What is the current philosopohy of canon?

[Shawnster]

In other words: conflicting canon is like conflicting religion. I believe in no religion but those who do argue that one is true and the other is either flat-out not or at best a misinterpretation.

For contradictions in real-life events: I tend to believe either the truth is somewhere in the middle or every story has at least two sides, then I see if I can maybe piece together what really happened if I put together enough sources.

In my analogy, there is no conflicting canon. Canon is what the powers that be say is real/acceptable. Everything else is apocryphal.

For there to be conflicting canon (like conflicting religions) there would need to be a second (or more) independent powers that be making their own version of Star Trek and promoting it as the true adventures of TOS/TNG/VOY/ENT/DSC.

What you are describing sounds more like conflicts in continuity.

ChallengerHK, it sounds like you are also meaning continuity, not canon. Since all the Star Wars movies are sanctioned as the legitimate story, they are all canon. The conflict within the continuty of the episodes is what you are describing.

A Canon conflict would be like if George Lucas said "forget this Disney nonsense, I'm going to make my own episodes 7-9 and they will be the real ones. What Disney produces is fake and you should ignore it." That would be conflicting canon.

We cannot have conflicting canon because of copyright laws. Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney. They own it. They are the masters.

Conflicting Canon is when there are conflicting masters.

 

[Christopher]

Nor am I asking what the producers believe is canon; they've made their opinions pretty clear.

People keep assuming it's a matter of creator opinion, but it isn't. The word "canon" is an obsession of fandom. Creators rarely need to pay any attention to it at all, because what they create is the canon, by definition, and what other people create is not. The only time the creators have to get involved in addressing the idea at all is when the relationship of a tie-in to the core canon needs to be defined or clarified (again, usually only when the creators themselves are involved in the tie-ins), or in cases where a work created to be part of canon is later retconned out of it (like the "all a dream" season of Dallas, the Ninja Turtles comics volume that was retconned out of canon, or the various Highlander, Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc. sequels that were disregarded by later sequels). But those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Let me jump universes for a moment. In Empire, Yoda says that the Force is an energy field that "surrounds us, and penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." There's some degree of depth to that, whether you believe it's true or not. The Phantom Menace went on to retcon a lot of the original trilogy, including, as some writer I once read put it, changing the Force from a mystical religion to an infectious disease.

That's a common misunderstanding. Midi-chlorians were not the source of the Force, they were symbiotic microorganisms that helped living beings connect to the Force. Indeed, they were implied to be the source of life itself, the original life forms in the universe and thus the first, purest connection between life and the Force (or, as The Clone Wars put it, between the Living Force and the Cosmic Force). The nature of the Force itself, an energy that links all life, was unchanged. We just got a little more detail about what kind of life was most sensitive to it and why some people were more in touch with it than others.

I mean, as you say, the Force was always defined as something that "penetrates us," i.e. an energy that interacts with living beings. So what's the difference between interacting with a human made of billions of cells and interacting with billions of single-celled midi-chlorians inside a human? Why is one spiritual and the other not?

Midi-chlorians were actually a pretty clever analogy with mitochondria, the symbiotic organelles that generate chemical energy as the fuel source for living cells. Hardly an "infectious disease," but an inseparable part of our cells that we depend on for our very existence, even though they're in a sense apart from us. That's actually pretty philosophically profound if you think about it, and using that as a model for an intimate human connection to an external spiritual energy on which all life depends is, in my opinion, the single most original and imaginative idea George Lucas ever came up with in a career built mostly on pastiche, homage, and nostalgia.

My point is (I think) that while these are mere entertainments of the one hand, they also have the power to comment on important concepts, to rise above their station, as it were. The Force as a means to becoming one with the Universe is heady stuff, possibly heady enough to get people questioning themselves and reality. The Force as something one can inject onself with...not so much.

