The Cage, Discovery, and Soft Canon

[Wowbagger]

So I don't see why it's any harder to use the same handwave here.

'cause they change it all back. It's difficult to understand why they would revert to what is clearly a lower technology level after making such a big leap forward, all within the span of a decade. It would be like having Apple II's in 1990, iPhone X's in 1993, and then back Performa PCs in 2000.

I once tried to come up with an explanation for a similar visual evolution/devolution as part of a crazy plan to reconcile the JJ Verse and the Prime Verse as the same universe. And, hey, it kinda worked. But it required some intense suspension of disbelief, and plenty of folks said it was a crazy idea at the time. (Essentially, I posited that Starfleet made a major technological breakthrough, implemented it throughout the fleet, but then a disastrous technical flaw revealed several years later forced them to roll everything back until the problem could be worked out in time for TMP.) Now something quite similar is canon.

This is, as always, not dispositive. Discovery could bend canon beyond the breaking point and still be a good television program. The root problem is I think it's a very bad television program. Because it is already bad, when it comes along and breaks canon, I'm not inclined to put in the mental work necessary to deal with it. And since Discovery absolutely delights in breaking canon, which breaks immersion for me as a viewer, they really are demanding a lot of mental effort from me.

 

[Captain Crow]

Discovery, in its infinite retcon, is methodically contradicting many canon aspects of the Cage -- the uniforms (as we see from the S2 teaser), the design of the Enterprise, women in command, etc.. Personally, I don't mind this at all. The Cage was a one-off show conceived before anyone even imagined that Trek would have the longevity it does, and before Trek was even Trek. Add to that much of the dialogue from the Cage is cheesy pulp sci-fi, like "We've broken the time barrier!", and you can see it's a huge outlier.

Instead of dissing Discovery for erasing things established in the Cage, perhaps it's time to simply look the other way. Uniforms aren't sweaters with huge collars? Big deal. The nacelle struts are wrong? Close enough. Bridge doesn't look like a cardboard set from the 60s? Ehn. The Women! are staffing the bridge, despite Pike's stern objections? Yawn.

I propose that we instead adopt "soft canon" for the Cage, and to a similar extent, Where No Man Has Gone Before (James R. Kirk, anybody?). Earlier Trek should be viewed as foundational, but allowed the flexibility to grow into what it has become. Nothing should be taken literally or at face value, other than it's a story about the Enterprise and its crew.

Discuss!

I think you're mixing up canon with continuity.

Canon is what characters and events TPTB deem to be officially part of a franchise. Continuity is the timeline/reality/universe in which those characters and events exist.

Discovery and The Cage are just like TOS and the Abbrams films. Canon but different continuities. So there's no need for shouting "CANON VIOLATION!!111!11!!11!" or anal retentive hoop jumping and ramming square pegs into round holes to make the two fit together.

A variation of The Cage happens in the Discovery continuity plain and simply. Nothing is contradicted or
retconned and original The Cage doesn't magically poof out of existence.

 

[WarpFactorZ]

I think you're mixing up canon with continuity.... Discovery and The Cage are just like TOS and the Abbrams films. Canon but different continuities.

I think you're mixing up the fact that the production staff said this was Prime continuity, with your personal belief that it isn't.

 

[Captain Crow]

I think you're mixing up the fact that the production staff said this was Prime continuity, with your personal belief that it isn't.

The whole "Prime Universe" thing is pulled out of the ass gobbledygook from around the time of the first Abrams movie that was a vain attempt to pacify those who for some odd reason think when a reboot happens the original just poofs out of existence.

But since you wanna play the "IT'S TEH PRIME UNIVERSE!!11!11!" card.

Tell me what constitutes the "Prime Universe"?

The Cage?
Where No Man has Gone Before?
TOS? (due to fluctuating continuity please specify episode or grouping of episodes)
Pre-Post TOS time travel episodes?
Movies Pre-Post 4 time travel?
Movies Pre-Post Generations time travel?
Movies Pre-Post First Contact time travel?
TNG? (due to fluctuating continuity please specify episode or grouping of episodes or season)
Pre-Post TNG time travel episodes?
DS9? (due to fluctuating continuity please specify episode or grouping of episodes or season)
Pre-Post DS9 time travel episodes?
Voyager? (due to fluctuating continuity please specify episode or grouping of episodes or season)
Pre-Post Voyager time travel episodes?
Enterprise? (due to fluctuating continuity please specify episode or grouping of episodes or season)
Pre-Post Enterprise time travel episodes?
The beginning of the 2009 film before Nero shows up?

No hoop jumping. No convoluted Fanon to badly connect the dots. I want an exact answer.

What constitutes the "Prime Universe"?

 

[dahj]

What constitutes the "Prime Universe"?

Everything except the Kelvin Universe.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Pike's objection to women on his bridge besides Number One is contradicted in the episode itself when other women can be seen at background stations. Hell, here's one standing right in front of him.
http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x00hd/thecagehd0275.jpg

That bridge is really, really blue themed. Should fit right in with Discovery

Well he does act like it is a new thing.

