Emh said:
But I believe Trent's point is that some people think that someday there might be a director's cut that does include that scene. Now, you and I don't expect Stuart Baird to do something like that, but Joe Average may.
Then they'd be wrong. Stuart Baird has stated clearly on numerous occasions that he doesn't believe in "directors' cuts" and has no intention of ever creating one. He's satisfied with the film as it exists; it is
already the director's preferred cut.
Just because a number of people may think something doesn't make it any less wrong. The more people who hold a misapprehension, the more important it is to clarify the reality.
Therin of Andor said:
We haven't really seen too many (any?) examples yet. I'd guess a new novel mentioning Vejur's cloud would now have to specify 2 AUs in diameter (TMP DVD-DE), not 82 AUs (theatrical and TV editions).
I did so in
Ex Machina, but not because I "had to" -- simply because I believed the 2 AU figure made much more sense in terms of the
Enterprise's travel time through the cloud. There were no dictates from the licensing office about which version to follow.
Paula still uses the old Roddenberry/Arnold "ST Office" memo about canon as a guide to what's canonical, and what's not, but its authors actually anticipated the existence of several future examples... The memo never mentioned restored scenes. Even the restored scenes of "The Cage" don't alter canon, except maaaaaybe for how Pike leaves Vina the first time (ie. the Talosians giving her an illusion of Pike for company in a scene that repeats itself exactly, years later, but with the real one).
But the memo stopped being a hard and fast rule from the day after Roddenberry died, and Richard Arnold was no longer vetting the proposals and finished manuscripts of the tie-ins on GR's behalf.
Keep in mind that canon itself has many internal contradictions, things that get changed over time. Lithium crystals became dilithium. UESPA became Starfleet. The depiction of antimatter in "The Alternative Factor" was ignored everywhere thereafter. Ferengi lost their weird body language after their first appearance. "The Battle"'s assertion that headaches had ceased to exist was wisely ignored in later shows. Data used contractions routinely in the early first season and wasn't defined as emotionless until the third season. Trills were redesigned and lost their inability to use transporters. "Threshold" has been renounced by its own writer as non-canonical. And so on.
"Canon" never means an absolutely consistent continuity -- it just means the core body of stories that's meant to be treated
as though it's a common, consistent history even when it isn't. And generally the rule is that the more recent of two contradictory assertions is to be treated as the "true" version -- the revised draft of history, as it were -- while the earlier assertion is swept under the rug. Data did use contractions all the time in early TNG, but we novelists are obligated to pretend he did not -- or at least to avoid explicitly asserting that he did.
Of course, contrary to fan mythology, this is not a matter of strict, systematic rules printed down somewhere, but more a matter of art and creative judgment. Actual written definitions of canon like the Arnold letter are quite rare; more commonly it's just an "I know it when I see it" sort of thing. But it is a convention, if not a formal law, to go with the later, revised interpretation of things where there's a conflict. So that would suggest that if there are two different cuts of a movie, the newer version is preferred.
Well, maybe. The catch is, most of those reinterpretations didn't just come later, but were referred to more often. There are bound to be cases where the reverse is true: where one thing was asserted in multiple episodes, and then a contradictory thing was asserted once, later on. For instance, Deanna saying in INS that she'd never kissed a bearded Riker, when that actually happened at least 4 or 5 times in TNG. Which version do you go with?
So if there's just one example versus one example, the original vs. the director's cut, it might not be so easy to decide which is preferable. Generally it's the one that has the most influence on the canon as a whole; a lot more episodes have depended on Data's lack of emotion or Dax's ability to use transporters safely than on the earlier assertions. But something like, say, Colonel West's role in the ST VI conspiracy has had no bearing on other canon.
Of course, all this is beside the point of this thread, because, again, all indications are that the cut of NEM that exists now is already the director's preferred version. Personally I wish Baird would change his mind and put the Picard/Data philosophical discussion back in the film while cutting out the entire dune buggy chase. But even if he did decide to make a director's cut, I can't see any reason why he would choose to restore that horrible Madden scene. It just plain didn't work, not as a scene in and of itself and especially not as the ending of the film. So
expecting the Madden scene to be restored to the film "someday" is irrational on a number of levels. Just because a scene was filmed doesn't make it obligatory to use it. That's why films are edited in the first place.
