100 AU from Earth
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
Considering how dark and grainy all the effects are on this show, they should have already been doing that anyway.
But... Pegg didn't write the first JJVerse movie...
He wrote the third. Ergo retcon.
Suddenly many UI artists feared for their safety
For the Great Bird's sake, I'm not planning on a photon torpedo barrage!
I'd be grateful if they re-read ST: Star Charts and paid closer attention to some of the detail work, though. Like the explanation of sectors and the quadrant/sector grid stuff...oh, and if they'd also visit whitten.org?
The official canon was the live action movies and TV shows the last time I heard. The official canon includes only the Star Trek productions, not what the creators say about the Star Trek productions. What the creators say about Discovery tells us what they want it to be. What it will be depends on what they have made it and what they will make it in the future. If they make a Discovery series that can fit into the Prime timeline then we can accept their statement that it is in the Prime timeline. If the creators create a Discovery series that can NOT fit into the Prime timeline then we MUST accept that it is in an alternate universe.
Star Trek: Discovery may be canon, but Fateor didn't say it was not canon. Instead Fateor claimed that it is in an alternate universe to the Prime timeline. If Star Trek: Discovery can fit in the Prime timeline, we can accept that the creators succeeded in their intention to fit it into the Prime timeline. If there is no possible way for Star Trek: Discovery to fit in the Prime timeline, the failure of the creators to fit it into the Prime timeline is total and their intention to fit in it is irrelevant.
Time and many plot developments will tell if Star Trek: Discovery is or is not in the Prime timeline, not the intentions of the creators. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the road to storytelling failure is paved with good storytelling intentions.
Pretend all you want, but it's still the Prime timeline. I'm not sure why a vocal minority have such an issue with this. The designs changed, nothing else. We're even getting direct references to Archer and the NX-01, what more do you need? Other than a return to fifty year old sets and costumes?
It's rather telling that the one time the writers did not want their creation to be the Prime Universe at all, they went to extraordinary lengths to explicate that this is the case - a quarter of an otherwise straightforward action movie is dedicated to things like time travel theory, predestination and fate, and the existence of two different Lives and Times of James T. Kirk.
Everywhere else, Trek writing has either stayed neutral on the issue, or taken steps to ensure that everything ties into one unified whole. Much of this is specific to scifi, because any other type of writing would carry the assumption that the World is the World rather than a series of conflicting continuums. A cop show doesn't try and distance itself from other cop shows: even in the absence of actual crossovers The Wire doesn't try to actively pretend that it exists in a different universe than Shield, because there really is just this one World. Not so in Trek - so the writers actively compensate, writing those otherwise extraneous references to other bits of Trek.
This also is the opposite of assuming that in the absence of explication, things are as they "ought" to be. The Klingon Empire has no Emperor. Spock's "ancestors" are revealed to be his Mom and Dad. Assumed truths (even those assumed by previous writers) don't hold unless nailed down in onscreen writing. So yes, there can be a war nobody mentions, and a planet nobody mentions, until somebody does. It's just a matter of degrees whether this is realistic - and for these two examples, I don't see showstoppers. Nobody ever said Sol doesn't have fifty planets, nobody claimed SB1 isn't at Sol, nobody claimed SB1 orbits Earth. But we can argue degrees. And will.
Timo Saloniemi
Everywhere else, Trek writing has either stayed neutral on the issue, or taken steps to ensure that everything ties into one unified whole. Much of this is specific to scifi, because any other type of writing would carry the assumption that the World is the World rather than a series of conflicting continuums. A cop show doesn't try and distance itself from other cop shows: even in the absence of actual crossovers The Wire doesn't try to actively pretend that it exists in a different universe than Shield, because there really is just this one World. Not so in Trek - so the writers actively compensate, writing those otherwise extraneous references to other bits of Trek.
This also is the opposite of assuming that in the absence of explication, things are as they "ought" to be. The Klingon Empire has no Emperor. Spock's "ancestors" are revealed to be his Mom and Dad. Assumed truths (even those assumed by previous writers) don't hold unless nailed down in onscreen writing. So yes, there can be a war nobody mentions, and a planet nobody mentions, until somebody does. It's just a matter of degrees whether this is realistic - and for these two examples, I don't see showstoppers. Nobody ever said Sol doesn't have fifty planets, nobody claimed SB1 isn't at Sol, nobody claimed SB1 orbits Earth. But we can argue degrees. And will.
