Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

My personal attitude is that the comics were never claimed to be canonical in the first place, and if they're contradicted, that's no different from what's happened to countless other books and comics over the decades.

On the other hand, this episode essentially established that there are many possible branching universes, including more than one variation of the Mirror Universe. So if one were so inclined, one could easily invoke that to reconcile any story one wanted.

 

Wait. You're saying Captain Kirk didn't really visit the Planet of the Apes?

 

Now that I would have liked to see on screen

 

No, but Flint, Tristan Adams, Plasus, and Sarek did. (And Khan, if you count the "present-day" movies.)

 

There's like a year between the christening of the Charon and the events of Succession. Maybe something happened to Airiam inbetween.

 

That's how I see it.

 

Has someone said they were canon? I know people from the show, like Kirsten Beyer, are working more closely with the creators to keep things consistent, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone involved actually use the c-word.

 

Yes, that's my whole point, that nobody ever said they were. So it isn't really a surprise or a huge deal if the show contradicts them, any more than it is with any other tie-in.

 

People keep saying Roberto Orci said 2009 Countdown was canon, but they never look at the full context, the interviewer goaded him into saying that. He said later that it wasn't up to him to decide what is and isn't canon.

 

And even when he did say it was canon in the interview, it's very obvious from the way he said it it wasn't a declaration, given it was "what do you want? Do you want to hear me say the comic is canon? Fine. The comic is canon. Now can we please move on?"

 

Yeah, if you get your subject on a bad day, interviews can go south really damn quick.

It's like that Warrant song "Cherry Pie". A lot of people thought that, based on this one interview, Jani Lane (the lead singer) hated the song and was embarrassed to have written it, but that was when he was in a real foul mood and the interviewer was giving him shit. When things calmed down he laid it all to rest, saying he was happy to have written such a huge hit and wasn't ashamed of it at all.

 

I recall Anthony Hopkins doing an interview years ago in which, having just shot multiple movies back-to-back, he was apparently worn out and badly in need of a break. Somehow this sparked headlines along the lines of "Anthony Hopkins Retires from Movies!" even though it was clear from the actual interview that he was just tired of making movies at that moment.

 

Back a few years ago a reporter for one of the local news stations admitted that they hated having to interview Tom Clancy. Apparently he was just really difficult to deal with.

 

Wishful thinking. The opiate of self-proclaimed experts.

 

While technically a spinoff from Star Trek: Discovery, the new cast-announcement trailer for Strange New Worlds has at least one character who's appeared pretty prominently in the more-recent Litverse books --

Spoiler: SNW Spoilers

Dr. M'Benga:



Fortunately, looking at Memory Beta, it appears that there really isn't that much established about his pre-Vanguard history, although I do wonder if they TV producers would at least be willing to keep his pre-established first name from the books (Jabilo). They did use Number One's name from the Legacies-trilogy onscreen on DSC (and David Mack is rather tight with the production-teams, in terms of input), so who knows.

Also, Vanguard itself is still at least 4-5 years in the future from when SNW seems to be set in the timeline, so there's a fair bit of wiggle room to play with, there.

 

I established in The Captain's Oath and Living Memory that Uhura was on the Enterprise under Pike, and I kept it deliberately vague how long she served there, since I suspected something like this might happen. So her being there doesn't necessarily conflict with my books. M'Benga being on the Enterprise before Vanguard doesn't quite fit the letter of those books, IIRC, so it might take a bit of fudging.

Chapel being in Starfleet already seems hard to reconcile with "What Are Little Girls Made Of?," though, since that episode said she only joined Starfleet after Roger Korby disappeared 5 years before, i.e. 2261. Then again, I suppose it's possible there could be a time jump between DSC season 2 and SNW, given how much more gray Pike seems to have in his hair.

 

I think it's possible that La'an Noonian Singh is a New Human.

Maybe they are descendants of the Augments that survived the Eugenic Wars and WW3 and stayed on Earth.

Maybe a mutation gave them a more stable temper and telepathic skills or they got their emotions in check kinda like the Vulcans and learnt from them a few psionic techniques.

 

It could be simpler than that. It occurs to me that, per “Space Seed,” Khan ruled a quarter of the Earth’s population across much of Asia for at least 4 years. So it could be that many families within his realm adopted his name, like how Vietnamese families have often adopted their emperors’ names as a show of loyalty. Or maybe he had many concubines.

 

That's also possible, but i kinda doubt that. There would be a lot of criticism for naming a character after Khan without any necessarity.

While bringing up the New Humans could be a clever marketing ploy, considering the new release of the TMP Director's Cut and as i mentioned in another thread, both Augments and the New Humans are examples of the same trope (Homo Superior)...

 

As I said, "Space Seed" established that Khan was the ruler of a quarter of the world. Any reign that widespread should plausibly have left some kind of footprint on history and culture, but we've never seen any indication of it in Trek. It would be good worldbuilding if we were shown that it did have some long-term impact, even in something as mundane as naming traditions.