Head-banging, loud, over-drinking warriors who sing of battles usingaxesbat'leths = Vikings. Don't overthink it.
If you remove overthinking EVERYTHING, this board would have about four posts a day.
Elements of TOS which contradict later series
- Thread starter Voth commando1
- Start date
If you remove overthinking EVERYTHING, this board would have about four posts a day.
"Continuity errors" is a weird thing, and I find it's defintions vary across most fandoms I've encountered.
In some ways, it still seems strange to me that TOS should be 'the odd one out' and that later shows the 'right' continuity, given that TOS was first. Shouldn't that mean TOS is correct, and later shows are wrong for contradicting it?
On the other hand, is the weight of evidence. TOS may have been first to establish the facts of the Star Trek universe, but where later shows contradict it and then maintain continuity within themselves, it basically means the sheer weight of it overwrites whatever TOS did.
I find all this quite the dilemma. As, on some level, I still feel like TOS was the UR-Trek, so even though it only had 79 hours of TV and six movies to 'do it's thing', part of me is like, who cares if there are 100s of hours of later Trek that change continuity up? TOS was first. It's later Trek which gets the continuity 'wrong'.
I'm 50/50 on it, to be honest.
In some ways, it still seems strange to me that TOS should be 'the odd one out' and that later shows the 'right' continuity, given that TOS was first. Shouldn't that mean TOS is correct, and later shows are wrong for contradicting it?
On the other hand, is the weight of evidence. TOS may have been first to establish the facts of the Star Trek universe, but where later shows contradict it and then maintain continuity within themselves, it basically means the sheer weight of it overwrites whatever TOS did.
I find all this quite the dilemma. As, on some level, I still feel like TOS was the UR-Trek, so even though it only had 79 hours of TV and six movies to 'do it's thing', part of me is like, who cares if there are 100s of hours of later Trek that change continuity up? TOS was first. It's later Trek which gets the continuity 'wrong'.
I'm 50/50 on it, to be honest.
People want to shoehorn 50+ years of Star Trek history covering several TV series and movies into some kind of coherent continuity and it's just not possible. Too many contradictions and there was never any attempt by any of the people in charge of the franchise over the decades to even attempt to create anything like that. The whole idea of trying to tie it all together is pure folly. They were, and are, mainly interested in telling what they hope are entertaining stories. They aren't concerned that Klingons used to be treacherous and are now honorable, or some bit of trivia that took place in one episode of TOS but is contradicted by a later series. They aren't concerned that the ships in Discovery are far more advanced looking than the TOS Enterprise was. They weren't concerned with the inconsistencies in how Data's ethical program was presented in different situations. These are writers and producers who want to tell stories, not create a unified history.
In some ways, it still seems strange to me that TOS should be 'the odd one out' and that later shows the 'right' continuity, given that TOS was first. Shouldn't that mean TOS is correct, and later shows are wrong for contradicting it?
I agree. TOS forever and fornicate the rest.
@Henoch Well, the is the Hegh'bat. And starting in TNG season three, the Klingons were explicitly intended to be a mashup between Vikings and feudal Japan. IIRC, R. D. Moore wrote wrote an internal memo describing them in those very terms.
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Why in the world are you trying to make an argument out of this? The point, which I thought was obvious and quite well-known, is that TNG-era Klingons are based on both Vikings and samurai. Just as TOS Klingons were based on both the "Mongol Horde" stereotype and the USSR (or Red China), Romulans were a blend of Ancient Romans and WWII German sub crews, etc. Mashups like that are a common way to create fictional alien cultures.
In some ways, it still seems strange to me that TOS should be 'the odd one out' and that later shows the 'right' continuity, given that TOS was first. Shouldn't that mean TOS is correct, and later shows are wrong for contradicting it?
Not at all. Fiction is created by trial and error, refined and improved over time. Compare it to any other human endeavor -- everyone starts out weak at a thing and gets better at it with experience. When you're creating a fictional universe, just like when you're doing anything else, your early efforts are the roughest and you improve as you go. So the later versions of things in a fictional series are like the more refined and perfected version, and the early stuff is just the rough draft. So as a rule, the later version takes priority. That's why we don't still talk about James R. Kirk and his part-Vulcanian science officer on the Earth ship Enterprise operated by UESPA and powered by lithium crystals. The early versions gave way to the later ones.
