Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Pike series and novel continuity

When your the first that is bound to happen.

Just look at all the things in the United States named "Washington" (I say, writing from Washington State).

 

One thing I've recently learned about this place is that the more innocent you think a comment is, the more intense an argument it ends up spawning.

 

For whatever it's worth, given how small the Archer's crew was in comparison to its apparent physical size, I decided to just mentally replace the Hermes design with the Archer class for my own headcanon.

 

*Stargazer, Lantree and Vengeance squirm in the corner*

 

I noticed both of Pike's log entries were "supplemental" in this episode. I remember that was a trick they used to use to get the episode to time, since it saved a few seconds compared to reciting the full stardate, but since that's not an issue anymore, I wonder if someone noticed the mismatch between dating styles very recently and that was only fix they were able to make in time.

 

Uhura's opening log in episode 2 gave the stardate as 2912.4, so they're not sticking with the Kelvin style.

 

Which is a shame because, earth-centric as it (and everything in Trek) is, it actually made sense. But as I've said elsewhere, meaningless TOS stardates mean the show can continue indefinitely and still preceed TOS.

 

It doesn't make any sense to call something a "stardate" when it's just a less clear way of expressing the Gregorian date.

Personally, I'm kind of hoping the two different stardates in episode 1 aren't an error, but a conscious reversion to Roddenberry's Making of Star Trek handwave that stardates are different in different parts of the galaxy due to relativity and whatnot. After all, the caption stardate was for the Kiley system and Pike's log's stardate was for Starbase One at Jupiter.

 

Except I don't really think it makes sense. Why would the United Federation of Planets, an interstellar republic spanning dozens of alien worlds, all of whom have hundreds of local cultures, use one particular culture's calendar from Earth? The idea of a "stardate" as a new "neutral" calendar system that doesn't belong to any one culture within the Federation makes a lot more sense. And it frees the writers from having to tie in an episode to a specific real-life date if they don't want to.

 

The MASH of Star Trek...

 

Every culture has its own calendar system, but SF needs to use only one, most likely based on Earth timekeeping.

 

Having finally seen "Strange New Worlds" yesterday, like Disco S1 and 2 it's a very tough fit with TOS except in very broad strokes. I like to think of it as Prime Universe, but a new adaptation of Prime Universe. Which is subtly different to it being an AU like the Kelvinverse (although all I could think while watching is that this is pretty much the series I wished followed the 2009 movie), I guess a Doylist viewpoint wheras most fans are locked into the Watsonian perspective.

Aka, it's only a TV show. Kinda makes we want to re-read Children of Kings, which was set in a Kelvinesque modernised and updated TOS realm.

 

Roddenberry himself was Doylist about Trek. He saw TOS as a rough draft that he tried to improve on in TMP and TNG; by the TNG era, he considered much of TOS apocryphal. He wasn't married to its details, and indeed any TV producer of his generation would not have hesitated to reinvent a series' universe as it went along.

I think we've reached the point in the franchise where TOS is the odd one out in terms of its production values and its social mores, so perhaps it should be best seen not as inviolable gospel but as a preliminary sketch. Instead of saying other shows don't fit with it, maybe we should be saying that it no longer fits with the other shows.

After all, when two ideas in a series clash, we tend to favor the later one -- James T. Kirk over James R., Starfleet over UESPA, Data not using contractions over Data using contractions, etc. It's all part of the process of refining a creation as you go, a revised and corrected edition superseding the earlier edition.

 

I don't see UESPA and Starfleet as clashing. I see the former as being Earth specific and the latter as being Federation specific. It could even be that early on in TOS the Enterprise was under UESPA authority, moving over to Federation auspices later, in much the manner of a US army unit going under UN command. It could even explain that "Twelve like her in the fleet" line.

 

Of course we can handwave it to fit after the fact, but the point is that we try to fit UESPA into the later idea of Starfleet, rather than denying the existence of Starfleet and insisting there's only UESPA. The later interpretation of the universe takes precedence over the earlier one, and the earlier version is either reconciled with the later one or discarded in favor of it. We don't say the later interpretation is wrong because it differs from the earlier version.

That's what we did with individual details that were changed within TOS or within TNG or whatever. So it seems valid to do that with TOS as a whole, to treat it as the rough-draft version and SNW as the polished version that supersedes it. It's doing the same thing we've always done, just on a larger scale.

 

As soon as Uhura said her parents were dead, I went, "well there goes @Christopher latest book".
Seriously, did they have to give her such a sad backstory? She gets her memory erased later on. That's surely enough for one character.
Frankly I don't think the writers have earned the privilege yet to add story to the legacy characters.

 

Sure they have. Because they are writing for Star Trek. That GIVES them “the privilege” of adding story to legacy characters. Like it or not, by virtue of them having the jobs they do, that by definition gives them the ability to add to the story of legacy characters.

Moreover, until these episodes, until SNW, it’s not like there WAS much in the was of a story for Uhura. “Canon” Uhura, not counting the various resource material and fan lore that canon could overwrite when it pleased, was rather thin in terms of character. SNW at least is exploring her as a person, not as a duty position. That WAS much of Uhura’s “development” until now.

 

I think you have to earn it for them. The new characters they can do whatever they want but they need to prove themselves before handling the Legacy ones.

 

Why do that when you can use an arbitrary, culturally-neutral numerical system that applies universally?

The problem, of course, is that there is no such thing as "U.N. command" in the sense you are describing, because the United Nations is an intergovernmental organization, not a sovereign state; it does not possess its own armed forces. There is a multinational military force called "United Nations Command" that was established to support the South Korean government during the Korean War, but it is not itself a military force. Rather, it is a command structure to which sovereign states have seconded some of their own armed forces' units -- but those states remain the sovereigns to which those units owe primary loyalty and legal obedience. A United States Navy ship operating under the auspices of United Nations Command is still a United States Navy ship, it remains United States property, and its captain is still ultimately legally bound to obey the lawful commands of the United States President above those of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

This is in contrast to Starfleet, whose ships are described as Federation property (TVH), whose ships carry the name "UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS" on them (TMP), whose officers take an oath to obey and owe ultimate legal loyalty to the Federation government (DS9 "For the Cause"), and whose commander-in-chief is the head of Starfleet (TUC, et al) whose supreme commander is the Federation President (DS9 "Paradise Lost").

Sorry, but the idea that the Enterprise was a United Earth ship rather than a Federation starship until mid-2266 really isn't compatible continuity-wise with the depiction of anything about Starfleet and the Federation in later TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, DIS, or SNW, or any of the movies.n

To be very clear, they "earned the privilege" of adding story to the legacy characters when they were hired to be professional scriptwriters for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds by the people who own the Star Trek franchise, and fans whining on the Internet don't get to dictate what they do and do not have a right to write about.