That is what I expect. After MU Gorgeio's non-starfleeet tactics in the final episode, Burnham, Tyler, and Sarek use infroamtionm from the MU Voq to negotiate a peace and create the neutral zone. That would actually be cool to see on-screen what let to the creation of the neutral zone.
Spoilers Is the Klingon War within canon?
- Thread starter timmy84
- Start date
That is what I expect. After MU Gorgeio's non-starfleeet tactics in the final episode, Burnham, Tyler, and Sarek use infroamtionm from the MU Voq to negotiate a peace and create the neutral zone. That would actually be cool to see on-screen what let to the creation of the neutral zone.
It has to be created sometime and we never saw its creation during TOS or during the movies so why couldn't it be the DSC war that created it or did it just get created between TOS and movies with no mention of what event caused it?
The Organian peace treaty could have created it, just never mentioned.
If it was set up before DSC, Klingons seemed to be crossing it all the time in TOS
That is certainly possible and comes to my issue of the whole "but why has nobdoy ever mentioned it before?". So creating a neutral zone in TOS and not mentioning that is fine, but no mention of a war with the klingons 10 years earlier is a huge problem and violates canon and should have been mentioned. Both are big deals but it doesn't mean there was a reason to bring them up. I'd actually say not bringing up neutral zone in errand of mercy is a bigger oversight if that is when it happened.
If not mentioning a Cardassian war after 3-and-a-half seasons of TNG, only to have it come out of absolutely nowhere in "The Wounded", is excused and never discussed or complained about (and that was a long, drawn out conflict) I think we can give DSC a pass...especially since we don't know the end of the story to pass judgement about how it fits together.
There's are also backstory lines in "Whom Gids Destroy" that make it clear Starfleet has been through a conflict earlier in Kirk's career.
It all fits just fine if we are motivated to look at it that way. If we are predisposed to not like the show, we will find a way to make sure it does NOT fit.
No magic to it really.
Not anymore. If it's on screen, it's canon. Canon does not need to respect continuity--it merely has to be presented on screen.
As to not mentioning the war in Errand of Mercy, it's easy enough to infer from all the back and forth about "disputed areas". Not really a problem.
Yeah, wasn't Kirk referred to as a 'warrior'?
Thank you and completrely agree.
ANd sarak is a master diplomat. We might see in the next 2 episodes where that reputation came from.
There was definitely a line that inferred that in his past he was a soldier at some point. I wish I could remember the exact line. It was during the dinner scene where Spock admits to feeling as though he could consider himself Kirk's brother
He was a gunner on the Farragut IIRC
To be honest, I think that we shouldn't think too much about Star Trek canon. The reason is simple. Because there are too many heads who involved in writing the story of this Franchise, and every episodes (in TOS and TNG) were loosely independent episode that has weak connection to the others. You can't expect them to honor the previous writers idea and implement them to their story board if that canon is violating their own idea. It is different if Star Trek is the product of a single writer, and it is a serialized huge saga that connected to each other strongly. Like Game of Throne, The Expanse, etc. Plus Gene Roddenberry himself had said to ignore the TOS. Although they revisited TOS in DS9 and maybe Voyager, just consider them as filler, and ignore them.
The original TWOK script had Romulans for that scene. Then they decided to reuse the visual effects from the first movie to save some money and changed them to Klingons, but they kept the "Neutral Zone" and "they take no prisoners" lines in the script.
Just because it never came up, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Short story. I work retail and one of drivers who makes deliveries to the store I work at likes Star Trek, but he refuses to watch Discovery. His reasoning is that they caused Star Trek Axanar to be cancelled since they would be covering the same topic.
This made me think that whatever they do I was gonna give the show a shot. So far I haven't been disappointed. Then the end of this weeks episode happened.
My first thought is whatever is happening right now in the show is gonna be undone with time travel. The Klingons never occupied 20% of the Federation. Now its just story telling but ultimately inconsequential stuff until they can fix the damage to the timeline. Then I started to think. Does this actually violate canonical history?
My train of thought focused back onto Axanar (am I spelling that right?). This was suppose to focus on the Battle of Axanar where Captain Garth (of Izar) wins a great battle. In canon, we never learn who the opponent was. So instead, outside of canon, its the Klingons. This is do to a reference to an Star Trek games rulebook reference to "The Four Years War". So for some people, a war with the Klingons has already been accepted as a possibility.
So now we are at Discovery. They have traveled to the future by almost a year, and 20% of the Federation has been occupied by the Klingons. Is this unacceptable? I thought about it and no I don't think it is.
"Well why have we not heard about it?" you might be asking. Well, it took 5 seasons (or 4, its late and I'm not gonna look up the exact time) to learn that the Federation has been in an active conflict the entire time with the Cardassians. A species we have never heard of. A war that cost millions of lives on both sides. That lasted decades. What about V'Ger? That was crazy, but no one talks about it. Why didn't the Organians stop the Klingon - Federation border war before the Dominion? Didn't that violate the peace treaty?
I don't think this is gonna be undone (although I can be wrong). This war is happening, and has happened by the time we get to Kirk, the soldier diplomat of the Federation. A captain who came up in a Starfleet who fought a losing war for a year at this point (being 10 years before TOS, Kirk is somewhere serving in Starfleet). A Starfleet who tosses General Order One out the window to negotiate mining rights with primitive people in the hopes of gaining an advantage over the beaten Klingons who may invade the Federation again at anytime.
Canon is at the whim of the writers and it always has been, this why in TNG and DS9 we have mentions of The Cardassian War, the Talarian War, the Tzenkethi War and border conflicts with the Tholians. All of these appear to have occurred within a 10 - 15 year time span and a couple were still going on while the Enterprise was swanning around bumping into space jellyfish, lost colonies of irish people and having to put up with visits from Lwaxana Troi.