There's no dilemma as long as you distinguish between the fundamental substance of a story and the surface trappings of how it's told. What fundamentally matters about Star Trek isn't what the uniforms look like or what the alien makeups look like or whether they have holograms or whether they're sexist or whatever. It's about the bigger stuff, the overall nature of the world and the personality of the characters and the ideas the series stands for, the stuff that stays the same even when the surface details change.
These are all just stories, and every story changes from teller to teller. What we see is filtered through different storytellers' styles and resources and attitudes and flaws, and so we see the same things represented in slightly or significantly different ways. What defines the universe is the stuff that's consistent, that all the tellers basically agree on and try to get across in their own varying ways.
I forgot about this probably because we never see it enacted. The practice seems to be primarily for the old and crippled, but then again, it is a retcon in TNG.
Thanks for info, I haven't heard this before.
Actually, this largely worked for a long period of time. Yes there were a few minor errors. But 99.99% of Star Trek made sense in terms of a single continuity. It wasn't until they stopped caring(yes a generalization) with Enterprise, then JJTrek, and the Discovery that made it impossible to reconcile. It doesn't require memorizing every fact in the Star Trek franchise to get it right. The Star Trek encyclopedia worked for most of us for many years. Need to know about something, just look it up. It's really not that hard to keep track of what's going on. Which just emphasizes the laziness of modern TV shows that can't even keep track of their own continuity.
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Heh-heh-heh. Try tracking down some of the old Best of Trek collections and their regular "Star Trek Mysteries Solved" articles in which fans debated all the continuity errors in TOS and tried to make sense of them. Or the letter I once saw from a 1982 Starlog insisting that the first two Trek movies couldn't possibly be in the same reality as TOS because everything was so different. Good grief, it was years before TOS fans as a whole finally accepted TNG as a legitimate continuation.
The only reason the past shows seem in retrospect like they fit together is because earlier generations of fans finally got over their whining about the contradictions and started using their imaginations to reconcile them. Eventually fans will do the same about today's Trek shows and movies.
Wasn't the book TMOST released between TOS seasons 2 and 3? I think it would reflect the ideas of the producers and writers at that time.
Kor
I think TMOST was entirely Roddenberry
Given that it came first, it would be subsequent series that contradicts TOS.
Yep. (Which means the Klingon battlecruiser design debuted in the book before it appeared onscreen, ironically as a Romulan ship in "The Enterprise Incident" because "Elaan of Troyius" was delayed for later.)
Anyway, the problem with using "revisionist" as a negative when talking about fiction is that fiction is created by revision. Your first draft usually sucks, then you revise it and revise it and revise it again as many times as it takes until you finally get it into a reasonably publishable condition. Writers and artists do our work by changing our minds a lot. So things shouldn't be denounced just because they're rethought from the old version. If the new version is good, that's all that matters.
Just to sound off about something from page one:
Mudd asked Spock if he was "part Vulcanian". Spock replied "I am a Vulcan." I've always taken Mudd's question to be based on some form of casual racism, and Spock's curt reply to be a Vulcan eyeroll.
Mudd asked Spock if he was "part Vulcanian". Spock replied "I am a Vulcan." I've always taken Mudd's question to be based on some form of casual racism, and Spock's curt reply to be a Vulcan eyeroll.
The planet itself was originally supposed to be "Vulcanis". Memory Alpha says that the planet's original name was used in publicity and in the original first draft script of "Mudd's Women", but it was never used in any of the broadcast episodes. The term "Vulcanian", however was still used throughout the first season, even as it's inhabitants were called "Vulcans".
http://scriptsearch.dxdy.name/?page=results&query=({series|tos,}) and ({line|vulcanian,})
http://scriptsearch.dxdy.name/?page=results&query=({series|tos,}) and ({line|vulcanian,})
I just checked the scene on Netflix, and you're misremembering. Spock's sole response to Mudd's question was "Mmm."
The first use of the word "Vulcan" in TOS was in "The Man Trap," where it was used to refer to Spock's planet rather than his species. The first time it was used as a species name was in "The Naked Time," by Nurse Chapel. Spock himself never referred to his people as Vulcan until "Balance of Terror," and he never said "I am a Vulcan" until "Operation -- Annihilate!"
