Elements of TOS which contradict later series

[Maurice]

[...[Look at Harlan Ellison's script for City on the Edge of Forever. Well he didn't really get some aspects of the series, nothing he did violated the writers Bible.[...]

To be fair, I don't think there was a writer's guide when he started the script (@Harvey ?), and certainly not when he submitted his approved story outline in the spring of 66. He was caught in part by the shifting sands as the show evolved from a concept to what it was going to be. By the time he submitted his final draft in August 1966 the show was more solidly defined and not quite what he imagined.

 

[Christopher]

To be fair, I don't think there was a writer's guide when he started the script (@Harvey ?), and certainly not when he submitted his approved story outline in the spring of 66.

I'm pretty sure there was a bible by then. The most famous version from April 1967 was the third draft; the second one was written after the pilots. (I have it in PDF, but it lacks a title page so I don't know its date.)

 

[suarezguy]

But thoughts, examples, ruminations?

I think the biggest inconsistency is that realistic-looking robots/androids seem a lot more advanced and even also not really rare in the series compared to TNG and the other 24th century shows. Shapeshifters also were/felt at least bit more common than in Deep Space Nine.

Feeling inconsistent with Enterprise, I get the sense from the original show that Starfleet and the deep-space exploration had started just the generation before Kirk, the space program just about 30 years before he became captain, definitely not over 100.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Feeling inconsistent with Enterprise, I get the sense from the original show that Starfleet and the deep-space exploration had started just the generation before Kirk, the space program just about 30 years before he became captain, definitely not over 100.

TOS has ships like the Valiant, the Horizon and the Archon already exploring "deep space" 100-200 years prior to the Enterprise. The Romulan War was fought 100 years before the events of TOS.

 

[Christopher]

Feeling inconsistent with Enterprise, I get the sense from the original show that Starfleet and the deep-space exploration had started just the generation before Kirk, the space program just about 30 years before he became captain, definitely not over 100.

Huh? That's a very weird impression to get from TOS, given that the Valiant was launched 200 years before, that Cochrane disappeared in deep space 150 years before, that there was a war with the Romulans 100 years before, that the Archon visited Beta III and the Horizon visited Iotia 100 years before, and that Janus VI had been in operation for over 50 years. TAS added the data points that the Federation had kept the peace for 100 years ("The Infinite Vulcan"), that Federation ships had been disappearing in the Taurean sector for 150 years ("The Lorelei Signal"), and that the human-Kzin wars had been 200 years before (though that makes more sense in the Known Space universe than in the Trek universe).

(Oops, just beaten to it.)

 

[uniderth]

(I'm not just here to bitch, by the way -- The Expanse is the newest TV SF there is, and their depiction of the universe is better than anything I've ever seen. It's also a great show teamed by wonderful people. "Best SF on TV since TOS", I say. And yes, they take some dramatic licenses. Only Firefly had the spoons to have soundlessness in space, for instance, but on the whole, it's orders of magnitude smarter than where Trek has been the last few decades.)

Nailed it. I was just about to mention The Expanse. They've done an amazing job showing long range combat. Growing up on TNG and Voyager, Star Trek's long range combat just seemed too slow and a limitation in visual effects. But once you know it was the actual intent and the potential realities of space combat, suddenly Star TREK is light years (plun very much intended) above TNG, DSN, and VOY (not to mention the unmentionables).

It's like the difference between eating junk food and eating a delicious healthy meal.

 

[Christopher]

But once you know it was the actual intent and the potential realities of space combat, suddenly Star TREK is light years (plun very much intended) above TNG, DSN, and VOY

Realism is a stylistic choice, and it's not wrong to make different ones. Cartoons aren't realistic, but you have a Gold Key panel as your avatar, so presumably you don't feel that the stylization of comic books is insulting your intelligence.

Certainly I prefer it when SF productions use good science, but it's just needlessly picking a fight to accuse creators of "assuming their audience is stupid" just because they opt for a different style than realism. As I said, I interpret Trek's VFX shots as symbolic for the sake of clarity.

The problem is, people today have grown up with realistic effects and feel cheated by anything that falls short. I grew up in a time when VFX were almost never lifelike and convincing, so I learned from childhood to look beyond the unrealistic surface of what I was shown and extrapolate the thing it was meant to suggest. It's the same kind of extrapolation we use when we read comic books or watch cartoons or see a puppet show, or when we look at printed words on a page and imagine the story they describe.

 

[J.T.B.]

A space battle where you never actually see the ships interact and need everything explained in dialogue might be comprehensible, but it's not as interesting to look at -- or as interesting to create if you're a VFX artist.

It didn't seem to hurt the popularity of "Balance of Terror" though.

 

[Christopher]

It didn't seem to hurt the popularity of "Balance of Terror" though.

This is a silly argument. There is no single right way to create things. If five different creators choose to do things in five different ways, they can all be right.

 

[J.T.B.]

This is a silly argument. There is no single right way to create things. If five different creators choose to do things in five different ways, they can all be right.

Your earlier comment made it sound as though the space battle which was "not as interesting to look at" was a less viable approach.

 

[Christopher]

Your earlier comment made it sound as though the space battle which was "not as interesting to look at" was a less viable approach.

