Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?

[Crazy Eddie]

So, basically I can't say that the emperor has no clothes if the emperor's PR tells us that in the first place?

It depends. You show up to the Imperial Swimsuit Charity Photoshoot expecting to see the Emperor in a tasteful one-piece speedo and a swimscap. Instead, she's frolicking around in a skimpy thong bikini that seems to be held in place entirely by waterproof tape and good intentions. You can shout all you want about the emperor being (basically) naked, but at the end of the day it wasn't the EMPEROR who misunderstood what was meant by the word "swimsuit."

Irregardless of what the Powers That Be chose to address or not address, DSC has continuity errors in the visuals department

I don't consider visuals to be part of inter-series continuity. It's unlikely anyone currently working in television does either.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The thing is, ordinarily, when a property "updates its look" and is only consistent with the "general lore," that's what you call a reboot.

No, reboot involves an update of both the look and the narrative content of the story. Reboots may or may not be consistent with the "general lore" (many of them, in fact, are not) but they are reboots by virtue of the fact that they retell the story, rather than build additional stories around that lore.

From your example:

2005's Batman Begins isn't a prequel to 1989's Batman. If the filmmakers had tried to say it was, though, viewers would have been confused and frustrated, and quite reasonably so.

Yes, for reasons that had nothing at all to do with the visuals. Remember, the prior 4 batman movies had ALREADY drastically re-imagined Gotham City and Batman's character and equipment in its latter two sequels. People were puzzled, but they still went with it because story wise there wasn't anything wrong with it (it was just super weird and off-putting because the changes were garish and terrible).

Batman Begins can only be a reboot because it contradicts some of the major plot points of the original Batman. In particular, it changes the details about how Bruce Wayne's parents were killed, and by whom, and what he ended up doing about it. It changes the background of how Comissioner Gordon comes to learn of Batman's existence and, for that matter, Gotham as a whole. It writes Jack Napier completely out of Batman's origin story and, at the end of the film (and in the one that follows) reboots the Joker as a nameless psychopath who just happened to escape from Arkham in the chaos.

Now, COULD Batman Begins have been a prequel? Absolutely it could. But certain story elements would have to be changed for that to be the case; to begin with, nothing that Batman does in that movie could be recognizable as being done by Batman. The entire scene where he confronts his parents' killer would have to be heavily re-written (unless they just make it a slightly younger Jack Napier and have Bruce develop amnesia or some other bullshit so he doesn't remember the encounter until years later) and Bruce would only develop the signature Batman look at the very end, never revealing it to Gordon at all.

It's a conceit of Star Trek that the visuals have been consistent IN THE PAST at times when multiple series were being developed by the same creative team at around the same time. But this isn't something that's rational to expect in science fiction IN GENERAL, because it rarely actually occurs.

 

[fireproof78]

If you insist surface details like the look of the uniforms is the same thing as narrative, then you might as well give up entirely on this show because it's never going to satisfy you.

In general, I think this point is where we are at. Visuals in Trek change multiple times, often simply because of budget.

 

[Tuskin38]

I like the blue ones, but they may change during the run towards something closer to TOS’ pilot.

Well they hinted at Wonder Con that the Enterprise's crew would have a familiar uniform.

 

[lawman]

Cute, but that kind of falls apart when you address that Joe Chill killed Bruce Wayne's parents instead of Jack Napier. Plus, nobody in production ever claimed BEGINS to be a prequel set in the same universe as Burton's film.

Hey, you're the one who asserted that there are "far more substantial differences" between the Batman films, versus the "trivial surface details" setting DSC apart from previous Trek. I'm just saying it's not that clear-cut.

To put it another way, one shouldn't have to ask for (much less rely on) statements from producers to tell what fictional reality a story belongs in.

I don't consider visuals to be part of inter-series continuity. It's unlikely anyone currently working in television does either.

If that's the case, it's a damn shame. When you're talking about a prequel set in a recognized period of an ongoing franchise, they should be. You lose far more than you gain by changing them.

(And although it's getting tiresome to keep reminding the thread of this, we're not just talking about visuals here. There are story elements in DSC that raise the same kinds of questions. For some people, obviously the answers still add up to "yes, it fits," but it's specious to pretend the questions don't exist in the first place.)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If that's the case, it's a damn shame. When you're talking about a prequel set in a recognized period of an ongoing franchise, they should be. You lose far more than you gain by changing them.

