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Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

You asserted that the spore drive is gibberish that takes away 'one of the things that made [Star Trek] special and successful in the first place'. It has nothing to do with your opinion of the show, which you are completely welcome to, to point out that Star Trek was dealing with concepts (either in 'The Cage' or 'Where No Man Has Gone Before', if you prefer) as far-fetched as, if not more than, the concept of the mycelial-network-as-transport-mechanism, since literally the first episode.


No, I said that about when the creators of Star Trek productions ignore science in general. That's the key. My argument was general, not granular. From the start, Star Trek has tried to build a relatively grounded, believable SF universe (at least compared to the lazy drivel that passed for SF on other shows), while needing to compromise its plausibility on occasion for dramatic or budgetary reasons, and sometimes its attempts have fallen short of credibility due to the writers not being scientists. But at least, overall, the producers tried to make something less utterly stupid than the other SFTV shows on the air at the time. At least they made enough of an effort to figure out the grade-school basics the other shows got egregiously wrong, like what a galaxy is. Even though TOS had a lot of silliness, in balance it still came out ahead of every other SFTV show from the '60s, '70s, and '80s, if only because those other shows didn't even make the slightest effort at plausibility. It tried when nothing else did. That's what matters, that it tried, even though it frequently fell short.

By contrast, these days we live in a time where a greater drive for plausibility in mass-media SF is finally starting to take hold. We have hard-SF movies like Interstellar, Europa Report, The Martian, and Life, and at least one hard-SF TV show, The Expanse. But Star Trek is no longer at the vanguard of plausible mass-media SF. Its makers aren't really trying to make it grounded anymore. That's what's been lost. It's just one more way that Star Trek is no longer at the cutting edge of SFTV and has become just one franchise out of many.

As someone who grew up in an era when Star Trek was exceptional, was head and shoulders above the rest of SFTV, I'm glad in some ways that the example it set has been emulated and has spread to other SFTV, to worthy successors like Babylon 5 and Stargate. But I also regret that it's no longer leading the pack, and that so many viewers today just see it as one more show out of many and don't realize what was so extraordinary about it in the first place.


As much as I like Q, the character, I have to agree.

The only thing that makes Q work is John DeLancie's performance. Conceptually, the character is ludicrous. He's basically Mr. Mxyzptlk, except he's harder to get rid of.
 
I never realized just how good the science in TOS was compared to other shows from that era until I started watching Lost in Space when they used to show it on MeTV. That show got this reaction from me at least once in almost every episode I saw. The show had giant talking carrots, and guys flying around in rocketships wearing medieval plate armor.
 
Possible partial-answer to the whole "where's Prime Lorca?"-question:

During this week's After Trek, a fan got up and asked producer Ted Sullivan and Rekha Sharma if Prime Ellen Landry was Prime Lorca's XO aboard the USS Buran, and both of them indicated "yes" (although Sullivan added something along the lines of, "in my mind"). So, if the producers roll with this down the road, Prime Landry too might also have survived that starship's destruction, which would go slightly against Mirror Lorca's insinuation early in the the series that he killed his entire crew off, and which raises the possibility that Prime Lorca's still alive somewhere out there.
While I suppose it's possible Landry Prime could have served on the Buran, I find it more likely she was transferred off shortly before its destruction. It's war, transfers are going to be a much more frequent thing. Also, she almost certainly wasn't the XO of USS Buran, if she were she would have been XO of Discovery rather than Saru, just by virtue of seniority. So, I'm going with Landry Prime being chief of security of the Buran, transferred off just prior to its destruction.
 
About that spoiler...

Given the circumstances of Prime Landry's death, I find it very hard to believe that she could ever have been the XO of the Buran.

Nobody who is that stupid and reckless could EVER possibly ascend to the position of first officer.
 
^
Trauma changes people. Even though the most prominent examples in DSC, Tyler and Lorca, ended up being big fake-outs, it's still possible that Landry was a very different person before her ship was destroyed and she came to believe that caution invites catastrophe.
 
About that spoiler...

Given the circumstances of Prime Landry's death, I find it very hard to believe that she could ever have been the XO of the Buran.

Nobody who is that stupid and reckless could EVER possibly ascend to the position of first officer.
startrek2.jpg
 
The map only shows the Beta Quadrant plus a tiny sliver of Alpha Quadrant.
Cool, thanks. I kinda figured as much -- nearly the entire thing gets "swallowed" up by the advancing Klingon border when the Discovery tactical officer updates the map at the very end of the episode, and I remember thinking that Cornwell's "20 percent" seemed like an awfully lowballed figure in the preview, compared to what we just saw on that previous map.
 
I’m sure that line about only Archer on Qo’noS conflicts with some of the novels since I’m pretty sure there’s have been others since then.
 
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OK...so:

  • Lorca's fortune-cookies, R.I.P.
  • Also: R.I.P., "Captain Killy"?
  • Captain Archer shout-out!
  • Also-also, I seem to recall Archer kicking some Klingon admiral-ass on Qo'noS in ENT: Kobayashi Maru... Wait, so was Cornwell's line only in reference to Archer having visited during the timeframe of the ENT television series, or could it apply to afterwards too? Gonna have to recheck that one.
  • And did Cornwell specifically reference only "Starfleet officers" as never having set foot on the Klingon homeworld since Archer's time? If so, this would give some wiggle-room for The Final Reflection and Federation ambassador Emanuel Tagore in the early 23rd Century.
  • Wow, looks like we've gotten our first-ever canonical map of the geograhy of Qo'noS, including major cities, continents, and other features (including what I seemed to make out as the "Lake of Lusor"). Definitely conflicts with the map provided in the Decipher RPG...I don't envy whomever takes on the job of overhauling the Memory Beta article now.
  • And Mirror!Qo'noS is canonically a "blackened cinder" as of 2257? Emperor Georgiou being melodramatic, or fo' realzies? And does anyone recall offhand how this compares with the Litverse Mirror Universe stories?
  • Possible link to the Saratoga-destruction mentioned in the episode: Rather than a modern, 23rd Century-era starship, could this instead have been the United Earth starship mentioned in ENT: "The Forgotten" (the ship whose engineering section Trip requested a transfer from)? Who knows, it could've still been in service a century on, and it's clearly not the Miranda-class starship seen in Star Trek IV.
 
