I'd suggest the differences in technology, backstory and characterisation go way beyond the visuals (i.e. Pike's character in Disco is based on the movie version and not the sexist original), but each to their own.
Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
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He’s not sexist. People read too much into that line.
There is only one way to possibly read that line. I love TOS, but it's a product of it's time. I watched "The Enemy Within" recently and cannot imagine how modern movie Uhura or Michael Burnham would have reacted to the comments that crewmen were directing at Janice. Except maybe to break their faces.
You dwell too much on details. Roddenberry himself saw Star Trek as an imperfect dramatization of the future it represented, filtered through the 20th-century writers and artists who created that dramatization. He would've said that the dated elements are merely errors in the recreation rather than part of the "real" underlying story, like when he asked TMP audiences to accept that Klingons had "really" had ridges all along. Similarly, the "real" consoles wouldn't have had 1960s tech in them, and the "real" characters wouldn't have had the 1960s sexism that sometimes ended up in the scripts. After all, they're centuries in our future. Any present-day simulation of their existence is bound to be imperfect and limited by the preconceptions of the era in which it's made.
It's a television show, not a dramatization or adaptation of anything. Of course it's limited by the preconceptions of the era it was created in, as all fiction is. Don't defend sexism. It's much more damaging than a "detail".
How dare you? I'm not defending it. I said nothing to even hint that I was defending it. On the contrary, my whole point is that it's easy to just ignore that sexist line in "The Cage" as a mistake, an error in the attempt of 1960s writers to portray the future. You don't have to treat every mistake in a work of fiction as inviolable gospel. You can just mentally edit it out of later portrayals, reject it as something that never happened at all. (Indeed, since the "women on the bridge" line was cut out of "The Menagerie," and is only heard in the restored "The Cage," it's questionable whether we should even count it as canon to begin with.)
So you have no right and no grounds to accuse me of defending sexism. You are WAY out of line here.
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As already mentioned, Mike is short for Michael and Jim is short of James. Also, there's plenty of real world precedents for children who share a first name with their parents to have variations on that name used. Example, both my dad and grandfather are named Thomas. My grandfather went by Tom, my dad goes by Tommy. Nothing unusual there.
I wouldn't expect any novels dealing with Prime Lorca in the Mirror Universe until after Disco ends. That topic is likely off-limits to the novel writers in case the show wants to do something with it.
That's literally the same name. Like "Jack" and "John".
Perhaps when Michael was born, her father started going by the nickname Mike so there would be no confusion. Although I'm fairly sure that, while Michael is not unheard of as a woman's name, the shortened "Mike" is mainly used for men.
And there's no reason Desperate Hours has to be ignored, either. Perhaps both names for Mr. Burnham are true, and one of them is his middle name (he could, for example, be named Calvin Michael Burnham, and decides he likes his middle name better than the first. It's been known to happen).
Unlikely. If a writer wants to do ReguLorca again, there's no legal reason they can't. There is no "off-limits" in effect. Although they still may choose to wait and see what the show does, they don't HAVE to.
There actually is. Because CBS would have to approve any novel with Lorca in it.
It's not uncommon for shows to provide plot details that are off-limits for tie-ins to touch because there are plans to cover that material in the show. Or even if the tie-ins aren't provided a list of off-limits material, often when a tie-in plot is submitted to the studio for approval, the studio will reject it because there are similar plans for the show. This happens all the time with Doctor Who tie-ins. Indeed, I suspect this may be a reason as to why all Disco novels published so far have been prequels. Well, that and the serialized nature of the show doesn't create much room to squeeze an adventure between episodes.
We assume he’s in the Mirror universe. Something else may have happened to him.
Any particular reason they're making it explicit this time?
I mean, there were a lot of dangling threads from TOS, such as the ultimate fates of the USS Defiant and the Romulan commander from "The Enterprise Incident", that got lots of different follow-ups in the novels. Nobody ever told writers they couldn't pick up on those bits. So why are they doing it with ReguLorca?
Any particular reason they're making it explicit this time?
I mean, there were a lot of dangling threads from TOS (such as the Defiant, the Romulan commander from "The Enterprise Incident", etc.) that got lots of different follow-ups in the novels. Nobody ever told writers they couldn't pick up on those bits. So why are they doing it with ReguLorca?
Because the show is still on the air. When the show is cancelled down the road, then something like Lorca could probably be used.
Regardless, anything involving Prime Lorca after the destruction of the Buran likely won't be covered in a novel until after the show is over since there exists a possibility the show will deal with that.
