My choice is the retcons and creative choices made in "The Good That Men Do" and the following Romulan war arc. "These Are the Voyages" was awful but it could have been tackled so much better. Did not enjoy.
I actually feel the exact opposite about that. TATV is probably as close to actually hating something in Star Trek as I ever got. Even as bad as Voyager's "Threshold" was, I can watch it from time to time and if nothing else get a few laughs (I like that even Braga admits that was not his finest hour, a little self deprecating humor can help). But TATV didn't even have 'laugh at yourself' moments like some bad episodes/movies can have.
The Good That Men Do found a way to retcon that episode without
actually retconning it. What we saw happened from the standpoint that Riker observed those events as we saw in TATV, but it was later discovered that it was a false history. That novel actually made TATV somewhat more watchable for me in the sense that I watch it while keeping the novel in mind now. The way the novel portrayed those events made the story of the episode make much more sense.
I did like where
The Romulan War novels were going, at least through the first
Romulan War novel. Unfortunately I thought they shorted it by taking it from the originally planned 3 to 4 novels just down to 2, and after the first one was already written meaning the last 3 years of the war had to be shortened to just one novel. The 2nd novel ended up basically being almost a summary of events with a lot of gaps. Overall storywise it was ok, but a lot probably had to be left out of what Michael Martin probably initially had planned. It's one reason I always wished S&S did a Tales of the Romulan War anthology like they did for the Dominion War to add more details to the Romulan War that were missing in the 2nd book (using the 2 books as a framework to build off of). But the ship has sailed on that I'm sure.
I always found it interesting that Michael Martin seemed to have left the Star Trek fold not long after that. I sometimes wonder if the shortening of the series had something to do with that. I mean, it's always a risk when writing novels that something could be dropped or shortened. But it seemed to me like they were shortened to just 2 books after he already wrote the first one and probably had everything planned out for 3 or 4 novels (I forget what the original 'final' plan was supposed to be before it was shortened) and then had to condense what was going to be 2 or 3 more books down to just one. I imagine if nothing else an author might be irritated at that, even if they know the business. They are, after all, only human.
And of course, the novels didn't ignore TATV. They took advantage of the fact that TATV only showed a simulation rather than the firsthand events. They still remained true to the letter of the text, as all tie-ins are obligated to do.
Yes, exactly. As much as I disliked TATV, the episode did us one huge favor by showing us what happened as a holodeck simulation. That gave us an 'out.' It's why I say The Good that Men Do is a 'retcon' without actually being a retcon. Those events in TATV still happened from the standpoint of Riker going to the holodeck. We just learned it was a false history he was viewing.
I understand Wormhole's point, that it might have given some novel readers an exaggerated view of how much non-canon sources actually 'control'. But I think many of us who read the novels realize they are not canon. If Picard has done anything, it has shown us just how little novels contribute to canon (which is not at all).
I feel like the New Frontier time-jump was far less successful than the DS9 one.
Agree with you there. At first the DS9 jump was a bit jarring, but over the years they filled in most of what happened during that period so now I don't feel like I missed anything (at least significantly).
But with NF that never happened. We learned very little about what happened during that period. Peter David wanted to shake things up, but I just don't think it worked out all that well at the end of the day. I didn't dislike the later NF novels. They had their good points and they were ok overall. But there was a noticeable drop off IMO. There were 2 for me in fact for NF. After the first
Excalibur was destroyed then after the time jump another. Now, I suppose that could happen in any long running series. It seemed David had everything mapped out for the first several books and that served those novels well. They were exciting stories, with good characters and well placed humor. Then when he completed those it just seemed he lost a bit of that early magic.
My vote is for Vedek Kira.
I know I'm in the minority on that one but that never bothered me too much. Kira's faith was always an important part of her psyche. And she always regretted some of what she had to do during the Occupation. I thought she had achieved all her secular goals, with the final goal guiding Bajor into the Federation. It seemed to make sense for me that she would work on her more faith based goals and becoming a Vedek seemed to make sense for me. It gave her the perfect opportunity to work more on her faith and where she felt she was lacking in that regard.
Letting that DeCandido hack come up with a Federation government. What a convoluted unoriginal mess that was.....
Yeah. What moron writes about politics anyway
