A reboot would be nice. End the arguing
Discovery Showrunners fired; Kurtzman takes over
- Thread starter StCoop
- Start date
It's just the 90s. Which is kind of the same thing I guess.
A reboot would be nice. End the arguing
They kind of rebooted with jjVerse. Didn't end any arguing.
My take they didn't reboot enough. Even though they say you should never go full reboot, I say, this time, go full reboot.
Sidebar:
Now, onward...
That might be a perfectly marketable approach. But it's not a fate I want to see for Star Trek, or any of its characters.
And (hey, look! the original topic!) to the extent that's the approach that DSC has been taking so far, or might take under new leadership, that's one of my big reservations about the show.
Anything written by Brian K. Vaughan is well worth checking out!
Now, onward...
Hear, hear. What Trek needs is to keep the continuity (worldbuilding is hard work!), but shed the formula. The opposite approach leads to something as stale as, e.g., the Bond franchise. James Bond in Fleming's books is a person with a specific past, linked to real-world events and experiences (military and otherwise), operating in a specific historical context (the Cold War), however sensationalized. On film, though, for the sake of extending the longevity of the cash-cow "franchise," Bond has become a cipher, divorced from any personal history or human characteristics beyond a handful of behaviors and verbal refrains, going through endless iterations of the same basic formulaic story, in a world where it doesn't even make sense for him to exist.
That might be a perfectly marketable approach. But it's not a fate I want to see for Star Trek, or any of its characters.
Again, I don't want to speculate about what "most people" think, not only because it's unknowable, but also because it's irrelevant. (Actual data: most people don't believe the theory of evolution is true. So what?) If most people think four more Voyager probes "could easily have existed," they would be wrong... because of both the science and the politics of the 1970s. The ones that actually exist were launched within a fairly narrow window of opportunity where it was possible to chart a path out of the solar system that intersected the orbital locations of the outer planets. Later ones would have had less exploratory potential, and the political atmosphere of the time, turning against the space program, would have made it impossible to secure funding.
Why do you? How does that improve it in any way?
Why not keep both the essence and the date, and thereby keep Trek intact as a larger fictional construct, simply by ditching the conceit that it's consistent with events that are now in our own "present" but far in the future of when its stories were told?
Fair enough... except that "to each their own" really doesn't work in this case. If the actual producers take that attitude and only care about the broad strokes, the "general gist" of Trek history, but ignore the details, they'll wind up doing significant and compounding damage to the larger fictional construct of Trek that a lot of us enjoy. It'll become the sort of generic franchise Bond has become, as I described above.
Hear, hear. Elegantly and succinctly put.
It really doesn't. Beside 1968 (which I've mentioned), for instance, the 1996 visited by Voyager was also markedly different from our reality. (Of course it looked a lot like it, because they shot things on location, for heaven's sake, but the details weren't the same. Even beyond Chronowerx, others have already mentioned Rain Robinson's possession of a miniature DY-500.)
Again, it really doesn't. At least, not unless you're reading history books written by conspiracy theorists. Among other examples, in Trek's reality, Earth really has been visited by ancient aliens (multiple times!), and the US government really is hiding the truth of an alien landing in Roswell in 1947.
This sentence literally makes no sense to me. Logically, those elements are precisely what mark it as not our world.
No, we don't. We live in a world that superficially resembles (parts of) the past of that world. It resembled it somewhat more in 1960, but as time goes by, the divergence becomes more obvious.
I'd argue the exact opposite, actually. From the 1980s forward, when it became clear that Trek could be an ongoing franchise, with first the movies and then especially TNG, Trek began putting far more effort into maintaining its larger fictional construct than it ever had before. Whatever one thinks of the Berman era overall, no one can dispute that it invested a lot of energy into intricate worldbuilding.
If that were to happen, it'd be a damn shame. To the extent you're right (or might eventually be) about Trek erasing its past and undermining its own foundation for the sake of accessibility to contemporary audiences, that would be an approach driven entirely by marketing needs, not by creative integrity.
And (hey, look! the original topic!) to the extent that's the approach that DSC has been taking so far, or might take under new leadership, that's one of my big reservations about the show.
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I would agree. A complete blank slate restart.
Is ER set in our world, in your view?
But, what if in the new world there is no XCV-330 Enterprise
?
E.R. takes place in the Tommy Westphall Universe as seen here:
http://tommywestphall.wikia.com/wiki/ER
linked via Chicago Hope and Third Watch
Interestingly Star Trek itself has only the most tenuous of connections to Tommy Westphall's universe. Apparently Benny and Tommy weren't friends.