I don't see how. The changes are almost always a matter of budget and problem solving and are usually an IMPROVEMENT. As I gave the example earlier, it's kind of like how there are two different versions of the "Battle of the Line" in Babylon 5. The original version was filmed in the series' first season when their special effects were still relatively primitive. When they did the "In the Beginning" TV movie they re-shot the entire sequence with the same actors and reaction shots but completely changed all the effects shots. NARRATIVELY, it's the same battle, but the visual impact is a lot more visceral; while the original we just see a bunch of ships sort of bobbing around and getting shot down one by one by an unseen attacker, the new version literally fills the sky with enemy ships and drives home just how completely fucked Sinclair's squadron really was.

And although it's getting tiresome to keep reminding the thread of this, we're not just talking about visuals here. There are story elements in DSC that raise the same kinds of questions.

Yes. Those story elements ARE what the producers were talking about. The visuals are not.

 

[fireproof78]

To put it another way, one shouldn't have to ask for (much less rely on) statements from producers to tell what fictional reality a story belongs in.

I don't.

 

[Ceridwen]

To put it another way, one shouldn't have to ask for (much less rely on) statements from producers to tell what fictional reality a story belongs in.

You don't though. If it says Star Trek then it's in Star Trek.

 

[lawman]

The changes are almost always a matter of budget and problem solving and are usually an IMPROVEMENT.

Is that really what you think about DSC vs TOS? That's clearly a controversial claim, to put it mildly.

Yes. Those story elements ARE what the producers were talking about.

The story elements (you say) the producers are talking about are not the ones I see posters here actually talking about.

Long story short, as I posted recently in a thread on continuity over in the TrekLit forum, there's a certain amount of mental "editing" involved in watching (or reading) almost any story that's part of a larger franchise, because things seldom fit the continuity perfectly. The question (and it's a subjective one, and I actually think the OP of this thread posed it reasonably well) is where one draws the line... where one deems something to be more "in" than "out" (kind of an example of fuzzy set logic, if you're familiar with that). It's the point where the mental effort to make a given story "fit" stops being worth the trouble. That's what all the argument here is about: where should that line be, and which side of it does DSC fall on? There's more than one way to answer those questions, but again, it's pointless to pretend they're not legitimate questions in the first place.

You don't though. If it says Star Trek then it's in Star Trek.

That's branding. It resolves nothing about continuity.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Is that really what you think about DSC vs TOS? That's clearly a controversial claim, to put it mildly.

Which part is controversial? The fact that DSC has a much larger budget than TOS? The fact that DSC has 50 years of lessons learned from science fiction television production and technological development to draw from? Or the fact that Discovery's visual effects and costumes are of a much higher quality than those of TOS? I see nothing controversial in any of those statements.

The story elements (you say) the producers are talking about are not the ones I see posters here actually talking about.

What story elements are you actually referring to, then?

It's the point where the mental effort to make a given story "fit" stops being worth the trouble.

Perhaps you should give us the long version, then, since I have no idea what it is you think couldn't be made to "fit" storywise. To be honest, I can't think of a single thing that happened in Discovery that doesn't fit extremely well into TOS given that series' overall lack of world-building, plus the ten-year gap between them.

 

[lawman]

Which part is controversial? The fact that DSC has a much larger budget than TOS? The fact that DSC has 50 years of lessons learned from science fiction television production and technological development to draw from? Or the fact that Discovery's visual effects and costumes are of a much higher quality than those of TOS? I see nothing controversial in any of those statements.

Your capitalized word "IMPROVEMENT"—that's the controversial part. Obviously, a lot of us find the visuals in DSC to be less aesthetically pleasing than those in TOS.

Certainly the budget is higher, and the FX technology is more advanced. But that doesn't necessarily mean the actual visual results are better to look at. The FX tech would be at 2018 levels no matter what design choices were made, after all. In fact, there's actually a whole separate thread discussing how the FX in DSC are actually inferior to a lot of other contemporary FX work (with comparisons to shows like, e.g., The Expanse), not necessarily due to the talents of the FX house involved (which is apparently quite good), but due to specific creative choices that come from someone on the production side, like the high-contrast shadows, the lighting blooms, the omnipresent blue sheen, the surfacing and window boxes of the starships, the cluttered spacescapes, and other technical details.