Timo Saloniemi
Indeed. I was the only one in my HVAC engineering design class in college that knew what an AU was during a discussion of solar angles - our professor didn't even know.
There were fans four decades ago who were convinced that TMP and TWOK couldn't possibly fit into the TOS universe. There were fans three decades ago who were convinced that TNG couldn't possibly fit. And so on. It doesn't matter what an individual fan may believe about what can or can't fit, not just because there will never, ever, ever be anything that all fans agree on, but because the canon is the work of the series' creators or owners. And canon is not about consistency or continuity. Many canons deliberately contradict or erase parts of themselves, like when Dallas retconned an entire season into a dream in order to reverse a lead character's death.
Fans ascribe the word "canon" with mythic power that it simply doesn't have. It's just a figurative shorthand for the original creators' or owners' work, used as a way to distinguish it from derivative works like tie-ins or fan fiction. What we nickname a "canon" is still simply a story, a work of imagination that people are making up as they go. And as long as it's a work in progress, the people creating it are going to change their minds about certain things from time to time, or decide not to be bound by what their predecessors did, because that's how human creativity works. And the audience has no power over that process, because we're just spectators of someone else's work. We can decide as individuals what we don't want to count, but we can't expect our personal wishes to be binding on anyone else, certainly not the creators.
Heh. Maybe I've just spent too much of my life reading SF and other genre fiction, but I tend to operate on the implicit assumption that every TV series takes place in its own alternate reality (unless there are explicit connections, as for example with All In The Family and The Jeffersons).
I mean, it's clear from the get-go that none of them are taking place in our world — otherwise they'd be documentaries, not fiction — so why not assume they're distinct from one another as well?
Law and Order theoretically takes place in the X Files universe, so anything is possible, but I certainly tend to see fiction which is grounded in reality or near reality being set ostensibly in our world. I think to say "well, Law and Order can't happen in a world where there was a TV show called Law and Order" is taking literalism a little too far. It's a cop show in modern day New York, I don't think we need to invoke a parallel world to suspend disbelief. Plus for some properties, making it not our world robs the narrative of a relevance and a mystery, imho. That there might 'really' be a Stargate programme out there operating in secret is much more interesting to me than "there's a parallel world where they found a Stargate".
Naturally YMMV; I'm not saying anyone else (or the mythical "typical viewer") has to see things this way. I just find it part and parcel of my suspension of disbelief to assume that anything I'm viewing or reading as fiction is at least a fraction of a degree separate from our reality (and from most other fiction as well). It's actually easier for me that way; it helps explain away a lot of things that would otherwise be inexplicable divergences from reality.
(When the heck did Law & Order cross over with X-Files?)
Directly, it didn't, but it did feature John Munch of Homicide: Life on the Street, who later moved to SVU. He's actually the linchpin of a sprawling network of shows which can be linked to the same fictional universe with different degrees of certainty, and from that, to all being part of the dream that is the ending of St Elsewhere.
Detective Munch from L&O also appeared on X-Files and several other shows.
Which, of course, should not be taken too literally. Any discussion of the "reality" of works of fiction is naturally just figurative, and the whole "Tommy Westphall shared universe" thing is largely just a playful exercise. Some of the continuity links are meant seriously (like Munch moving from Homicide to L&O) while others were just Easter eggs and winks to the audience (like Mulder & Scully showing up in The Simpsons).
Then, of course, there's the continuity snarls that happen when two shows are mutually fictional within each other's universes. For instance, Doctor Who has been repeatedly mentioned as a TV show within the soap EastEnders, and EastEnders has been mentioned as a TV show within Doctor Who. And The Simpsons and Futurama have mutually referred to each other as works of fiction, though there was a later Simpsons episode that crossed over with Futurama as if they were mutually real. Which is pretty much the same thing that happened with Batman and The Green Hornet back in the '60s. Before their crossover episode in Batman, both shows had characters watching the other show on TV. Of course, the producers and the networks cared more about cross-promotion and encouraging people to watch the shows than they cared about continuity and consistency.
Like The Simpsons and Futurama, EastEnders and Doctor Who have crossed over, though I don't believe it's canon in either show.
^Dimensions in Time is definitely not canonical. I doubt either canon would wish to claim it.
