ST Movie Ere Rank Pins?

[Therin of Andor]

Timo said:
... while no inconsistency directly affects the yellow badges of TMP, once we start down the path of deconflicting the onscreen stuff, the badges are one of the things we could jiggle a bit.

Timo, you can jiggle all you like in your personal continuity, but I'm not taking your word over Robert Fletcher's just because no one on ST VI tried harder to colour match Valeris's collar and should tab in ST VI.

Valeris was a rebel. (And so was the actress playing her. The woman took it upon herself to have the prop department make her a metal headband, and she even designed the "no sideburns" Vulcan hairstyle, much to Leonard Nimoy's initial horror.) Seriously, it was an error made by the costumers as they struggled to find old Saavik jackets that could be altered to fit her, and sufficient collars and wrist and shoulder straps to make enough sets to get her through the filming on their tight budget.

Fletcher's scheme doesn't... explain the collar color changes of Scotty.

As a newly appointed "captain of engineering", maybe he finally decided to switch to the command track. So what?

It seems to suggest that Saavik was a cadet when she in fact (and quite explicity, both verbally and visually) was a commissioned officer.

And Kirk was a lieutenant at the Academy himself.

IIRC, the publicity materials (and the novelization) for ST II suggested that, after attending the Academy as a cadet over several years, one could then attend "Command School" (in the final year?) and do the Kobayashi Maru scenario from the captain's chair.

Put short, it needs patching. And the degree of patching applied depends on who's doing the patching - it won't become official, it won't become canonical, and it won't become consensus, but it will still be necessary for those wishing to see a self-consistent reality in the inconsistent fiction on the screen.

If in doubt, and if it doesn't clash with other canon, go with the creators' intentions, even if those intentions didn't explicitly make it to the screen to become canonical.

Similarly, the home planet of the Mugato is Neural, named only in the script. Never stated onscreen, but it was the screenwriter's intention, and not overruled by any other canonical fact.

My take on this is the path of minimum resistance, sort of. Accept everything else but make white an optional color for department heads

That's "minimum resistance"???

Minimum resistance is: accept the word of the man who wrote the memo.

 

[uss_griffin]

Timo said:
Alternately, accept Fletcher's intentions and postulate that these people dress up all wrong every now and then, either by mistake or just for fun, and damn the military discipline that makes them don uniforms in the first place. Not my cup of decaf.

If I were to slavishly accept every little goof-up done in 20th-century TV/movie production, I'd need something a lot stronger than decaf to keep my sanity!

However, my view is not "it's just a TV show," which is really rather unimaginative. Rather, I'm in the camp that deems the TV episodes and movies as after-the-fact retellings of the actual in-universe events. (Note the after-the-fact commentaries of the captain's logs, especially in the early episodes.) As with any retelling, there is a certain amount of error, "creative interpretation," and embellishment.

 

[Therin of Andor]

uss_griffin said:
I'm in the camp that deems the TV episodes and movies as after-the-fact retellings of the actual in-universe events. (Note the after-the-fact commentaries of the captain's logs, especially in the early episodes.) As with any retelling, there is a certain amount of error, "creative interpretation," and embellishment.

Yep. Me too. Makes it even easier to accept that all the licensed tie-ins "happened", at least in some version, because some adaptor used a little creative license to fill in unreleased details of old ships' logs.

 

[Timo]

Minimum resistance is: accept the word of the man who wrote the memo.

That would work if the people who actually brought Trek to life (that is, who put it on screen for us to watch) had read said memo.

Since the writers and visualizers don't listen to their science advisors, we have to rationalize the Trek science for them. So when they don't listen to their costuming advisor, why should we hesitate from rationalizing? Fletcher isn't part of the Star Trek universe. (But Roddenberry is - just read all those dedication plaques! )

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Therin of Andor]

Timo said:
That would work if the people who actually brought Trek to life (that is, who put it on screen for us to watch) had read said memo.

Apart from the Valeris wardrobe mess-up, the movie makers did follow the memo.