How can these episodes (from TNG, DS9, and ENT) be canon any longer?

[The Rock]

Star Trek: Discovery updated that era of Star Trek (10 years before Kirk) to look not so.....1960's. Which is fine. I get it. It would've been silly to force Star Trek: Discovery to make everything look like how it did in TOS. That's all well and good.

It presents a problem, however.

In the TNG episode "Relics" we see a holodeck simulation of the bridge of the original Enterprise straight outta TOS. They didn't update the design whatsoever. They just recreated it perfectly. In the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" when the DS9 crew travel back in time to the TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" they, once again, didn't update the TOS look at all. They kept everything the exact same way it looked back in the 1960's. And then in the Enterprise two-parter "In a Mirror Darkly" we see the USS Defiant from TOS end up in the Mirror Universe with, you guessed it, everything in that ship keeping the same exact aesthetic from TOS.

Having said that, how can said episodes be canon anymore since they contradict what we've seen in Discovery? Thanks to Discovery, the aesthetic from the 1960's TOS is no longer canon and thus the episodes I mentioned can't be canon anymore.

 

[Timo]

...Or anything from TOS itself, for that matter.

Also, they changed the actor of Tora Ziyal quite a few times, so those episodes must go, too. And all those where the graphics on the bridge were different from the original ones (applies to all series). Basically, it makes things easier: only the very latest episode of the very latest show is canon. Depending, of course, on the airing schedule around you.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BillJ]

Star Trek: Discovery updated that era of Star Trek (10 years before Kirk) to look not so.....1960's. Which is fine. I get it. It would've been silly to force Star Trek: Discovery to make everything look like how it did in TOS. That's all well and good.

It presents a problem, however.

In the TNG episode "Relics" we see a holodeck simulation of the bridge of the original Enterprise straight outta TOS. They didn't update the design whatsoever. They just recreated it perfectly. In the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" when the DS9 crew travel back in time to the TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" they, once again, didn't update the TOS look at all. They kept everything the exact same way it looked back in the 1960's. And then in the Enterprise two-parter "In a Mirror Darkly" we see the USS Defiant from TOS end up in the Mirror Universe with, you guessed it, everything in that ship keeping the same exact aesthetic from TOS.

Having said that, how can said episodes be canon anymore since they contradict what we've seen in Discovery? Thanks to Discovery, the aesthetic from the 1960's TOS is no longer canon and thus the episodes I mentioned can't be canon anymore.

Just go with what you feel. Canon should really only be important to people working on the various properties. I treat Discovery as a separate timeline.

 

[Jedman67]

Cannon is extremely important if you don't like Xerox

 

[KennyB]

Life is too short for this crap.........

 

[1001001]

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Having said that, how can said episodes be canon anymore since they contradict what we've seen in Discovery? Thanks to Discovery, the aesthetic from the 1960's TOS is no longer canon

Anything onscreen is canon. Discrepancies be damned.

 

[Silvercrest]

I hear that Spock doesn't look like Leonard Nimoy anymore, either.

 

[BillJ]

Anything onscreen is canon. Discrepancies be damned.

Canon and Continuity aren’t the same thing. Canon is just the body of work, warts and all.

 

[Greg Cox]

Sigh. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. A few visual discrepancies doesn't mean that entire episodes are not "canon" anymore. Just chalk it up to artistic license and move on. If it really bothers you, just pretend that the sets in "Relics" or whatever always looked like the one on DISCO, like the way we used to pretend that the Klingons on TOS always looked like the ones in the later shows, or that Robin Curtis's Saavik looks the same as Kirstie Alley's Saavik, etc.

"Canon" is an illusion. It's just smoke and mirrors. Don't let it bother you.

 

[BillJ]

In my head I have four distinct main timelines for Trek multiverse:

1) TOS, TAS, TMP
2) Star Trek II- Star Trek VI, TNG, DS9, VOY, TNG films
3) The Abramsverse
4) Enterprise (spun out of the events of First Contact), Discovery

Broad strokes among them remain largely the same, the details are different.

Everyone has their own internal way of dealing with discrepancies.

 

[XCV330]

Star Trek: Discovery updated that era of Star Trek (10 years before Kirk) to look not so.....1960's. Which is fine. I get it. It would've been silly to force Star Trek: Discovery to make everything look like how it did in TOS. That's all well and good.

It presents a problem, however.

In the TNG episode "Relics" we see a holodeck simulation of the bridge of the original Enterprise straight outta TOS. They didn't update the design whatsoever. They just recreated it perfectly. In the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" when the DS9 crew travel back in time to the TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" they, once again, didn't update the TOS look at all. They kept everything the exact same way it looked back in the 1960's. And then in the Enterprise two-parter "In a Mirror Darkly" we see the USS Defiant from TOS end up in the Mirror Universe with, you guessed it, everything in that ship keeping the same exact aesthetic from TOS.

Having said that, how can said episodes be canon anymore since they contradict what we've seen in Discovery? Thanks to Discovery, the aesthetic from the 1960's TOS is no longer canon and thus the episodes I mentioned can't be canon anymore.

If you like the episode, you'll find some way to make it work in your head, which is basically how all stories work anyway.
If you don't, well you have an easy reason to discount it.

The story is more important than the visual continuity, in my opinion.
Also

Spoiler

Did you actually see the Enterprise bridge in season 2 of Discovery or are you basing this on season 1?

I would go on but I am long winded.

