What is the current philosopohy of canon?
- Thread starter ChallengerHK
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^^It has been too long since something made me laugh so hard I got tears. But that did it!
It always strikes me how arbitrary that year was. Apparently the writers picked a year ending in "64" because the first Star Trek pilot was made in 1964. And the year "2364" only ended up in the finished episode because the 1988 Writers Strike had started and they had to shoot what they had in the current draft. I wonder if "The Neutral Zone" had been rewritten more, would that line have made it to the finished episode? How how different might a Trek Chronology look if it hadn't?
McCoy's age in "Encounter at Farpoint" is one of the major data points for most people doing a ST chronology. And yet people have no problem discounting Data saying that he was "Starfleet Class of '78" in the very same episode.
I know that that year was based on the Starfleet Chronology timeline, but it's funny that people treat Data's line about McCoy's age from the episode as Gospel while totally discounting his other line about when he graduated Starfleet Academy.
Yes, it's true that comics have had a lot of reboots and retcons. (In fact the term "retcon" originated in comics in a letter column in All-Star Squadron. It's short for "retroactive continuity.")
There have been lots of sweeping continuity changes in comics over the decades, but from my perspective they've really accelerated since 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths gave DC Comics license to rewrite much of their fictional history, starting with Superman in 1986's Man of Steel. Now most characters get relaunches or reboots at least once a decade. It's gotten pretty nuts.
...You think that there's acceptance of continuity changes in comics?
Oh man, comics fans are broken into so many different fiefdoms it's nuts. Some DC fans don't acknowledge anything after Crisis. Some don't like all the changes that were made in the wake of 1994's Zero Hour. Some don't support anything after 2011's New 52 reboot. Right now DC's doing another reboot called Rebirth. Everybody has their own favorite version (usually dependent upon when they first started reading) and thinks the other versions are wrong. And that's just at one company.
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I'm not sure it was that arbitrary. All the publicity for TNG stated that it was specifically 78 years since the time of the original crew (without specifying at what point in their history that was supposed to be); 2364 was exactly 78 years after 2286; and 2286 was exactly 300 years after the release date of the recently in theaters latest Trek film featuring the original crew. I think that all lines up too neatly for it to have been a purely arbitrary choice; though given the chance to rewrite, they might have jiggled the number one way or another a bit so that the timeframe for TOS wasn't so on-the-nose.
That would be a good example of something that, strictly speaking, happened in canon being overwritten in continuity.
To touch upon a couple of other points of the conversation in general...it strikes me that a good example of something that was, strictly speaking, "canon" at the time it was made later being widely disregarded would be Galactica 1980.
Also, this whole conversation has been bringing to mind that text page that John Byrne wrote in the first issue of Superman/Batman: Generations, about the difference between continuity and history. History is a potential third element of interest in this conversation, distinct from canon and continuity. History is whatever product was actually put out in the franchise, regardless of whether it remains in continuity or in canon...the actual Star Trek episodes and movies that were released, exactly as they were; the actual comics that were published, even if they're several generations of retconning in the past; etc. I tried to Google up an electronic copy of the text page but wasn't successful.
Some of the early publicity I remember for TNG said that it had been 87 years since Kirk and company. And it was never entirely clear if they were counting 87/78 years from TOS or from the movies. So there was certainly some wiggle room. (Yes, I know that GEN had the title card reading "78 years later." I'm talking about when TNG was first starting in 1987.)
And of course they never specify what year it was in TVH at either end of the time travel. The posters said they crew was travelling to the year 1986, but the movie never did. And all Kirk told Gillian during the restaurant scene was that he was from "on what your calendar would be the late 23rd century."
So I'm still in the "arbitrary" camp. The one thing I'm convinced about is that they set TNG several decades after TOS at least partially so that people wouldn't be constantly clamoring to have the original crew guest star on the new show. It's pretty much the same reason they decided to set Frasier in Seattle instead of Boston after Cheers ended. And of course, that gave the creators more freedom to do things like introduce new alien races or show the old ones in new contexts, like the way the Klingons were now allies of Federation.
Well, except that there was no further onscreen material in that continuity after that, so that's just a matter of fans not liking the story rather than something actually being decanonized by later productions.
Also, Galactica 1980 contradicted the original Galactica in a number of details in order to justify its premise. The original show implied that it was set in Earth's future, with the planet "Terra" in the later episodes appearing to be an Earth colony (given that its inhabitants used Earthly names and measurement units). And the season finale had Galactica picking up broadcasts from the first Moon landing, so it had to be set well after 1969, but Galactica 1980 was supposedly set 30 years after BSG, which would put BSG in 1950. (Also, they used "years" now instead of "yahrens.") Plus, "The Return of Starbuck" retconned Adama as thinking of Starbuck like a son, which never seemed to be the case in the original series (and is unlikely given that Starbuck two-timed Adama's daughter with, and dumped her for, a hooker-turned-nurse). So the two shows never really fit together in continuity anyway; the sequel series just pretended it fit and changed the details to suit its own needs. Which is how a lot of sequels, revivals, etc. have always done things.