Meanwhile, "Vulcanian" continued to be used alongside "Vulcan" throughout season 1, in "Mudd's Women" (by Mudd), "Court Martial" (by Kirk, the computer, and Spock himself), "A Taste of Armageddon" (again by Spock), "This Side of Paradise" (by Sandoval), and "Errand of Mercy" (by Kor's lieutenant). In the last two episodes, other speakers use "Vulcan," implying that the writers had decided by that point to treat "Vulcanian" as an older or erroneous usage.
I'll have to check my discs. When one relies on memory, errors can slip in. It does help one to retain one's memory to exercise it, but it is often unreliable.
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I think the continuity of TOS was basically very easy to follow! It's the later Treks that spoiled it by either ignoring it or changing the science to accommodate their version! The Enterprise could travel to one side of the galaxy and back again but that was changed for the later series with each area of the Milky Way designated as quadrants. Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta! Both are good theories but it's best to either keep them seperate!
JB
JB
Even the best, most internally consistent fictional universes make continuity errors. Heck, even universes authored by only one person will contradict themselves, let alone the many faceted franchises written by hundreds of people over the course of decades. Author Terrance Dicks once said that continuity is only what an average person may be expected to remember from within a strict period of time, and that his yardstick was that contradicting past events is fair game after that period of time elapses and what people can be reasonably expected to remember from a few seasons ago is a little fuzzier. A good rule of thumb, I feel, albeit one that feels perhaps less relevant in the current day and age, where technology gives us access to whole libraries of stuff. Doctor Who book author Lawrence Miles went one further, writing an essay distinguishing the difference between what he called small c continuity vs capital C Continuity. One of them is building a character by establishing a major event in their life and commemorating that every so often, remembering to do so at the right point in that character's cycle, subtle stuff but with enough broad strokes not to inhibit the telling of fresh stories, while the other is trying to nail in things in stone tablets and giving lashes to any poor unfortunates that dare contradict it, while increasingly becoming obsessed with referring backwards to it. I think we can see why the latter may be too much, sometimes.
This reminds me of one of my personal favorites. Even though TNG had come into existence by 1989, Star Trek V made only base overtures towards acknowledging it... to all extents and purposes, treating the newcomer as still being the second-tier Star Trek. 1991's The Undiscovered Country, however, repeatedly throws forward to things established in the spin-off, eg the Alpha and Beta quadrants are only ever namechecked in TOS era in that one movie. The crossover was much stronger, because by then, The Next Generation had well and truly re-written the boundaries, so now TOS was being forced to play by TNG's rules instead of the other way around....
This reminds me of one of my personal favorites. Even though TNG had come into existence by 1989, Star Trek V made only base overtures towards acknowledging it... to all extents and purposes, treating the newcomer as still being the second-tier Star Trek. 1991's The Undiscovered Country, however, repeatedly throws forward to things established in the spin-off, eg the Alpha and Beta quadrants are only ever namechecked in TOS era in that one movie. The crossover was much stronger, because by then, The Next Generation had well and truly re-written the boundaries, so now TOS was being forced to play by TNG's rules instead of the other way around....
Was that on his blog, or in an interview, or in one of the About Time books...? Sounds familiar but I can't place it.
I liked in VI how during the dinner scene they said they were about being a thousand light years from Starfleet HQ, whether that was hyperbole or whatever now with the Enterprise retcon, but back then it made space feel huge.
Or deliberate continuity changes, to refine the work over time. Like the Enterprise changing from an Earth/UESPA ship to a Federation Starfleet ship, or Data being retconned into an emotionless being at the start of season 3 (though I never considered that an improvement, since the "robots can't feel" idea was cliched even then and doesn't make a lot of sense).
I disagree with your interpretation. ST V's script was written during TNG's first season, and that season didn't establish all that much about the Trek universe that the ST V screenwriters could build on, since it mostly avoided TOS-era elements like Vulcans, Klingons, and Romulans. So it's not that they were avoiding TNG references, just that there wasn't much to reference yet. Indeed, I'd say that ST V did consciously foreshadow TNG in the only way it really could that early on, by showing the UFP and Klingons starting to become friendlier at the end of the film.
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