But mainly, what I'm talking about here are the designs. DSC is at its best when it sticks closest to the TOS visual aesthetic — with things like the phasers and communicators and the engine room. The more it diverges from them, the more unsightly it gets — with things like the uniforms, the Charon, and (at the nadir) the redesign of the Klingons and their ships. At least, that's my take. I like the look of TOS (always have), and so do a lot of other people. So making a blanket statement like saying DSC is an "improvement" is, yes, controversial. One might as well say "Star Wars has a better visual aesthetic than Star Trek" and expect people to swallow it.

What story elements are you actually referring to, then? ... To be honest, I can't think of a single thing that happened in Discovery that doesn't fit extremely well into TOS given that series' overall lack of world-building...

Gee, it's like you haven't read the thread at all.

You mentioned three that (you surmise) the producers were talking about because they imagined they were the primary areas of fan concern: Burham's family background, the Klingon War, and the continued existence of the spore drive. I already explained that Burnham poses no actual problem, and hardly anybody here has claimed otherwise; that whatever problem the war did or didn't pose, ending it didn't make a difference, and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle; and that the spore drive does pose an issue for future continuity but the producers seem to be in no hurry to address it, as they already gave themselves an excuse to write it out and then closed that door on themselves.

Beyond that, other posters have mentioned quite a few things. For example, the widespread use of cloaking devices a decade before the Romulans surprised everybody by having them because they were considered only theoretically possible. The widespread use of point-to-point intraship beaming when a decade later it was considered a risky trick for emergencies only. The widespread use of holographic comms when those weren't previously seen in Trek until a century later. The widespread knowledge of the existence of the Mirror Universe when it was apparently completely unknown a decade later. The tech level seen in the Mirror Universe, which is at odds with it being comparable to the Federation's a decade later. The apparent invisibility of either of the two types of Klingons we've seen before, even though showing them would improve the backstory about internal divisions in the Empire. The conversion of Harry Mudd from a sleazy con man to a brutal killer. The fact that Starfleet's admiralty, the Federation Council, and Ambassador Sarek(!) were depicted as being hunky-dory with putting a mass-murdering psychopath in charge of a cutting-edge starship and using genocide (or the threat thereof) to resolve a war. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a few... people have called attention to so many!...

Sure, it's probably possible to cobble up rationalizations for most or all of those story elements, and even for the visual stuff. I've seen 'em in this thread. But the more rationalizing you have to do, the more you have to squint when you watch the show and do mental somersaults for it to make sense, the more you have to ask whether it's worth the trouble. That's the central question that runs through this whole thread.

For my part, as I've said, I do still include the show in my headcanon, as part of (what I consider) the "prime timeline." But it's an open question how many of its details I'm going to have to elide in the long run to keep doing that. (And if it keeps doing shark-jumping episodes like Lorca's heel turn or painfully contrived ones like the season finale, that'll only underscore the question of whether it's worth the trouble.)

And I'm not even going to touch the notion that TOS was deficient in worldbuilding. That's just ridiculous on its face.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Your capitalized word "IMPROVEMENT"—that's the controversial part. Obviously, a lot of us find the visuals in DSC to be less aesthetically pleasing than those in TOS.

And there are people who think The Chainsmokers are more aesthetically pleasing than Stevie Wonder, but there's no question which one of them is a better musician.

Don't confuse quality with personal preference.

Certainly the budget is higher, and the FX technology is more advanced. But that doesn't necessarily mean the actual visual results are better to look at.

No, just better QUALITY.

That is, they are closer to photorealism, with more dynamic lighting effects, and are able to film ships, sets and interiors from a wider variety of angles and under different light conditions (where TOS has to recycle exactly 5 exterior shots as stock footage and give is 4 or 5 otherwise identical planets that differ only in color), Discovery is able to custom-make each set piece or FX shot specifically for the purpose of the episode. Which means Discovery can do things TOS never could have tried to do, or could have afforded to do, or would have THOUGHT to do even if they could.

You would have PREFERRED a different look, obviously. Doesn't change the fact that all of the new sets, visuals and props are of vastly higher quality than what was used in TOS. Thus they are an improvement.

