What would you like to see retconned?

With me it's warp speed.

They really fucked that up.

It was all well and good at the time of TOS, where the ship moved at the speed of plot. But the Franz Joseph Tech Manual had a throwaway about a cubic relationship. Warp 1 = Speed of Light, Warp 2- 8c, Warp 5 = 125 c, Warp 10 = 1000c and so on.

It didn't mean much to the show, but it did raise a couple of issues in terms of speed, range and distance. Pre dilithium meant warp four, ie voyages of months and years between stars. Post dilithium cut that down to weeks and days, but it made for some intriguing literature.

But the Federation got bigger, and for TNG that scale had to be dispensed with. Hence the exponential warp scale. Basically, at lower ends of the scale, it behaved much like the cubic relationship, and at higher ends, it behaved asymptotically. The closer you got to Warp 10, the faster the ship travelled, and with Warp 10 = infinite speed = unreachable.

This brought back speed of plot, but then the TNG tech manual messed things up again with the 1 yr = 1000 light years relationship. Basically a starship can travel 1000 light years in terms of engine wear, fuel consumption, supplies and so on. But then we are presented with a Federation which is thousands of light years across. But all these starships seem to be within a couple of days of Earth

DS9 was at the edge of the final frontier, but still a quick jaunt away from San Francisco.

The biggest and most notorious over babble came with Enterprise, which appeared to use the cubic relationship for its Warp 5 engine. The 6 minutes to Neptune and back was quite correct.

But the heart of the Klingon empire, 2 days away at warp 5, halfway between Earth and Proxima Centauri was not.

I'd loved to see Warp Speed retconned back to a simple Plot Drive.

I'd also like to see the date of the future erased. No 23rd or 24th Century. I'd just like Trek in some unimaginable future era as it once used to be.

 

That formula actually appeared years before Franz Joseph's Star Fleet Technical Manual in the Star Trek Writer & Director's Guide (Bible) by Gene Roddenberry. My particular copy of that production document is dated April 17, 1967.

TGT

 

I sit corrected.

But, it was never mentioned on the show.

 

Just as well, considering the more bullshit physics and engineering one crams into a sci-fi show the harder it is to suspend the disbelief of viewers possessing an IQ higher than that of a clam. Starfleet has warp drive and it works just dandy. That is all we need to know. Indeed, Gene Roddenberry himself objected to the mention of "transwarp drive" by Harve Bennett in ST:TSFS ("Warp speed is fast enough!" according to Susan Sackett's Inside Trek) because he felt that supplanting one entirely fictional FTL propulsion technology with another only reduces the believability of the Trek universe in that it puts an inappropriate focus on ultimately trivial storytelling props instead of the story itself.

TGT

 

TNG "The Host"

 

I'd probably want to see "The Host" retconned out of existence, as captcalhoun noted above.

I definitely want to see "These Are the Voyages..." retconned as per the events in The Good That Men Do.

I'd probably want the visions of Surak's life from ENT's Vulcan arc retconned to match the description of Surak's life from the novel Spock's World.

 

Thres.......hold

 

Retcon Threshold? Phooey, I want Janeway and Paris Juniors to be regular characters on the next Trek series...the Amazing Warp 10 Mudpuppy Twins!

But I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing TATV retconned into the cornfield.

 

"Threshold" has already been effectively retconned by the creative decision to ignore the episode and everything it established.

 

i didn't mean decanonise it, i just meant remake it with the DS9 version of Trills instead of the more parasitical version we had in TNG.

 

Threshold was already retconned. In a later episode--Day of Dishonor, or something like that--Paris says, "I've never navigated in transwarp before."

Either Janeway ordered the "Threshold" incidents to be Armin Tamzarianed, or this line was thrown in as an admission by the writers that certain events are no longer considered part of the canon by the Ecumenical Council of Trek.

 

Personally, I think that TPTB should've used a far greater number for "infinite speed", like Warp 100, etc.

Using "Warp 10" has boxed themselves in, IMO. In any story, if you have one ship going, say, warp 17, and then meets another race cruising along at Warp 42... Well, then there's a serious amount of tech difference implied right there.

Unlike current Trek where you have "Warp 9.972" vs. "Warp 9.9845"...

Also, cutting down the Magic Deflector Dish's capabilities would be REALLY nice. Make the characters THINK their way out of a predicament.

Cheers,
-CM-

 

Aside from the forementioned "Threshold" and "These Are The Voyages...", things I'd like to see retconned:

-Picard depicted as being bald when he was a Starfleet cadet in "Nemesis." That was simply stupid, IMO...

-Phase weapons and photonic torpedoes as Starfleet's main weapons in the 22nd-Century. Let them be experimental weapons instead that were exclusively for the NX-class, while the rest of Starfleet relied on laser weapons and atomic missiles.

-Trills like Jadzia and Ezri were the only ones of their kind during DS9. Trills like Odan could have been depicted as minorities, at the very least.

-The Enterprise pizza cutter, I mean the Enterprise-J...

-Neelix (he never existed--he was a figment of everybody's imagination).

 

Picard had hair in some flashback scenes in some of the TNG episodes. The one where the Telepatic species come aboard and start mind raping people. Crusher recalls when hirsute Picard brought her dead husband home.

But it's true, Stewart lost his hair young.

A throwaway line about Picard shaving his head as a bet would have been all that it needed.

 

"Violations"

"Tapestry" also showed young Picard had hair when the Nausicaan stabbed him in the heart.

 

They showed Picard having hair only ten years before TNG (when he told Beverly and Wesley what happened to Jack) and every other flashback to Picard's youth showed him with hair.

 

Considering that it's a fairly well-established fact that 24th Century technology lets people grow hair at will, I'd just as soon presume that Picard was bald by choice as a young man for a while, then had his hair grown back before going bald again.

 

I'm no Nemesis apologist, but I never understood why this one was such a big deal.

He shaved his head for whatever reason at the academy, then grew it back by the time he graduated. Simple.

 

Awwwwww. Ethan Phillips was wonderful as Neelix!