Let's continue TOS

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Kor, Kang, and Koloth went from TOS Klingons to TMP Klingons. So that doesn’t work.

No, it can still all be true.

Remember, we don't know HOW those Klingons went from QuchHa' to hemQuch. Did it assert itself naturally? Did they have cosmetic surgery? It's all possible.

If some aspiring writer wants to write an SNW episode featuring 'Final Reflection' Klingons, for example, they can do that if they ing feel like it. We will just have to work it out for ourselves, how it fits. That's our job. That's our place.

 

[Dukhat]

Really? It’s our job to explain how the continuity all fits together? I don’t remember CBS/Paramount offering me that job, or telling me that what I determine to be the way it fits together is canon.

 

[Trekker09]

@fireproof78 wrote,
TOS is 60s viewpoint, warts and all. If you wish to continue it then you have to accept the worldview that was of the time it was made.
True --You could maybe get all the technical details to match, but it would be of no avail. It just isn’t possible to “get the tone right” or recreate the 60’s vibe- the mindset, the atmosphere that pervaded TOS (if that's even a desirable goal). For most of the writers, as well as Shatner and Nimoy, the memory of WW2 and the Holocaust was all too fresh in their minds. The immediate present meant Viet Nam, the Cold War and the Cuban Missile crisis, assassinations, coming close to nuclear catastrophe. These threats, sense of urgency, impacted the themes, the characters, the dialogue.
Not necessarily political in the sense of partisan, but inevitably topical.

 

[XCV330]

Really? It’s our job to explain how the continuity all fits together?

remarkably yes!
It's called using your

imagination

 

[Ssosmcin]

I have started to take each Trek differently and I make them work in my own head thusly:

TOS thru Star Trek 6, then TNG (and their films) thru Voyager is one timeline.
ENT in the prime timeline until "Regeneration" - that's where things split.
Bad Robot films fall into this new timeline.

Paramount Plus shows all fall into an alternate, separate timeline. That works for me and as far as I'm concerned, that's all that matters.

That is...when I feel like thinking about it. Mostly, I just figure they're just TV shows and who the hell cares? I won't watch them if I don't like them. I'm less worried about the connections to TOS than I am about the lack of imagination and the small universe syndrome when it comes to characters (Spock's sister, Kirk's crew on the Enterprise, Q, etc).

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

It might be difficult, unless you lived there and then, to feel and think the same.

That'd be an interesting episode idea in itself; an author goes back in time to strand himself in a time and place where he can better get the feeling for a book he wrote which wasn't selling due to critics saying he failed to capture the feel of that era.

Yet, the best sci fi/fiction of any kind transcends the the zeitgeist in which it was birthed, even as it bears the unmistakable hallmarks of influence.

 

[PCz911]

It is my every nightmare come true.

I confess I love that thread also

 

[Dukhat]

remarkably yes!
It's called using your

imagination

The problem with using my [spongebob]imagination[/spongebob] is that people rarely agree with what I imagine.

 

[plynch]

Being an Overthinker, I myself have wondered why I like it so much too.

TOS is my first love, maybe my only “love” in Trek. I enjoy behind the scenes stuff, and some ppl here know SO much about shot X in episode Y. It is fascinating. To me.

 

[XCV330]

The problem with using my [spongebob]imagination[/spongebob] is that people rarely agree with what I imagine.

so?
no one agrees with anything in fandom. thankfully. it keeps threads lively. we still have a frame of reference.

The worst would be a situation like pre-Disney Star Wars EU with one person manning "the holocron" deciding what is and isn't "real" and furthermore just how real it was. As fun as that can be to speculate on:
A: it doesn't matter and
B: it restricts future development.
I think they threw the baby out with the bathwater in that particular instance, but I can see why they did it.

Those connections have almost always had discontinuities, and that is perfectly fine.

 

[Dukhat]

so?
no one agrees with anything in fandom. thankfully. it keeps threads lively. we still have a frame of reference.

The worst would be a situation like pre-Disney Star Wars EU with one person manning "the holocron" deciding what is and isn't "real" and furthermore just how real it was. As fun as that can be to speculate on:
A: it doesn't matter and
B: it restricts future development.
I think they threw the baby out with the bathwater in that particular instance, but I can see why they did it.

Those connections have almost always had discontinuities, and that is perfectly fine.

But I was told that it was my job to figure out how the inconsistencies all fit together. If no one agrees with me as to how they all fit together, why was I given that job?

In all seriousness, it is not the job of the person watching the show to explain why shit doesn’t work. It is the job of the people making that show. Telling the audience that they need to figure this stuff out means that they don’t care enough about it to figure it out for themselves, or they simply lack that ability because they suck at being writers. So if they don’t care, why should I?

 

[XCV330]

But I was told that it was my job to figure out how the inconsistencies all fit together. If no one agrees with me as to how they all fit together, why was I given that job?

In all seriousness, it is not the job of the person watching the show to explain why shit doesn’t work. It is the job of the people making that show. Telling the audience that they need to figure this stuff out means that they don’t care enough about it to figure it out for themselves, or they simply lack that ability because they suck at being writers. So if they don’t care, why should I?

