks in Legacy, a portion of Burning Dreams (which is probably already out due to DSC's conflicting info about Pike's father), and a couple of scenes in my own The Captain's Oath -- but I was careful to show only Pike and Spock on the Enterprise and avoid specifying any other crew.

 

Bold assumption when the entire premise of DIS is the showrunners making their mark on Spock's family history. There is no way they will be able to resist making their mark on Kirk's early crew history.

 

That is also an assumption. Yours are no better than mine.

Besides, though new shows bend canon, they don't completely ignore it, and "The Menagerie" clearly said that Kirk met Pike only once. So I doubt they'll have him join the crew as a junior officer or something. Besides, Kelvin already did that.

 

It's pretty much been ignored all along that Kirk and Pike are supposed to be the same age.

 

No, because that line was an obvious mistake. That would have made Pike 20 years old in "The Cage," which is absurd. Roddenberry just got confused, because he intended Pike to have been roughly the same age in "The Cage" as Kirk was in season 1, and he forgot that he'd established a 13-year gap between those two periods so that Mendez's line made no sense in context. It's the same kind of mistake as Ron Moore having an admiral in DS9 say the Eugenics Wars were 200 years earlier instead of nearly 400, because he remembered the 200 years line from TWOK and forgot that his show was a century later. Just a dumb mistake that slipped through the editing process.

 

I didn't realize the Pike material was all grouped so closely together.

 

It’s not that surprising, I would think - it’s the rule that licensed tie-ins need to adhere to canon, so, with how little material Pike had until Discovery introduced him, the things that DID feature him would be taking place around the canon portrayal.

 

That doesn't follow. Tie-ins have to stay consistent with canon, but that hardly requires us to limit ourselves to the specifics established in canon. Many novels have filled in unexplored gaps in the timeline or featured book-original crews.

I think it's just that most Pike stories have been isolated, standalone things. Each one is a fresh start, so each one uses "The Cage" as its starting point because that's the one familiar Pike story.

 

I was thinking in terms of characterization - stories set around the same event offer a relatively consistent portrayal. With The Cage featuring this rather significant event for Pike (considering the knowledge that he ends up going to Talos at the end of The Menagerie, so the show portraying it as a defining moment for him), it’s something that portrayals would focus on as a major source of his characterization and development, which makes it the point that portrayals exploring him from that point would want to build off of.

 

Which is entirely separate from the requirement to remain consistent with the facts and events of canon. The line isn't so fanatically micromanaged that we aren't even allowed to evolve the characters from their onscreen portrayals, except in the brief period in the late '80s and early '90s when Richard Arnold was in charge of approvals. If writers choose to stay close to "The Cage" as a touchstone for characterizations, that's because they want to do that, not because the studio compels them to. As long as you don't contradict "The Cage," there is absolutely no requirement to huddle close to it or directly reference it in any way.

 

I see the point that you are making, DGCatAniSiri. Rule or no rule, straying far from an established spatiotemporal setting seems to be more uncommon than not, especially where Pike stories are concerned.

 

I don't think that's so. We've had plenty of TOS novels set in the movie era (though of course nowhere near as many as the 5-year mission), and whole series of TNG, DS9, VGR, and ENT novels stretching years beyond the ends of their series.

And "especially where Pike stories are concerned" is the whole point -- that nearly all Pike stories have huddled close to "The Cage," more so than other books have concentrated around any single point in time. I mean, for all that the Historian's Notes on post-TMP novels always seem obligated to say they take place "shortly after" TMP, the actual in-story evidence often places them years after it -- for instance, The Better Man was meant to be two years after it (though based on the early Chronology that put it in 2271, so that it's now much closer to its revised 2273 date), and Ice Trap is 8 years after Chekov joined the crew, putting it c. 2275. If TMP tie-ins were done the same way as Pike tie-ins, then nearly every one would purport to be the mission immediately after the movie, or would be set shortly before it. There are a few that do that, yes, but in the Pike case, nearly every one does it.

 

I'm actually a bit surprised they stuck so close to The Cage, I would think the writers would take advantage of the freedom they'd get by moving farther away from it.

 

Given the showrunners being more or less the same as Discovery & Picard, I'm not optimistic about the new show.

However, I willll certainly give it a chance.

 

No. Disco's current showrunner is Michelle Paradise, Picard's was Michael Chabon.

 

Eh, the names Michael and Michelle are "more or less the same"