There are a number of religious traditions around the world that involve taking drugs to induce mystical or ecstatic states. Heck, even Catholicism says that you can have a miracle happen inside you by eating a wafer and drinking a sip of wine. A physical component does not negate a spiritual experience. The idea that the physical and the spiritual are separate is a Western philosophical prejudice, one that isn't shared by the Eastern belief systems that inspired the ideas behind the Force and the Jedi.

Although I'd assume you can't just "inject" midi-chlorians, because you can't inject mitochondria, at least not separately from the cells they exist inside of. Your midi-chlorian count is something you're born with, an inherent property of your cells. If midi-chlorians are the original life forms in the galaxy and the font of all other life, then they'd be in every cell of every living thing everywhere.

 

[MAGolding]

I think the modern preoccupation with the word "canon" just gets in the way of discussions about continuity. Star Trek continuity has always been full of inconsistencies, long before that word became a hot topic (e.g. James R./T. Kirk, lithium/dilithium crystals, UESPA vs. Starfleet, Angela Martine/Teller, Lt. Leslie dying in "Obsession" and being fine the next week, etc.). Fans debated continuity just as much then, but they didn't care what label you used to describe it, they just talked about the thing itself.

It seems pretty easy to me to suggest simple reasonable explanations for every problem you cite.

1) There is no rule that people in different eras and places have to have a specific number of names. I myself have relatives with as many as two and three middle names born as long as 200 years ago. It would be very easy for Kirk to have several middle names and select "James R. Kirk" as the official version of his name when entering Starfleet, and change it to "James T. Kirk" to avoid being reminded of the tombstone made by his friend Gary.

2) The crystals can hardly be pure lithium, unless there is some special phase of lithium with strange powers I never heard of. Therefore they are probably a compound, which probably has a complex chemical name something like Chlorohydropolysylabicdilithiumpolybathroomflourinethiazide, and Starfleet personnel called them "lithium" crystals for short until during the first season Starfleet ordered all personnel to either use the full chemical name or else "dilithium", the short term used by other Federation agencies, to avoid confusion with the element lithium.

3) You can imagine that in a feudal land a knight might owe military service to his count, and the count might owe military service with his knights to his duke, and the duke might owe military service wit his counts and knights to the king. In the modern USA the national guard units are under the authority of both their states and the federal government. In the 1960s many US astronauts were officers in the US military on leave to serve in the civilian agency NASA. So I see no problem with the Enterprise crew being part of both UESPA and Starfleet.

4) In my opinion almost every single episodes of a long running adventure series has to happen in an alternate universe of its own, separate from the alternate universe of other episodes, in order for the protagonists to have any change of surviving. So possibly Angela uses different surnames in different episodes in different alternate universes. For example, she might have been divorced by the first season, and decided to continue using her husband's surname in some alternate universes and decided to resume using her birth surname in others. Or she might be of Hispanic culture and have the right to use two or more surnames and chose one surname for her official Starfleet name in one alternate universe and another surname in others.

5) If it would be statistically impossible for the heroes to survive all the dangers they face in all the episodes put together, then almost every episode should be in an alternate universe of its own, separate from the alternate universes of the other episodes, in order for the heroes to survive the series. So Mr. Leslie may have been killed in the alternate universe "Obsession" is in but not in the alternate universes of some other and later episodes.

The idea that the animated series is non-canonical was always a myth. Roddenberry and Richard Arnold put out a memo in 1989 declaring as much, but they had no actual authority over TNG itself at the time, as proven by the fact that it wasn't long after that "Unification" alluded to "Yesteryear." And there were a number of TAS references in later shows, like DS9 referring to the Klothos as Kor's ship. The only actual influence the memo ever had (over anything besides fan opinions) was in prohibiting the tie-in novels and comics from using TAS elements, because Arnold had approval power over the tie-ins at the time. It was never actually binding on the shows themselves.

I suspect that Roddenberry's attempt to decanonize TAS was merely part of his attempt to discredit D.C. Fontana's contributions to Star Trek as part of his ongoing battle to deny her the TNG co-creator credit she rightfully deserved. The irony is, TAS was the one Star Trek series that Roddenberry was given total, unfettered creative control over, yet he chose to entrust it to Fontana instead. So for him to turn around and say that it wasn't "real" Star Trek because he didn't personally make it was staggeringly hypocritical and petty.

