A-freakin'-men!
Star Trek Retcons
- Thread starter thesadpanda
- Start date
A-freakin'-men!
DS9 "Dr. Bashir, I Presume": an admiral refers to the Eugenics Wars as happening 200 years ago. Which would actually put them in the 22nd Century. Ron Moore admitted he screwed up when he was writing the script, but if it's onscreen, it's canon.
It could be that the character misspoke. Maybe that admiral failed his history classes at the Academy.
We shouldn't assume infallibility of all characters in the franchise.
Not only that, but TOS "Where No Man Has Gone Before" strongly implies that the Valiant is a pre-warp ship.
It kinda does, I admit. That line about the time barrier being broken suggests that the "time/space warp" factor is a development that would be news to the Valiant crew.
Ive always taken that to mean the fith Enterprise with an NCC-1701(-#) on the end.
Plus the retcon could be the first Warp 5 ship was going to be called something else, Phoenix maybe (Earths first Warp 5 ship named after their first Warp ship), but then The Enterprise-E went back in time and through Cochrane and Lilly the name Enterprise was tabled.
I would also like to add that
In the TNG episode Frame of Mind a hand phaser set to its maximum setting and on wide beam could take out half a building, yet in DS9's The Siege of AR-558 everybody forgot this some what important fact.
Then theres trilithium which goes from explosive starship warpdrive waste that everyone knows about in Starship Mine to Star destroying super compound that barely anyone knows about in Generations back to explosive starship warpdrive waste in The Chute.
In the TNG episode Frame of Mind a hand phaser set to its maximum setting and on wide beam could take out half a building, yet in DS9's The Siege of AR-558 everybody forgot this some what important fact.
Then theres trilithium which goes from explosive starship warpdrive waste that everyone knows about in Starship Mine to Star destroying super compound that barely anyone knows about in Generations back to explosive starship warpdrive waste in The Chute.
It may be onscreen and it may be canon but that doesn't mean the Eugenics Wars happened in the 22nd century. In the ENT Augement-arc it is re-established that the EW took place in the 1990s. Space Seed and Borderland against Doctor Bashir I Presume means it is now canon that the admiral got his history a bit confused.
Not this time. That was indeed a mistake, and it will be ignored. It never happened.
Nope, sorry, the intent of the writers doesn't have anything to do with a discussion on retcons.
For example: I'm sure when Gene Coon wrote "Metamorphosis", he fully intended for Zefram Cochrane to be the inventor of warp drive for the entire galaxy, not just Earth. And I'm sure the intention was that he really was from Alpha Centauri originally, not Montana. And yet fans are quick to ignore those original intentions. No one is saying First Contact is a mistake and should be ignored.
If we can ignore the original intent of writers like Gene Coon, I see no problem with ignoring Ron Moore's statement that he meant to put a different number in a script.
I'd have to say that Ron Moore's statement is valid, especially since the evidence citing the Eugenics Wars happening in the 20th century FARRRR outweighs all the evidence (re: one typo) citing them happening in the 22nd century.
Same thing with First Contact. We have one line of Cochrane being from Alpha Centauri, and a whole movie plus random episodes scattered about that say Montana.
I don't think there's a whole mountain of evidence that the Eugenics Wars happened in the late 1990s. Really, it just comes down to Spock's statement in "Space Seed".
DS9's "Dr. Bashir" puts it in the 22nd Century. In ENT's "Borderland", Phlox simply says that Augments were developed using 20th Century technology, giving no firm dates for the Wars.
In ENT "Hatchery", Archer says his great-grandfather fought in the Wars. Given long life expectancies in Star Trek, I'd say there's plenty of wiggle room there on the actual dates.
And then there's McCoy's statement in TAS "Infinite Vulcan" that the Eugenics Wars happened "150 years ago", but since most people here don't consider TAS canon, I'm not opening that can of worms.
So really, it just comes down to "Space Seed", and one could just as easily say Spock was mistaken about the dates, as the admiral on DS9.
Of course, Spock's reading Khan's record from the historical database which identifies him as ruler of a quarter the Earth's surface from 1992 to 1996. And Scott identifies the DY-100 as being of late 20th century design. And historian McGivers describes Khan as a 20th century human being. And Khan describes his ship as lost in space from the year 1996.
But, yes, it could be that the history databases, Spock, Scott, McGivers, and Khan were all simultaenously mistaken and made the same error while an Admiral spoke perfectly correctly about a nonessential point of fact.
