Alex Kurtzman: 'Star Trek: Discovery' Will Spark Debate And Adhere To Canon
- Thread starter RAMA
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Huh? Continuity in the same episode, yes. Rigid continuity in the same franchise, that starship sailed ages ago at warp factor 20.
How did continuity with TOS and DS9 affect "All Good Things"?
Only 20?
Well someone stuck a gaseous anomaly up the starship tailpipe
"All Good Things" changed Tasha Yar's hairstyle, contradicted what "Legacy" established about Picard and Yar's first meeting, altered the stardate on which Picard took command, used the post-season 1 bridge command chairs and master situations table in engineering, dropped Troi's original accent, and made O'Brien main bridge conn when Colm Meaney's "Farpoint" character was battle bridge conn. Continuity always gives way to the practicality of the story you're telling and the logistics of the production. It's one tool in the kit, not the entire purpose of the exercise.
Besides, this is not a continuation of TNG. It's a new incarnation of Trek for a new generation and era. Like most previous new incarnations, it continues the pretense of being in the same reality, but it's still new.
The props shown so far say otherwise as it's definitely set in the time between "The Cage" and the start of TOS. The time period they set it in VERY MUCH seems to mater to the story considering the TOS era characters involved such as Harry Mudd and Sarek of Vulcan (Spock's father).
Not sure that was his point.
What I mean is that the show will have it's own vibe. TNG and DS9 were different styles of shows even though both are clearly sharing the same, shared universe. Even if they do make us feel like it is Prime Universe show, which is a question mark for me it will still feel different from any other prime universe show.
Jason
Just as they all feel different from each other. It's like I keep saying -- the older differences don't seem as great because we've had years to get used to them and blur them together in our minds as part of a single whole, even though they were actually quite different from each other. The newest iteration always feels more different because we haven't had time to smoosh it into our mental model along with all the rest.
Li
Like Brent Spinner using contractions as Data, we have to accept a few mistakes made by the humans making the shows
But you see, that's where you got it wrong. Some of those visual and conceptual differences between the pilot and the finale of The Next Generation were no mistakes. They were produced knowingly and willingly, because the actual story they wanted to tell was much more important than some minor details from a few years back.
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The contractions thing never even made sense. Do you know how EASY the code / algorithm would be, to look for words combinations that can be contracted, and do a simple replace???
Ugh. No offense, man, but I really detest this sort of fan-wankery. It has an (for lack of a better word) apologist vibe that sucks the fun out of it for me. I must reject this sort of interpretation, lest tedious world building exercises emphasizing unimportant minutia pollute my fun time. It's such a relief not to process canon as if consisted of historical documents.
Granted, I've gone down the rabbit holes of hairsplitting countless times, but I must draw the line somewhere. "This far, no farther!"
Exactly. The appearance of continuity is a means to the end of telling a story. It's good to make that appearance as convincing as feasible, but ultimately it's all just pretend, and sometimes it serves the story to pretend that something actually happened differently than it did before -- whether it's to correct a mistake or to finesse something for the sake of a new story.
Even if it is real, it's pretty clearly an alternate timeline to begin with, because none of the changes Picard makes in the past have any effect on the present.
To be fair, "Datalore" never actually said that Data couldn't use contractions, just that he preferred not to, that it was his habit to speak more formally. (Never mind that he'd been using contractions routinely up until that was established, even earlier in the same episode.) It wasn't until "The Offspring" (and later "Future Imperfect") that this was retconned into an actual inability to use contractions.
Still, it works if you think of Data as autistic. A lot of autistic people have trouble using contractions or understanding figurative speech, because both involve recognizing something that's implied beneath the surface, one thing represented by a different thing, and that indirectness can be hard for an autistic mind to grasp. Autistic people also often tend to be more logically, intellectually oriented and less equipped to relate to others emotionally. It's really unfortunate in retrospect that TNG defined Data as insufficiently human because of these attributes, because I think a realistic, more enlightened future society would recognize them as well within the range of behavior for humans who happen to be on the autistic spectrum.
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