I am in favor of considering all the good stuff in TAS canonical, and including all the bad stuff in TAS as canonical doesn't scare me, since there is already a lot of bad stuff from live action movies and TV in canon anyway.

Shawnster said:

Contradictory information does not have anything to do with canon. Canon will contain contradictions. James R. Kirk or James T? Lithium or dilithium? Remus or Romii?

And I say those are no not examples of contradictory canon, they are examples of contradictory statements made in canon.

James R. Kirk or James T? See my point 1) above. It is possible that neither is totally correct because both are shortened forms of Kirk's full name.

Lithium or dilithium? Both and neither, according to my point 2) above, because they are probably both very much shortened forms of the complex chemical name of the crystals.

Remus or Romii? Actually there are three choices, Remus, Romii, and RomII, since it is hard to be sure of what is written on the "Balance of Terror" map.

One possible explanation is that Romulus and RomII on the map are two different stars, and the planets Romulus and Remus are not shown on the map but both revolve around the star Romulus as stated in Star Trek: Nemesis. Why the planet and the star would both be named Romulus is unknown, but that is certainly possible.

 

[Christopher]

It seems pretty easy to me to suggest simple reasonable explanations for every problem you cite.

Of course, but that's beside the point. The point is that any long-running fictional continuity is bound to have inconsistencies. The fact that many of them can be explained away afterward merely underlines the fact that they exist. Indeed, long-running continuities sometimes generate stories that are about explaining away past contradictions, like Marvel writers explaining Doctor Doom acting out of character by revealing that he was actually a Doombot at the time, or Enterprise doing a story to explain why TOS Klingons look different from later Klingons. It's just the nature of a series that it will continue to generate such inconsistencies that need explaining for as long as it exists.

I am in favor of considering all the good stuff in TAS canonical, and including all the bad stuff in TAS as canonical doesn't scare me, since there is already a lot of bad stuff from live action movies and TV in canon anyway.

Yes, and there are some parts of live-action canon that have been implicitly removed from continuity and are freely contradicted by later stories -- "The Alternative Factor"'s portrayal of antimatter, ST V's portrayal of the quick travel time to the galactic center, "The Host"'s version of the Trill, "Threshold"'s version of transwarp. Canon and continuity are two different, if somewhat related, concepts.

 

[Mojochi]

They're not even trying so why should we?

Always this. I may hold to some things within one show's own continuity, because, they could at least be bothered to make sense of their own individual thing, but outside of that, I'd rather try to make a cohesive story out of a vat of alphabet soup than try to reconcile over 500 of hours of production, on 7 different tv shows & 13 movies. So mostly, if it's shown on screen, then you have to accept it, even if it's nonsense

 

[Lord Garth]

Shawnster, everything you say makes sense. Then there's this one thing you mentioned...

For there to be conflicting canon (like conflicting religions) there would need to be a second (or more) independent powers that be making their own version of Star Trek and promoting it as the true adventures of TOS/TNG/VOY/ENT/DSC.

Hmmmmm... no, I'm not going to go there. I'm not going to do it. I don't want one of the mods breaking out the jar.

 

[F. King Daniel]

First, thanks for the thoughtful replies.

Based on some of those replies, I'm not making myself clear in the original post. I'm not asking what canon is; I understand it in both the religious and secular senses. Nor am I asking what the producers believe is canon; they've made their opinions pretty clear.

For those who brought in religion, there were some good comments. The one thing I think I disagree with is that "it's just a tv show" thought, although obviously, it is a tv show.

