You seem to be having trouble buying into the fantasy.
Spoilers Canon, Continuity, and Pike's Accident
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No, I have trouble buying into a bad analogy.
Indeed.
If Trek had the historical records to recreate it to exact function as intended then go for it. But, it's not meant as that
Puh-lease.
A Winchester rifle 20 years out of place in an award-winning major Hollywood historical film. Imagine that.
Hey, you ever counted the number of shots fired in a Western and compared it against the weapon being fired? Of course you haven't.
That's real, historical technology there, you know. It's not some nonsense made up on the fly to fit the plot of a fantasy about a spaceship going halfway across the galaxy and backward in time to break an Air Force jet with its, uh, "tractor beam" because it hit a "black star," and then flying super-close to the Sun to propel itself forward again.
In fact, filmmakers have frequently equipped characters with firearms and other equipment inappropriate to the years in which a given story takes place. Costuming was often a matter of what was in stock, the design of "Western towns" was often a matter of budget convenience (never mind a paucity of research or consistency in the presentation of historical locations) and man, did they play fast and loose with - wait for it - the dates at which real things happened, the sequence in which they occurred, and so forth.
6 HORSE MYTHS WESTERNS TEACH US ("Myth" here means "bullshit they know they can get away with because you don't care or know enough to care")
You're not making your case. Not at all.
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No, they are all taking place in real, researchable history.
Which perfectly refutes the too-often -repeated, nonsensical claim that viewers watching historical films would be necessarily disturbed by inconsistencies or even large contradictions with what we "know" and expect about other eras - or that "treating Trek as a period piece" requires or even implies a high level of concern for consistency from one production to the next.
Neither are true. And no one can have it both ways - claiming on the one hand that Trek's narrative is somehow comparable to historical fiction, but then insisting on the other that the ways it handles continuity between two series or movies or even episodes within a series ought to be held to a stricter standard than historical dramas.
Yeah, being consistent with the real world is generally a positive for historical fiction, but being consistent with stories in the same continuity is more important.
Dude, it annoys me when Doctor Who isn't historically accurate, never mind historical films. I can overlook a lot of stuff due to my staggering ignorance about vast amounts of history, but I'm always disappointed when I do the research afterwards and learn how wrong they got it.
But you can't research the function of a Trek tech like you can historical pieces.
Never mind the simple production shortcuts and time saving measures that real world demands impose.
Never mind the simple production shortcuts and time saving measures that real world demands impose.
The fact they went to the trouble of making sure Pike was a Fleet Captain when he met Kirk, tells me that they clearly care about the continuity and the shows connections with TOS. I mean, just look at the amazing efforts put into The Enterprise, the uniforms, the equipment. Everything is clearly meant to evoke The Original Series, just with an updated aesthetic for modern audiences. I don't think they could've done a better job telegraphing that this is the Original Series, figuratively speaking.
BUT ARE THESE THE VOYAGES OF THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE ON HER FIVE YEAR MISSION!?!?!!
THE PROOF IS YET TO BE THE PUDDING!!!!!
That's it, that's the thing. Some of us prefer literal, and some of us are happy with figurative. And some of us in the former don't always agree either.
You know how Revenge of Sith ended with things looking almost exactly like they did in A New Hope? It's a lot like that for many of us.
There's a disconnect between the idea that some people view Star Trek as an independently functioning universe and people who have the idea that it has to be a constantly changing depiction of a future that hasn't happened yet. Updated for modern audiences, when appropriate.
We need to find a way to handshake this one off, because we definitely know what each other means, but we don't seem to be able to accept each other's differences yet.
John Boorman's Excalibur is one of my favorite films, visually beautiful, haunting, and a seminal example of how to utilize a preexisting musical score. With respect to the time at which the legendary Arthur is supposed to have lived, the film's plate armor is anachronistic AF, by eight hundred years, give or take. But that matters not one whit.