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OK...so:

Also-also, I seem to recall Archer kicking some Klingon admiral-ass on Qo'noS in ENT: Kobayashi Maru... Wait, so was Cornwell's line only in reference to Archer having visited during the timeframe of the ENT television series, or could it apply to afterwards too? Gonna have to recheck that one.
She said "nearly a century ago." And at this point we're actually more than 102 years after Kobayashi Maru, and 101 years after Archer's visit to Qo'noS in The Romulan War, so there's still wiggle room.


And did Cornwell specifically reference only "Starfleet officers" as never having set foot on the Klingon homeworld since Archer's time? If so, this would give some wiggle-room for The Final Reflection and Federation ambassador Emanuel Tagore in the early 23rd Century.

That's pretty much irreconcilable with modern Trek history anyway.
 
I thought that was the ship Sisko was commander on during Wolf 359
Presumably a different Saratoga (NCC-1887 in The Voyage Home, and NCC-31911 in "Emissary"), along with circumstantial physical differences (the DS9 Saratoga is missing the "roll-bar" on top).
 
She said "nearly a century ago." And at this point we're actually more than 102 years after Kobayashi Maru, and 101 years after Archer's visit to Qo'noS in The Romulan War, so there's still wiggle room.
That's pretty much irreconcilable with modern Trek history anyway.
Tagore's history from John Ford's novel has been referenced in the modern Litverse -- Capt. Hallie Gannon in Vanguard mentions that Tagore was the Federation's first ambassador to the Empire, and also that she was his star pupil at Starfleet Academy. Was thinking that a version of it could still theoretically make it into the new show's continuity, since they've referenced the novel once already before now.
 
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Tagore's history from John Ford's novel has been referenced in the modern Litverse -- Capt. Hallie Gannon in Vanguard mentions that Tagore was the Federation's first ambassador to the Empire, and was also his star pupil at Starfleet Academy. Was thinking that a version of it could still make it into the new show's continuity, since they've already referenced the novel once already before now.

Bits and pieces of it, yes, but I don't see the overall story working. Borrowing individual characters and concepts is a different matter from incorporating an actual storyline. Look at all the various comics, films, shows, and computer games that have incorporated Harley Quinn despite being in completely different continuities from Batman: The Animated Series.


Meanwhile, I just discovered another continuity issue while entering this episode in my chronology file. "Obsession" is presumed by the Star Trek Chronology and Memory Alpha to be in early 2268, which means that the Farragut, lost 11 years earlier, was destroyed somewhere around early 2257, give or take a few months. The Klingon war began in May 2256, and between the 6-month jump between episodes 2 & 3, the couple of months evidently spanned by the next set of episodes, and the 9-month jump between episodes 13 & 14, we should now be in roughly October 2257. So that means the Farragut's loss must have happened during the war, possibly not long after Discovery disappeared. I suppose that's not impossible, but it's a pretty major recontextualizing of what we knew before. Are there any book depictions of the Farragut's loss other than Debt of Honor and the Shatnerverse?
 
Bits and pieces of it, yes, but I don't see the overall story working. Borrowing individual characters and concepts is a different matter from incorporating an actual storyline. Look at all the various comics, films, shows, and computer games that have incorporated Harley Quinn despite being in completely different continuities from Batman: The Animated Series.
Yup, that's exactly what I meant there -- just the broader textures as quick references, not the deeper incompatible specifics.

Meanwhile, I just discovered another continuity issue while entering this episode in my chronology file. "Obsession" is presumed by the Star Trek Chronology and Memory Alpha to be in early 2268, which means that the Farragut, lost 11 years earlier, was destroyed somewhere around early 2257, give or take a few months. The Klingon war began in May 2256, and between the 6-month jump between episodes 2 & 3, the couple of months evidently spanned by the next set of episodes, and the 9-month jump between episodes 13 & 14, we should now be in roughly October 2257. So that means the Farragut's loss must have happened during the war, possibly not long after Discovery disappeared. I suppose that's not impossible, but it's a pretty major recontextualizing of what we knew before. Are there any book depictions of the Farragut's loss other than Debt of Honor and the Shatnerverse?
My Brother's Keeper: Constitution has lots of immediate, after-the-fact grief and reflection on Kirk's part (set in 2257), though I think it never actually shows the incident itself. And of course, no mention of a huge Federation/Klingon war raging at that same time in that context, either.
 
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And of course, no mention of a huge Federation/Klingon war raging at that same time in that context, either.

Well, Star Trek seems to have a habit of not mentioning on going wars during series anyways (see what Christopher mentioned several times about how TNG suddenly announced a war with the Cardassians had been going on for a few years even though it hadn't been mentioned in the seasons before).
 
The war with the Cardassians was over before TNG started. Hence O’Brien’s appearance.
 
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