Trust me, if TPTB had deliberately retconned the Eugenics Wars to be in the 21st or 22nd Century, there would be dozens of people offering ridiculous explanations for how the dialogue in "Space Seed" still fits in with continuity (Hey! Khan was just coming out of years of hibernation! You'd expect him to make mistakes!) My point being, Star Trek fans can rationalize anything. I don't see why people are so eager to pull in real-world backstage statements to justify ignoring some onscreen events, and not others.
Modern Trek repeatedly speaks of the pre-Federation era as one of barbarism. There would be a clear watershed there. And it just plain wouldn't make sense to include the (unknown!) number of previous holders of the name Enterprise in the list of UFP Starfleet Enterprises - the E-D is the fifth for that organization, even if she is the 76th or 85th or 327th (nobody can ever know the exact figure) overall.
That as such is not an error: real soldiers don't use the spray'n'pray setting of their assault rifles, because rationing of rounds is important, and so is aiming.
What is more serious is that Worf in "Chain of Command" actually uses Level 16, in blasting that little hole in that rock wall. Unless the rock was specifically difficult to blast, there would seem to be a discrepancy between the usage and Riker's claims. But of course, Riker would be fully entitled to a little bit of exaggeration in the situation he (thinks he) is in!
"Barely anyone"? All we get in ST:GEN is Riker expressing a tiny bit of surprise at the claim that signs of trilithium were found on the observatory. He doesn't say he doesn't know what trilithium is and what it does. That his underlings nevertheless tell him (that is, tell us) is a routine storytelling device that hardly qualifies as a continuity error. Television and movie heroes are always muttering to themselves, stating the obvious, pausing dramatically and posing even more dramatically, and doing other such things that simply do not happen in reality.
As for the "phasers and warp coils in the 22nd century", people generally misunderstand what is being discussed in "A Matter of Time". Here's the real dialogue:
That's "progress", not "invention" or "introduction". Riker is really only claiming that warp drive made progress during those two centuries, and that he thinks this was the most important sort of progress made in his culture in that time.
Compare to Worf's choice:
Worf is clearly speaking of an invention. However, he's also speaking of progress made in the past 200 years, so it's perfectly acceptable to say that Worf is stating that phasers were invented during the latter decades of the 22nd century.
Of course. Why would anybody settle to saying that the (fictional) universe makes no sense, or is faulty? Universes cannot be faulty. They can only be poorly understood.
And it's pretty clear that TPTB didn't deliberately retcon anything there. There was no deliberate effort to move the Eugenics Wars forward in time, just a bit of careless writing or poorly researched pseudofacts.
As for TAS "Infinite Vulcan", it certainly doesn't state that the Eugenics Wars were 150 years prior to the ep. What it states is that the mad scientist who lived in the general period of the wars but was shunned (hence probably worked after the wars, when there were stong anti-augment feelings) would be over 250 years old by the time of the episode - which makes possible any dating of the wars between late 20th century and McCoy's own time.
Timo Saloniemi
Thankfully, we have Memory Alpha to back this up:
From Memory Alpha said:
Because, in this case, one of the powers that be (for that matter, one of the head honchos) outright confessed to an honest mistake and told viewers how it should have been. How many times does THAT ever happen on any given TV show, let alone something as continuity-heavy as Trek, where the head writer goes, "oops, you viewers were right all along?"
You're contradicting yourself there... in one sentence you're saying that we don't have to accept that this fictional universe can be faulty, and in the next you're willing to remove this one event from the timeline due to "careless writing". Either everything that happens onscreen is canon, or we have to accept that this fictional universe contradicts itself from time to time.
Once again, if we use the intent of the writers to determine what's canon, then nothing will make sense. "I meant to say 400 years, not 200 years" is Ron Moore's intenet. Gene Coon's intent was "Zefram Cochrane is from Alpha Centauri and invented warp drive for the whole galaxy".
Arthur Singer's intent in writing "Turnabout Intruder" was that women really were not allowed to be starship captains, not that Janice Lester was nutty and didn't know what she was talking about.
When Ron Moore wrote TNG "Relics", his intent was that Kirk was still alive at the time Scotty got stuck in the transport buffer. Not that Scotty was so addled that he couldn't remember seeing one of this closest friends die.
Again, if you use the writer's "intent" to decide what's canon or not, things get messy real fast. I see no need to make an exception in the case of "Dr. Bashir, I Presume".
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