Plus, you're running from the analogy again: JMS redid the visuals and SFX of a pivotal scene IN HIS OWN SHOW because he eventually acquired the technical knowledge and resources to do so. Likewise, some of the edits George Lucas did to the original Star Wars trilogy were a measurable improvement over the theatrical version, especially in the case of A New Hope, which makes a far less jarring contrast between the prequels and the sequels as a result (although not all of his changes were necessary or logical. Han definitely shot first).

the FX in DSC are actually inferior to a lot of other contemporary FX work (with comparisons to shows like, e.g., The Expanse), not necessarily due to the talents of the FX house involved (which is apparently quite good), but due to specific creative choices

... that you do not like. Again, don't confuse personal taste with quality. The world's most skillful painting is still the world's most skillful painting even if the object OF the painting happens to a fresh dog turd.

That being said: apart from the Babylon-5 style fog bank nebulas everywhere, I like the FX just fine. They're at least comparable with TOS and of objectively better quality anyway.

Beyond that, other posters have mentioned quite a few things. For example, the widespread use of cloaking devices a decade before the Romulans surprised everybody by having them because they were considered only theoretically possible. The widespread use of point-to-point intraship beaming when a decade later it was considered a risky trick for emergencies only. The widespread use of holographic comms when those weren't previously seen in Trek until a century later. The widespread knowledge of the existence of the Mirror Universe when it was apparently completely unknown a decade later. The tech level seen in the Mirror Universe, which is at odds with it being comparable to the Federation's a decade later. The apparent invisibility of either of the two types of Klingons we've seen before, even though showing them would improve the backstory about internal divisions in the Empire. The conversion of Harry Mudd from a sleazy con man to a brutal killer. The fact that Starfleet's admiralty, the Federation Council, and Ambassador Sarek(!) were depicted as being hunky-dory with putting a mass-murdering psychopath in charge of a cutting-edge starship and using genocide (or the threat thereof) to resolve a war. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a few... people have called attention to so many!...

Apart from the cloaking issue, none of these are inconsistent with TOS. They're new information, not contradictory information, and can only be interpreted as contradictory by someone who assumes they already knew all there was to know about the world. None of these things were previously established or disestablished one way or another, so there's nothing to be inconsistent WITH. The producers obviously know this, and have said as much.

As for the cloaking device, that would actually be a pretty good point if Enterprise hadn't already obliterated that particular piece of canon over a decade ago.

And I'm not even going to touch the notion that TOS was deficient in worldbuilding. That's just ridiculous on its face.

TOS' world-building was always extremely and deliberately vague. Rodenberry wanted the show to be oriented around the action and the characters rather than long-winded exposition on things the characters had no reason not to already know.

Don't believe me? Perhaps you'd like to go back through the scripts/transcripts of TOS episodes and source an answer to this very simple question:
On what planet was Kirk born?

 

[lawman]

Don't confuse quality with personal preference.

We're talking about design choices here, not technical capabilities. There is no objective metric of "quality." To pretend there is and that you're surprised at the controversy is just disingenuous.

Apart from the cloaking issue, none of these are inconsistent with TOS. They're new information, not contradictory information...

So you say. Obviously it's debatable (for 120 pages). Sure, one can argue that the transporters, the comms, the MU tech, etc., were all better than what we saw a decade later, because we don't know they weren't and it's impossible to prove a negative, but how plausible is that, really? And that Mudd softened over the years. And that Federation and Starfleet leadership pulled its collective head out of its ass. And so on. Like I said, it can mostly be rationalized; it's not irreconcilably incompatible with things we know. It's just incompatible enough to raise a lot of questions. As I said. And they're questions that the show apparently has little interest in answering.

As for the cloaking device, that would actually be a pretty good point if Enterprise hadn't already obliterated that particular piece of canon over a decade ago.

The existence of one half-assed retcon does not excuse pulling an even more half-assed retcon later on. Moreover, what was shown in ENT could mostly be rationalized away as it stood (again as already discussed here... highly classified encounters a century before Kirk and Spock; the Suliban tech was from the future; the Romulan cloaking tech may have been just holograms rather than actual invisibility, and it presumably wasn't used during the Romulan War) in ways that the flagrant Klingon use of the tech in DSC simply cannot.

And if you want more blatant contradictions, how about Lorca having physical relics of a Gorn and a Horta years before first contact with either one? Sure, those were just "Easter eggs" (not actual plot elements), but they were anachronisms. Easter eggs should add a little lagniappe to the enjoyment of a story, not leave you scratching your head.

