The Cage, Discovery, and Soft Canon

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

'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.

This seems like an overly complicated solution to something that doesn't even need to be a problem. Perhaps this is a false equivalency, but the way I see it is...if you have to believe that the technology we see in Discovery has to downgrade itself to how it is portrayed in TOS...just to make them connected, then would you also need to think of a reason as to why the universe went from 3D to 2D between TOS and TAS.

 

[XCV330]

everyone knows that when the events of the Cage occurred there was a strange event occuring in the galaxy that prevented anyone from seeing color. It soon passed however. arise canon, arise!

 

[Lord Garth]

I blame any and all visual inconsistencies on the Talosians. What we saw was an illusion.

There's our Unofficial Canon Explanation.

 

[Noname Given]

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.

Re watch TOS - "Balance of Terror". The only thing intimated was that was war was fought (by their standards 'today') with 'primitive' ships and 'primitive' weapons. It was even stated BOTH sides had 'allies'. Also, it's not much of a full on war if it's ONLY fought in space. one would think BOTH sides would be after resources and places to set up local command bases in the 'theater' where the war is occurring.

I blame any and all visual inconsistencies on the Talosians. What we saw was an illusion.

There's our Unofficial Canon Explanation.

^^^
LOL - /thread.

 

[Nerys Myk]

What constitutes the "Prime Universe"?

It's what ever the people making the show say it is. No one else gets a "vote".

 

[Kor]

It's all broad strokes. I see no reason to get all caught up in the minutiae.

Kor

 

[Christopher]

everyone knows that when the events of the Cage occurred there was a strange event occuring in the galaxy that prevented anyone from seeing color. It soon passed however. arise canon, arise!

"The Cage" was filmed in color. That's why the scenes from it in "The Menagerie" are in color, decades before the technology for digital colorization existed. In fact, the actual master film from "The Cage" was physically recut into the 2-parter, and the leftover bits were believed lost. That's why the first home-video release needed to draw the restored bits from Roddenberry's black-and-white copy, since it was the only complete one known. But a couple of years later, they found the cut parts of the original color film and were able to reconstruct the whole thing in color.

 

[XCV330]

"The Cage" was filmed in color. That's why the scenes from it in "The Menagerie" are in color, decades before the technology for digital colorization existed. In fact, the actual master film from "The Cage" was physically recut into the 2-parter, and the leftover bits were believed lost. That's why the first home-video release needed to draw the restored bits from Roddenberry's black-and-white copy, since it was the only complete one known. But a couple of years later, they found the cut parts of the original color film and were able to reconstruct the whole thing in color.

Ok I apparently needed to use some sort of "I am not serious and am just making a minor point" tag.

 

[nightwind1]

Ok I apparently needed to use some sort of "I am not serious and am just making a minor point" tag.

No, it's just Christopher...

 

[Wowbagger]

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.

Dude, go back and read your post I was replying to. You offered a handwave, then argued that a handwave isn't necessary. I don't dispute the second part -- it's a matter of personal taste, really -- but my reply was an argument that the handwave you did offer didn't make much sense.

You're now going whole-hog with "a handwave isn't necessary." That's fine, and I respect it, but that wasn't the part of your post I was replying to, and pretending that it was is not super cool.

It's perfectly coherent to say, "Visual continuity in Trek is meaningless! Just suspend your disbelief when they recast Uhura as a white lady from Queens!" It's not how I engage with works of fiction, but that's just me. But if you're going to offer an in-universe explanation for the radical visual discontinuity in Discovery, this is a Star Trek forum, so of course I'm going to tell you that the explanation you offer is a much bigger stretch than anything in Star Trek TMP, and then I'll offer a competing, more plausible, explanation.

I mean, heck, connecting dots like this in a plausible way is the raison d'etre of all your Trek books. I was rather hoping you'd eventually try to reason this discontinuity out in a future work, but it sounds like that work will not be forthcoming, which is too bad, IMO.

 

[urbandefault]

All Trek canon is "soft", subject to change at the whim of the current creators. It's always been that way, and always will be.

 

[Christopher]

Dude, go back and read your post I was replying to. You offered a handwave, then argued that a handwave isn't necessary.

Of course it isn't necessary. It's just an option that people can use if they want to. All of this is make-believe. There's no sense in being strict or rigid about it. We can make up pretend excuses to help rationalize the changes while simultaneously being fully aware that they're just excuses and don't really work. Because it is all just pretend, and pretending means containing two different interpretations in your mind at the same time. When I was a kid and I pretended my front porch was the bridge of a starship, I never ceased being aware that it was a front porch in real life, but I embraced the illusion that it was a bridge within the context of the make-believe. There's no conflict there; it's just how imagination works.

I mean, heck, connecting dots like this in a plausible way is the raison d'etre of all your Trek books. I was rather hoping you'd eventually try to reason this discontinuity out in a future work, but it sounds like that work will not be forthcoming, which is too bad, IMO.

What a silly thing to say. What I do in a professionally written work of fiction is obviously a different matter from what I say as a fan on a bulletin board. Naturally I approach the former with the goal of making everything as plausible as I can, but when I'm just speaking as myself in a real-world context, I can acknowledge that this is all just make-believe and that any handwave is an imperfect pretense at best. Again, there's what you pretend within the fantasy and what you acknowledge as real outside of it. Both can be kept in mind at the same time. Indeed, those of us who create the fantasies exist within that duality all the time.