Christopher said:
Zane Gray said:
And Piper... if nothing else, resurrecting Tucker makes good business sense. Like him or not, he was clearly one of the more popular characters with fans of the show. If you're going to launch a successful book line based on the series, it only makes sense to have all your characters available to work with.
Uhh, the book series has six years pre-TATV to play around in, so it's hardly as if it wouldn't have been able to use Trip without this. And even with this retcon, he's still believed dead by the public, so it's not as if he can continue as a regular in any post-TATV books. So that argument doesn't really hold up.
Piper said:
I don't need to read or buy this book to already know what's in it, that's the joy of being here on a messageboard and reading spoilers.
Oy. There is a huge, huge difference between knowing what people say about something and knowing the thing itself. If you don't understand that, you must have a very limited experience of the world. Perhaps because you're too ready to believe what other people tell you about it rather than experiencing it for yourself.
Piper said:
Fact One: The book entitled Last Full Measure has a framing sequence outside of the main body of the story.
Fact 2: This framing sequence involves the character of Trip Tucker.
Fact 3: Margret Clark decides to make it her own personal crusade to right the wrongs of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga by making choices "from her heart" and saving Trip Tucker.
Already there are 3 main facts that I got just from reading the posts here. So yeah, I can make an opinion about how stupid it was to worry about the Trip Tucker thing without spending 10 bucks of my hard earned money.
You're just digging a deeper hole for yourself. Selectively picking out three data points that fit your prejudices and ignoring the dozens more that don't fit them hardly qualifies as having an informed opinion. It qualifies as being a closed-minded, intellectually lazy person who thinks that facts only exist to justify your preconceptions and that rightness is determined by how effectively you can shout down your opposition.
And this may be a cheap shot, but your claim to have an informed opinion would be slightly more credible if you had been aware that the price of
Last Full Measure is 7.99, not 10 dollars. But only slightly.
Piper said:
Why not have framing sequences where Data and Jadzia Dax arent't dead but really somewhere on Risa playing poker? I know, why not write one where Tora Ziyal is really in hiding because she's the queen of all Bajor? Hell, why not use the novels to explain away all the unwanted deaths we've ever had in Trek's 40 years of existance?
Why not have Spock's coffin soft-land on the Genesis planet and have it magically bring him back to life? Why not have a Tasha Yar from an alternate universe end up in our universe? The shows and movies were doing this long before the books did. And this isn't the first time the books have done it either -- remember Shatner bringing Kirk back to life in
The Return and quite a few sequels?
Besides, it's a spurious argument, because each case is different. Just because they have that one thing in common -- a character's death -- doesn't mean that everything else about them is identical. Trip's death is different from those other cases, and not just because he was a popular character. It's different because it was only seen in a computer reconstruction after the fact -- which creates an opening for the reality to have been different* -- and because it was extremely implausible and strange in its circumstances -- which practically demands an explanation for that anomaly. If anything, this "resurrection" is far less contrived than Kirk's in the Shatnerverse.
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*I'm reminded of Sherlock Holmes' "death" at Reichenbach Falls in "The Final Problem." When Conan Doyle wrote that story, he fully intended it to be Holmes' real, permanent death, because he was sick of the character. But he happened to structure it in such a way that we didn't actually witness Holmes' demise -- Watson just surmised it from the evidence and Holmes' disappearance. That left a perfect opening for Holmes to be brought back a few years later (when Doyle was offered enough money to overcome his reluctance), simply by revealing that he faked his death.