Let me jump universes for a moment. In Empire, Yoda says that the Force is an energy field that "surrounds us, and penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." There's some degree of depth to that, whether you believe it's true or not. The Phantom Menace went on to retcon a lot of the original trilogy, including, as some writer I once read put it, changing the Force from a mystical religion to an infectious disease. My point is (I think) that while these are mere entertainments of the one hand, they also have the power to comment on important concepts, to rise above their station, as it were. The Force as a means to becoming one with the Universe is heady stuff, possibly heady enough to get people questioning themselves and reality. The Force as something one can inject onself with...not so much.

I think Star Trek falls into this category, for different reasons, and I think that's one reason to pursue a canon/continuity. (There is also, as someone upstream pointed out, the shear fun of it) Let me know what you think.

I used to love the idea from TOS that a starship was a very special posting, that there were only 12 of them in the fleet (Diane Carey's novel Final Frontier goes into detail about how this might have been). Since ENT and now with DSC, we see there really isn't anything special about the classic Enterprise, Starfleet have been making ships with the same abilities for a hundred years.

Star Wars made The Force less special and Trek did the same to the Starship Enterprise.

 

[alensatemybuick1]

I never expected to enjoy a thread about canon, but thanks to Shawnster and Christopher, I have really enjoyed (parts of) this one. I am embarrassed to say that I have nothing more to add to the discussion, other than to offer kudos to you both for your eloquence and the thoughts you've provoked.

 

[Shawnster]

It seems pretty easy to me to suggest simple reasonable explanations for every problem you cite.

EXACTLY! This is an example of how to resolve (apparent) continuity errors or contradictions within the same canon.

Was the garment red or purple? It depends on your point of view. What you call red I might call purple. A color blind person might think it's gray when it's really pink.

Just remember canon can be like cannon. 2 authorities shooting at each other in conflict. Since there is only one authority making Star Trek, there are no canon violations or conflicts. Canon violations by definition, require more than one recognized authority.


Everything the fans argue over here are continuity errors. The fun has always been in rationalizing these continuity errors.

 

[ChallengerHK]

I can get behind these ideas:

1. Canon is anything depicted onscreen (this includes visuals and sound).
2. Due to several factors, canon may or may not contradict itself.
3. Continuity is the degree to which canon "hangs together" .

I was thinking about an interesting concept as I was going to sleep last night that ties in with all of this, and I saw a post on the same topic on Facebook this morning. So let me get thoughts on this:

• Are Star Trek Continues and Star Trek New Voyages canon? They are made by producers, who happen to be (in a legal sense) unofficial producers. On the other hand, they've arguable done a better job of creating Trek than anyone in the last 30 years. (I believe this is because they are creating a labor of love, with an artificially long development period.) They also, again arguably, do a better job of fitting material into continuity than anyone in the last 30 years.
• If they are canon, then what makes other, similar but "lesser quality" series (in whatever way we wish to interpret that phrase) non-canon. Or are all productions canon?
• Finally, if fan productions are canon, are novels and fanzines canon? They're not onscreen, but theyy're telling stories which are ostensibly in the same continuity?

 

[F. King Daniel]

I can get behind these ideas:

1. Canon is anything depicted onscreen (this includes visuals and sound).
2. Due to several factors, canon may or may not contradict itself.
3. Continuity is the degree to which canon "hangs together" .

I was thinking about an interesting concept as I was going to sleep last night that ties in with all of this, and I saw a post on the same topic on Facebook this morning. So let me get thoughts on this:

• Are Star Trek Continues and Star Trek New Voyages canon? They are made by producers, who happen to be (in a legal sense) unofficial producers. On the other hand, they've arguable done a better job of creating Trek than anyone in the last 30 years. (I believe this is because they are creating a labor of love, with an artificially long development period.) They also, again arguably, do a better job of fitting material into continuity than anyone in the last 30 years.
• If they are canon, then what makes other, similar but "lesser quality" series (in whatever way we wish to interpret that phrase) non-canon. Or are all productions canon?
• Finally, in fan productions are canon, are novels and fanzines canon? They're not onscreen, but theyy're telling stories which are ostensibly in the same continuity?

I don't believe that anything not made by (or with permission of) the legal owners of a property can ever be canon to that property, regardless of quality.

