We don't need to photoshop anything, all one has to do is look at the show.
No way any one would buy this show is Prime without CBS saying it to reassure them.
Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
- Thread starter Annorax849
- Start date
We don't need to photoshop anything, all one has to do is look at the show.
No way any one would buy this show is Prime without CBS saying it to reassure them.
If you say so.
So treating a show (or a franchise) as just a rolling series of retcons is okay by you? That would drive me up a wall. It's a very Big Brother-ish approach to the past.
The devil is in the details, after all. It's the little details of fictional worldbuilding that make it both credible and interesting. A world that has to be reduced to "broad strokes" to avoid contradictions is not well-suited to tell stories worth telling.
That seems like a serious overstatement to me. Imagining plausible future technology has always been a very small part of what Trek is about. There's nothing about phasers, transporters, or warp drive that is remotely related to present tech or even to scientific reality; they've always been motivated by the needs of the plot. (Indeed, even in SF-nal terms, the transporters are famously at a conspicuously different tech level from the rest of Trek tech. We accept them because they've been there from the beginning, no other reason.)
No, you really can't. Reshaping a fictional reality to have different details and backstory is pretty much the definition of a reboot. At best, what you're talking about is a so-called "soft reboot"... which to me is frankly an oxymoron, and becomes an exercise in frustration almost every time I see it tried.
The third episode? "The Corbomite Maneuver"? What, pray tell, "reshaped the universe" in that one? The uniform collars changed, but that's not exactly a big deal.
Now that's the kind of headcanon I like... a speculation that actually makes sense of something that seems initially counter-intuitive! It's not what the show actually intends, of course, but it's clever.
Straw man... nobody's saying continuity has to be perfect. The goal is simply to avoid gratuitous changes and careless contradictions. Fiction is mutable, yes, but when you call attention to that mutability, you blow the illusion.
As for shedding anachronisms... fine, let's make sure the bridge doesn't have hardcopy printers and the captain doesn't complain about having women on a starship. I can get behind that. But oh, wait, Trek already did those things, a long time ago. I can't think of very much else about Trek, either core concepts or small details, that "doesn't work." (And if I could, from their track record so far, the people behind DSC are not the ones I would trust to come up with something better.)
The narrative has always been very close to consistent. And it has always been sold that way. Heck, the very existence of the term "prime timeline" (which of course prompted this thread) is an example of selling it that way.
Quite so.
All the previous examples aside, here's one that's almost impossible to get around... Star Trek imagined a future history in which the space program of the 1960s continued and expanded, and reached out to explore and colonize the solar system, even before other stars were within reach. Our reality, sad to say, is not one in which that has happened. It is fundamentally different from Trek's reality in that regard, and there's no amount of retconning that can really paper that over.
Good point, on both clauses. Continuity isn't the only problem or even the main problem with DSC. But when continuity is the issue, DSC has done things that do undermine the worldbuilding of Trek's fictional reality as a whole.
I'm not sure about that... if they hadn't cared at all, they wouldn't have bothered using Cochrane at all, they'd just have invented some other historical turning point. (After all, he was just a one-off character from an episode that was then almost 30 years old; how many viewers would remember him?) Instead, how it comes across to me is that they did some superficial research to dig up the name for the sake of a callback, and maybe read a capsule summary of "Metamorphosis," but otherwise disregarded everything that had been established about the character. They certainly ignored other details established about Trek's 21st century, even in TNG (e.g., the date of World War III).
Actually, I've already mentioned the two obvious occasions when they traveled to the modern-day world (as opposed to the near future or near past) — 1968 in "Assignment: Earth" and 1996 in "Future's End" — and in both cases, the world was clearly distinguishable from our own. Did you have something else in mind?
(Same goes for most of the near-contemporary visits. For heaven's sake, Star Trek's world is one where aliens actually did land at Roswell, NM, in 1947! Do you mean to accept that as our reality?)
Perhaps. But this is a discussion among fans, on a fan forum. Who cares what "the average viewer" thinks? I take it as a given that the average viewer — of Trek or any other show — is in fact average, and pretty undiscriminating. The show should aim to satisfy discriminating viewers; "average" ones won't give a damn about the details one way or the other anyway.
That doesn't really ring true. There was no contradiction about Burnham's background in the first place, merely new information being added to Spock's famously secretive family history. The Klingon War either did or didn't fit canonical history, depending on one's POV, but the fact that it's over after one season (as was promised) doesn't change that either way. As for the spore drive, they crafted a golden opportunity to write it out of continuity (the lack of spores) and then specifically didn't do so, so they don't seem to think of it as a problem. So whatever the showrunners were talking about "lining up" with TOS, it seems unlikely to be these things. There are other inconsistencies that are more conspicuous.
And this is why people are objecting to the producers' dictates. They get to say it's part of a specific fictional world that they didn't create, and then they make arbitrary changes to that world seemingly at whim. If it were their own creation, or a reboot, no one would mind; it would be judged on its own merits. But they're messing up a very nice sandbox that someone else built and they were just invited to play in.
And I, and others, get called group think members for agreeing with CBS' press releases.
So, where does it end?
False equivalencyI guess Trump is right since he is the official leader of the US. We should follow him without question!
Who knew?!?
Welcome to Talos IV. How long will you have been staying?