Thanks to all those who answered my comic questions. What I was searching for was a way to explain what I have noticed in fandom, which appears to have been a change in behavior. I got into fandom in the very earlu 70s. When I read The Making iof Star Trek, it was very clear that the producers put a lot of emphasis on continuity, and the fans that I met, through at least the early 80s, did as well.
Starting sometime in the 90s I started to notice a shift, with many fans saying that it was irrelevant. What I was testing with my comic questions was if that was an attitude that ported over from comic fandom. Sounds like there's no enough evidence to go with that hypothesis.
So, at this point I have to say that I either ran with an exceptionally focused group of fans, or, for some reason, prevailing fandom attitudes changed, for reason or reasons unknown.
Maybe fans responded to increasing continuity errors by throwing their hands up and saying screw it?
Starting sometime in the 90s I started to notice a shift, with many fans saying that it was irrelevant. What I was testing with my comic questions was if that was an attitude that ported over from comic fandom. Sounds like there's no enough evidence to go with that hypothesis.
So, at this point I have to say that I either ran with an exceptionally focused group of fans, or, for some reason, prevailing fandom attitudes changed, for reason or reasons unknown.
Maybe fans responded to increasing continuity errors by throwing their hands up and saying screw it?
That would have been my attitude toward increasing retcons in comics. It got hard to invest in whatever was passing for the current continuity when you knew they were just going to rewrite it all at a whim.
I think a big part of it is that the creators have stopped trying to maintain continuity like they used to. There were always contradictions between episodes and series', but it wasn't too hard to suspend disbelief and pretend it all fitted together.
Then in 2001, Enterprise quite deliberately rewrote the past of TOS, the Kelvin movies from 2009 onward used time travel as an excuse to reboot the movie timeline with a new look and free themselves of established character fates, and now 2017's Discovery has borrowed some visuals from the Kelvin films, changed a whole bunch of other stuff besides but the creators insist it's part of the same world as the original series. The scale of differences have grown exponentially with each new generation of TV/film Trek.
Some Discovery fans have invented the term "visual reboot" to try and explain how the stories still fit (spoiler: They don't) even if everything looks completely different to how it did in every prior Star Trek. If they do another Star Trek Encyclopedia, they're going to have to differentiate Discovery's version of Capatin Pike's Enterprise with the one seen in "The Cage" because they look noticeably different. Ditto the Klingon D7 battlecruiser, which looks vastly more different.
Pike's Enterprise, TOS version
Pike's Enterprise, DSC version
So I ask again, why should we pretend everything fits perfectly together when the people making the show aren't trying?
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Probably to an extent. Prior to TNG with its specific time setting I think there was less concern for it, more acknowledgment and even emphasis that the original series had its inconsistencies and that was OK, more inconsistencies were also OK and probably inevitable/necessary with an ongoing entertainment. Then in the spinoff/'90s era there was more attempt by Paramount and some consensus within the fans that it was one pretty-consistent fictional universe/timeline, having consistency among them was nice and even to be expected. Then since '90 there were films directly in their own timeline (in part on the basis that having to try to be consistent with too much was too stifling) and with the next spinoff, though in the old timeline, I think fans are more critiquing the importance of consistency, emphasizing that other factors are more important and the attempt at consistency was never fully successful, maybe not even seriously tried.
It's probably taking things too far to say that viewpoint is the consensus, some argue that the inconsistencies between the series aren't so severe, but it is a lot more prevalent than it was pre-'09.
TOS was made in an era when continuity was not really a priority. They didn't have home video or the Internet, didn't even have as many reruns as there were later on, so if you missed an episode, you might not ever get to see it, not for a long while, at least. And it was harder to experience a show as a unified whole without the heavy reruns and box sets and guide books and wikis that we have today. So shows were experienced more on an episode-by-episode basis. Also, the classiest early TV shows were anthologies, so even ongoing shows tried to emulate an anthology flavor and make each episode stand completely alone. Often, continuity between episodes was all but nonexistent. Events in one episode would never be mentioned again and would have no lasting impact. So the fact that Star Trek even had as much continuity as it had -- for instance, having Kirk in "By Any Other Name" refer to Spock's telepathic escape trick from "A Taste of Armageddon" and the galactic barrier from the second pilot -- was impressive by the standards of the time.
