Correct. What's interesting is that it often gets held up to a higher standard than even historical fiction..
Probably because there are no hidden elements or things that can come to light later on.
It is all right there on the screen. In the here and now, it is all available at the press of a button.
But, it's still meant to be representative of the future. If it goes back to TOS and uses tech that way that's a 60s era interpretation of future technology rather than taking the future tech and exploring it from a better understanding of technology and it's capabilities.
Well yeah, I have a higher bar for something based on History rather something made up out of whole cloth. Go figure.
Sure there are. That's how this fiction thing works. Spock has an inner eyelid? Kirk has a son? McCoy's father died just before a cure was found? Sulu has a daughter. All of those are hidden elements that came to light later.
"No, Frylock, The Highlander was a documentary, and events happened in real time"
-Master Shake, Aqua Teen Hunger Force
I think they have treatments for that.
it just made me realize.. the Klingons could have stopped Discovery at every engagement with some well placed anti-fungal cream.
Exactly. "Canon" is always a work-in-progress. It's not as though the entire Star Trek universe sprang into existence, complete and entire, back in September 1966. They were making it up as they went along, just as the latter-day shows and movies do.
Which is great, because it gives us tie-in writers new toys to play with.
Heck, remember when TNG's "The Wounded" introduced not only a whole new species, the Cardassians, but established a hitherto-unmentioned war between the Federation and said Cardassians? I admit that, at the time, I balked at the notion that somehow this apparently major conflict had gone completely unmentioned until now, but look how much mileage Trek has gotten out of the Cardassians since then . . . .
That whole discussion in this thread has me scratching my head: I don't recall anybody ever saying anything about Vulcan being conquered, and I do vaguely recall something in "The Immunity Syndrome" about Vulcan having never been conquered.
You have a good memory and are absolutely right.
"SPOCK: Captain, the Intrepid would have done all these things too, and yet they were destroyed.
KIRK: Well, they may not have done all of these things. You just pointed out how illogical this situation is.
SPOCK: True. It is also true they never knew what was killing them. Their logic would not have permitted them to believe they were being killed.
KIRK: Explain.
SPOCK: Vulcan has not been conquered within its collective memory. The memory goes back so far that no Vulcan can conceive of a conqueror.I knew the ship was lost because I sensed it.
KIRK: What was it you sensed?
SPOCK: The touch of death.
KIRK: And what do you think they felt?
SPOCK: Astonishment."
it's illogical to assume that
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From The Conscience of the King...
Spock: "My father's race was spared the dubious benefits of alcohol."
McCoy: "Now I know why they were conquered."
I think McCoy is just being a dick here. He's a dick a lot in TOS.
Spock: "My father's race was spared the dubious benefits of alcohol."
McCoy: "Now I know why they were conquered."
I think McCoy is just being a dick here. He's a dick a lot in TOS.
One might say it was decanonized.
And indeed, in "Requiem for Methuselah," we get this (Re: Spock declining the drink McCoy had offered him before the line about Vulcan being conquered):
(Blish, perhaps using a line that was cut, has Spock declaring that nothing happens that he isn't far better able to deal with).
And thanks, @Turtletrekker.
So Vulcan hasn't been conquered, okay. But Vulcan is at that point a long-standing member of an interstellar Federation of planets with some worlds that have, at some time, been conquered. Vulcans are not stupid. Vulcans cannot conceive of a conqueror? Just because they personally have not been conquered means that they don't even understand the concept?
Seems odd to me.
I always felt that it was implicit in that line that no Vulcan could conceive of a conqueror of Vulcan, or of any group of Vulcans. Not of a conqueror in general.
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