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

Get Smart, on the other hand, wasn't shy about President Johnson (other than mentioning him by name) at all: steer-horn hotline, remarks about "baby powder," and so forth.

 

Sure, you could imply and allude all you wanted, but if a story needed to show a contemporary political leader onscreen and have them play a role in the story, it would be a fictional character.

I read a cool article once about the history of screen portrayals of US presidents over the decades and when references to real, current ones started to become explicit, but I can't remember how to find it.

 

Yep. By then, Lincoln wasn't a political figure; he was an historical figure.

 

Was just watching this week's The Ready Room-aftershow following the new SNW-episode, and Anson Mount (during his interview with Wil Wheaton) talks about how the novels and comics have been featuring the Gorn for years now. Very cool.

 

This episode of SNW has a completely new story for the Rigel VII mission that immediately preceded "The Cage," superseding the one in Early Voyages #3.

 

Yes, I didn't realize that Mount was such a ST fan coming into the franchise.

 

Inevitable, really -- though I wondered if naming Pike's yeoman Zack Nguyen was a nod to EV's name for him, Dermot Cusack.

 

I don't follow this at all.

 

Zack. Cusack.

 

When he was at Shore Leave in 2019, he hung out with the writers and novelists, he was offering his suggestions on books to read, and he took recommendations. In his talks with Ethan Peck, he talked about how he had been up for Gabriel Lorca in the first season of Disco, and when he received the audition script for season two and he read for that, while the character was not named "Christopher Pike" in the script, he instantly figured out who the character really was and he knew he had to have that role. "I would have liked Lorca, but I wanted Pike" is roughly what he said. (Peck, by the way, said the Spock character in his audition script was an Andorian.)

Mount is just super-literate. When he was asked about which Shakespeare play he'd like to perform, he talked about how what he really wants to do is Jacobean revenge drama. I think it was Middleton's Second Maiden's Tragedy that he named specifically.

 

That's awesome. I love that he figured out he was auditioning for Pike.

 

And Peck figured out he was auditioning for Spock, even though the character on the page was an Andorian. IIRC, Peck said something like, "I was reading the script, and I'd think, 'That sounds like something Spock would say.'"

I'm not laughing at Peck. It's just funny to me.

 

While I get obfuscating the role's actual identity is necessary these days to prevent spoilers leaking, saying your looking for an Andorian when you actually want Spock seems an odd choice. It runs the risk of potential actors turning down the audition because "I don't want to have to go in blueface every week." Though I will admit, I don't know what they could say as an alternative. Maybe if it were a 24th century show they could say Romulan, but that would raise more questions if they said they were looking for a recurring Romulan on Disco.

 

I think actors who've been in the business for any length of time are aware that casting sides often conceal the characters' identities. Besides, a decision like that probably comes later in the process. Even if you're not sure you want to play a specific character, attending the audition and showing the casting director and producers what you're capable of can put you on their radar for other roles. So it probably makes sense to go to the audition anyway, and then if they offer you the part (which they probably won't, most of the time), that's when you learn more of the specifics and decide if it's something you really want to do.

 

And in a case like Star Trek, you can easily have actors who grew up on it who actively WANT to play an alien who requires various forms of makeup and prosthetics. Isn’t there a story about Kirstie Alley wearing Saavik’s ears home, for example?

 

Okay, since I'm at the Shore Leave con with Kirsten Beyer, I asked her about this, and it's probably a coincidence. She thinks the character was named for a friend of one of the other writers.

 

I'm not following...what do those two names have to do with each other?

 

No.

No.
It's all canon. There's just the one timeline. Events have been shifted.

 

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Of course, it could also be "Kyoo-sack," but it's in a print medium, so it could go either way. Anyway, it didn't pan out, so never mind.

There's one canon, but more than one version of the timeline. Because canon does not mean a uniform continuity, it just means a complete set of connected creative works. And if that set of works includes stories about the timeline being changed, those stories are all equally part of the canon. (Cf. Doctor Who's Time War, or the Arrowverse's Flashpoint and Crisis.)

Indeed, most long-running canons include revisions to their internal continuity, usually without bothering to explain it with time travel but just pretending it was always that way and hoping people are engaged enough by the stories that they either don't notice the change or aren't bothered by it. For instance, M*A*S*H was an 11-year series about a 3-year war, and after nudging the calendar up to early 1953 (final few months of the Korean War), they realized the show was in no danger of cancellation anytime soon, so they bumped the timeline back to 1950-51 while still keeping the updated cast and character continuity.

But it's all canon, because canon means stories, and stories are about characters and their experiences, not dates and figures and set designs. The Eugenics Wars may be decades later, but Pike and Spock and Number One are still the same people who've had, or will have, the same experiences shaping their lives. And that's the true meaning of canon, Charlie Brown.