Why do you tackle such a problem from an authoritarian standpoint? Figure it out for yourself.
We will disagree. Viewer engagement is important to the any show, or the show has not done it's job. If you're not interested in how, why, and what the goddamned jolly rancher buttons are for without them handing out 8 by 10 glossy photographs in a special viewer packet with circles and arrows on each button to show what each button is or pre-empting a technical manual made by Franz Joseph because the yayhoos still question its canonicity even though its been on the freaking screen before I mean come on that would be like a Lutheran Bishop raising doubts about the canonicity of the book of Isaiah even though it's specifically referenced in the New Testament and I am not trying to assume that everyone knows about the canonicity disputes of Christianity that go back at least 1800 years (see Ireneus) but if we're going to go there we might as well discuss the fact that Samaritans (yes they still exist) and Jews still can't agree on the proper version of the Torah and they've had thousands of years, not to mention the fact there probably wasn't a single version of such classics as the Iliad and the reason we have the version we generally have now is too complicated for even this deliberately horribly run on sentence, though I ask that you will bear with me, because now that I have started it, I feel it too difficult to quit and at this point I am really just trying to type myself into an off-ramp, I hope you understand, but anyway the point is this show is sixty years old, and is going to get older with more added on and it simply is not workable or possible to make it all fit together in a way that would please everyone, even though there are plenty of us with big enough egos to think we could do the job.

Phew. Just watch and enjoy what you can. No one wants anyone to be the Continuity Dictator, although that is a great idea for a screen-name and someone lurking should take it. I won't charge a royalty.

 

[Nyotarules]

Then don’t make the claim that your show is a prequel to another show whose tech is out of date in real life.

Or don't make a show with the promotion, this is humanity's future, cos some folks might believe ya!

That’s nice that you don’t care. Other people do.



But Kor, Kang, and Koloth went from TOS Klingons to TMP Klingons. So that doesn’t work.

Kronos is the cosmetic surgery capital of the cosmos

Phew. Just watch and enjoy what you can. No one wants anyone to be the Continuity Dictator, although that is a great idea for a screen-name and someone lurking should take it. I won't charge a royalty.

Let the Trek church say....Amen!

 

[1001001]

Let the Trek church say....Amen!

 

[Dukhat]

Why do you tackle such a problem from an authoritarian standpoint? Figure it out for yourself.

I have figured it out for myself. And when I point out what I have figured out for myself, I get a backlash of CBS ass-kissers telling me I'm wrong. So it's not as cut-and-dried as you're making it out ot be.

At this point I think we're going in circles, so I'm fine dropping this discussion.

 

[XCV330]

So it's not as cut-and-dried as you're making it out ot be.

It is. I'm the Continuity Dictator. You're demoted.

 

[Lord Garth]

I already have a Church that I've been sucked into becoming part of (long story), even though I'm really Agnostic, and have a Deacon I'm friends with.

I don't need to join the Church of Trek too. Gene Roddenberry was against religion anyway, so I can't see him being a fan of religious canon arguments.

Actually, wait, no. I'll go to the Universalist Church of Trek. Universalist Churches accept all religions. They take TOS/TAS and DSC/SNW, which works for me. They take stuff I'm not a fan of either like Kelvin and ENT, but I'll ignore those since they're not hurting me personally.

EDITED TO ADD: Maybe being Agnostic is why I have a more open mind.

 

[fireproof78]

If a production is asking me to park my brain at the door and accept something different as the same as what came before I find it insulting. Particularly when the new version is a pale reimagining of the original.

I don't recall being told this ever by a production. So, again, I feel people are going out of their way to be insulted.

This is a very different approach than what was done with TOS-R where a clearly contemporary perspective was dictating the changes and additions.

Yes, that is the danger of doing an update after the fact. It happens with several productions not just Star Trek.

So TOS isn't being replaced. How it's visually depicted depends on the series (which is messy, I won't deny it, but that's a different kind of problem). The events are still referred to.

Exactly.

True --You could maybe get all the technical details to match, but it would be of no avail. It just isn’t possible to “get the tone right” or recreate the 60’s vibe- the mindset, the atmosphere that pervaded TOS (if that's even a desirable goal).

Indeed, and that's largely my point. There is this strong effort to make TOS the strictest, literalist, history every in the history of history. And, that, for me, doesn't work. At no point do I go "This is how it must be, forever." Studying history has revealed that much of what is taken as fact is not always such. Taking it as one person's point of view of a particular story makes it way freaking better.

Phew. Just watch and enjoy what you can. No one wants anyone to be the Continuity Dictator, although that is a great idea for a screen-name and someone lurking should take it. I won't charge a royalty.

Once that position opens up at CBS you know it's going to be an cage match for getting the position

 

[1001001]

And when I point out what I have figured out for myself, I get a backlash of CBS ass-kissers telling me I'm wrong.

Come on, man.

 

[Dukhat]

My apologies for using harsh language. My point still stands.