Spoilers Star Trek: Prodigy and the Novels

[Zarm]

VOY: Flashback and ST: Beyond, as well, for the movie era, and ENT: These Are the Voyages for exteriors. But at what point does 'well, production necessity to match the original' (which, you know, maybe kinda tells you something about the original that's worth matching) give way to 'the principle has been soundly established and verified over and over and over again, this is established principle'? I would argue it has long-since happened, and DIS/SNW did *not* have the freedom to start from scratch- they just arrogantly acted as if they did, in defiance of 50 years of continuity. '****ing hubris,' as Admiral Clancy once put it. :-)

But, Prodigy also adds to that case by indicating that even without the production necessity of matching being in place, the principle still holds, for every series outside of DIS/SNW. (And arguably Picard, which does use the SNW exterior, and LD that doesn't really weigh in on it).

 

[Zarm]

Are we destined to always be at odds? :-) That was not my intention when joining the forums.

 

[Christopher]

and DIS/SNW did *not* have the freedom to start from scratch- they just arrogantly acted as if they did, in defiance of 50 years of continuity.

That's ridiculous, and needlessly inflammatory. The very first people to throw out the old designs and start from scratch were Gene Roddenberry and Robert Wise in ST:TMP. There's no way that a mere 3 years of progress could explain everything in the movie changing so drastically in appearance, not only in Starfleet but with the Klingons as well. Roddenberry was the first to say that a new production should be free to redo everything and start from scratch. Creators rarely have the same sense of purism about their own works that audiences do, because creators know that a lot of what ended up in the final work was the result of compromise and shortcuts, things they didn't actually want but had to settle for because they lost an argument or ran out of time or money. So Roddenberry had no great loyalty to the look or details of TOS. He was happy to retcon everything and try to bring it closer to the ideal in his head. And he is on record as saying that he approved of the idea of later creators reinventing Trek in their own way.

 

[David cgc]

I'm more surprised he didn't look at Lower Decks- with its serious-Trek-but-also-comedy-parody-moments tone and tendency to explore the weird, goofy, and obscure side of Trek, and go 'oh, they're just ripping off the format of New Frontier (but with less sex)!'

I do think PD deserves credit for basically creating the template for Lower Decks (even if coincidentally and unintentionally) several decades ahead of his time. Between that and the Brikar, modern animated Trek owes a lot to Peter David.

I think LDS has the most in common with Improvised Star Trek, if anything (obligatory fan-fic warning for the authors, do not click), but, you know "Star Trek, but wackier" is a fairly obvious premise to execute on and there'll be similarities for anyone who tries to do it. In practice, the crew of the Sisyphus is pretty different from the crew of the Cerritos, sassy Vulcan character added near the end of the run notwithstanding.

 

[Zarm]

I will have to disagree with you there; that was an 'almost totally new Enterprise,' the change was justified; completely different from breaking with 5 decades of established precedent consistently presented across 5 separate series. (I'd say 6, but TAS *did* take a few liberties with Engineering...).