Actually, I'd argue that TOS did a good job of resolving all of its apparent paradoxes within a single episode, and leaving the timeline as clean as they found it, as it were. It was only 30 years later when Braga got his hands on the franchise, and proceeded to indulge his love of writing time travel stories without actually understanding how to structure one logically, that the unresolved paradoxes really started to pile up.
I love TOS unconditionally in spite of its flaws, but in all honesty, can we
really call the following examples "doing a good job of resolving all of its apparent paradoxes within a single episode"?
"The Naked Time" (TOS):
KIRK: The time warp...what'd it do to us?
SPOCK: We've regressed in time seventy-one hours. It is now three days ago, Captain. We have three days to live over again.
KIRK: Not those last three days.
SPOCK: This does open some intriguing prospects, Captain. Since the formula worked, we can go back in time, to any planet, any era.
KIRK: We may risk it someday, Mister Spock. Resume course to our next destination, Mister Sulu.
"Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (TOS):
SPOCK: Mister Scott and I both agree that the only possible solution is a slingshot effect, like the one that put us here. My computations indicate that if we fly toward the Sun, seek out its magnetic attraction, then pull away at full power, the whiplash will propel us into another time warp.
CHRISTOPHER: Slingshot effects are fine for you people. How do you propose to return the Sergeant and me?
SPOCK: Logically, as we move faster and faster toward the Sun, we'll begin to move backward in time. We'll actually go back beyond yesterday, beyond the point when we first appeared in the sky. Then, breaking free will shoot us forward in time, and we'll transport you back at a point before any of this happened.
KIRK: You won't have anything to remember, because it never will have happened.
Right then, no unresolved paradoxes there at all!
Wow, that's damning with faint praise! 25 years ago was 1994, after all. Almost every good thing the Trek franchise has produced was already in the past by then. Since then it's almost all been unmitigated crap, with the arguable exceptions of First Contact and a few episodes of ENT S4.
Can't agree there. In 1994, having just found its stride, DS9 was poised to pick up the pace of its evolution from slow but foundationally solid beginnings into one of the most engaging
Trek shows ever produced in its later seasons. And I'm not just swooning over fangasmic space battles, either. Its unique setting and whole cast of characters—both major and minor, both protagonists and antagonists—gradually developed and cohered into something every bit as special as, and yet pronouncedly distinct from, TOS or TNG's. It may have started out in 'good not great' territory, but it
became truly great as it went along.
On the above point, I
know there are plenty of fellow Niners here and elsewhere who would agree with me. Perhaps less popularly, I would also say there were strong episodes (if not always in unbroken stretches) in ENT right from "Broken Bow"—which in my book is as good an opener as any series since TOS has had. (And better than "Caretaker" by a fair ways I'd say, though not to imply agreement that "almost all" of VGR was "unmitigated crap" either, albeit I'll concede it's my least favorite
Trek show overall. I'm currently re-watching it, and finding it rather more endearing than when initially aired, even if a great many episodes remain entirely forgettable, as ironically embodied little better by any but the one cheekily entitled "Unforgettable"! There was plenty of crap to be sure, but also plenty of mitigation. The addition of Seven of Nine really brought a lot to show...and I don't mean in the prurient sense.)
There's no way it could have been Romulans; the whole story occurs during the century-long period of no contact between humans and Romulans. No one even knew what they looked like yet.
Section 31 might...
I'd like to think the opposite... that the Federation is an open society that trusts its citizenry and believes in accountability, not a present-day-style regime obsessed with keeping its activities secret.
Except where Talos IV is concerned...but that's the one and only thing Fleet Command is sitting on, and omitting even from the
"top secret, eyes only" summary, right? Oh whoops, that and the
Pegasus. Probably just those two, though? No wait, Section 31...the Omega Directive...and so on...
Heck, the Federation Council
itself signed off on the covert forced re-location of the Ba'ku, before Picard threw a monkey-wrench into it and forced them to
"conduct a top-level review"! I suppose that demonstrates a
form of accountability, sure, but not necessarily by design. How do you suppose the scenario would have played out if it hadn't
just so happened that he and his android friend came to be drawn into it?
(Speaking of which, I don't find
Insurrection to be "unmitigated crap" either. It's flawed, but even so, of all the TNG movies, I find it to do the
best job of recapturing the 'feel' of its parent series.)
Yeah, it's frustrating. Something like this doesn't quite break the premise, but it comes close.
