Spoilers So now Discovery is 'synched-up' with canon

This was one of the burning questions the producers wanted to use this season to answer; how Discovery syncs up with the rest of Trek canon.

I don't know how the rest of you feel, but, I'm not sure this was entirely necessary.

I saw no reason why Discovery, itself, had to literally be removed from time as a way to address why no one ever mentioned this ship, its crew, its spore drive, or the events it experienced. Point like these confuse me. Does every Starfleet officer on every starship have to know everything that occurred within the Star Trek timeline and make reference to it whenever possible?

In my mind, the spore drive issue had already been resolved; twice. Stamets mentioned in the season one finale that Starfleet was looking for a non-human interface for the technology. Leaving it at that, one could just assume Starfleet was not successful and so it shelved the technology. He mentions this point once again in NEW EDEN by saying Starfleet had decommissioned the drive (despite using it moments later).

My initial hope for the spore drive not being a proven technology was that they'd find out they were doing harm to the lifeforms living in the network -- and we even got to that point where that was stated on screen, but, it didn't seem to be reason enough to abandon the technology.

Spock never mentioning Micahel fits directly in with his character since he never mentioned Sybok prior to STAR TREK V or even Sarek being his own father in JOURNEY TO BABEL; and these points were talked about by various sci-fi news outlets before Discovery even aired as way to justify why it was OK for Spock to have a sister.

Thoughts?

 

I agree.

Nothing going on has been problem for me. IMO, they made the statement after seeing all the bellyaching going on in chatboards, and did it to try and calm things down. IMO, they should know better than that by now.

 

While 'syncing up with canon' might have been one impetus for the decision, based on what Kurtzman said it's more of a decision to take the show in a new direction and start the slate clean with a new unknown time period. "Discovery" is no longer just the name of the ship (just like how "Voyager" was supposed to be more than just the name of the ship, but we won't talk about that...) And I think it's great that someone finally figured out what the show is supposed to be about.

 

Agreed, everyone agreeing not to mention the ship and crew is ludicrous.

One of the things Kurtzman said a while back got on my nerves a little. I dunno if anyone knows the interview I'm on about, but he said they'd resolve why nobody talks about Discovery or Michael. As if space isn't vast enough and Starfleet sprawling enough that it already makes sense that nobody talks about the ship. Does he think Kirk should just sit there name-checking every ship in the fleet or something? Does he think the universe should revolve around five or so ships we've already seen? Given the presence of the Enterprise and the mentions of the Defiant in this series, maybe.

Also agreed that there needed to be no explanation as to why Spock never talks about Michael. He never explicitly says he doesn't have a sister, and there aren't really any instances in TOS or TAS where it would be necessary for him to bring her up (except maybe Yesteryear), so it already just about fit into canon. Not to mention, the emotional circumstances of his relationship with Michael and the fact he was cruelly stopped from joining her at the last minute are more than enough reason for it to be something he's not comfortable discussing. Their only task was to sell us on Burnham's existence being a good idea in the first place.

I'm excited about the possibilities of the show going into the future, but the scenes after Discovery leaves came across as completely lazy and stupid.

 

Necessary? No, not necessary.

Enjoyable for me? Yes.

 

"synced up" only if you don't think about it too much. Did they need to do it? I dunno. With how they implemented it, they would have been better off resetting the timeline.

 

It was kinda weird. Now keeping the Disco going into the future instead of being destroyed as a secret made sense, but then they went completely overboard with it. There was no need to say that they'd never talk about it, or that the Sarek-Graysons would never mention Michael. It really didn't even make sense from the perspective of the cover story. The story was that the ship got destroyed and everyone on board perished. Certainly you can mention them in that context?

Also, I really don't understand why the spore drive would be classified. It really had nothing to do with the events and seemed to work absolutely fine.

This was just an awkward attempt to clear up the continuity. On the other hand it tried to answer questions that didn't need to be answered (why Spock doesn't mention Michael or why we haven't heard about Discovery) and on the other hand didn't satisfactorily answer the questions that needed to be answering (why no one uses the spore drive.)

 

You took the words right out of my head.

As far as I was concerned, the perceived canon issues were already addressed. By having every Starfleet officer aware of Discovery or even mentioning it (and this even applies to things in the other Trek shows) only makes the universe seem smaller. Michael stated there were something like 7,000 active starships. And that's just in that time period. In Discovery's two seasons how often did we see her with another starship other than the Enterprise? How many Starfleet vessels are even aware of Discovery's existence out of a possible 7K ships, and if so, are they watching its every move? To your point, are officers name checking a database? Don't forget, Discovery was new when we first saw it.