I'll build oneBut, what if in the new world there is no XCV-330 Enterprise
But, the problem with that argument is that it undermines Star Trek's original foundation to begin with! So, which part are we to ignore, and which is more important?
I realizing that I am arguing a point that no one seems to get, but part of art and really anything, is understanding context and authorial intent. Yet, demanding Star Trek be treated as its own fictional world with no ties (or limited times-sorry, briefly hyperbole) to present reality is another way of undermining Trek's foundation.
I can't change how people engage the work, but I think it is remiss to demand others engage it the same way.
The joke was apparently lost
I do agree that a full reboot would be best.
an argument could be made that Kirk and Spock never really entirely restored the timeline pollution when Edith Keeler did not die exactly as she was supposed to but good enough for the Guardian of A Really Long Time, and from that point on the Trek-Verse and its own branches were very different from "our" time.
The joke was apparently lost
I do agree that a full reboot would be best.
It wasn't. I just wanted to put in my Tropic Thunder reference
Or, the Temporal Cold War had longer reaching implications than previously thought or revealed. Which, makes sense and is fine by me.
Oh, so I missed the jokeIt wasn't. I just wanted to put in my Tropic Thunder reference
No. Of course not. It's fiction. Fiction is not reality. That's what the word means.
Granted, when you're dealing with contemporary mimetic fiction (whether on screen or in prose), the intent is that the setting resemble our world much more closely than with SF. Even so, the differences are there. Some of them are obvious (e.g., the hospital in question and the characters involved don't actually exist). Some are more subtle (I lived in Chicago at the time, so I could talk about a whole lot of small ones; my mother is a doctor, so she could talk about a whole different set of them). But the differences definitely exist.
I think what a lot of this comes down to is that you're using the phrase "our world" to denote "a world resembling ours," whereas I see those two phrases as meaningfully distinct from one another.
In light of new information, I agree we'll see the Borg again. Just not in Discovery.
I really don't think it does. You seem to be positing Trek's thematic foundation as at odds with its worldbuilding foundation, but I don't think they are. I agree that it's inherent (and important) in Trek that it depict an optimistic future in which humanity (used inclusively) has found ways to solve most of its problems, improve quality of life, and pursue lofty ideals. That's more the exception than the rule with SF in recent decades, much of which has tended to express its lessons through more cynical and dystopian visions of the future. (Not that there's anything wrong with that — it's often very powerful — but it's not the only way.)
However, that aspect of Trek (or other optimistic SF) doesn't necessarily mean that the problems its future world has solved happen to be (much less need to be) the exact same ones that exist in whatever year one happens to watch or read it. SF conveys its messages through allegory, after all, and the human condition is complex enough and diverse enough that allegory is applicable to a wide variety of circumstances. It seems to me an exceptionally narrow viewpoint to think that everything has to be precisely on-the-nose.
And unavoidably, forecasting is more art than science, so not just Trek but pretty much all futuristic SF manages to render itself divergent from its readers' reality in fairly short order. But "divergent" is not the same thing as "obsolete" or "irrelevant." Even very old visions of the future —e.g., classics like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward — are still entertaining and insightful today.
Indeed, there are some ways in which Trek's future is more poignant, thought-provoking, and inspiring if understood as divergent rather than as extrapolated from the here-and-now. "Look what we could have accomplished if only we hadn't abandoned the space program!" is a message worth thinking about, even if it's not one Trek's early creators expected to be delivering.
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Okay, I'm curious. What new information?
I am about a year older than Harry would be. The real world in Harry Potter is pretty much exactly how those years went, with the possible exception of Dudleys anachronistic PlayStation. She even got the weather right for the summer of his fifth year. She did mess up getting the days to land on the right dates mind you.
The Harry Potter real-world segments are not remotely 60s, I don’t think they even reference the sixties revival going on at the time.
The only things we see set in the ‘future’ or ‘now’ (21st century) are inside the magical world...where technology does not work the same way. Magic messes up electronics.
The post WW2ness you mention is largely in the Wizarding World, because they had just got over the first rise of Voldemort, and because their tech pretty much stops at the industrial revolution, with magic doing most everything the electric, electronic and digital advances did in the muggle world, sometimes ahead of it.
Aside from that, I am not sure you are too familiar with the books.
Hospital staff don’t work that hard, and aren’t as sexy. But ER isn’t in the NHS so I could be mistaken...
I've only seen the movies, which make the UK look like the pre-Ed Sullivan Beatles might be walking down the alleyway any minute.
The flying Ford Anglia in particular is extremely 60s and never once is the internet even mentioned even though it already existed when the first book was published in the 90s. So it really doesn't feel very modern.
