The record was deleted in the final episode, thus rendering all "It's not canon, Spock said there's no record of a mutiny" canon discussions that occured over the past six-ish months meaningless. I had a good lough
God that is fucking stupid.
Spock gets an autobiography!
- Thread starter golddragon71
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God that is fucking stupid.
Wasn't meaning to be rude, @Jinn. It is just that is stupid on so many levels. I mean, everyone still knows Burnham mutinied, it is no secret, so it fails as an explanation on that level. The Federation openly acknowledges that it is okay to mutiny if you have a good reason, and it also openly accepts that Burnham was right to begin with.
This is what happens when you're trying to shoehorn a show into a fifty year old continuity. You end up making poor choices that have to do more with continuity than good drama.
The record was deleted in the final episode, thus rendering all "It's not canon, Spock said there's no record of a mutiny" canon discussions that occured over the past six-ish months meaningless. I had a good lough
Those people are forgetting that TOS contradicted itself on this point. When "The Tholian Web" claimed there had never been a mutiny before, they were ignoring Spock's mutiny in "The Menagerie," not to mention the spore-induced mutiny in "This Side of Paradise." And it was later contradicted when "Whom Gods Destroy" established that there had been a mutiny against Captain Garth when he went mad.
Fans today are so hypersensitive. Trek has been full of contradictions for half a century, and it used to be that fans just used their imaginations to reconcile them, or just ignored them. But these days, one teensy-weensy inconsistency and its "AAAAAAHHHH THE UNIVERSE IS BROKEN ALTERNATE TIMELINE CANON CANON CANON!!!"
Since we never saw a moment when Kirk and Co. found out about Spock's foster sister, for all we know they all knew, and had numerous in-depth discussions regarding her, off-screen, and she was present at several important events in their lives floating around in the crowd of extras. As you point out, we never saw Demora until Generations, but everyone around knew about her. Kirk had met her at least once between TMP and TWOK (while he was doing several other things we also didn't find out about until years later involving clocks and ranches and horses and retiring and unretiring). Hell, we never heard word one about Sulu's partner (maybe Demora was a clone!) but around Beyond, people kept asserting that we knew he'd produced his child with a human woman in the traditional style and he couldn't have possibly had had a husband the whole time.
You know, come to think of it, the "Spock kept Michael secret" idea, while more plausible than its detractors imply, still sort of fits into the "people don't poo on Star Trek," "The Federation is a military dictatorship" TV-myopia that creates my least-favorite takes on Star Trek. We have a limited window into any fictional world, and I don't like taking advantage of it to make bad-faith criticisms.
Eh, don't worry, I figured that you meant that the "explanation" was stupid and not that me finding it all very funny was stupid
Well, the way I understood it they erased her mutiny from official Starfleet records, like, they have a spreadsheet with "name", "rank", "ship", "date" and "reason for mutiny" and deleted the colon that had Burnham in it; plus they deleted the information from her official file. They probably didn't go through all Federation newspapers and force them to delete their articles on her. And Spock only quotes there being no record of a mutiny, which I understood as reffering to Starfleet records. I do think that it was unneccesary to explain it in the first place, but to their credit I think the scene works pretty well regardless of the Spock line in TOS and doesn't forced in for continuity reasons.
Yeah, but that was Then, and everything that was Then was good, unlike the things that are Now which are bad. Of course Then used to be Now and then Then was also bad, but that was then and now Then is Then and not Now and thus redeemed.
This isn't a separate excuse, it's an excuse for why he wouldn't talk about any family member.
Do we need one? He's a private person. That's reason enough. And it's not like the other TOS characters are all that garrulous about their families either. Unmentioned relatives popping up out of nowhere are an enduring trope of series fiction going back generations.
I got curious about Trek character's rarely appearing siblings so I set out to Memory Alpha and found out that
- Kirk's brother was first mentioned early in season 1 and died later in it, Spock's half-brother was established in the fifth movie, his foster sister was first seen in Discovery and Scott's sister was established in the second movie.
- Worf's brother was introduced in season 3 of TNG; Picard's brother in season 4, Yar's sister was first seen and mentioned in season 4 and La Forge's sister was first mentioned in season 7(!) The only ones I'd know from the top of my head are Worf and Picard's brothers and I remember Yar's sister now that I looked her up but I completely forgot La Forge's sister.
- Kira has two brothers, Jadzia has a sister, O'Brien has two brothers and Sisko has a half-sister and two-half brothers. All of these were first mentioned in season 2 and I was only aware of Sisko's sister and O'Brien's brothers because I started reading Force and Motion yesterday and that started with O'Brien talking Nog to death about his brothers.
- Neelix has a bunch of sisters that are established in season 1, Janeway's sister was first mentioned in season 3 and Chakotay's sister was first mentioned in season 7(!) Here I only remembered Neelix having sisters, the other character's siblings escaped me.
- Reed has a sister that's first seen and mentioned in season 1, Mayweather has one sister who gets mentioned in season 1 and one brother who gets mentioned and seen in season 2, Tucker got a brother mentioned in season 1 and a sister in season 2's final episode while Hoshi's two siblings were first "mentioned" in the Defiant's file in season 4's "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II". Here I only remembered Tucker's sister because she died in the Xindi attack.
- Burnham has two foster brothers, Spock and Sybok, but that's it for the Discovery characters.
So, what's the point of this? I dunno.
No we don't need one, but now we have one. The whole premise of "Lethe" was to explain a thing about Sarek we didn't need an explanation for because it was already explained in "Journey to Babel," and I thought it was one of Discovery's best episodes. Christopher, you've built your entire tie-in career explaining things we didn't need an explanation for, so I'm surprised to see you take this stance.
How often did it end up being memorable? Sure, you can give Wesley eighteen step-siblings and it wouldn't violate the continuity, that doesn't make it a good idea.
The only thing memorable about Burnham so far is her connection to Spock and the lifting of Worf's backstory.
Memorable in-universe or in real life? Personally I don't find her connection to Spock all that memorable, I tend to think of her as the doughter of Sarek, not the sister of Spock (although both are true of course). What I found memorable about her was her mutiny, how she freed the tardigrade and the end of the Klingon War, but of course YMMV.
It's just that this is one of those things where fans attack a new show for a supposed "continuity error" that's actually entirely consistent with pre-established facts that they just don't remember, or that they don't care about because they have an agenda. I hate the double standard of people criticizing the newest Trek for things that are already part of earlier Treks. Over the years, I've seen so many people damn the newest incarnation for "violations" that are perfectly consistent or explainable to anyone who actually knows the facts, or at least no worse than the continuity errors that Trek has always, always had. And I'm sick of it.
Well, okay, I agree with you, and I haven't done such a thing. (In fact, I've published multiple positive reviews of the show.)
Worf also has a foster brother, first mentioned in the first season, first seen in the seventh.
When will Now be Then?