Bryan Fuller Stepping Back From Showrunner Role on ‘Star Trek: Discovery’

"Let's do that again, updated and different."

 

It had Doctor McCoy in episode one, and followed the registration letter pattern from the Movies on the ship itself. It was a reboot only in so far as it was the same set up as TOS but with a new cast of char eyes and was further in the future etc....it was the first continuation of a franchise basically. It's what stops Star Trek being about Kirk, Spock and McCoy and made it be about the wider universe instead. It's basically the Lord of The Rings to The Hobbit.

 

They just set out to do the weekly "voyages" of the Enterprise as Roddenberry conceived them in the 1980s instead if the 1960s. Even used the same intro.

Soft reboot.

 

I don't know...certainly not any kind of 'reboot' in the sense it's used now. A reboot in the older sense of a return to basic principles, or a change thereof, whilst still being part of the same series...yes. Too much iconography, characters, even sets and locations, carry straight from TOS/MOVIES straight into TNG. The ship designs from the movie era are right there in episode 2 as an even bigger example. It is clear TNG is in continuity with the movies (much as Rodenberry disliked the direction those had taken) from the very beginning, and the only thing close to actual reboots are in the first two movies. And even then...too much carries from one version to the next. In modern terms (bsg etc) Trek has never had a reboot, redux or reimagining, the closest it gets is the Kelvinverse, and that went to lengths to avoid being totally that, and is now being folded into even more of a parallel timeline bump that it was to begin with. I also think Trek is simply too big for an actual reboot at this point....it's history is something it trades on, part of its brand, and the whole Axanar thing just illustrates that as well.
Every other hiccup is just occasionally breaking internal continuity or occasional production hiccups....the whole thing is otherwise a contiguous whole, which is why we can have things like the Chronology etc about it. It's the only whole cloth SF universe that actually works that way anymore, (that is still more or less in production anyway) with a slight allowance for Who...though that has bigger bubbles and rips.

 

The 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 29th century settings of Trek are fundamentally identical. This isn't a "future history" or real narrative chronology; it's a recycling of a single format and template.

 

This actually proves that it isn't a reboot at all.

 

Except A LOT of things were wholesale retconned. The prime example of this was The Prime Directive

IN TOS the Prime Directive ONLY applied to worlds/civilizations which had no knowledge of intergalactic spaceflight technology; or that life existed on other planets - and further, many times 'Prime Directive' protection wasn't explicitly granted until someone from the Federation had done a survey (per the TOS episode "A Private Little War").

In TNG it seemed the Prime Directive applied to any non-member world of the Federation; which is interesting in that if that's teh case how does a 'new' world who wants to join BECOME a member?

 

I'd say it does. The 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century are all different from one another to an astonishing degree. Trek may say it is a different century, but they are all exactly the same. Same enemies, same weapons, same rules.

 

So first TMP and TNG were reboots because everything was "different" and now they're reboots because everything is the same???

 

I'd say they were soft reboots because they weren't consistent with what came before. Klingons changing their looks and complete visual discontinuity between the various shows on a fundamental level (including changes on how the Romulans look).

It is a fine line, admittedly.

 

There's two facets to the Prime Directive by TNG...non-interference in pre warp society, and non interference in internal matters for any society unless legitimately requested to do so (no taking sides in civil wars, no saving from disasters unless a distress call is sent or help requested....the sort of thing that happened in A Private Little War is exactly the sort of thing that would lead to this stipulation.) it's perfectly understandable, and it's extremely likely the Prime Directive simply evolved in the eighty years or so. That's not retconning, it's a logical change. Most retcons are little more than continuity bumps. The warp scale is changed, but then ships don't nip too and from the edge of the galaxy anymore...it's actually not that big of a change if you accept a lot of that was vague to begin with. For instance...the bit of a galactic spiral arm at the edge of that shape is the edge of the galaxy. But the edge of the circle around the whole shape could also be described as the edge of the galaxy. Both are edges, both end in intergalactic space. The same is true for the centre. There's an absolute centre and a mass or area that is considered central. There's really no retconning of any real nature.

 

Yes. The conflicts in those centuries bear no resemblance and have no links to one another *looks at current world issues* then again....I would say you may be a little incorrect based on history and current affairs.

 

TMP and TWOK are as close as Trek gets because of these things...but then you have the same actors portraying the same roles, with story points carrying directly through from TOS. TWOK is a sequel to space seed after all.

 

What do you mean? Is the Middle East in turmoil like it was in medieval times? Do we have religious wars like we did in the Crusades? Do Native Americans protest about trespasses in their reservations like they did in the 19th century? Oh, wait…

 

One can reboot and still use actors and plots from the previous incarnations.

 

Great argument. I hope you didn't take too long to think of that.

 

In the exact same roles with the exact same backstory? That's not a reboot, that's a budget upgrade on sets and effects. And if they reuse the exact same plot, that's bad writing and running out of ideas....however what I referred to was following up on older plot threads and events. That's a continuity.

 

Yeah, TWOK was rather reboot-y.

 

If that's the case then almost every other sequel is a soft reboot.