So we know by the deleted scenes that Mark Madden is now the new first officer. We also know that in Generations that Geordi gets tortured, but that scene is a deleted scene and as far as I know, doesn't appear on any DVD or VHS video. So does that make it not canon??
If it's deleted, then
it's not in the movie. It's not an actual part of the finished story, any more than the chunks of marble left on a sculptor's floor are part of the finished sculpture. Editing and removing things is a basic part of the creative process. You try things out, decide they don't work, and remove them as you hone in on the final version of the thing you're creating. If a scene is removed from a film, then it is not meant to be part of the story. That should be self-evident. The problem is that including deleted material on DVDs has become so routine that some people mistakenly see them as part of the overall film rather than material that was purposefully removed because it didn't
work as part of the film. Deleted scenes aren't supposed to be part of the actual movie. They're just a glimpse at the leftovers and might-have-beens.
No offense to you or anything, I'm just asking, but who says that it's not canon just because it maybe on one cut of a DVD, but not another.
If it's actually included
in a version of the film itself, then yes, it is part of the story in that version. That makes it "real." But if it is only included as a bonus feature, if it's separate from the body of the film, then it is not meant to be part of the story. It's something they deliberately chose to exclude from the story, and it does not count.
And Stuart Baird has made it clear that there will never be a "Director's Cut" of
Nemesis. The film that showed in theaters was the final version of the film as he wanted it. So there's no reason to expect that any of the deleted scenes will ever be restored to the film (even though the Picard-Data scene after the wedding reception really should've been left in).
And let's face it, that Martin Madden scene was
very, very bad. It was awkward, it was unfunny, it was inappropriately frivolous in the wake of Data's death, and it stretched out the ending of the film longer than it needed to be. It was cut out of the film for very good reasons.
Worf really should have been the next first officer.
And in the novels, he is.
Also, I posed the question of what if also at the end of the movie, Worf's son Alexander to the surprise of Worf and the audience, he's now a member of the Enterprise crew instead of trying to be a Klingon warrior with the Klingons. What do you think of that idea?? Would it have worked?
I see absolutely no point to that. It would be an even more gratuitous intrusion into the story than the Madden scene was. Movies are a medium that require compactness and efficency of storytelling. They aren't novels where you can cram in all sorts of side stories and details. You have to keep the storytelling tightly focused and not waste time including elements that don't add anything to the story. (Which is another reason the Madden scene was dumped. It wasn't important to the film's story to establish a new first officer.) Alexander joining Starfleet is a story of its own; it's not something you can just tack onto the end of a completely unrelated story.
