Spoilers New Picard TV Series and Litverse Continuity (may contain TV show spoilers)

I like Elnor, Kestra and Soji.

 

I don't understand why this is even an issue, Brian Brophy hasn't acted in years, so there was very little chance of him coming back.

 

* That's been bugging me, actually...

Spoiler

An officer in command of an entire squadron should at LEAST be a Commodore, ideally an Admiral. They couldn't give Riker a field promotion?

 

There was some discussion here and there regarding that.

Spoiler

If it was a temporary or quick assignment, Riker may have been the senior-most captain anyway and been the designated taskforce/squadron commander. Promotion to commodore or above would probably occur if it was a permanent or long-term assignment.

 

I just realised,

Spoiler: novels and Picard

The novelverse has Data 2.0, the canon has Picard 2.0

 

Kirk demoted himself from Rear Admiral to Captain in TMP when he took over the Enterprise. Perhaps Full Admiral Riker (ret.) did the same when he took command of the Zheng He.

 

Something I wrote in a comment on my first-season overview of Picard on Tor.com that I want to repeat here (though it's stuff I've said in this BBS before):

The novel continuity isn’t “lost.” The books still exist. I’m staring right at them. For that matter, the pre-Force Awakens Star Wars novels also still exist.

I don’t know why people stress about what’s real in a fictional construct, or why movies based on comic books are different from their source material (example: the Tony Stark in the comics is precisely NOTHING like the way Robert Downey Jr. plays him in the MCU) and get to be the most popular movies on the planet, yet when novels based on TV shows differ from their source material, it’s a source of pearl-clutching and/or dismissal of those novels.

Trek on screen has been contradicting Trek in print since 1979, when the opening scene of The Motion Picture shitcanned Spock Must Die! It has ever been thus, from The Next Generation and its spinoffs contradicting the Klingon and Romulan cultures developed by John M. Ford and Diane Duane to First Contact contradicting Federation to Discovery contradicting Sarek and a number of other novels.

The Federation/First Contact dichotomy is a particularly good one, because Federation remains a well-regarded novel and First Contact remains a well-regarded movie. The world can survive with two different versions of Zefram Cochrane’s life, it can survive with two different versions of what happened after Nemesis……

 

All of that is absolutely true, KRAD, but I think people can also rightfully mourn that this version of the story has to stop now without hyperbolically saying it has ceased to exist. If you've spent 20 years eagerly buying books to see what happens next, and there is no "what happens next" now, that sucks. Right?

 

And that’s a key distinction: tie-ins aren’t purchased purely for their literary quality, but also to find out more, to learn what happened next. This is especially strong in areas where the reader may have come to expect that tie-ins would provide the only version of what happened next, as in the post-Nemesis setting. A tie-in feels very different from something like the MCU vs the original comics, where the parallel worlds are clear from the start: you don’t read a non-MCU comic to find out more about the MCU, but a tie-in is all about the parent release.

Even if I know on an intellectual level that Season 2 of PIC is free to contradict any number of elements from The Last Best Hope, if that happened there would still be that nagging annoyance, “Ok, but did the showrunners have to go in that direction? It’s a tie-in, so why can’t everything be tied together with just a little more effort?”

 

One of the things I liked about season 1 of Picard is that it felt like a 10 chapter novel from the litverse. Ok the continuity doesn't match but the way it was put together, the way characters from other series or former minor characters would pop up or the way the main characters acted or changed all felt very much like the modern Trek novelverse to me. Things people object to about the show have happened in the books in recent times (the language, gruesome deaths, resurrections, characters leaving Starfleet).

It is the closest we have come to seeing one of the books on the screen.

 

I’ve suggested before that if fans would only use tie-in novels in place of “litverse”, they’d always have it right in front of their eyes that novels were never supposed to constitute a ‘verse by intent: that was merely a product of the time prose tie-ins were left running without an ongoing parent production. As soon as that changed, the bubble burst with no hope of a parallel continuity, which wouldn’t happen to evenly matched projects such as the Arrowverse as opposed to the DCEU.

 

While, yes, I can see that those who have spent the past twenty years invested in the Litverse might be sad to see it go, the simple truth as I've said on the matter many times is that it was always going to end at some point, simply because everything ends and nothing is forever. And to have the Litverse ends because there's new onscreen content that's overriding it is perhaps the best case scenario anyone could hope for. It's certainly a lot more preferable than the alternative, that it had to end because of low book sales resulting in S&S losing the license or deciding not to bother renewing it.

It was never realistic to expect new onscreen content to acknowledge the novels or incorporate their continuity in any way. It wasn't a realistic expectation of Star Wars fans several years ago, and it isn't a realistic expectation of Star Trek fans today. And this whole attitude of "oh no! What of the Litverse" we've been seeing ever since Picard was first announced has more recently made me alter the chorus of the Dean Lewis song Be Alright to fit the situation. "I know you love them, but it's over, mate. Doesn't matter put the book away..."

 

^ For what it's worth, I agree with all of that completely. I made no claims to expectations realistic or otherwise, I just said I can see someone being sad that 20 years of amazing stories are coming to a close. There's lots of things in life that you know are coming someday and are still sad when they arrive.

 

Yeah, going back to the Star Wars example, I got into the EU/Legends line through Dark Journey, a story centered around Jaina Solo, and connected a lot with her character arc and evolution, going back and collecting the rest of the novels. Her story was and has been one that has emotional weight and resonance for me. And it's really disappointing to me that, right as she was going to get an entire trilogy to take center stage, the great reboot happened, cancelling those novels and denying that story. I have come to live with it, obviously, since we are long past the point that they would have been released, but I still regret and mourn not getting them.

I get wanting the things you love to continue in the way that they have previously. It's entirely understandable and reasonable. Sure, the ending may have been inevitable, may always have been coming, but it doesn't mean that the ending still doesn't feel abrupt, or that there weren't things you were expecting and hoping from the journey continuing you can't be disappointed won't be appearing.

 

All this is fair. I consider myself glad that we had the Litverse, and that, just as the 1980s continuity did, elements of the second litverse may well go on to influence this new generation of Trek.

 

I have yet to see Picard (have to wait for the eventual Blu-Ray) but just a question. Was anything from the novels mentioned in the show, any kind of Easter eggs or anything? It does sound like Picard does wipe out pretty much the entire litverse at least from "Destiny" onward.

Also, I'm curious. Say they incorporated something, like a character. Say someone on the show really liked the character of Lt. Chen and decided they were going to incorporate that character into the show (not just the name but the background of the character as well--all in). I believe Christopher first created the character way back in "Greater Than the Sum" I think it was. Would the showrunners owe anything to Christopher at all in that case? I know the authors are basically writing with a license from CBS and whatever other PTBs that are involved. But does anything go back to an author in a case like that.

Would he even get something as simple as "Lt. Chen character created by Christopher Bennett" or something akin to that? I'm just curious.

 

Nope, we wouldn't get anything. Screenwriters are entitled to that because they're unionized and it's covered in their collective bargaining agreement with the studios. Prose writers have no such privileges and no such organization. So if, say, President Bacco shows up in Picard, nobody would owe me a damn thing.

Which is fine. We knew this going in. It's spelled out in the contract(s) we signed.

 

as far as I know, in British TV (i.e. Doctor Who) it's not unusual to find that happens, but I don't think it does in America. In America, everything you do belongs to the owners of the show.