Look, Picard and Data also share some warm looks and a few suggestive words over the course of TNG/movies/PIC, and there are people who do ship those two, as they are welcome to.
Oh, come on, that's just insulting. There's an obvious difference between that kind of platonic comradeship and the kind of physical closeness and emotional subtext I saw here. I'm not a "shipper" eager to read into things. I don't have any particularly strong feelings about MOTU one way or the other. I'm just describing the casual impression I got, and it is a completely different impression than anything I ever saw between Picard and Data.
Technically, New Adventures is counted as its own universe in the MotU-Multiverse, as well, which I'll take as a good excuse to post another Spector Creative video:
I am so sick of modern fandom's need to force every variant interpretation of fiction into a "multiverse" model. Stories aren't universes, they're narratives. Each story has its own narrative, and presenting a story as a sequel to an earlier story is a narrative device. Narratively, structurally,
Revelation is
absolutely a sequel. It's not a story that can stand on its own, but one that relies entirely on reference to a past work of fiction and its characters and continuity, and that presents itself as a continuation of the original series's (approximate) status quo. It
functions as a sequel while being a reinterpretation in some ways, which is true of many sequels, as I said. For instance,
Young Frankenstein is functionally a sequel to the Universal Frankenstein movies while also being a reinterpretation. The 1988
Starman TV series is functionally a sequel to the movie of the same name, but it modifies the events of the movie to push them back in time so that the title character could have a teenage son in the present. Similarly, the
Alien Nation and
Stargate SG-1 TV series are presented as direct sequels to their source movies, referencing their characters and events directly, using their footage, and continuing the stories beyond them, while modifying a few details of the movie continuities to fit the needs of the series.
Indeed, it's not unusual for a franchise to include multiple incompatible continuities that all present themselves as sequels to the same original work. For instance, the Godzilla movies released between 1955 and 2005 occupy seven distinct continuities, but all seven are sequels to the original 1954 film, counting it as part of their backstory but differing from each other (and sometimes reintepreting or retconning elements of the original).
Knight Rider has had a revival movie (
Knight Rider 2000) and two revival series (
Team Knight Rider and the 2008 series) that all presented themselves as sequels to the original show while ignoring and contradicting each other.
Get Smart has had three incompatible sequels: the feature film
The Nude Bomb, the TV reunion movie
Get Smart Again!, and the 1995 sequel series. And so on.
In short, what makes something a sequel is not a perfectly consistent continuity. Very few fictional franchises have perfect continuity, so it's an unrealistic standard. What makes something a sequel is that it's narratively dependent on something previous, that it's presented as a continuation of a past story, or a version of that past story. And that is very, very blatantly the case here.