 

[SPCTRE]

 

[Doom Shepherd]

See my sig line.

 

[Christopher]

I used to love the idea from TOS that a starship was a very special posting, that there were only 12 of them in the fleet (Diane Carey's novel Final Frontier goes into detail about how this might have been). Since ENT and now with DSC, we see there really isn't anything special about the classic Enterprise, Starfleet have been making ships with the same abilities for a hundred years.

I'm not sure what you mean by "abilities" here. If you mean technologies, it doesn't make much sense to me to expect a naval fleet to limit the deployment of a useful technology to a single class of ship. If you mean the types of mission profiles it's capable of, I think we've seen that Discovery does indeed have different abilities/specializations than the Constitution class. It's specifically a reseach vessel, designed for conducting scientific experiments and as a testbed for new propulsion technology, while the Connies are more general-purpose vessels designed for long-range space exploration and long-term patrol missions, as well as colony support, diplomacy, etc. The Connies are frontier vessels, probing space far beyond the Federation's borders and protecting those who travel and settle the frontier. That's what makes them special and important. Discovery so far has been set much closer to home, mostly within Federation territory or on its fringes.

As for ENT, the NX-class ships were deep-space explorers, but that was it. They weren't designed with the same kind of military and diplomatic objectives in mind, though NX-01 ended up fulfilling a lot of those functions out of necessity.

Star Wars made The Force less special

I think The Last Jedi and recent Rebels episodes have added whole new layers of specialness and spiritual weight to the Force.

Besides, isn't the whole point of the Force that it isn't some special elite thing? It's an energy that pervades all living things equally.

I can get behind these ideas:

1. Canon is anything depicted onscreen (this includes visuals and sound).
2. Due to several factors, canon may or may not contradict itself.
3. Continuity is the degree to which canon "hangs together" .

I disagree with point 1. As I've said, it isn't the medium that makes something canonical, it's whether it's the original work or something derived from it. The canon is the source of the fictional franchise, the original from which the ideas spring. Apocrypha are the reflections of that source, the imitations and homages made by others. A canon can exist in both screen and print works if the original creators produce and manage both. In the case of Star Trek, though, they don't.

Also, canon is about the aggregate, not the details. People often mistake the "canon is what's onscreen" shorthand for a statement that every single image or detail is "fact." That's not true, because there are plenty of details that are in-jokes or errors or contradictions. The canon is the overall whole that presents itself as a consistent reality, even though it has inconsistencies on a granular scale. Canon is not a case-by-case seal of approval for individual details, just a nickname for the overall whole. Like I keep saying, fans are far too obsessed by a word that has a very limited and largely unimportant meaning.

I was thinking about an interesting concept as I was going to sleep last night that ties in with all of this, and I saw a post on the same topic on Facebook this morning. So let me get thoughts on this:

• Are Star Trek Continues and Star Trek New Voyages canon? They are made by producers, who happen to be (in a legal sense) unofficial producers. On the other hand, they've arguable done a better job of creating Trek than anyone in the last 30 years. (I believe this is because they are creating a labor of love, with an artificially long development period.) They also, again arguably, do a better job of fitting material into continuity than anyone in the last 30 years.
• If they are canon, then what makes other, similar but "lesser quality" series (in whatever way we wish to interpret that phrase) non-canon. Or are all productions canon?
• Finally, in fan productions are canon, are novels and fanzines canon? They're not onscreen, but theyy're telling stories which are ostensibly in the same continuity?

Those are all the very things that the word "canon" exists to exclude. Canon is the original work, the stuff from the original creators or their direct, official inheritors. Apocrypha are derivative works made by other people based on someone else's concepts. It has nothing to do with quality or consistency. It has nothing to do with how good you think something is. It's not a value judgment of any kind. It's just a label for describing the difference between the original creation and its imitations or adaptations.