If, when all is said and done and taken into due consideration, it "
doesn't break the premise" in your eyes, then what sense is there in being "frustrated" at its "coming close"? I mean, it seems you've already stipulated to a view that "Rejoined" (DS9) can be tossed in with the ninety percent of
Trek comprised of "unmitigated crap" that's "not something to emulate" anyway, right? (And for my part, I'll certainly concede that it isn't one of DS9's better episodes.) No disrespect or offense intended by any of this, but it appears to me that you may be the one pulling
yourself out of this immersion in the fiction you so bemoan the loss of, by thinking about it all a little too hard. (Or perhaps, alternatively,
not thinking about it
hard enough. Myself, I derive a fair amount of enjoyment from figuring out my own creative ways of fitting together elements that might seem at first blush contradictory. It's part of the fun.)
It seems like some writers don't have any concept of tech levels; anything that's "futuristic" is interchangeable to them. Granted, from its beginnings Trek never exactly had the most internally consistent tech level, but at least there were some clear boundaries about what Starfleet tech could and couldn't do, which shifted and expanded (slightly) as the franchise moved into its own future in the TNG era. Unfortunately ENT undermined that in a lot of ways by "backdating" versions of TOS tech... and DSC seems to have doubled down on the problem, pretty much tossing any concern with depicting a consistent progression of tech right out the window.
It seems reasonable enough to me that they seek to maintain some semblance of what reflects the general viewing audience's
current perceptions as to what's "futuristic" rather than attempting to hold themselves to slavish "consistency" with what you yourself admit has more or less always been internally inconsistent to begin with. (Of course, as this whole conversation illustrates, what seems 'within reason' to some of us doesn't to others...which has been my overall point all along.)
At any rate, we're talking about
Section 31 here, who within the fiction are notorious for playing havoc behind the scenes, and meticulously covering up their handiwork as they go, moreover abetted by accomplices at the very highest levels of the command and oversight structure, and on down through the ranks to the lowliest of file clerks. It seems to me the very point of depicting them with TNG-style combadges and such at the outset was to signal that they might have access to tech that is beyond the remit of the regular rank-and-file. That's a 'fig leaf' broad enough to cover a multitude of 'sins.' (As is the experimental nature of
Discovery herself, and the sensitivity of her missions, for that matter.)
Here again, you speak of "undermining," but that is again a subjective characterization. I'm largely fine with the idea that most of the fundamentals of 'standard'
Trek tech were more or less firmly in place by the end of the 22nd Century, and were only refined and supplemented through the 24th. As stated by its creators, the whole premise of ENT was to show the birth of
"the first starship" whose legacy would be directly inherited by the TOS
Enterprise, and to answer the question of
"what happened between that muddy world where everybody was living in First Contact
on Earth, and the world of Kirk and Spock, which was just a couple hundred years later."
Looper had absolutely terrible time-travel logic. It's not something to emulate.
And yet, it was well-received and highly rated among critics and moviegoers alike. It was even nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film that year. Roger Ebert, ironically echoing some of your
own language here, said of it:
Rian Johnson's "Looper," a smart and tricky sci-fi story, sidesteps the paradoxes of time travel by embracing them. Most time travel movies run into trouble in the final scenes, when impossibilities pile up one upon another. This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened. You have to grin at the ingenuity of Johnson's screenplay. [...]
Think this through. If the loop is closed on you, did you never exist? Or did you live your younger life up until the point you kill your older self? "Looper," to its credit, doesn't avoid this question. It's up to you to decide if it answers it. Time travel may be logically impossible, but once we allow a film to use it, we have to be grateful if it makes sense according to its own rules... (
Chicago Sun-Times, 26 September 2012).
See how that works? Different folks, different strokes.
I'm not really talking about this in terms of subjective impressions.
Okay.
When I describe a retcon with a word like "contradictions," I don't mean thematic or character-related inconsistencies. I mean actual logical negations, such that Event X cannot logically coexist with Event Y, meaning that one version much displace the other.
As I said to begin with, I
do entirely understand what you mean. All I meant is that when one steps back and takes a larger view, the line between exactly what sort of alterations 'make sense' and which don't often
does have a lot of subjectivity to it, but what can
objectively be said is, unless the work in question is one-and-done, one manner of change or another becomes inevitable, and will continue to accumulate the longer the fiction runs, passing through different hands, being written (and re-written) bit by bit, week by week. Some lament it, some embrace it, and some just shrug and wonder what the heck all the fuss is about. I'd say all are valid, but none more so than another.