My biggest issue is that a lot of things in Trek are perceived as a canon violation by fans simply because they aren't mentioned by anyone. I'm sure a lot of you were here during the days of Enterprise and how so many haters viewed the entire series as a blatant violation of canon simply because we never heard of Jonathan Archer and the NX-01 before. Now don't get me wrong, there were times throughout the past Trek shows where I could've seen where a reference to the Enterprise events would've made sense, but we all know the real world reason as to why that never could happen. And that's fine.

Quick edit: From my POV, the lingering questions that the finale scrambled to address were already answered or, could just be extrapolated to make more sense in the greater context. We saw this season, Spock's anger toward Michael because of their complicated past, and that RIGHT THERE, seemed like that was the exact reason why we never heard of Michael before. Spock just 'erased' her. Again, the spore drive was stated to being both decommissioned and Starfleet searching for a non-human interface to operate it. One could easily surmise, Starfleet wasn't successful and abandoned it.

And don't forget, Starfleet was trying to develop transwarp technology in Star Trek III. I always found it hard to believe they didn't have the kinks worked out by the time Voyager was lost. Do we ever talk about that?

 

The inquiry had them all claim the spore chamber exploded and consumed the ship. Yes, they can say the "ship was lost in the fight with a rogue Section 31 group" or the crew where killed in action, but going into more detail would be a no-no. Since Starfleet lost the only ship with the drive by what they believe was a catastrophic failure of it.

 

I think there are a couple of ideas that needed a little jiggling to fit into canon - spore drive being an easy example, but there were very obvious ways to get all of those to work.

The end of the finale felt like the culmination of an attitude towards writing that I really hate. Small Universe Syndrome is one part of it, but it goes far beyond that. In being desperate to tie everything back to TOS, rather than just using the setting and time period as a vehicle to tell new stories, they've made it feel like Starfleet has about three ships, Spock is the most important person who will ever live, and the alpha quadrant is about 5 miles wide.

It's almost the exact opposite of the feeling TOS evokes, that the galaxy is so huge and populated by so many civilisations and insane cosmic entities that you can fly off in any direction and find something nobody else has ever seen before.

 

TNG had the same feel as well. It always seemed like the Enterprise was in their own backyard, and yet, they encountered so many things that no one had seen before.

Of course, I'm holding out hope that if a Pike series came to fruition, that's exactly what the show would be.

 

It reminds me of what Janeway said when describing this era to Kim.

"The Alpha Quadrant still largely unexplored, humanity on the verge of war with Klingons (lol), Romulans hiding behind every nebula. Even the technology we take for granted was still in its early stages; no plasma weapons, no multiphasic shields - their ships were half as fast."

 

Second most important, behind Michael Burnham.

 

I thought spending a season to establish the 23rd Century, take it close to the status quo and then to leave it at the end was an awful idea. That said, they made it work far better than it had any right to, to the point one would like to see them continue with a Pike series. I thought Ethan Peck's Spock was terribly off-putting at first, this guy is not Spock! Then by the end, he shaved off his beard and I was like "Hey, that's not my Spock!".

I've always felt Discovery was an odd duck as a prequel, it seemed to be set in a timeframe it had no interest in adhering to so I am curious where they will go from here. I wouldn't mind a season of Discovery actually exploring and "discovering" things without wondering why the Klingons are like that or why everything seems so different from the previous properties and what not.

 

While I agree with you, in retrospect I think that was due to Fuller's original anthology idea where different time periods would be visited, but by the time DSC actually started being produced, it was scaled back to just a decade before TOS. Either way, no, it didn't really work as intended.

 

I'm not wild about the time jump either, I thought there was more than enough room for Discovery to coexist besides the original series. The bald klingons, the spore drive, holograms... I didn't mind any of it as long as we got to expand the world of the original series more.

 

You know what? I CAN LIVE WITH THAT!

Computer, end log.

 

Not just syncing up with canon. They neutralised control before they jumped, so I really don't know why they still had to go, plot-wise....

 

I agree. The erstwhile solution they found was a nuclear bomb when a flyswatter would do. Not just overkill, but the wrong kind of solution for the problem at hand.

"Let us never speak of this again" doesn't hold up to much scrutiny anyway. Why bury all mention of Michael and the Spore drive along with Discovery and Section 31? They're barely connected to the risk that needs covering up, beyond having been there at the time offerering solutions And it's further stupid when we've seen Starfleet gloss over plenty of other crazy dangerous technologies in the past – the consoles and even whole starships in every series that explode at the drop of a hat being a prime example. I guess that's why the showrunners felt the need to have the threat be a galaxy-wide extinction level event, but I can't not be aware that they're only writing it this way because it's a prequel, and if they'd done this exact same storyline on a 25th century show, they wouldn't have bothered to scuttle all plot points and storylines like this.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with this thread.
Yes, I had problems syncing DIS up with the rest of the canon as well. But IMO this episode did nothing to adress that. The same problems are still existing.
The only thing it really did was sever the show from it's own continuity, it's own previous two seasons. And as a viewer, that's simply disappointing to see.