An entertaining story is actually the lowest thing that I will accept. I want to see compelling, believable, consistent characters, and yes, I do want to see it fit into what has come before; as I said upstream, if the writer can't work all of that out, that writer should write whatever he or she wants, but don't call it Star Trek.
Of course, the definition of what constitutes compelling, believable, consistent characters is subjective. You can't reasonably demand a writer not write for
Star Trek on such a subjective basis.
Point of fact, I think the biggest problem with canon is that so many of the production staff either just want to be a part of Trek, or worse yet they want to put "their stamp" on it, regardless of what came before.
It is the duty of a writer to write the story that speaks to them. Like it or not, that means that different writers are going to end up telling different kinds of stories in
Star Trek than other writers. It is unreasonable to demand they not "put their stamp" on it. Writers have been "putting their stamp" on it since TOS. Gene L. Coon put his stamp on ST; D.C. Fontana put her stamp on ST; Nicholas Meyer put his stamp on ST; Harve Bennett put his stamp on ST; Leonard Nimoy put his stamp on ST; William Shatner put his stamp on ST; Maurice Hurley put his stamp on ST; Michael Piller put his stamp on ST; Ronald D. Moore put his stamp on ST; Brannon Braga put his stamp on ST; Ira Steven Behr put his stamp on ST; Robert Hewit Wolfe put his stamp on ST; Jeri Taylor put her stamp on ST; Jonathan Frakes put his stamp on ST; Kenneth Biller put his stamp on ST; Stuard Baird put his stamp on ST; John Logan put his stamp on ST; Manny Coto put his stamp on ST; J.J. Abrams put his stamp on ST; Roberto Orci put his stamp on ST; Simon Pegg and Doug Jung put their stamp on ST; Justin Lin put his stamp on ST; Bryan Fuller put his stamp on ST; Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts put their stamp on ST; Today, Alex Kurtzman is putting his stamp on ST; Michael Chabon is putting his stamp on ST; Kirsten Beyer is putting her stamp on ST; Akiva Goldsmith is putting his stamp on ST; and Mike McMahan is putting his stamp on ST.
Writers have never not be putting their own stamps on Star Trek
. Sometimes the stamps were good. Sometimes the stamps greatly improved the show over what had come before. Sometimes the stamps were mediocre. Sometimes the stamps were bad and made the show worse than what came before.
But the stamps are inevitable and unavoidable.
For the most part, I'm more inclined to consider Star Trek Continues and the New Voyages material as canon that I am, say, Lower Decks.
Canon is
not the same as continuity.
The
canon is the body of works created by the intellectual property owner upon which derivative works are based. That's it.
In spite of popular vernacular, "canon" is not a synonym for "continuity."
Detective Comics, Batman, and other comic books starring Batman published by DC Comics constitute the Batman canon. Works such as
Batman: The Animated Series,
The Dark Knight, or
Harley Quinn are derivative works based upon the Batman canon. But not all issues of
Detective Comics et al are in continuity with each other! Many intentionally contradict one-another, in fact. But they remain canonical.
So it is with
Star Trek Continues or
Star Trek: New Voyages. It is impossible for them to be canon, because canon is not a matter of subjective opinion. They are derivative works, not the original bodies of work produced by the intellectual property owner. Our opinions about the relative quality of the derivative works or canonical works are entirely besides the point.
Until it's not. James R. Kirk was overwritten. UESPA and the Enterprise as an Earth vessel was overwritten. Who knows what happened to Kirk's other nephews. Fiction is mutable. Continuity is mutable.
Exactly.
Star Trek is a work of fiction, not a documentary series trying to re-create some historical reality.
Canon may be mutable, except insofar as it involves continuity. Continuity is not mutable.
Continuity is absolutely mutable, because, again,
Star Trek is not real. It's all make-believe. And if it's all make-believe, the make-believer can make-believe new things that contradict what they used to make-believe, and they can also make-believe that the new things do not contradict the old things.
That said, I value the art of being able to come up with a reasonable, believable way of explaining inconsistencies. One of the first times I was ever published was an article inspired by Admiral Morrow's comment that the Enterprise was 20 years old. I wanted to come up with an explanation of how he could make such a mistake. Others have spent tons of time on similar pursuits.
There are things which become inexplicable, or at least inexplicable in a believable way. Most of the time, I look at those situations and say "That could have been very easily fixed."
Absolutely! Making up new things to rationalize discontinuities can be fun.
I have a difficult time picturing Ogg the Caveman telling a story to his tribe and Crogg the Caveman saying "No, that's not the way it happened."
I
promise you, that definitely happened. There wouldn't be five million different versions of the Arthurian legend, or the story of Heracles, or the Trojan War, etc etc etc, if human beings didn't have a natural tendency to take a story and then try to re-work it or contradict it in some way.
It is a fannish attempt to make up for the shortcomings of the production staff in producing a canon that maintains continuity.
If talking about a single universe, I think Cloaking Device use hurts Discovery more than it did in Enterprise. In "Balance of Terror", we have a Spock who would've been part of the Klingon war just a decade prior. Since it appears Klingons were using the Cloaking Devices everywhere to the point they had pushed the Federation deep into their own territory. That information would be hard to keep quiet, which makes Spock ten years later and unreliable narrator to events he's taking part in.
In Enterprise, we have the cushion of a century where they could've fallen into the cracks if Starfleet encountered less and less of them.
I mean, sure. But ultimately which particular rationalization one uses for a discontinuity doesn't matter unless it opens the door to telling a new and interesting story.
They can be a good dramatic device, I just think they were the wrong device for Discovery as it relates to "Balance of Terror".
Of course, everyone's mileage will vary.
Yeah, I mean, if I were writing DIS, I wouldn't have included cloaks. But it isn't actually that important at the end of the day.
Nerys Myk said:
Well, it was referenced again in Voyager and Enterprise.
I'm not sure I'd call an obscure reference in a graphic you can barely read (VOY) a "reference." The UESPA bit in the Starfleet seal in ENT was easier to read, though. But either way, it was definitely retconned such that the 1701 had always been part of the Federation Starfleet rather than UESPA.
I mean, only replaced 'visually'. All the stories and character and events in TOS have still happened exactly the same so far.
And even then they haven't completely replaced it/ignored it, for example in Season 2 of Discovery, they had a 'Previous on Star Trek' segment that reused footage from "The Cage" completely unaltered.
Plus any merchandise created under the TOS brand name, still uses TOS designs, for example TOS novel cover covers still use the TOS Enterprise design and uniforms.
So CBS isn't completely discarding the TOS look, just for any TV shows showing the era, it's just been updated for the 21st century.
Yup, exactly. And they expect audience members to have the common sense to say, "This is a work of fiction; everything does not have to fit together perfectly. A TV show from the 2020s cannot look like a TV show from the 1960s and maintain verisimilitude, so the TOS look is gonna be updated in new installments. We can live with that."