Novels dealt with the Romulan Commander and the Defiant years after TOS ended when it seemed likely those matters wouldn't be touched on screen. Even then, the Defiant eventually did anyway. Disco is still in production, meaning there still exists a possibility the show may revisit Prime Lorca, so he'd be off-limits for the novels for the time being.Any particular reason they're making it explicit this time?
I mean, there were a lot of dangling threads from TOS (such as the Defiant, the Romulan commander from "The Enterprise Incident", etc.) that got lots of different follow-ups in the novels. Nobody ever told writers they couldn't pick up on those bits. So why are they doing it with ReguLorca?
Your post made it seem like TOS' rampant sexism was on the same level as trivial minutiae like Klingon ridges and jelly bean buttons, which touched a nerve.
I was a little harsh in my reaction, and I apologise.
As I recall, that was only in his novelization of the first movie, something that he himself stated was not to be considered canonical. As far as the Klingon thing, that may have been his intent (a visual retcon of sorts), but ENT would later establish that that there was no retcon and that Klingons really did look like that back then (wish we could see some TOS Klingons on DSC, but that's neither here nor there). Not sure that really "counts."
Admittedly, I don't exactly see Roddenberry as "word of God" on the franchise, given that not only was a good chunk of it made without him, he also wasn't the only creator who made it. While I do find JK Rowling's habits of making decrees about the Harry Potter universe on social media long after she finished the books a bit eyeball-rolling, as the sole creator of that world, at least she seems to have a "legitimate" claim to do so, for lack of a better word. I don't know, am I looking at this wrong?
Well, it was a TV show and even if some people do get fun out of suspending disbelief on that point and melding things together to create as error-free a timeline as possible and all that, it still isn't going to be perfect. I guess that's why I don't see the need to view the franchise as a TV show within a TV show; beyond the fact that the source material itself is presented as being reality within its own world (as if we were flies on the wall), it feels like it's trying to explain something that doesn't need explaining. (Now, I do like when inconsistencies are given plausible explanations, either in the shows themselves or tie-ins, but I'm okay with accepting boom mike shadows, minor script errors, and the plot wholes that sometimes happen in storytelling as just part of the inevitable when making stuff like this).
Uraei (it didn't call itself Control in the beginning) created Section 31 before the Federation was even founded, not the other way around.
There's actually very little in common between the DSC entity known as Control and the one David Mack wrote about. Very little.
An aside: it's kind of annoying that Memory Beta doesn't make the distinction between the two clear, because their backstories are incompatible and it gives the wrong impression.
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Funny story. My mom had a sister named “Beth” and another named “Betty.” So as a smart-alec teenager, I asked my mom “Why did grandma give two daughters the same name? Both Beth and Betty are nicknames for Elizabeth.”
“Because grandma’s name is Elizabeth.”
“Oh.”
No, it wasn't only there. That was just one example illustrating his philosophy. I already gave the second example, of asking audiences at conventions and such to pretend the Klingons had always looked that way.
I'm not talking about the "facts" onscreen, I'm talking about interpretation, the philosophy you bring to a work of fiction. Creators like Roddenberry understand that what they create is unreal and mutable, because the act of creation is itself a lengthy process of trial and error and change. Creators of TV shows and movies in particular are aware that much of what ends up on screen falls far, far short of what they imagined due to various compromises and limitations, so they're often disappointed in the result and would gladly change it to something closer to their original vision given the chance.
It's not about "word of God" or anything like that. I'm just pointing out that fans are free to take a Doylist interpretation of Trek, to accept the inconsistent details as just quirks or errors of the artistic interpretation rather than being "real" in the putative reality being portrayed. Some fans think that the only way to be "true" to Star Trek is to be obsessively literal about every last detail, that any divergence from that would be a betrayal of its creators. I'm pointing out that Roddenberry, like most creators, would've thought quite differently. He openly invited fans to be flexible in their interpretation of the franchise, to acknowledge that it was an imperfect creation and that they didn't have to take every last bit of it as immutable gospel. Of course we don't need Roddenberry's permission to use our own judgment in deciding what parts to accept, but it's significant that we have his permission. And it's likely that every subsequent creator has felt the same way, for the reasons I mentioned above.
Don't take it so literally. The "show within the universe" conceit Roddenberry used in the TMP novelization was just that, a conceit. It was a figurative, playful way of telling the audience that he saw the movie as being a truer version of the reality he envisioned than the show had been, that he was taking the opportunity in the movie to improve on what he'd done before. It was just a cheeky way to handwave the changes, not something I'm suggesting you should take as a literal in-universe fact.
Except that Dave's Control/Uraei is known for putting up false fronts and making people think it's been defeated. What we're seeing on Discovery could simply be another one of its misdirects, or perhaps an experimental offshoot of itself that went out of, err, control.