It was an interesting choice to make the characters as clueless about it as the audience, but I suppose alien races somehow keeping something this massive a total secret is nothing new for Star Trek.
Spoilers Strange New Worlds General Discussion Thread
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They basically repeated every one of the fan theories that were floated for years after ST:TMP premiered.
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I guess a lot of those fans must have been happy to have been proven right 26 years later. The ones still watching Enterprise that is.
Phlox knew Klingon anatomy in 2151 but McCoy is clueless in 2293. Trek is about as consistent as a politician's campaign promises, although that can also be chalked up to bad blood between the Federation and Empire in the 23rd century leading to fewer physicians having a working knowledge of Klingon anatomy.
Yet he can spot a Klingon with the wave of a salt shaker.
Star Trek. We know what we're doing. Not really.
Ok, you prefer never having answers over having an answer that you simply don't like, is that correct?
It's funny that real examples are either dismissed as 'apples and oranges', or as 'hyperbole', or 'pota-tay-toes' when they come from the other side. So you wanna have different levels like non-canon episodes (when they have major hommages in it), semi-canon-episodes (if they have minor hommages), and fully consistent canonical ones (with no reference to anything previous)? That would be even more confusing.
and there was only 1 writer who knew all their own scripts, or reading other people's scripts was just as easy and quick as looking up MA, I suppose... XD
I did not know that error, probably because no one says they're in the 28th century. it's based on an assumption of a child trickster being and a meteorologist.
if the potayto is this: A B B B B B B B B B (as in Data's comment in Farpoint, James R Kirk, or the single Trill in TNG)
and the potahto is that: A A A A A A A B (as in the Discoprise, the Disco Klingons, etc.)
then they are different, and the potahto is a deliberate continuity breach that could've easily been avoided. the potayto is an initial mistake that was followed by a then consistently applied correction.
do you really not see the difference? it's a little obvious.
Yes.
No, I simply recognize that as a scripted television production and work of fiction, there are absolutely going to be retcons, mistakes and changes in production design that are introduced for behind-the-scenes reasons over anything else, be it deliberately or by mistake, that don't necessary need to have in-universe reasons or even acknowledged in-universe.
I don't need an in-universe explanation for why Starbase 1, stated on screen in Discovery to be 100 AU from Earth, is shown still orbiting it. I know that the reason is that the VFX crew screwed up, why would I need to craft convoluted explanations about an Oort cloud object whose ice structures incidentally happen to mimic the coastline of the St. Lawrence River or that the length of an AU might have been redefined by the 23rd century, when I can just recognize it as a mistake and disregard it?
Of course, speculation about the hows and whys is perfectly okay. It can be a fun pastime. The problem is when the "I wonder why" becomes "It needs to be explained."
Why is the canonicity of something determined by how closely it reproduces 60-year-old design choices? Star Trek is not a historic documentary and it isn't a factual depiction of actual future events. It's a TV show about the future. The Enterprise looking different in two completely separate productions created 20 years apart does not make any of those productions any less "canon". Something is either canon or non-canon, and it's not the fans who decide what canon is. It's the owner of the copyright who does. TOS, DS9, Discovery and SNW depict a fictional starship whose appearance is determined by a series of executive decisions. The 23rd century looks like how it did in TOS in Trials and Tribble-ations not because TOS had already "established" what the 23rd century looks like and they "needed" to adhere to it. It looks like that because they wanted to make an homage. If they had wanted to change it, they would've.
Star Trek's apparent visual continuity before 2009 was not a deliberate practice of establishing a must-follow, definite, detailed design framework for a constructed universe. It was a result of the same studio and the same production company creating the franchise more-or-less continuously from 1979 to 2005 and having most production assets originally manufactured for the first three movies ready at hand so that they could save money by reusing them over and over. And if any new things had to be created, they were designed and manufactured by the same people for 26 years. It's easy to have the Ferengi make-up look the same for a quarter of a century when they have the original molds to create it in their workshop, and when it becomes a routine, they won't feel inclined to redesign it, unless they don't like how it looks and decide to do it over (e.g. the Nausicaans in Enterprise) or keep tweaking it until it feels "right" (e.g. Worf in TNG that people tend to rationalize as his aging process despite Dorn wearing his Season 7 make-up in the flashbacks in All Good Things).
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Sadly, the point of it being Prime is to get as many people as possible to watch it; that's the same point as calling it "Star Trek." As I've said elsewhere, "Star Trek" is now just a marketing term. It has no other value, as TPTB will change anything they want to change. And then decree that "Yes, it's Prime Star Trek."
Only if there's a good reason. They don't just things willynilly.
They also know the Prime Timeline has hundreds and hundreds of hours of adventures, characters and continuity they can mine. The Kelvin Timeline is three movies, which while generally popular and liked by many Trekkies are a very limited well from which to draw water and hamstrung by the fact that the fourth movie has now been in limbo for about five years so they weren't about to nosedive into that timeline without knowing if a new movie was definitely slated for production.