So it's not really comparable to the modern approach to continuity, where we've come to experience TV shows more in terms of the overall whole than the individual parts, and where our access to online references and episode recordings gives us a level of intimate, meticulous knowledge of continuity details that past generations of viewers would've had to be absolute obsessives in order to accumulate. It's a totally different phenomenon now, and modern audiences hold shows to far tighter standards of self-consistency.
It's really the other way around, as I said. Continuity was pretty optional in past shows, because the audience was less aware of exact details from older episodes. Heck, lots of early radio and TV shows, in the days before such things were commonly preserved and they were seen to be ephemeral, didn't bother with long-term continuity at all, because they expected their audience to come and go over time, or just to remember the broad strokes of the characters and the premise rather than the exacting details of past episodes. Sometimes long-running shows would even remake their own older episodes on the assumption that nobody in their current audience would remember them at all.
The thing to remember is, there is never any single thing that "the fans" believe. Fans disagree with each other about everything. If you heard some fans saying they didn't consider continuity essential, they were probably reacting against other fans who insisted it was all-important.
With something like Star Trek has been made in different, disconnected time periods, what constitutes the original body of work vs. a tie-in can be unclear.
Isn't something's canon status therefore debateable when there have been multiple creators and/or the creators are different than the owners?
I disagree with this. As I said, TMoST makes it very clear that it was a priority. That's not to say that they were always perfect, but they very clearly cared about it a great deal, and went above and beyond to make it fit. And, having been there and interacted with them, at least the fans that I knew cared about it as well. We recognized background characters who were in different episodes, and foreground characters like Riley who were reused. We recognized the later season callbacks to like the Cochrane Deceleration. So, it definitely was an issue for producers and for fans.
That's part of the frustration from TNG on. TOS paid Kellam Deforest to research science issues and make them as scientifically plausible as they could. I'll bet there's a couple of dozen people here alone who would have performed the same function for continuity for later productions, and would have done it for free, myself included. It's kind of like watching an alcoholic friend; you know you could help him, but he has to take the first step, and he has to want help. So many people could have helped post TOS/TAS Trek, but they didn't want the help, so they floundered from a continuity persepctive.
Shatner was just discussing how a company has developed the means to use his performance to recreate his younger self. I'd love to see him coming out of a shower, with Janice Rand in his bed saying "It was all a dream."
Well technically, these aren't even the same ship.I think a big part of it is that the creators have stopped trying to maintain continuity like they used to. There were always contradictions between episodes and series', but it wasn't too hard to suspend disbelief and pretend it all fitted together.
Then in 2001, Enterprise quite deliberately rewrote the past of TOS, the Kelvin movies from 2009 onward used time travel as an excuse to reboot the movie timeline with a new look and free themselves of established character fates, and now 2017's Discovery has borrowed some visuals from the Kelvin films, changed a whole bunch of other stuff besides but the creators insist it's part of the same world as the original series. The scale of differences have grown exponentially with each new generation of TV/film Trek.
Some Discovery fans have invented the term "visual reboot" to try and explain how the stories still fit (spoiler: They don't) even if everything looks completely different to how it did in every prior Star Trek. If they do another Star Trek Encyclopedia, they're going to have to differentiate Discovery's version of Capatin Pike's Enterprise with the one seen in "The Cage" because they look noticeably different. Ditto the Klingon D7 battlecruiser, which looks vastly more different.
Pike's Enterprise, TOS version
Pike's Enterprise, DSC version
So I ask again, why should we pretend everything fits perfectly together when the people making the show aren't trying?
I think it's fun to decide what is "canon" and what isn't just by what is good.
No, because the owners hire the creators. Obviously this is copyrighted intellectual property, so only the owners of the copyright in a series have the legal right to produce new content in that series. In the case of something with one author, the author owns the copyright, by default. I own the copyright in my original fictional universes, so if anybody else tried to sell stories in one of those universes without my permission, that would be plagiarism. (Writing it as fanfiction would be another matter; that's tolerated so long as no attempt is made to profit or compete with the owner.) But in the case of a television series, it's the studio that owns the copyright, because the creators were working for/with them. So they retain ownership after the original creators leave. And it's the successors who are hired by the owners who are the only ones with the legal right to continue telling that story. It's that continuity of ownership that provides continuity of authorship.
Really, this shouldn't be hard. It's easy to understand the difference between a work produced by the franchise owner itself and a work that the owner licenses out to another company. CBS makes Star Trek TV shows. CBS licenses Pocket Books to do Trek novels, IDW to do Trek comics, Modiphius to do Trek tabletop RPGs, etc. The difference is between the company itself and the other companies it hires to work on its behalf, and that shouldn't be hard to grasp.