I'll let Kinga Forrester of Moon 13 tidy this one up:

"Please ignore that, since you didn't see anything, because it doesn't exist." Kinga Forrester, MST3k

 

[Tenacity]

"In a Mirror Darkly" we see the USS Defiant from TOS end up in the Mirror Universe with, you guessed it, everything in that ship keeping the same exact aesthetic from TOS.

Trying to remember if we ever saw the bridge dedication plate.

I treat Discovery as a separate timeline

Same as "the Borg are everywhere" verse, the 2 or 3 Mirror Mirror verses, Spock died at seven verse, etc..

4) Enterprise (spun out of the events of First Contact), Discovery

Enterprise definatly separate from the first four (live action) series.

TAS had that additional door to the bridge, not sure where to place TAS..

It's a matter of degree and of course individual perspective, a few small differences are ok in my book, but major changes do actually mean something.

 

[fireproof78]

Sigh. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. A few visual discrepancies doesn't mean that entire episodes are not "canon" anymore. Just chalk it up to artistic license and move on. If it really bothers you, just pretend that the sets in "Relics" or whatever always looked like the one on DISCO, like the way we used to pretend that the Klingons on TOS always looked like the ones in the later shows, or that Robin Curtis's Saavik looks the same as Kirstie Alley's Saavik, etc.

"Canon" is an illusion. It's just smoke and mirrors. Don't let it bother you.

This is my approach.

It is art after all.

 

[seigezunt]

Canon =/= continuity.

The novelization of TMP, written by God Himself, includes a preface by Admiral Kirk, in which he laments that the accounts of his heroics were overstated.

None of what we are seeing on the screen is 100 percent what "really" happened in this pretend universe. So God Himself adjusts for inconsistencies.

You're welcome.

 

[MAGolding]

I like to think that the Discovery look is probably just an old fashioned (or experimental) look that most or all of the ships seen in the series happen to have, while the Enterprise from "The Cage" and TOS has the look that most starships in the era had.

Since I haven't paid to watch Discovery yet, I largely ignore most of the discussions and flame wars about how well it fits in with other Star Trek productions. No doubt I will watch discovery sometime and then have opinions about where it fits in.

It is my belief that in a long running tv series with many episodes and little continuity (most shows more than 20 or 30 years old had very little continuity) almost every episode can be considered to happen in an alternate universe of its own, where the other episodes don't happen because they happen in alternate universes of their own.

If the series has a pilot episode each alternate universe would contain the pilot episode and one other episode which was a sequel to the pilot episode.

And most old television series would have a few exceptions where one episode would be a sequel to another, or when there was a story arc a few episodes long.

Such a theory helps explain many small differences between episodes, as well removing the extreme statistical improbability of the protagonists of an adventure series surviving tens or hundreds of exciting and dangerous adventures one after another.

So it is easy for me to imagine that Discovery happens in an alternate universe which diverged from the many alternate universes of TOS one to two decades before TOS.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

All those other examples were one off nostalgic callbacks.

I think having a singular “Canon” is the only thing that sets Star Trek apart from any other ships and aliens series. If they’re not going to expand on a single universe I’d much rather them just not use the word “Star Trek” and make their own IP.

But I’m fine treating discrepancies between shows the same ways I would treat discrepancies between two history textbooks. Both are writing about the same universe and same events, just the individual authors are injecting their own ideas about the world into it.

Personally I think trying to split apart things into different timelines whenever we don’t like something is much more obsessive and narrow minded a fan behavior than just pointing out and explaining discrepancies.

 

[Jayson1]

Remember the Q are Gods. All the canon issues is the Q having fun playing around with the look of the universe. For a laugh they decided the 23rd century would look 60's like until they got bored with the look, and switched it up. Meanwhile everyone in the universe doesn't notice the look or are program to ignore them. That's why Picard in "Relics" doesn't find it weird that the old TOS bridge looks less advanced than the NX-01 from many years later. The Q have messed with people's minds to not notice those things on a conscious level.

Jason

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Canon and Continuity aren’t the same thing. Canon is just the body of work, warts and all.

Exactly.

And before people start piling on DSC for breaking continuity - not even TOS was consistent WITH ITS OWN SELF. So they can get over it already.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Star Trek: Discovery updated that era of Star Trek (10 years before Kirk) to look not so.....1960's. Which is fine. I get it. It would've been silly to force Star Trek: Discovery to make everything look like how it did in TOS. That's all well and good.

It presents a problem, however.

In the TNG episode "Relics" we see a holodeck simulation of the bridge of the original Enterprise straight outta TOS. They didn't update the design whatsoever. They just recreated it perfectly. In the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" when the DS9 crew travel back in time to the TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" they, once again, didn't update the TOS look at all. They kept everything the exact same way it looked back in the 1960's. And then in the Enterprise two-parter "In a Mirror Darkly" we see the USS Defiant from TOS end up in the Mirror Universe with, you guessed it, everything in that ship keeping the same exact aesthetic from TOS.

Having said that, how can said episodes be canon anymore since they contradict what we've seen in Discovery? Thanks to Discovery, the aesthetic from the 1960's TOS is no longer canon and thus the episodes I mentioned can't be canon anymore.

We just take everything way too seriously. To them, the kind of continuity in the X-Men films is what they're going for with Trek - that is to say, whatever they're doing now matters and what they (or their predecessors) were doing before does not. And from the POV of each show, they happened as-seen and something like the others did.