How would you retcon Strange New Worlds?

She definitely was. Julius Ceasar said so himself in his latest Tik-Tok

Unless it's in the Mirror Universe Bible

 

Despite your factual accuracy it is dramatically a dead end for both characters.

 

I'd rather just overwrite TOS and its more problematic elements entirely. Roddenberry himself, by the end of his life, was wont to consider TOS to be only soft-canon, and I see no reason to disagree with that. The way Chapel is presented in TOS is a fundamentally sexist portrayal that has no place in what Star Trek is supposed to be. TOS was created by people of their time, doing their best, and now we are capable of doing better. So we should. There's no reason to try and manufacture a reason for TOS to retroactively not be sexist anymore. It simply is. Let's replace it with something better.

 

The drama isn’t about the end,

 

Hard disagree. And I expect that many writers would enjoy the challenge. Bring it on, I say!

My only disagreement is that we don't need to replace it. We can add on to it and make it better.

Maybe it's not the destination but the journey!

 

[ My point was that it is a dramatic dead end for both characters. There is no more suspense. Why watch it ? They need to fix this.

 

That’s not how it works.

 

You're asking Trek to do something it has thus far been unwilling to do, but which (I would argue) it probably should have done a long time ago: allow for temporal shenanigans to have real consequences. The amount of time-travel bullshit that has gone on in the various shows and movies without having caused any meaningful change to how history unfolded is beyond any reasonable suspension of disbelief. It's one of the reasons I generally loathe time-travel stories in Trek. (Even the one you're thinking of, whichever one you're thinking of.)

Every time there's a time-travel episode or movie, what it should do is either alter the prime timeline or create an entirely separate timeline. The Kelvin movies are the only example of the latter. What you're asking would be an example of the former, and it would have significant consequences for continuity in that it would mean "The Menagerie" never happened. It's a pretty big deal for a major genre-fiction franchise to simply declare that one of its marketable pieces of content no longer happened. The closest thing I can think of is Star Wars memory-holing the Holiday Special. Is Star Trek prepared to do the same to "The Menagerie"?

 

Not a chance in hell.

 

My position is that we should replace it. TOS portrayed Chapel in a really gross way. She was written as perpetually pining for a man, because that was a trope in how women were portrayed on TV at the time. She's basically Moneypenny. Her defining trait is her unrequited love for Spock. That's gross. Why try to rehabilitate it? Why not just replace it with something better, like a mutually flirty friendship?

 

I would say just move on. I would not stay with TOS, much as I love that show and era. I would either reboot it completely (please and thank you) or just move forward in the timeline.

SNW is trying to thread a very small needle to recontextualize TOS. Maybe they go on and do their own TOS and I would be curious to see them try. But, TOS is ground in to people's memories as being so much more than it was, and that takes a very delicate touch to replace it while respecting that history.

And I can't think of a single person in Hollywood or anywhere else I would trust to do so.

 

I mean, we almost always know that a main character is not gonna die in a given episode. That doesn't rob it of drama.

I think what's gonna happen is, bits and pieces of TOS will be/are being overwritten without the entire thing being overwritten. So, like, Chapel is just going to be a fully-developed, confident, assertive woman going forward. She's not gonna turn into the meek, two-dimensional cardboard cutout she was in TOS. And the discontinuity between the two will never be acknowledged by the narrative.

Same way TOS "Turnabout Intruder" very clearly established that women were not allowed to be starship captains, but this has been completely ignored by ENT, DIS, and SNW. No need to reconcile -- it's just being overwritten and ignored.

... what the hell are you talking about? Spock doesn't offer his life to save the universe. He risks his life to save people just like every other main character. Then, he leads a political movement and gets sucked into an alternate timeline trying and failing to save Romulus. Then he watches his homeworld in that alternate timeline get destroyed and dies of old age a couple years later. Literally nothing about this is Jesus-like.

 

The thing is, we could have. Had DSC not introduced his foreknowledge as a plot point, it would have been pretty easy to bring back Pike, without eliminating "The Menagerie" from history: simply have someone develop a cure for his condition, pick him up from Talos, bring him home, and then you have SNW take place after TOS, on a different ship, rather than before TOS, on the same ship. And sure, you could still do that now, but you'd be shitting on all the dramatic work that's gone into the acceptance-of-destiny arc for Pike. Curing his condition and bringing him back from Talos would be akin to bringing Sisko back out of the wormhole and into a Starfleet uniform.

 

Would have, could have, should have. How long shall we live in that world of what might have been? I need to know so I can make appropriate dinner reservations.

 

@Voodoowoman2 please fix your quotes replies.

 

As someone who broadly does not care for TOS and considers TNG the superior series in most respects, I must say I find the reverse to be true. TNG's writers allowed the Prime Directive to straitjacket them into arguing for passive genocide over and over again. TOS tended to approach the PD in a much more rational, sensible way, as if it were a guiding principle formulated to keep Starfleet crews culturally respectful, as opposed to an ironclad law demanding that Starfleet allow people to die by the billions.

 

One of the most annoying things about the ultimate resolution to Data's arc is that the series always, and very obviously, seemed to be showing that he actually did experience emotions, he just didn't process them the same way as organic life forms did, or hadn't learned how to process them, or hadn't learned how to express them (or even recognize them within himself.) And then they just with the dumb "emotion chip" and ruined it.

 

The TNG stories where they upheld the Prime
Directive were far better than the TOS stories where they didn’t.

 

All that biological-sex-determinism stuff from earlier in this comment weirds me out, but I can certainly agree with you here. Both of them seem very one-note. Either give them more depth (they seem to be gesturing this way with La'an by the end of the first season) or replace them.