It's an over-flogged example to be sure, but
Trek has been making "actual logical negations" and "displacing" elements of itself ever since the days of James R. Kirk, and "contradictions" of all kinds have always, and surely always will, abound within it, whether the greatest of pains are undertaken to avoid them, or the slightest. Personally, I haven't really found anything DSC has done to have inordinately (
i.e., more than any previous iteration) compounded that. Obviously, others feel differently. It's all to my point that not everyone weighs all "contradictions" equally. Whether these "destabilize the setting" and whether this indeed accordingly serves to "thereby diminish audience investment" or not depends on the viewer, so I humbly submit that it
is largely a matter of "subjective impressions"—irrespective of whether we're talking about one variety or another.
I simply don't find the distinction you're drawing here to be as significant as you do (which is not to say you are 'wrong' in finding it so). I am reminded again of Meyer's words:
"I've always likened the Star Trek
process to writing the music for the Catholic Mass. The words are the same, the text is the same, it's the music that's going to be different..." The catch to the analogy is, the question of precisely what constitutes "text" versus what constitutes "music" in this context is open to varied interpretation between one individual, be they a member of the production staff or the audience, and another.
Again, sure, opinions are subjective. But that's not the same as saying they're a matter of complete relativism. I thing you'd have to look long and hard to find anyone whose favorite episodes of Trek are "The Alternative Factor" and "Spock's Brain." Intersubjective aesthetic standards do exist... and Sturgeon's Law does apply, to Trek as to anything else. If you were to ask a statistically valid sample of fans to name the best 10% of Trek episodes, you certainly wouldn't get all the same answers from everyone, and there would be a few outliers... but I think it's safe to assume you'd get a range of episodes showing a normal distribution... that is to say, concentrated around a central cluster of oft-chosen "good" ones that it would at least be safe to characterize as "better than average." (And you could repeat a similar survey to identify the ones that are subpar.) Those better-than-average episodes represent a quality threshold that it would be nice to see new material aim for.
If you care to go through such an elaborate exercise to the aim of 'proving' that 90% of
Trek has been crap, and exactly which 90% that might be, go right ahead. Doesn't interest me in the slightest, personally. (My all-time favorite
Trek film is TMP, which I have always found a singularly striking and evocative piece of art. I doubt it would fare too well in such a popularity contest.) All competitions for "best" and attempts to qualify "standards" aside, I don't find it a stretch to imagine that there are those who find episodes like "Spock's Brain" (TOS) delightfully entertaining precisely
because of their very absurdity. The so-bad-it's-good phenomenon is quite real, for many. Mind you, at
no point in this discussion have I meant to convey the implication that this is the "quality threshold" that should be "aimed for." (And I don't agree that they
are aiming for it. Nor hitting it, either.)
Moreover, in the specific exchange you were responding to here, Arpy wasn't merely suggesting Trek should be "good" according to some arbitrary subjective standard. On the contrary, he was using the new backstory on the RA suit as an example of "bad" writing comparable to past underwhelming Trek outings, and explaining in some detail why that backstory was problematic, in a fairly logical and persuasive way. In light of that, it seems much fairer to say "yeah, that makes sense, the writers should have thought through the implications more carefully" rather than to say "taste is subjective, I'm sure somebody out there liked it."
If I had wished to directly address
@Arpy's post, I would have quoted it. I was merely musing upon a tangent of thought prompted by
@fireproof78 and
@Michael's exchange that followed on from it. As I said, I'm content to hold off on evaluating the overall logic of the story until it's complete, and probably moreover until I've had a chance to re-watch the entire season.
I look at its from the reverse angle: if it has obvious logical inconsistencies, then it's too over-the-top to make for a good story.
"Logic, logic..."
I wouldn't be remotely surprised if your proposed experiment above resulted in TWOK ranking squarely among that elite 10% of best
Trek stories. Yet, it has gaping logical inconsistencies, if you think about it too critically. (For starters, why does
Reliant completely overlook that the Ceti Alpha system is
missing a freaking planet?)
To be clear, I am by no means arguing
against logical storytelling here. Don't misconstrue me, I tend to
agree that a sense of internal logic as part of the foundation for a well-balanced story can indeed go a long way toward increasing enjoyment and investment on the part of the audience when applied effectively. However, the fact remains that many people will not be bothered by a lack of logic
if the story nevertheless evokes enjoyment in other ways, such as for instance on an emotional level. And by the same token, if someone
doesn't feel emotionally attached to what's happening in a story, seldom will exquisitely impeccable story logic prove the saving grace. (Though it may in cases, of course.) To say that a story
must make rational sense (within itself
or with respect to others) in order to be a good one is a gross oversimplification, IMO.
"Logic is the beginning of wisdom...not the end."
-
MMoM
FWIW, I've been accused of the former far more than the latter. I also derive a lot of enjoyment from the process of piecing together the big picture of continuity in a shared universe. That doesn't mean I don't find it frustrating when careless writers make that process needlessly complicated.