The fact that people genuinely ask 'why we have never heard of this before' boggles my mind. We haven't heard of it because the writers made it up to suit a story they want to tell. That's it. It's unrealistic and somewhat entitled to expect writers to be beholden to our assumptions and expectation of events within star trek.
If Discovery's Klingon War does need to be explained, it's pretty easy to do so. We know from TOS that the Federation has been in conflict with the Klingons for a long time. We also know that Kirk has a number of commendations from an unspecified military campaign and is considered one of Starfleets greatest tactical minds as a result. Why could these commendations not be because of Kirk's conducted in a Klingon conflict? We also know that Kirk became a Captain at a young age. In 'The War Without, The War Within' it's stated that a whole lot of experienced officers are dead, is this why Kirk rose up the ranks so quickly? We know from Deep Space Nine that at some point Kor, Kang and Koloth attacked a Federation Starbase on Caleb IV, it's never specified when the attack occurred, why could this have not been during the Klingon war of 2256? There is plenty of off the cuff information that can fit nicely into what is occurring on Discovery.
Very much indeed, yessir.
Heck, the writers keep on quoting extremely low casualty figures even now that they want to make the war seem big and important. Waving off a conflict where soldiers fight a lot but nobody much dies is simple. Cornwell argues that the Klingons are making uncoordinated if devastating attacks. The implication would be that they maximize their glorious victories by aiming at easy targets, which might mean targets with few defenders - or then by aiming at individual important military targets, where losses would be limited to soldiers.
Which is why SB 1 and its 80,000 dead is still shocking to Cornwell, because on this "inner" starbase, not all of those folks were expendable soldiers, but there were actual people people in the mix, too.
And the practical result of this is the opposite than what you appear to think - what the actors say is the only thing that matters, because it is the only part of the creative product that the writers ever manage to put into existence. All the rest remains nonexistent.
Also, the characters through their actors stay part of the Trek creation forever. Writers disappear when they stop writing.
Like Nerys Myk quoted from "Whom Gods Destroy", Kirk indeed seems to agree with Garth's assessment that he once was a warrior. He doesn't placate the madman elsewhere in that discussion, and this would be the perfect place to contradict him if Garth had it wrong. And the timeline is exactly right for Kirk to have fought the war of DSC.
Although whether Axanar has anything to do with that is dubious. After all, Kirk did not fight at Axanar, but only read about Garth fighting there. Quite possibly, all that stuff happened long before DSC, as its practical results (Kirk and Spock serving as brothers) seem to predate DSC.
He "manned the phaser station". We don't know if that was aboard the ship or on the planet, but the latter is sort of implied: all the phaser action that Kirk compares to his original poor showing is planetside, with sidearms, while the resilience of the creature to phaser fire from the ship's cannon comes as a total surprise to Kirk.
I'd like to think of Kirk as a redshirt toting a phaser rifle on a hilltop. Or perhaps carrying a forward fire controller backpack allowing him to direct starship fire. In either case, the assumption seems to be that Captain Garrovick expected phasers to be necessary for his mission, even though this is seldom the case when Kirk beams down on a random planet. Perhaps Garrovick wanted to drill a hole in the planet for geological survey purposes and for that reason wanted Kirk to bring the tactical backpack?
Timo Saloniemi
Heck, the writers keep on quoting extremely low casualty figures even now that they want to make the war seem big and important. Waving off a conflict where soldiers fight a lot but nobody much dies is simple. Cornwell argues that the Klingons are making uncoordinated if devastating attacks. The implication would be that they maximize their glorious victories by aiming at easy targets, which might mean targets with few defenders - or then by aiming at individual important military targets, where losses would be limited to soldiers.
Which is why SB 1 and its 80,000 dead is still shocking to Cornwell, because on this "inner" starbase, not all of those folks were expendable soldiers, but there were actual people people in the mix, too.
And the practical result of this is the opposite than what you appear to think - what the actors say is the only thing that matters, because it is the only part of the creative product that the writers ever manage to put into existence. All the rest remains nonexistent.
Also, the characters through their actors stay part of the Trek creation forever. Writers disappear when they stop writing.
Like Nerys Myk quoted from "Whom Gods Destroy", Kirk indeed seems to agree with Garth's assessment that he once was a warrior. He doesn't placate the madman elsewhere in that discussion, and this would be the perfect place to contradict him if Garth had it wrong. And the timeline is exactly right for Kirk to have fought the war of DSC.
Although whether Axanar has anything to do with that is dubious. After all, Kirk did not fight at Axanar, but only read about Garth fighting there. Quite possibly, all that stuff happened long before DSC, as its practical results (Kirk and Spock serving as brothers) seem to predate DSC.
He "manned the phaser station". We don't know if that was aboard the ship or on the planet, but the latter is sort of implied: all the phaser action that Kirk compares to his original poor showing is planetside, with sidearms, while the resilience of the creature to phaser fire from the ship's cannon comes as a total surprise to Kirk.
I'd like to think of Kirk as a redshirt toting a phaser rifle on a hilltop. Or perhaps carrying a forward fire controller backpack allowing him to direct starship fire. In either case, the assumption seems to be that Captain Garrovick expected phasers to be necessary for his mission, even though this is seldom the case when Kirk beams down on a random planet. Perhaps Garrovick wanted to drill a hole in the planet for geological survey purposes and for that reason wanted Kirk to bring the tactical backpack?
Timo Saloniemi
Redefining canon leads to retcon, which can lead to more stories.