I was saying that was the judgment of the people who made it at the time. My whole point is that it's nonsense to make blanket generalizations about something as individual as art.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Your earlier comment made it sound as though the space battle which was "not as interesting to look at" was a less viable approach.

Indeed. That was how I read it as well.

How interesting science fiction is to watch isn't necessarily a function of how intricate its VFX are.

 

[Harrison Bergeron]

All the "Cage"/"Menagerie" references to lasers were retconned away by ENT and Disco all having phasers as the norm a decade before TOS.

..."Star Trek Disco" ...Wouldn't that been set in the 1970s?

 

[Henoch]

Many of the TOS inconsistencies come from both pilots, especially in terminology, curved v. straight corridors and round v. wedge-shaped rooms. During the regular seasons of TOS, things were better with a steady evolution of trek tech on the ship, but even to this day I'm still confused about deflectors v. shields v. deflector shields...

 

[Christopher]

Many of the TOS inconsistencies come from both pilots, especially in terminology, curved v. straight corridors and round v. wedge-shaped rooms.[

Why is that an inconsistency? It's a big ship. Maybe the round rooms are in the center of the saucer and the wedge-shaped ones are around them. And the straight corridors are radial and the round ones concentric.

but even to this day I'm still confused about deflectors v. shields v. deflector shields...

Originally, they were called "deflectors," "deflector screens," or just "screens," but "deflector shields" or just "shields" came into use by the mid-first season and came to be the more common usage over time, though "screens" was still in occasional use as late as TAS. They were all used interchangeably.

The exception was in TMP, where Decker made a reference to "screens and shields," and there were several lines in the first V'Ger attack on the Enterprise establishing that the ship had both "forcefields" and "deflectors" as separate defense systems. According to a behind-the-scenes memo (reprinted on p. 50 of Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series), the intention in TMP was that the ship had a dual defensive system -- a set of multiple, directional, skintight "deflector shields" that covered various parts of the hull and could be turned on and off individually (called shields because they were planar and directional like a knight's shield), and a single, weaker "forcefield screen" that surrounded the entire ship in a bubble, like the way TNG and later shows depicted deflector shields. I guess they were trying to standardize and clarify the different terms, but it didn't stick.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Originally, they were called "deflectors," "deflector screens," or just "screens," but "deflector shields" or just "shields" came into use by the mid-first season and came to be the more common usage over time, though "screens" was still in occasional use as late as TAS. They were all used interchangeably.

I'll not lower muh scrreens!

 

[Maurice]

Many of the TOS inconsistencies come from both pilots, especially in terminology, curved v. straight corridors and round v. wedge-shaped rooms. During the regular seasons of TOS, things were better with a steady evolution of trek tech on the ship, but even to this day I'm still confused about deflectors v. shields v. deflector shields...

Well, the way it was supposed to work was that the shields were supposed to be around the ship and the deflector was supposed to project outwards in a specific targeted direction, but the scripts fumbled that a lot.

 

[johnnybear]

Shields protect the ship from the blast were as deflectors hurl the energy away from the ship or even back to where it came from?
JB

 

[Christopher]

Well, the way it was supposed to work was that the shields were supposed to around the ship and the deflector was supposed to project outwards in a specific targeted direction, but the scripts fumbled that a lot.

Different use of "deflector." That's the navigational deflector beam, which emerges from the forward dish and pushes space debris out of the ship's path. It's an idea that was worked out by the show's technical advisors and mentioned in The Making of Star Trek and the Concordance, but was never clearly established in dialogue until TNG. In TOS, the deflector screens/shields, or just deflectors, were a more general vessel defense. As I said, they were originally called deflector screens, but started to be interchangeably called deflector shields midway through season 1. There was never any attempt to differentiate the meanings of "screen" and "shield" until Phase II and TMP.

Granted, in the first couple of uses, it does seem like "deflectors" is being used in a manner commensurate with the tech advisors' asteroid-beam idea. In "Where No Man," Spock orders deflectors to full intensity as they approach the barrier, and reports "deflectors say there's something there, sensors say there isn't." And in "The Corbomite Maneuver," Sulu says "deflectors aren't stopping" the cube buoy as it approaches. Those both suggest that the deflectors are something acting at a distance ahead of the ship. But right after that in "Mudd's Women," Kirk and Farrell refer to the "deflector screen" as something that can be extended around the scout ship they're pursuing. By "Balance of Terror," Hansen refers to the border outpost's "deflector shield" as a defense knocked out by the Romulans; a stationary outpost would have no need for a navigational deflector beam, so clearly it's being used in the more familiar sense. In "Arena," Sulu reports that the Enterprise's phasers had no effect against the Gorn ship's "deflector screen." And in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," Spock said the ship's "deflectors" were blocking Earth radar beams.

So it seems like they were initially guided by the tech advice about a forward deflector beam, but generalized it into some more vaguely defined "deflectors," plural, that served whatever purpose the script required, so that they rapidly evolved into a more general, omnidirectional defense system.

 

[Henoch]

Shields protect the ship from the blast were as deflectors hurl the energy away from the ship or even back to where it came from?
JB

I thought shields absorbed energy?