Let's use my written fiction as an example. I've written a bunch of Star Trek novels and stories and a couple of Marvel Comics novels under license from Pocket Books. I've also written original fiction in two ongoing universes of my own creation -- the so-called Only Superhuman universe (including the novel of that title and nearly all the stories in my upcoming collection Among the Wild Cybers) and the Hub universe (including the stories collected in Hub Space: Tales from the Greater Galaxy). In the case of Star Trek, what the shows' and films' own writers and producers create is the canon, and what I write is apocrypha, because I'm just hired to write an outside imitation of what they create. In the case of the OS and Hub universes, though, what I write is the canon, and what other people might do based on my creation (which so far is just the audiobook adaptation of Only Superhuman, unless there's some Troubleshooter fanfic out there I don't know about) is not. What I write is canonical if it's my creation, non-canonical if it's a derivative of someone else's creation.

 

[ChallengerHK]

Let me see if you'd agree with this. I think you will.

Dodge made first generation Challengers from 1970 to 1974. Starting in 2009, they started making a visually similar Challenger on an entirely new platform. Both of these would be "canon" Challengers. On the other hand, a company named Dynacorn is making 70-74 Challenger bodies, which are in almost all ways identical to the original Challengers. Because they are not made by Dodge, however, they are not canon Challengers.

 

[Nyotarules]

he word "canon" is an obsession of fandom.

This needs to be repeated often in large flashing neon lights

 

[Valenti]

Everybody has the force? Not just Jedi?

 

[1001001]

Everybody has the force? Not just Jedi?

I'm guessing you're either joking, or haven't seen The Last Jedi?

 

[Christopher]

Let me see if you'd agree with this. I think you will.

Dodge made first generation Challengers from 1970 to 1974. Starting in 2009, they started making a visually similar Challenger on an entirely new platform. Both of these would be "canon" Challengers. On the other hand, a company named Dynacorn is making 70-74 Challenger bodies, which are in almost all ways identical to the original Challengers. Because they are not made by Dodge, however, they are not canon Challengers.

I guess that works as an analogy. But I certainly hope that car aficionados are free of sci-fi fandom's unhealthy fixation on a single word.

Everybody has the force? Not just Jedi?

The Force isn't something people "have." Obi-Wan and Yoda explained this to Luke in the first two movies. It's an energy that pervades everything in the universe, that connects everything to everything else. Only some people are able to attune themselves to it and harness it to manipulate people and things, but that's not "having" the Force, it's just being aware of it, feeling the connection it gives you to other things, giving into it and letting it guide you. You can't be a Jedi if you think of the Force as a possession to control. Jedi philosophy (which is based on Buddhist philosophy, largely) is about letting go of control and possessiveness and ego.

Basically the Force is the equivalent of a non-personified deity, a divine essence that pervades and guides the universe, like the Brahman principle in Hinduism or Tian in Chinese religion (a term that's translated as "Heaven" but that more properly refers to a sort of intrinsic force of justice in the universe that ensures success for the righteous and defeat for the unrighteous, at least in the long term).

Besides, the Force has been part of the universe since the beginning, since before life evolved. The Jedi philosophy is just one of many that have developed to understand and connect with the Force. We've seen other Force users in canon, notably the Sith and the Nightsisters.

 

[ChallengerHK]

I guess that works as an analogy. But I certainly hope that car aficionados are free of sci-fi fandom's unhealthy fixation on a single word.

It was intended as an analogy. But some of the same issues exist. Car people, for instance, will have a huge difference between an original Hemi Challenger and what's called a "clone" Hemi Challenger, a Challenger which started life with a lesser motor but had a Hemi installed later. The first has a great deal more value, roughly analagous to its canon status. The latter is valued much less. As I've said many times, in many situations, human nature is to divide just about anything into "us" and "them", and the car world is not different.

One more question, Christopher. This can be construed as an insult, and I assure you that it's not meant to be. On the other hand, it does require you to be introspective. To what extent does your status as, for want of a better term, an indirect employee of the producers, inform your opinion? For example, do you think that Trek producers would potentially retaliate if you were to say that an unofficial product had canon status, preventing you from further work?