They pulls dates out of their ass some times.
And other nonsense facts like Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet.
I wouldn't use the official website for anything but news.
Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x10 - "A Quality of Mercy"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
And other nonsense facts like Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet.
I wouldn't use the official website for anything but news.
The Okuda works are not, as the Okudas are careful to remind people, not canon.
Because a character says a thing in a Trek episode does not make it incontrovertibly true within the Trek universe. All the series are replete with statements, especially historical ones, by various characters only to have those statements contradicted when the events are shown or referenced in a different context.
Then why consider anything canon?
It's canon that the character thinks that way. It doesn't make it 100% truth, even within the world. People do not speak literally all the time. People use metaphors, approximations, or state things that are flat out wrong but they think are right or are right based on what they know.
Well regarding 2270, it was Icheb who said it, in a very thorough and long article about Kirk. He wouldn't get that wrong.
Why treat canon as if it matters so much? It doesn't, because it's not fact. It's changeable as the producers decide that circumstances demand.
There are many events and places that are shown and dramatized onscreen. These make up the stories that Star Trek is built upon. And these things are vastly more important, and somewhat less malleable, than the thousands of things that are said but not shown.
The latter type of detail is the kind of so-called "canon" most likely to contradict itself. Does Trek take place 150 or 500 years from now? Both were said to be true during TOS's run. One of them is not more canonical than the other.
Icheb didn't write an article. Icheb doesn't exist. What he said was written by a television writer to serve the purposes of a script. It doesn't matter whether "Icheb would get that wrong" or not, because Icheb could only be as right or wrong as the writer called for.
Yeah, another writer could move Kirk's five year mission to whatever dates suited them, and the new dates would be every bit as canonical as the date given in a scene in Voyager.
I mean, the question of whether or not Pike could have avoided his accident while still keeping Kirk in command of the Enterprise in time for the events of "Balance of Terror" to unfold is besides the point, because Future!Pike told Our!Pike that every time he tried to make a different change to avoid his fate, another unforeseen disaster occurred. Pike can change his fate, but the cost of doing so will always be that more people suffer and die than would if he stays on the path that results in his radiation injuries.
Oh my DAYS how much does Ortegas even look like Stiles in this?!?!
People saying “cannon” instead of “canon” annoys me more.
Phaser canon
Since "cannon" and "canon" are pronounced identically, your annoyance stems more from people writing "cannon" when they mean "canon" instead of actually saying the sounds.
And now, we can add "literalist pedantry" to the list of annoyances.
(Yes, the misspelling of "canon" as "cannon" annoys me, too.)
Normally, an episode like this would make me groan. It's almost akin to a clip show, but remade. Somehow it all works. The new stuff seems fresh, the old is expanded and with a few twists. It's a touchstone for modern Star Trek. Anything else I say would seem like hyperbole so I'll end it there.
10/10
10/10
And perhaps the Commander himself was also a different person. He was much more sarcastic and witty than Mark Lenard's character (and somewhat less war-weary). I find it likely they're different characters.
Would have been mildly amusing if James Frain played the character tho.
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It's been a year since I've watched this obviously and once the initial shock of the Balance of Terror remake gimmick has faded, I find this episode itself doesn't seem that great in retrospect. Considering that Picard finally made the distinction between ridged and non-ridged Romulans clear (northerners and non-northerners), it's beyond bizarre that the key plot point of Balance of Terrror, that the Romulan commander looked exactly like Spock, was thrown out the window to give him ridges. The Romulan praetor was also referred to as a male in TOS, yet he's suddenly a female in SNW which is fine except it's beyond unlikely that Pike escaping his accident would somehow cause such a drastic change in Romulan politics.
Maybe the above would've been fine but now we're supposed to think that the Romulan fleet, led by the praetor herself, was somehow just ready to attack if their cloaked ship was victorious. It makes TOS seem nonsensical that apparently this praetor-led fleet was ready the whole time and they all just decided to go home after Balance of Terror. I noted that New Trek seems to love this over-the-top fleet of enemy ships, note how immediately after T'Kuvma's attack suddenly an entire Klingon squadron shows up at the Battle of the Binary Stars, or who Oh is suddenly able to escape years of Starfleet cover and take command of a squadron of 218 Romulan warbirds, in a Romulan free state that supposedly is at a low point in power, all for a Zhat Vash hatred of AI that we're told is specific to mainly the Zhat Vash to the point that most Romulans aren't even aware of them.
Slightly OT for this thread really, but the Warbirds in that fleet are tiddlers. If you look at the shot of Oh's flagship in warp, given the visible bridge window, it can't be more than 5 decks tall. I suppose they might all be Defiant-class level battleships but it certainly fits that the Romulan Free State doesn't have the resources to maintain or construct ships the size of the D'deridex after Hobus.
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