To be fair, CBS declared TAS canon so that more people would buy the DVDs (as in, the people who actually care about canon.) Before that they didn’t give a flip whether TAS was canon or not. But because CBS owns Star Trek in its entirety, it’s their right to do so, no matter what their marketing department’s reasoning was. CBS has a habit of declaring things ‘canon,’ ‘prime,’ etc. so more people will buy their product.
I wasn’t aware that that precluded me from mentioning its history. Because while TAS is canon, it’s not in continuity.
Because if one thing goes wrong, then poof! At least with the regular spacesuits, if there's a leak, there's still some oxygen left. And you're still protected from direct exposure to whatever star you're orbiting. The forcefield belts are a really flimsy idea in practice.
Not without all kinds of retconning it isn’t. For example, the last of the four Human-Kzinti wars was in 2069. That does not jibe with where humanity was during that time period according to everything that came after TAS.
And since it is highly unlikely that we will ever see the Kzinti used or even mentioned in Trek again, personally I can ignore that particular episode without any problem. Just like many other singular events we have had to retcon (or ignore) over the years.
We saw part of Utopia Planitia in Relativity, and I'm inclined to believe the space station we see in NYCC trailer could be part of those yards.
Certainly something orbiting Mars in dark stark vacuum is likelier than that other big thing hovering within the hazy blue atmosphere above what looks like Californian coastline... Although something so far otherwise unseen in the trailers is also a solid option. Timo
Let’s just say it’s not Prime universe. Fine, it’s canon, it happened. But Prime universe isn’t animated. Let’s borrow from Sony’s multiverse and call it a different universe.
There have been so many changes to the timeline caused by time travel, temporal cold wars, Annorax being Annorax, various Burnhams in angelic suits, etc that continuity is probably so problematic in the Trek universe (any Trek universe) that you need people like Lucsly, Dulmer and Daniels to sort it out. I'm pretty good with that. I can accept TAS without accepting the Enterprise. I can have a Prime timeline without the events of movie 5. Early earth sent out fusion powered deep space ships in the 1990's during the Eugenics wars until they didn't. All valid stories but they don't have to be taken in sequence.
That's not really the point, though. M*A*S*H had just as many continuity violations throughout the course of its 13 year run, and nobody blamed them on time travel. They are just mistakes or retcons that will always happen with different writers for a long-lasting show. It just happens. TAS is just as valid as ENT, whether they are in continuity with each other or not. That's what 'canon' means. It's just a collected body of work. It doesn't have to be consistent, and it doesn't need convoluted fanwanky explanations to try to fit it all together coherently.
And Benny. Benny is an esper who was driven to madness by his fluctuating visions of the future coupled with the injustices of the present.
Tell that to the writers of Discovery season 2. They tried so hard to bring "canon" in "sync" that they had to leave 23rd century completely behind. And they used exactly "convoluted fankwanky explanations" to do it.