Again: Yes, by the standards of the 1960s, TOS had surprisingly good continuity. But those standards were immensely different from today's standards of continuity. By 1960s standards, even acknowledging that past episodes had happened at all was an unusual degree of continuity. Most shows did not care about continuity at all, because audiences experienced television very differently than we do today, and the priority was to make each individual episode a complete experience within itself. Continuity between episodes was a bonus on top of that, and as 1960s shows went, TOS was above the curve in its regard for continuity. But the curve then was very, very different from the curve now, so it's a mistake to equate them. (In much the same way that TOS was feminist by the standards of the time, yet agonizingly sexist by today's standards. Or in the same way that its visual effects were groundbreakingly spectacular by the standards of the time, yet cheap and crude by today's standards.)
Of course the later shows had continuity advisors and technical advisors. There are people whose whole job is to keep track of such things. But the producers are not required to listen to them. These are stories. They're meant for entertainment. Continuity is not some absolute mandate that storytellers are required to follow; it's one tool in the creative kit. You use it if it serves the entertainment value of a story, or you disregard it if it makes the story better to do so. Ditto for scientific accuracy. The story always comes first. And it's damned insulting when people like you who don't understand that assume that it's the storytellers who are the ignorant ones. It's easy to be armchair quarterback and condemn how other people do their jobs when you have no clue how their jobs are actually done.
OK, sure that's clear (although less so is the case of was TAS made by Paramount or just licensed by Paramount but made by Filmation). But canon, especially given its tendency and somewhat expectation to be associated with there being continuity between works, seems a less clear or useful term when different, contradictory versions of events are published in the same format by the same company. Like with Superman comics after a reboot the old stories are canon in the sense of still being official but not in the sense of being in continuity (although I think that's rare for something to be referred to as canon but not in-continuity) or Halloween H20 declaring the events of IV-VI didn't happen.
Would you disagree that clear continuity violations tend to make a story and set of stories less entertaining, harder to suspend disbelief about, care about, enjoy? Like between the original series and Enterprise different crews encountering Romulans with a cloak for the first time twice, in Insurrection Starfleet seemingly not being at war while from the same time in Deep Space Nine it is, from the same series Voyager the Doctor falling in love for seemingly the first time twice? Or with the X-Men films Xavier being crippled in the prequel earlier than the earlier-released third film established he was or him being alive in the film after the one in which he died with minimal explanation?
Increasingly, I'm leaning toward this attitude. The producers quit worrying about story, character, and even continuity, seemingly the easiest of the three to accomplish. And they wonder why they kept losing audience.
A little off topic, but I know the CBS people say that Discovery did great. Anyone know how they're measuring success? Certainly not raw numbers. I'm guessing it' measured in All Access signups.
Pretty sure we/they didn't invent that.
Meh, close enough.
Pike's Enterprise, TOS version
Pike's Enterprise, DSC version
Why shouldn't we? Why should we all want to pretend it's still 1964? If Gene were making Star Trek for the first time now, it would look a hell of a lot more like Discovery than TOS.
I'm perfectly capable of suspending my disbelief enough to a) enjoy the show, and b) accept that it all takes place in one universe or timeline. This isn't a dig at you in particular, King Daniel, but I'm really beginning to get irritated by people who won't stop bleating on about how it can't be the same because the walls don't wobble when you hit them, or because no one has pointy sideburns. Times change, technology moves on. Move on with it, for god's sake.
To add my thoughts on the original topic, the only people who get to decide what's canon are the owners of the property. There's things I'd like taken out myself, but it's not for me to decide. It's all canon unless it gets contradicted later, or specifically stated not to have happened.
Heck, Star Wars had a big retcon right at the top of the second movie. In the opening crawl of SW, we're explicitly told that destroying the the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star, will "restore freedom to the galaxy." Not just a major victory in the war, "restoring freedom," as in, the war is over and the Empire is crushed. And the Rebellion has a gigantic awards ceremony at the end of the movie, implying that the Empire is no longer any sort of threat. Otherwise, they would've gone on the run to avoid retaliation from the Empire instead of taking the time to have a big awards ceremony.
In the opening crawl of The Empire Strikes Back, the Rebellion is suddenly at a disadvantage again. "It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy." So suddenly the Empire still has the upper hand, even though their ultimate weapon and many of their resources were utterly destroyed.
That sounds like a very different Captain Kirk than I would ever want to see. The Kirk I know from TOS would never sleep with a subordinate under his command and was very conflicted about his romantic feelings for Janice Rand.
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