Maybe he was frozen in ice along with Steve Rogers, he just didn't get found till the 23rd century

 

[Rahul]

The better the show is, the more I'll go out of my way to think of logical solutions how it fits myself.

If the show is garbage, and doesn't fit, I'll not even pretend it takes place in the same universe.

Right now, it's right in the middle between the two.

 

[Longinus]

I may not be exactly thrilled about the changing visuals, but ultimately that is just details. The continuity still can make sense. However, introduction of a drive system (powered by mushrooms!) which is more powerful than pretty much any drive system used in Star Trek by anyone ever in a prequels is such a colossally idiotic move that I just cannot get over it.

 

[Campe]

Ah, TEH CANON!!!!1!!!!!!

 

[Tuskin38]

Ah, TEH CANON!!!!1!!!!!!

We need Comic Book Guy (from the simpsons) dresses as Spock yelling that.

 

[Christopher]

'cause they change it all back. It's difficult to understand why they would revert to what is clearly a lower technology level after making such a big leap forward, all within the span of a decade. It would be like having Apple II's in 1990, iPhone X's in 1993, and then back Performa PCs in 2000.

Because they don't. Obviously 23rd-century technology would be a lot more advanced than anything in the 1960s or the 2010s. Both shows are just the closest approximations to future tech that they can manage given the limitations of the era in which they're made. You have to look beyond the surface and see the underlying "reality" that it implies. People who watched "Catspaw" back in 1967 weren't supposed to acknowledge the strings holding up the alien puppets. They were supposed to look beyond the imperfect effect and imagine the more truly alien thing that the crude puppets were suggesting. They weren't supposed to see the wrinkled astronomical artwork in the bridge wall screens as wrinkled astronomical artwork, but to ignore the wrinkles and imagine that they were video screens showing sensor displays. That's a skill that audiences have lost as FX have become more photorealistic. Now people's imaginations have atrophied and they expect shows and movies to do 100% of the work for them.

 

[DigificWriter]

'cause they change it all back. It's difficult to understand why they would revert to what is clearly a lower technology level after making such a big leap forward, all within the span of a decade. It would be like having Apple II's in 1990, iPhone X's in 1993, and then back Performa PCs in 2000.

I once tried to come up with an explanation for a similar visual evolution/devolution as part of a crazy plan to reconcile the JJ Verse and the Prime Verse as the same universe. And, hey, it kinda worked. But it required some intense suspension of disbelief, and plenty of folks said it was a crazy idea at the time. (Essentially, I posited that Starfleet made a major technological breakthrough, implemented it throughout the fleet, but then a disastrous technical flaw revealed several years later forced them to roll everything back until the problem could be worked out in time for TMP.) Now something quite similar is canon.

This is, as always, not dispositive. Discovery could bend canon beyond the breaking point and still be a good television program. The root problem is I think it's a very bad television program. Because it is already bad, when it comes along and breaks canon, I'm not inclined to put in the mental work necessary to deal with it. And since Discovery absolutely delights in breaking canon, which breaks immersion for me as a viewer, they really are demanding a lot of mental effort from me.

That's not how it works.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

We need Comic Book Guy (from the simpsons) dresses as Spock yelling that.

 

[Christopher]

Canon has never been about small-scale details like what a uniform design or a piece of equipment looks like. Canon is the pretense of the unified reality underneath a bunch of separate made-up stories. The idea of a continuous canon has always required glossing over individual inconsistencies -- pretending that Saavik is the same person in TWOK and TSFS, pretending that Anne Mulhall and Miranda Jones are not the same person, pretending that the Enterprise in TOS doesn't sometimes revert to looking like the pilot version in stock footage, pretending that all the different makeup designs for Klingons or Andorians represent the same species, etc. Canon is the putative whole that the individual, sometimes contradictory parts all pretend to share in common, and playing along with that pretense of an overall whole has always required some willing suspension of disbelief about the inconsistent details.

 

[eschaton]

Canon has never been about small-scale details like what a uniform design or a piece of equipment looks like. Canon is the pretense of the unified reality underneath a bunch of separate made-up stories. The idea of a continuous canon has always required glossing over individual inconsistencies -- pretending that Saavik is the same person in TWOK and TSFS, pretending that Anne Mulhall and Miranda Jones are not the same person, pretending that the Enterprise in TOS doesn't sometimes revert to looking like the pilot version in stock footage, pretending that all the different makeup designs for Klingons or Andorians represent the same species, etc. Canon is the putative whole that the individual, sometimes contradictory parts all pretend to share in common, and playing along with that pretense of an overall whole has always required some willing suspension of disbelief about the inconsistent details.

As I've said in the past, I'm of the general belief that Trek is supposed to be a dramatic depiction of what happens in the Trekverse, not an actual account. Clear evidence of this can be seen with the universal translator. Even if you presume it works, it shouldn't change aliens lips to match the speech in English. Yet it does so entirely for the sake of the viewers.

