The thing to understand about the word "canon" is that it's a noun, not an adjective. The canon, by definition, is the entire body of work from the original creators or owners... The canon is the aggregate of the various fictional works presented by the creators or owners of the property. Individual details within it are going to contradict each other from time to time, but the overall body of work pretends they represent a consistent whole.
Well, yes, it's a noun. The adjectival form is "canonical." Whichever form someone uses in a sentence, though, it carries more meaning than simply saying "what was on screen was on screen" (or "what was published was published"). It's the
implications that make the term such a potent topic of discussion.
Those implications have everything to do with continuity. When CBS says what's been on screen is canonical Star Trek, the implication is that the works on screen can and do fit into a coherent fictional reality. (With, moreover, a subsidiary implication being that derivative works, like say tie-in novels, have more room for deviation, may not fit in as well, and are subject to being disregarded at any time.)
Of course that fictional reality won't be perfect. Even Doyle, who had the significant advantage of being just one author, couldn't make everything dovetail perfectly in 60 stories written across 50 years. It's an ideal condition that can only be approached asymptotically. Still, the intention is clear.
That's why it seemed to me that Nerys Myk's and Awesome Possum's comments were beside the point — saying "it's canon" added nothing helpful to Fateor's comments about whether this latest puzzle piece (i.e., a successful Klingon attack within the solar system) actually
fits into an available space in the larger jigsaw puzzle of canon. That's what prompted my tangent about the use of the term. By way of contrast, other posters like Timo and The Usual Suspect have offered genuinely imaginative (albeit of necessity speculative) possibilities for why and how it could fit.
It's a matter of two different frames of mind. Consider the ur-source of the term "canon," the Bible. It's chock full of contradictions, of course. Trying to tease out those contradictions and figure out (as a theologian) how they might actually make sense together, or (as a textual analyst) how they got that way, is far more interesting than approaching the book as a fundamentalist and insisting that every word in it has to be taken at face value. In Trek terms, saying "it's canon" carries an implication of "get over it," and operates to dismiss further conversation rather than engage in it. I don't understand why people do that.
Looked at granularly, every individual Trek series has major continuity errors and internal contradictions, and there are major inconsistencies among the different series. But we gloss over the discrepancies as best we can, and we usually go with whatever the latest version of the continuity is...
Well, I'd quibble a bit here — I'd say that what prevails when discrepancies arise isn't always or necessarily the most recent version, it's the more dominant version, the one with the preponderance of evidence on its side. (Hence all the consternation about the "reimagined" Klingons in DSC, for instance, who are more recent but are outweighed by far far
far more depictions of significantly different Klingons.)
I'd also say that we (at least most of us) try to
reconcile and
explain discrepancies before we just gloss them over; that's a last resort. But you know this, of course; you've done ingenious work yourself along these lines, as for instance with your explanations in the
DTI books of how Trek's various depictions of time travel can actually fit together into a single coherent understanding of how time works in the Trekverse, a synthesizing effort which certainly required research above and beyond the call.
I've long since given up on Starbase numberings making any kind of sense. Really, any kind of numbers in Trek -- stardates, distances, registry numbers, you name it. The various creators over the decades have coined these numbers based on different assumptions and without any expectation that they'd be parsed to death as thoroughly as Trekkies have done, so you can either drive yourself crazy trying to make sense of all the contradictions or you can just shrug it off and not sweat the details.
Okay, on this I agree with you. If there's one aspect of Trek where I really have no problem just glossing over the details, it's with these kinds of numbers. They're arbitrary to me, and I lose no sleep over them. However, I don't begrudge those people who toil at
trying to find a way to make them work logically.
I've come to realize that Gene Roddenberry himself was fond of the "Doylist" view of canon as opposed to the "Watsonian" view -- that is, he saw Star Trek as a dramatization rather than the real thing, and thus its inconsistencies and logic holes were the result of errors in the dramatic presentation.
...
I find it easier to resolve the inconsistencies in Trek if I take them as differences in interpretation by different dramatizers. Presumably the underlying reality is more consistent, and those details that make the least sense or conflict the most with the whole can be seen as poetic license or error on the part of a given dramatization.
I've seen you say this about Roddenberry on a number of occasions, and I'm not sure why it should be relevant. Certainly we owe GR due respect as the creator of the show, but out of all the Trek out there he was only the primary creative force behind two seasons of TOS, two seasons of TNG, and the first movie. And even in the earliest days, much of it was shaped by Gene Coon and Bob Justman. (Just as Bob Kane may be the "creator" of Batman, but the character wouldn't be a shadow of what he is without Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson.) So however Roddenberry might have preferred to see things, 30 or more years ago, that shouldn't really influence how we choose to interpret canon that is, as you say, an aggregate construct, one that has grown tremendously since then. "Poetic license" still seems to me a last-resort approach when things just can't make sense otherwise.
Somebody really needs to compile a YouTube video showing all the things in TOS that were contradicted by TNG, DS9, or even later episodes of TOS. The idea that Star Trek has ever had tight continuity becomes absolutely ridiculous if you actually sit down and watch it from beginning to end.
Well, obviously it's never had perfect continuity. As I observed, that's a limit condition that's not really achievable. But when you compare it to most TV series, I'd say that it has indeed had
tight continuity, very much so.
Because that's how canon works. Show X does an episode establishing fact Y. At that point fact Y is part of the canon, even if Show W has said something different.
But that "fundamentalist" approach is boring. It asks viewers to turn their brains off, to accept whatever's on screen and not ask awkward questions. What's the point of that?
We've all been discussing an obvious contradiction within this very episode, after all... we were told in dialogue that Starbase One was 100 AU from Earth, yet we were shown the base orbiting an earthlike planet. Clearly both things can't be true. Your approach, however, would simply say "they're both canon" and take it all at face value... which leads to outright absurdities, like for instance posters suggesting that maybe an AU means some different distance in the 23rd century. In a case like this (which is undeniably pretty trivial), it may in fact make the most sense to take a real-world POV and gloss it over by acknowledging "the FX team screwed up"... but the more significant a contradiction, the more interesting and important it is to look for a sensible, non-absurd, in-universe explanation.