I disagree. A story that falls completely apart when you look at the minute details (was he carrying a .38 or a .357? Is her dress violet or indigo? Do tricorders have six buttons or seven?) either has a very shallow and uninteresting point to make, or a very shallow and uninteresting audience.
... which is pretty much how they're going to resolve the issue. The question "How come Spock has a famous mutineer sister we never heard about before?" is still being asked among fandom and hasn't been answered directly in-universe, despite the fact that we are obviously smart enough to connect the dots.
That's mainly because they intend to go on using it in future episodes, which is kind of obvious. The fact that the drive actually works on Discovery and that Stamets says Starfleet is committed to finding a non-human interface leaves that totally up in the air. So again there's the question "Why isn't the spore drive standard equipment later on?" needs to be answered on-screen.
These are, in fact, the only conspicuous inconsistencies from a narrative standpoint: Burnham, because she's never been mentioned before, the Spore Drive because it's never been used before, and the Klingon War because the Federation isn't dead. At least as far as the Klingons, it's likely we'll see them again fighting as a far more unified empire with more coherent political objectives in later seasons, and it's almost gauranteed that by series end we're going to have some kind of permanent "stop work" order on the spore drive that results in a fleetwide prohibition on its use.
More to the point: there aren't a lot of alternatives to what they COULD be talking about here. Literally all of the major plot points and/or twists in the first season were pre-established Chekov-gun Style at least four episodes prior. Almost anything they were planning to address in Season 2 has probably been mentioned or at least teased at some point in Season 1. If plugging any of those "inconsistencies" was to be a major plot point, they would have established them by now.
They, at least were invited to play in that sandbox. None of us were. So what difference does it make to us what they do in that sandbox?
Because, it matters...
There is always an emotional element in fandom that is not rational. We feel a sense of ownership over the property and how it is presented on screen. Discovery, like others before it, simply have the unfortunate struggle of finding their way under the spotlight of fan critique.
As established by this very thread people regard Star Trek wholly different from others, from expecting it to be a representation of our future to expecting everything to remain perfectly consistent across the board, as well as all the colors in between. At some point in time, perhaps we all need to acknowledge that these perspectives on fictional world building simply are not going to meet.
You can accept whatever you like into Headcanon. However, for the point of discussing fiction, it's pointless to bring headcanon into the fold. Otherwise, there's no common frame of reference. What makes the most sense for discussion of Star Trek is accepting the "Official" word, but that has no bearing on what you take into your own headcanon whatsoever.
For example, it's my headcanon that Andorians, Vulcans, Humans, and Tellarites founded the Federation (and yes, I know that I'm hardly unique in that). There's no canon support for this, however, save for a minor background newspaper clipping in Star Trek: Generations, and I'd have no problem with a Star Trek production eventually contradicting this headcanon.
No it doesn't. I don't think anyone is arguing that point.
Calling it a reboot won't make it good either.
Can't say I've noticed that it is. Most fans seem to have come to terms with it pretty early on, at the latest after "Lethe." After all, it kinda goes without saying that any fictional character at the moment of his or her introduction will be someone you "never heard about before," regardless of how he or she supposedly fits into the narrative.
And in terms of the plausibility of a new character's status vs. the never-heard-of-'em thing, Burnham doesn't really seem to pose much difficulty... certainly less than, say, the fact that we'd never heard of the incredibly famous and important Jonathan Archer or the NX-01 before the premier of ENT.
I kind of hope we get to see the ships of the line models on the Enterprise and they include the NX-01. Troll hard Kurtz.
Well the ship and her captain have already been mentioned on screen by name. The captain twice.
Having the model would cement it even more.
I guess Trump is right since he is the official leader of the US. We should follow him without question!
Who knew?!?
I must hang around different circles than you. It's a question I see a lot. Well, not a question so much as a complaint.
In season two, Pike will have this dialogue. "I've always wanted to captain an Enterprise. Archer was my hero growing up. I met him at the Academy, a lovely man. He always told us great stories about the old days of space exploration, then he'd start rambling about seeing a gazelle being born and would lose his train of thought."
and pet his stuffed dog. No, not a stuffed animal, but his preserved beagle.
Archer: Remember the baby gazella boy?
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: It was something alright.
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: Now where was I? Trip had just turned into a jack rabbit with ADHD and got himself killed fighting some random aliens with a power surge.
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: I know the MACOs should have done it, I don't know where they were.
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: Come to think of it, that might have been what we just told people. I saw Trip just the other day or was it some Scottish fella?
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: No, Daniels wasn't involved this time.
Cadet Pike: Sir, will this be on the test?
Archer: Quiet Trip, I'm getting to my speech I gave at the founding of the Federation. Now baby gazelles...
[Entire class groans]
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: It was something alright.
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: Now where was I? Trip had just turned into a jack rabbit with ADHD and got himself killed fighting some random aliens with a power surge.
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: I know the MACOs should have done it, I don't know where they were.
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: Come to think of it, that might have been what we just told people. I saw Trip just the other day or was it some Scottish fella?
Stuffed Porthos: ...
Archer: No, Daniels wasn't involved this time.
Cadet Pike: Sir, will this be on the test?
Archer: Quiet Trip, I'm getting to my speech I gave at the founding of the Federation. Now baby gazelles...
[Entire class groans]
Pretty much.
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