Because the plots, characters, everything are conveyed through a visual medium. The visuals are every bit as critically important as dialogue, lore, etc. They are every bit as much of a part of the story and what makes Star Trek Star Trek.
This what I genuinely cannot understand, how people don't understand this fact. A different visual aesthetic... in a work presented in a visual medium... fundamentally changes the work.
While I *WANT* that to happen, i'm under no delusions that it will, at least unless something absolutely drastic happens within the shows leadership. The only way that would ever happen is SNW ends up going longer than 5 seasons, which is doubtful, Kurtzman is replaced in another year or so (possible? Likely even apparently?), new director of Trek replaces Goldsman, and a new showrunner akin to Manny Coto or Terry Matalas picks up for the last season or two of SNW. It's not impossible, although potentially unlikely.
From a purely business perspective, it's honestly not a bad idea to have SNW morph into TOS at the very end of the series, presenting a "have your cake and eat it too" scenario. TOS continues to sell the most merchandise and generally be the most profitable thing in the Trek cabinet... it's EXACTLY why damn near everything in the past 15 years or so has been going back to that era. Flip SNW to be more TOS at the very end? You got to have your "updated visuals" for the run of the show, you send some goodwill out to the TOS fans... the ones spending the money... (and it also shouldn't matter to the other fans, because the visuals aren't important, right?), and then you can sell a metric shit-ton of nuTOS merchandise.
But... yeah. It's not going to happen.
An outcome I think could be realistic is something I would have been resistant to in the past, but welcome now, would be for SNW to end by 100% breaking the timeline... Pike changes his fate. He manages to both save the cadets AND himself.
No.
A phaser is still a phaser. It's still easily visually identified as a phaser. It still does exactly what phasers did in TOS.
Same can be said of The Enterprise. It's still a saucer with cylinders attached in roughly the same proportions. It's still easily identified as the Enterprise. Does all the same stuff. Still fires Torpedos. Still goes to Warp. Still has a circular bridge with a Captain's chair in the middle.
How is anything fundamentally different from TOS?
Fundamentally, things are virtually exactly the same.
???
Just to add to my earlier post regarding perspective and perhaps adding a more famous voice to the discussion. This is Noah Hawley's perspective on his upcoming Alien series, set after Prometheus but before Alien, largely focusing on the aesthetic he's aiming for.
"You have giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards… You have to make a choice. Am I doing that? Because in the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies' future. There's something about that that doesn't really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films. And so that's the choice I've made — there's no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me."
You can apply a lot of this logic to Discovery in relation to Ridley's prequel movies. He hasn't erased them ofc, but he does prefer to show you a world more visually in line with the first Alien movie, and there's nothing abhorrent or irrational about that idea either.
So when people say about refits or wishing the SNW Enterprise looked more like it did in TOS, they're not actually lunatics. It just seems that Star Trek currently appears to be unique in this "visual reboot" concept, and I can't think of another franchise that has ever used that expression.
"You have giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards… You have to make a choice. Am I doing that? Because in the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies' future. There's something about that that doesn't really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films. And so that's the choice I've made — there's no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me."
You can apply a lot of this logic to Discovery in relation to Ridley's prequel movies. He hasn't erased them ofc, but he does prefer to show you a world more visually in line with the first Alien movie, and there's nothing abhorrent or irrational about that idea either.
So when people say about refits or wishing the SNW Enterprise looked more like it did in TOS, they're not actually lunatics. It just seems that Star Trek currently appears to be unique in this "visual reboot" concept, and I can't think of another franchise that has ever used that expression.
And Vulcan mind melds, apparently.
Yeah, usually a visual reboot accompanies new continuity like in NuBSG, or Ghostbusters 2016. Are there any other franchises that kept the story continuity but we are supposed to ignore visual changes? I'm open to suggestions. I remember they changed the designs of the wands in Harry Potter between movies 2 and 3, but that's very minor compared to Trek.
They changed Saaviks between TWOK and TSFS. Is that minor too?
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