When it comes to true questions of canon, the bigger question is this: would a serious fan, albeit not one with an encyclopedic knowledge of Trek lore, have their immersion in the story broken by the decision to ignore past continuity? Generally speaking, I think this only happened three times in Trek:

1. The first half of Season 1 TOS in retrospect. But this is only because they were making up "canon" as they went along, so it's forgivable. Hell, half the fun of watching TOS now is realizing the off comments which were either promptly ignored, or sparked massive later elements of Trek history.

2. ENT Season 3. The Xindi arc had its moments, but it really is hard to swallow an alien alliance burned a line into Florida, killed millions, and it was not only never discussed again, but the species were never even mentioned in Trek canon.

3. Many of DIS's big-picture choices, from the "Klingon War" to the use of the spore drive. Maybe the latter will get a better explanation later however.

 

[Captain Crow]

What constitutes the "Prime Universe"?

Everything except the Kelvin Universe.

AAAAAAAhhh! But see there are many contradictions and time travel throughout canon Star Trek. So just saying everything before Nero changed time is the "Prime Timeline/Universe" doesn't work.

So... let's work out in the most pedantical way possible what the "Prime Timeline/Universe actually is shall we.

First we'll just ignore all the inconsistencies for sanity's sake and just focus just on the temporal stuff. Logically it's the "original timeline" so that would be TOS up to The Naked Now (First time travel episode). But! The only character given the "Prime" designation was Nimoy's Spock from ST09 who's supposedly from some time after Nemesis. So that would make it everything post First Contact (last film dealing with time travel before ST09) right?WRONG!A model of the NX-01 is in Into Darkness so that makes it Enterprise post Storm Front, Part II (last episode with time travel shenanigans).

So there you have it. We now know what the "Prime Timeline/Universe" is. The last 20 episodes of Enterprise, the bit before Nero changes time in ST09, and Discovery ('cause someone on the production staff said so).

Riker Prime likes eating lots of pies and Discovery doesn't contradict 20 Enterprise episodes or the first 20 minutes or so of ST09.

 

[Jinn]

#2. ENT Season 3. The Xindi arc had its moments, but it really is hard to swallow an alien alliance burned a line into Florida, killed millions, and it was not only never discussed again, but the species were never even mentioned in Trek canon.

I really don't think that the Xindi arc is that big a deal. By the time TOS takes place we're already more than a 100 years past the actual attack and the end of the Enterprise's mission into the expanse. I can see how it wouldn't come up all the time, especially since a much longer and much more important (at least in the grand political scene of things) war went off just a few years later. The Xindi probably returned to isolation. Of course there was most likely a lot of turmoil on Earth immediately following the attack and some time after, but by the time of TOS I don't think it would be part of the current political situation the way it was in the 2150s and 60s or the Romulan War is, as the Romulans just came back.

Even if the Xindi crisis were still important in the 23rd century it should be considered that the 79 TOS episodes in the 2260s portray less than 66 hours, over the course of more than three years (late 2265 to early 2269), so we have seen less than 0.2% of the Enterprise in these entire three years. That leaves plenty of time for Kirk and Spock to sit down and talk about how awful that Xindi attack one hundred years ago was off-screen.

 

[Noname Given]

3. Many of DIS's big-picture choices, from the "Klingon War" to the use of the spore drive. Maybe the latter will get a better explanation later however.

IDK- Is that any more or less believable then an Interstellar war between Earth and the Romulan Star Empire where NEITHER side was ever in a situation where prisoners where taken/interrogated; and NEITHER side knew at all what the other looked like (until about one century later where a Federation First Officer traced a Romulan ship signal to the point he was able tpo magically 'hack' a camera (an d get a shot of the Romulan ship's Bridge?)

And a century later how often does the world still talk about the influemza pandemic of 1918? My point? After a century, such an incident wouldn't be talked about without a reason (IE a similar incident somewhere else; so Kirk and Co. never mentioning it isn't much of a stretch.

(And yes, the reason it was never mentioned is it was introduced into canon by ENT 40 years after TOS, but still )

 

[DigificWriter]

Despite 40 years of fans accepting retcons as a normal part of the franchise's storytelling model, it's both ridiculous and hypocritical that, with Star Trek Discovery, writers are suddenly expected to stick to the absolute specifics of Star Trek TOS, a narrative that was massively inconsistent in and of itself.

 

[eschaton]

IDK- Is that any more or less believable then an Interstellar war between Earth and the Romulan Star Empire where NEITHER side was ever in a situation where prisoners where taken/interrogated; and NEITHER side knew at all what the other looked like (until about one century later where a Federation First Officer traced a Romulan ship signal to the point he was able tpo magically 'hack' a camera (an d get a shot of the Romulan ship's Bridge?)

ENT's last season established pretty authoritatively the Romulans knew about humanity, it's just the inverse wasn't true. As for why a Romulan was never captured, it doesn't seem that unlikely provided the Romulans engaged in little to no ground assaults, limiting the war to just ship-to-ship combat and orbital bombardment (indeed, Balance of Terror intimates that combat was almost entirely ship-to-ship). Add in some directive for Romulan soldiers to suicide before being captured, and I would think a multi-year engagement with no captives was possible.