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

Alpha lists Chapel as a Commander simply because that's what she was in TVH (her last onscreen appearance, chronologically speaking).

 

I think that might be the better option. It would give them a level of creative freedom with the legacy characters that they currently don't have, and let them set up stakes for interstellar conflicts that the backstory on TOS might preclude.

I'm also really hoping we see the return of Chancellor L'Rell and Ash Tyler.

 

I agree with the creative freedom regarding the characters, but I've had enough of galaxy-shaking stakes and interstellar political conflicts. This show was pitched to us as focusing on TOS-style episodic stories of exploration, and that's what I want to see. Go wild with the character continuity and development from episode to episode, but give us nice, solid one-and-done plots.



Meanwhile, I find it interesting that M'Benga now apparently has a Nigerian accent, rather than the American accent he had in TOS. How many characters have had different accents when recast? TOS's Sarek and Amanda had the kind of mid-Atlantic accents that American actors of that generation often affected, but Ben Cross's Sarek had an English accent and James Frain's had an American one, while all three subsequent Amandas (Majel Barrett in TAS, Winona Ryder, Mia Kirshner) had American accents. Kelvin Carol Marcus had an English accent, though that was implicitly justified (and explicitly in a cut scene) by having her father based in London in the alternate timeline.

 

Amen to that. I'm really growing tired of the 'galaxy' is in peril plot threads Discovery and Picard have been throwing at us every season. I'm hoping they stick with their plans to make this more episodic. I'm fine with continuity building, I love that in fact, and character building. But not every crisis has to have galactic consequences, and not every story has to even be a crisis per se. It'd be nice to just see a little exploration and develop some sort of story around that.

Fingers crossed that SNW will do that for us.

 

Recasted characters with different accents does not matter to production crew?

 

Recast.

 

I mean, Deanna Troi's accent has changed two or three times in canon even with the same actor, so I don't see why a legacy character in SNW having a different accent needs to matter much.

 

I'm not complaining, I'm just asking if there are any other examples I missed. I mean, we've had recast characters with different heights and eye colors from the originals, and sometimes much older than the originals (e.g. Zefram Cochrane and Harry Mudd). So it's not like accents are a deal-breaker. It's just a matter of curiosity.

 

Spock's full name, S'Chn T'Gai Spock from Barbara Hambly's Ishmael appears to be canon now. As is Jabilo M'Benga.

Wow.

 

Ah, the Spock poster didn't load for me the first time I clicked through to the story, so I though they'd had to change Spock's name (presumably, the studio clearances department found exactly one person in Wyoming named S'Chn T'Gai Spock, and they had to change it, just like what happened with Jackson Archer), but it looks like it's just an autocorrect bug that changed it to "T'Gain." Which I can sympathize with on a very direct level, having "Gian" in my name, which my phone also likes to change to "Gain."

Anyway, looks like the fanfic crew won out, picking that one instead of D.C. Fontana's tongue-in-cheek "Xtmprsqzntwlfd."

I'm amused that this, from a certain point of view, vindicates the post-ST09 trend in fanworks to refer to the character as "S'Chn T'Gai Spock" ubiquitously, more regularly than several canon names and facts are drawn upon. While the "S'Chn T'Gai" family name is official, but non-canon, originating in Barbara Hambly's Star Trek/Here Come the Brides crossover novel Ishmael, an equal degree of deference in contemporary fandom could've been afforded to "Xtmprsqzntwlfd," a tongue-in-cheek suggestion made in response to fan-letter by Dorothy "D.C." Fontana, a writer on the original Star Trek television series who made several important contributions to the character of Spock and his Vulcan background, which had historically also found some degree of purchase within the fandom (though never really winning out over the simplest answer, that his name is just "Spock," which of course is inaccurate, as the existence of a second name had been established in the episodes "This Side of Paradise" and "Journey to Babel").

However, as in the case of "Hikaru Sulu" and "Nyota Uhura," the long-delayed establishment of a canon character name reflects the consensus choice of the fandom from among several officially licensed and behind-the-scenes options and suggestions. In this light, it's unsurprising that Strange New Worlds, in canonically establishing a second name for Spock, would choose the more popular option rather than an (admittedly joking) one of arguably superior provenance, or even inventing a new name. Given that fan creators are frequently looked-down-up or treated as pariahs in officially sanctioned media venues for both legal and social reasons, I find this concordance of this piece of "fanon," (which is particularly popular among fans of a generation which could not have been exposed to Ishmael, a moderately obscure tie-in novel, directly) and "canon," amusing and worthy of a small, winking acknowledgement.

 

That wasn't fanfic. It came from Barbara Hambly's novel Ishmael. And it has been used in more recent novels as well (including, I think, one of mine).

Congrats to the Vanguard guys for "Jabilo" making it to canon.

 

I'm sorry, I was unclear, I meant the name that had been adopted by fanfic community in recent years as fanon. You see "S'Chn T'Gai" often enough in fanwork and memes and things that a lot of people would probably be surprised to learn it wasn't from an episode.

 

And it's been adopted by professional novelists like me in recent years as well, but that doesn't make it ours. It remains Barbara Hambly's creation, no matter how many people have subsequently adopted it.

 

We're obviously having a failure to communicate based on an ambiguously-assigned pronoun, so let me just edit my dipshit tossed-off joke so it's extremely clear that I already knew that, and there aren't any further misunderstandings.

 

SNW novel announced
https://twitter.com/TrekCore/status/1512509974110511112

 

Love seeing M'Benga's first name canonized. Hate seeing "S'chn T'gain" canonized.

 

It's S'chn T'gai, not T'gain, although people's autocorrects seem to be "fixing" it a lot. Why do people even use autocorrect?

 

Now we just need a Disco episode where someone from Ni'Var calls Michael "S'Chn T'Gai Michael Burnham" and she's utterly confused because like us episode viewers, the family name just never came up in her time with the Sarek family

 

Hehe, I got your point; in fact, I thought about you as soon as I saw the poster on fb!

Does anyone know if any licensed work used "S'chn T'gai" after Ishmael prior to The Tears of Eridanus? I can't think of any, and I'm not seeing anything on Google Books.

(Also I keep typing "T'gain" so it might not be autocorrect, just muscle memory.)

 

I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure none of them did. When I used it for Skon and Sarek's family name in Uncertain Logic, I stated in my annotations (confirming my own unreliable memory) that I did so for the sake of consistency with Tears, and cited Ishmael as its origin. So at least I'm not and was not aware of any intervening uses.