I fail to see a problem in a single thing stated in that interview. If anything, it makes me like Akiva Goldsman more than I already did.
Star Trek Canon Problems
- Thread starter Jmal234
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Which kinda goes against what Trek is supposed to be.
A) You know I don't think that, including from other posts of mine where I've said I believe in the three-timeline theory.
B) You didn't actually disagree with what I said. The DSC Klingons were nothing like the TOS Klingons. Same goes for the Mirror Universe.
What are you? A hippy communist?
Does it? There are many times were violence ends up as the answer. Trek is "supposed to be" necessarily anything. It says humanity can survive and grow and potentially become better, but that savage nature still exists.
ANAN: There can be no peace. Don't you see? We've admitted it to ourselves. We're a killer species. It's instinctive. It's the same with you. Your General Order Twenty Four.
KIRK: All right. It's instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill today. Contact Vendikar. I think you'll find that they're just as terrified, appalled, horrified as you are, that they'll do anything to avoid the alternative I've given you. Peace or utter destruction. It's up to you.
That is the whole point, we’re supposed to be better, we’re learning. Guinan,in “Q, Who?”, said that we might be able to understand and negotiate with the Borg, someday. We made “peace” with the Klingons. That is the whole underpinnings of Trek.
Giving us something savage and cruel, just for the sake of it being savage and cruel, is really a slap in the face.
Which is it?
You rationalize the Gorn in "Arena" to not be representative of "THE GORN" when you need to sidestep continuity.
But then their actions become representative of the entire damn species when you need to support SNW's portrayal of them as monsters. Can't have it both ways.
TOS "Arena" was making a point about empathy. That a future version of humanity was evolved enough to have empathy for lizard men that just killed colonists and silicon carpets that killed miners.
That is a total contradiction with SNW's take on them.
From TOS "Arena":
GORN [OC]: We destroyed invaders, as I shall destroy you!
MCCOY: Can that be true? Was Cestus Three an intrusion on their space?
SPOCK: It may well be possible, Doctor. We know very little about that section of the galaxy.
[...]
KIRK: No. No, I won't kill you. Maybe you thought you were protecting yourself when you attacked the outpost.
MCCOY: Can that be true? Was Cestus Three an intrusion on their space?
SPOCK: It may well be possible, Doctor. We know very little about that section of the galaxy.
[...]
KIRK: No. No, I won't kill you. Maybe you thought you were protecting yourself when you attacked the outpost.
From SNW "Memento Mori":
LA'AN: The Federation teaches that if we can find a way to empathize with an enemy, then they can one day become our friends. They're wrong. Some things in this universe are just plain evil. Have you ever seen eyes that are both dead and hungry at the same time? To them, humans are just walking feed bags of flesh, bone, and jelly. The Gorn trigger a primitive, ancient terror in warm-blooded species. We are prey. And when they hunt, they're unrelenting. The truth is, plenty of people have seen the Gorn. They just don't live long enough to talk about it."
"For the sake of it?"
No, not at all. It is to show that things still exist and require conscious choice, effort, to not be like that. The Gorn were not shown to be better. They simply were not. That they are that way does not go against the underpinnings of Trek, at all, since the underpinnings is that humanity survives and can become better. Not that it evolves.
Yes, I can. Because humanity is capable of having monsters.
Oh, a traumatized individual speaks for absolute truth for all humanity? Fascinating.
Kirk was wrong.
That's not even nostalgia though. That's... the most basic blocks of the established universe distilled down to buzzwords.
I'm not nostalgic for the word "Klingon". I'm nostalgic for the way that Klingons have been presented to me. I'm not nostalgic for the word "Spock", i'm nostalgic for Leonard Nimoy's portrayal of Spock. Just throwing things at me with a label on it doesn't actually scratch the itch.
On a side note here, i'm sticking with a fairly bold prediction that S3 is going to show that La'an and everyone were totally wrong about the Gorn, and they're actually NOT the evil monsters they've been being painted as. They're alien, and their method of reproduction seems monstrous to us, but in the end they're just living beings like we are and this whole thing has been a massive understanding.
And then we forget about them until "Arena" for some reason.
I mean, unless they present so differently in phenotype and were not expected in that part of the galaxy, as Nimoy's Spock notes.
Human beings enjoy generalities and assumptions around species being as one kind.
This. Too bad I can only like this post once. This is what I'm getting at that BillJ pretends not to get.
Saying anything in early-DSC was like TOS is the same as saying anything from the '70s Battlestar Galactica is like the '00s BSG. The names might be the same, but they're such different versions.
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Arena presented a unique opportunity for a Human and a Gorn to interact in a way that may have never been possible, up to that point.
Up to that very point, the Gorn were, for all intents and purposes, monsters. Kirk was given a unique chance to engage with one on relative even terms. It was through this engagement that Kirk learned that there was more to their motives than pure carnage.
La'an can also hardly be taken as a voice of reason when dealing with them. Her experiences have been coloured by the fact her family was fucking eaten by the Gorn. That might just have an impact on her opinions regarding Gorn/Federation relations.
So, we strip out the 60's aesthetics, the designs of the Enterprise (inside and out), the social inadequacies of the time, the Gorn, the timing of the Eugenics Wars, computer tech of the time, and a lot of other stuff. Why again is it so important that SNW and TOS be the same timeline?
I got it. What they are doing is based purely in nostalgia, if it weren't they would give us some new things to ruminate about. When they introduced the Klingons, the audience was supposed to go, "oooohh, Klingons!!!".
I blame the Star Trek Chronology and Star Trek Encyclopedia. Everyone took it as absolute gospel when the Chronology even had a disclaimer saying it was intended as a fun guide and not an absolute. A generation of fans grew up obsessing over those books like they were the holy writ.
The SNW Enterprise is still very much a 60's aesthetics.
Still looks like The Enterprise to me. Inside and out.
Timing had been changed for over 35 years. SNW is just maintaining canon with the vast majority of the franchise.
Because Strange New Worlds does nothing but improve the characters of TOS.
Franz Joseph's Starfleet Technical Manual, Rick Sternbach's Spaceflight Chronology and Sternbach and the Okuda's TNG Technical Manual are my absolute favorite Star Trek books.
Does it?
I think so.
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