Prime is safe and Prime is smart. You get to exploit 50+ years of in-universe history with Prime. Any other timeline means you're at best starting from the foundation of starships, warp drive and guys with weird prosthetics on their heads and hope that cross-franchise references will be enough to get people to care for an entire season.
Prime is safe and Prime is smart. You get to exploit 50+ years of in-universe history with Prime. Any other timeline means you're at best starting from the foundation of starships, warp drive and guys with weird prosthetics on their heads and hope that cross-franchise references will be enough to get people to care for an entire season.
But those who don't value canonical consistency also use their own version of hyperbole. You can see it a few posts above the post I'm quoting here, where the idea of how Peter Parker dressed in the 70s doesn't matter now. This is a simple argument which doesn't affect the story or the characters in any meaningful way, but at least a large number of people who DO value canonical consistency in Trek are arguing for avoiding changes that do affect the ongoing canonical story of Star Trek. If such a thing still existed, that is.
And yet, for no really good, justifiable reason, the Enterprise is different in Disco. And the Klingons are radically different in TMP, for no really good reason; just because Roddenberry wanted to change them. And then they're different again in Disco, same reason. (As I've said elsewhere, they change Klingons more often than they change uniforms.) And...you get the picture.
Creatives love to change things, to do something that makes it "theirs". What I've not be able to get (aside from the marketing angle above) is "Why call it Star Trek?" You want to make something new and different? Go right ahead. Surely Roddenberry's "archives" have more ideas to mine a la Andromeda and Final Conflict. Talk to Rod, pay him for said idea and make your own show, then you don't have any motivation to fuck with Star Trek. Do your own thing.
Aside from the marketing angle, though, this also brings into question whether the talent is there.
There is a good reason. it's not the 60s anymore. They updated the design for new modern audiances.
IIRC it wasn't Gene's idea to change them, that came from the makeup guy. He approached Gene about redesigning the Klingons and he approved it.
It does still exist.
Because IT IS Star Trek. It uses the Star Trek lore and mythos. There's call backs and references in every season. They use plot points from previous series.
If it wasn't Star Trek none of that could happen.[/QUOTE]
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When it suits the producers, and generally for no reason other than to try to make a connection with TOS. Which it then goes on to ignore, also when it suits the producers. That's not a canon; it's a loose aggregation of ideas.
Yet it worked just fine in DS9. and in ENT. The fans I know cheered when they saw the Enterprise in DS9. None of them said anything like "That's a sad old design from the 60s. They should have replaced it with something which made no sense but looked better."
Your next post should contain "Whatever, boomer" :-)
Fan service for the old fans.
The TOS Enterprise is my 3rd favourite enterprise, but I can admit it looks outdated for the 21st Century.
You just described what Star Trek has always been.
Like I said to another person above, apples and oranges. It's one thing to replicate '60s sets, costumes and filming models for a one-off 30th anniversary homage. It's an entirely different thing to create an entire show in the 2010s-20s that takes place entirely in that era and is broadcast in Full HD. Exact reproductions of 60-year-old production assets simply don't stand up to scrutiny in a modern production, no matter how often certain people keep pointing at fan films that were created for a very specific set of viewers anyway. A modern audience simply wouldn't accept an exact reproduction of the TOS assets as a realistic extrapolation of 23rd century technology.
And I know you would reply that they should've left the 23rd century alone and went further into the future if plausibility was an issue. But why? Why is it a nonnegotiable requirement that a production revisiting something created in the '60s absolutely has to look and feel exactly like it did in the '60s down to the littlest detail? It's still Enterprise shaped when I look at it. It's not like they threw everything out the window and made it into a Star Destroyer. And it certainly isn't like they pulled a George Lucas and replaced it retroactively in all old episodes too. The flashbacks to The Cage in Discovery didn't even use the HD remaster footage but the original one complete with the 11-foot Enterprise model. This is why we keep complaining about hyperbole, because there's no middle ground in these arguments. Either everything is set in stone and kept the exact same forever, or everything is fair game and you could turn Kirk into an LGBTQ woman of color and turn Vulcans into 9-feet-tall six-armed platypus-like aliens with purple fur. When we are talking about an Enterprise that's still recognizable as the Enterprise with some different details that most viewers would find minor enough to accept with a shrug, and most casual viewers wouldn't even notice.
Except, there is an argument to be made that the ongoing canonical story of Trek has oftentimes included changes, including with make up alterations, and updating the look to suit the producers ideas. Yes, Trek has acknowledged it's own shared history but it also has radically altered it to suit the primary idea of Trek for contemporary audiences. In TOS the 90s were reported to be a violent time, with fragmentary records. When Voyager goes back in time, to the 90s, it's modern LA with little evidence of a world war. Is that an inconsistency or expanding upon previous lore? Honestly, it's both.
Exactly.
