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Discovery Showrunners fired; Kurtzman takes over
- Thread starter StCoop
- Start date
Or they come up with something they like better.
I really think that is at the heart of it. I mean these are people, creative people who mostly love the show and the thrill of being part of it... the joy to contribute would be irresistible to not add one's own signature. All that canon stuff is for us to pounce on
Nothing "takes precedence", that's the point.
The idea of anything being "established" isn't what canon means, it isn't about internal universe building. It's a real world concept about the body of creative work that is the show.
Things can and do contradict throughout the franchise whilst remaining canon and we don't get to pick or choose, nor do we get to define the concept.
Still, in Trek as in other fictional canons, there are times when the preponderance of the evidence makes one bit of canon clearly preferable to another. In Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, for instance, there's one story that he dates specifically and inexplicably to summer of 1892... even though multiple other stories establish that from spring of 1891 to spring of 1894, Holmes was presumed dead and traveling the world after his famous showdown with Moriarty. The outlier story is still part of the canon, but it's also universally assumed that it's simply wrong about that detail.
Really? In every episode when she said that was time travel stuff. How can you don't understand context so badly and bring this as contradiction?
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Star Trek novelists have been working within established canon for decades and have produced a fantastic library of amazing stories.
It seems to be only screen writers who have difficulty with canon. Why? I don't know. Maybe they haven't enough time to research. Maybe they don't have the budget for a consultant.
Or maybe they simply don't care about producing great Star Trek and prefer to complain about canon rather than admit that they'd rather be writing (or would be better qualified to write) something else.
Obviously there are myriad differences. But how does it make keeping to existing continuity harder?
TV Shows spend less time on backstory, and they need to worry more about new viewers.
Eh, I dunno. A book is of course more akin to an entire season of a show than it is single episode. Thinking about the more-or-less direct TV adaptations of books (like say the first few seasons of GoT) there was as much backstory, and the show didn't bother making it easy for new viewers to jump in mid season. It was still a hit.
The biggest difference I see is not only are books written all at once, but authors often work on editing them for quite some time. I'm guessing contractually the turnaround time is much shorter for a lot of media-tie-in novels, but still, you have way more time than a TV writer to massage your story to align with everything that has come before.
I somehow missed this. Thank you for the kind words!
For example the holodeck could have gotten some narrator exposition; explaining how it is (could be) developed from tech seen in Enterprise but how you couldn't talk to holograms like you can in the 24th century. If Lorca just said "Good thing that Archer found thoes holodeck-building people back in the 2150s" and then Tyler answered "Yeah. A Pity we can't talk to holograms. Maybe in a hundred years..." that would come off as really unnatural, but a narrator in a novel could easily explain those facts.
It is effectively a reboot with vastly different sizes, tech, values, asthetics, tone, etc... The problem is that they don't want to admit that it is both to fans and to themselves. I agree that it should have gone (for better or worse) full reboot and been upfront about it. I'm not personally a fan of DISCO myself but being lied to under the guise of being supposedly catered to makes my opinion of it worse.
So canon is whatever gets established, but not contradicted. The moment someone decides to change something they didn't like that was previously established, it
Bad example.Really? In every episode when she said that was time travel stuff. How can you don't understand context so badly and bring this as contradiction?
I prefer Ron D. Moore's term reimagining which he used to describe his version of Battlestar Galactica, which wasn't a sequel, or prequel, but a new iteration that used elements of the old in the new like making the Cylon design of the 70s series what the Cylons looked like in the first Cylon/Human war. Reboot implies starting fresh, a clean break or slate from previous versions w/c Discovery isn't. Examples of reboots are James Bond every couple of years, Nolan's Batman trilogy, Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, Star Trek (2009), etc.
I'm fine with you and others using that term for those reasons. I don't personally make that distinction myself but it's reasonable IMO. What I'm not fine with is the DISCO creative team tossing out all the things I mentioned that helped make prime Trek what it was and yet still calling it prime. They wanted their cake (creative freedom from 50 years worth of canon) and to eat it too (convincing fans of the 50 years worth of canon to pay for a faux-continuation of it). I was fine with both BSG and JJtrek changing things up in reboots/reimaginings/whatever and evaluated both based on their own individual merits. If they threw in something from the previous incarnation that I enjoyed, kudos... but I didn't expect that they would and certainly didn't hold them to it.
And, because there's always one or two bad apples who assume too much in every trek bunch, that doesn't mean that I'm some luddite that wanted a return to Jolly Rancher control panels and 60's era low budget sets along with corny over the top acting. I wanted a modern show that updated the original to modern standards instead of wholesale replacing except for some token bridge beeps and an occasional small prop. I love what the Star Trek Continues team did with their fan series but that isn't what I would want for a new canon show set within roughly the same era.
What is "great Star Trek? And why did Nicholas Meyer get to write Star Trek at all?
I think once we answer what is great Star Trek, we can write to CBS to the writers can know what to do.
There are indeed. As @eschaton and @Jinn noted, to some extent we can attribute that to having more time to work and more narrative space for exposition... and to some extent it's also easier to finesse because the visual element simply isn't there. Still and all, that doesn't account for everything. It seems to me that many of the best Trek novelists simply have more interest in telling stories that fit into the larger tapestry, flesh out what came before, develop backstory, and/or expand on intriguing elements left unexplored in canon.
And FWIW, it is possible for that same approach to be applied to TV as well. For example, I think of the Reeves-Stevenses as among the best Trek novelists... and their contributions to ENT season four helped make it what is widely hailed as the best season of that show, and the only one that really lived up to its potential as a prequel.
If "Space Seed" says the Eugenics Wars were 1992-1996, and Discovery says they are 2092-2096, both are canon. One doesn't have any more weight than the other from a canon perspective.
No, Canon is everything that is produced and shown on tv and in the movies. That can't be contradicted. Continuity can be contradicted. Episode A says that something happened one way. Episode B says the same thing happened in a different way. If they are official productions, both are canon. The contradiction is a violation of continuity.
