Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Pike series and novel continuity

Never understood this continuity thing with the novels. Just let them be their own thing.

 

A sensible strategy -- though I certainly hope that if SNW features the Tholians, it'll only be a one-off adventure that doesn't invalidate VAN!

 

That's what original fiction is for. The whole purpose of tie-ins is to tie in -- to be an extension of the original work, to support and reflect it. A tie-in author is a hired contractor working on behalf of their employer, which is fundamentally different from being your own boss. They're the lead singer, we're the backup band. The backup singers don't do their own thing. Following someone else's lead is the whole point of the job.

So if you want fiction that's free to do whatever it wants, there's a vast universe of original science fiction and fantasy prose works out there. TV/movie SF, its tie-ins included, is just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm starting to wish they would come out and say it's a different timeline. It would avoid so many continuity headaches, and more importantly, it would give them a lot more storytelling freedom.

Indeed, a little conspiratorial voice inside my head has wondered if maybe the purpose of the time-travel story in Picard this season is meant to set up a rewritten timeline for SNW, sort of like Crisis on Infinite Earths in the Arrowverse. But that seems unlikely, given all the other ongoing series.

 

Wasn't that remark already toast by way of having him meld with the Red Angel, who turned out to be Gabrielle Burnham?

 

2259 according to the info cards for the Uniforms on display on the Star Trek Cruise.

 

Of course, as you yourself have often noted, every Star Trek series has had continuity inconsistencies and ultimately making it all into a coherent single setting will always involve some squinting and fudging of details. But who knows? The idea of a multiverse has gotten pretty popular these days; I could plausibly see them doing a "time has wobbled a little bit and so some smaller details might be retoactively changed by time travel shenanigans" plot device to rationalize away changes they want to make. (Doesn't mean they will do that of course -- just that it doesn't seem implausible.)

 

Hm, well, then Chapel being there is a continuity problem too.

At this point, I wonder if maybe we should just start thinking of TOS as the inaccurate approximation, like how Roddenberry explained the TMP Klingons.

True enough. And really, TOS actually had unusually strong continuity for a TV show of its era. Many other series played merry hell with their own continuity, reinventing it as they went.

They probably won't, but of course there are more important considerations than continuity nitpicking. The advantage of not being a prequel is that you're not constrained in what stories you can tell or how you can develop the characters. That's why Kelvin was an alternate timeline instead of a straight prequel. Although Kelvin was still constrained by not being a wholesale reboot, since they couldn't do things like change the gender or ethnicity of the core characters or reinvent the backstory of the universe.

I often feel that Trek is more hurt than helped by the determination to treat everything as a single reality. Lots of fictional franchises have multiple separate realities, like Sherlock Holmes or Batman or the Transformers or whatever. So they don't have to be beholden to the continuity or the flaws of past incarnations and can have a clean slate to reinvent the universe and the characters as they wish -- keeping the recognizable essentials but reimagining and updating the specifics.

 

Maybe we always should have. In his long-ago interview with Tim Lynch, Richard Arnold was pretty explicit that Roddenberry saw the original series as only sorta canon with respect to NextGen (and the films only in parts). In other words, something like the original series happened in the 23rd-century, but not exactly the way we saw it.

 

One thing I really can't wait to see is how this show informs future TOS novels. Like Chapel and Uhura's in-jokes about stuff before Kirk's time. Joking! But really just how the fleshing out of these characters here informs how they'll be portrayed in future TOS novels should be fascinating.

 

I sometimes wonder how different Trek would be if Roddenberry's health had been better and he'd remained in control of TNG. He probably would've made it more explicitly distinct from TOS's continuity, as opposed to later producers who were TOS fans and brought in more direct ties. So later revivals might have followed suit and rebooted yet again, so we might now have multiple distinct Trek continuities, instead of various often-contradictory interpretations pretending they all fit together as a single reality.

 

I'd agree with that.

Anyway, since we already have a multiverse established on-screen, we can assume that somewhere in all of that, there's a version of what we call the "Novelverse" where the events of Coda never came to pass.

I certainly intend to operate under that assumption, whatever happens next.

 

Maybe she got demoted for trying to roofie Spock with Mudd's love potion...

 

Chapel was a lieutenant in TOS too. The only female Starfleet officer in all of TOS who was above lieutenant's rank was Anne Mulhall in "Return to Tomorrow." (And yes, even Number One was a lieutenant in "The Cage," though the ranks seemed to be defined differently then.)

 

What I meant was that she certainly wasn't a commander in TOS, because no woman in TOS except Anne Mulhall was higher than lieutenant's rank. I just assumed she was a lieutenant, but I checked a few screencaps, and it looks like her sleeves were stripeless, which leaves it ambiguous, since medical tunics don't always have rank insignias (like McCoy's short-sleeved tunic). I guess that's what Alpha is going by. So I think Alpha is extrapolating a bit beyond the evidence.

 

The newest trailer has Pike saying "the whole future hangs in the balance," which made me vaguely wonder if maybe they are going to establish the timeline diverging from TOS because of Pike's future knowledge or by something that happens in the show. I'm probably reaching, though.