It's emblematic of the fast-and-loose approach the show's creators have taken. They invite these kinds of questions rather than trying to avoid them.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

Long story short, as I posted recently in a thread on continuity over in the TrekLit forum, there's a certain amount of mental "editing" involved in watching (or reading) almost any story that's part of a larger franchise, because things seldom fit the continuity perfectly. The question (and it's a subjective one, and I actually think the OP of this thread posed it reasonably well) is where one draws the line... where one deems something to be more "in" than "out" (kind of an example of fuzzy set logic, if you're familiar with that). It's the point where the mental effort to make a given story "fit" stops being worth the trouble. That's what all the argument here is about: where should that line be, and which side of it does DSC fall on? There's more than one way to answer those questions, but again, it's pointless to pretend they're not legitimate questions in the first place.

That's branding. It resolves nothing about continuity.

The Enterprise having slightly different design styles in two different shows is not going to make my head hurt. TOS has a style of its own. DSC has a style of its own. One isn't more "fit" than the other. I don't need to try to reconcile them by some arbitrary in-universe explanation because I frankly don't think it's that important. I'm not watching Star Trek to catalog starship designs and pretend it's some coherent universe.

This reminds me of the old debate over which f/x work is "canon", the original 60s or the new 2000s f/x. As far as I'm concerned, both are "canon". We just have two different ways to view it. One isn't more "official" than the other unless you have a preference.

 

[lawman]

I'm not watching Star Trek to ... pretend it's some coherent universe.

Seems like this thread wouldn't be your cuppa tea, then. I assume you clicked the "I don't care" button in the poll back at the beginning?

 

[Awesome Possum]

I fail to see how it doesn’t line up with TOS other than costumes and props, which is to be expected and has absolutely no impact on the story. All that we know about Star Trek is based on what characters have said over the years. Maybe they just didn’t mention anything from Discovery because it never came up. It would be odd that in the middle of the tribble episode Spock decided to bring up his adopted sister who served on a ship where the captain who turned out to be from another universe had a pet one.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

Seems like this thread wouldn't be your cuppa tea, then. I assume you clicked the "I don't care" button in the poll back at the beginning?

It's fun to see how things connect as an aside, but I'm not holding Star Trek to that because I do believe the stories being told in the moment should be of higher priority than trying to map out and fit. FIRST CONTACT intentionally retcons information of Cochrane and I'm totally okay with that because I thought we got a pretty solid Trek film anyway. I accept that Trek is going to bend things like that in favor of story, I only hope the story is actually good. I'm middle of the road with DSC so far, but I'm not upset over stuff like bat'leths making an appearance in a time period we never saw them in.

And I picked the first poll option, because DSC is not that troublesome for me to reconcile with the rest of canon for the most part. I personally think it fits fine with the lore, and I don't consider visual styles to be stories.

 

[fireproof78]

So you say. Obviously it's debatable (for 120 pages). Sure, one can argue that the transporters, the comms, the MU tech, etc., were all better than what we saw a decade later, because we don't know they weren't and it's impossible to prove a negative, but how plausible is that, really? And that Mudd softened over the years. And that Federation and Starfleet leadership pulled its collective head out of its ass. And so on. Like I said, it can mostly be rationalized; it's not irreconcilably incompatible with things we know. It's just incompatible enough to raise a lot of questions. As I said. And they're questions that the show apparently has little interest in answering.

It's only one season in. There appears to be this attitude that Discovery must settle this debate from the get go, rather than establishing itself, establishing the characters and their place in the franchise. To me, it is becoming unreasonable for the show to go out of its way to answer these questions, when they are only one season in, and still roughly ten years away from TOS. And, ten years is a long time for these questions to be answered.

They just don't have to be answered right away.

 

[Awesome Possum]

On the BSG reboot, the designs of the original Cylons went from copies of the old BSG costume to a more mechanical looking model, they even updated a museum piece that was shown with the original design in the miniseries to the updated model in the finale. Does this mean the beginning of the show is a different timeline than the end of the show? No, they just changed the design. You’re supposed to care about the characters.

I treat Star Trek the same way. Worf’s forehead changes over the course of TNG and DS9 because of various production reasons, but no one worries about what’s happening to his forehead.

 

[lawman]

It's only one season in...

Truth. The show has time to answer questions, and to fix other problems.

OTOH, the only reason it has that time (at least in my book) is because it's Star Trek, and there's an undeniable sentimental attachment there. If it were anything else, I would have already given up on it by now for myriad reasons having nothing to do with continuity.

As it it, I wish I had more confidence in the ability of these particular writers either to improve the show or to answer continuity questions. To the extent they do things that undermine that sentimental attachment, it really doesn't help.