When did canon become such a hot-button issue?

Well for TATV, I think there are plenty of episodes that are kind of ignored ( Space Newts anybody?) but TATV is the only one that comes to mind that was Completly changed in another medium, the book series changed it.. for the better.. I personally don't acknowledge TATV's existance.. watched it once, never have again..

I thought Nemisis was pretty good, but it was released the same time as The Lord of the Rings 3rd movie.. that sucked all the oxygen out of the room. But I do agree. Your not going to get new fans by just doing a niche movie..

Write what you think is a good story, bounce if off a few people to make sure, then go forward..

 

This was years and years ago, but I remember somebody once posting on this very board that Paramount should establish a Fannish Oversight Committee that would review all prospective new Trek movies, TV series, and episodes.

I can't remember if this was just meant to be advisory or if they actually thought the Fan Committee should have veto power.

 

Well, not really. The Good That Men Do was entirely consistent with the facts of TATV -- namely, that there exists a 24th-century holoprogram that depicts NX-01's final mission in the way that we saw. It merely reveals that the holoprogram was not a true account of history. It's fortunate that TATV presented it in that way, merely as a docudrama centuries after the fact. So there was already a built-in way to retcon it by revealing that the secondhand account we got was untrue. (Just as "The Final Problem" had a built-in way to retcon Sherlock Holmes's death because Watson did not directly witness it, merely inferred it from Holmes's disappearance and farewell letter. Note that even the TATV holoprogram avoids actually depicting Trip's death; I suspect the writers were leaving themselves an out just in case.)

 

You know, I never really thought of it that way. Had they not had TNG framing sequence the novel wouldn't have been able to do what it did without actually retconning the episode. By having it as a holodeck recreation it actually allowed "The Good That Men Do" to explain it as mistaken history--while at the same time not actually changing TATV. That still happened, they were just looking at an incorrect version of history.

I mean, when I first read the novel I thought myself it was an almost groundbreaking retcon of a canon episode, something pretty rare in Star Trek. But after considering it further I realized Martin and Mangels didn't actually retcon anything. TATV happened just as it was portrayed. It was just a version of history tampered with by Section 31.

TATV is probably my least favorite Star Trek production of all time. But I'll watch it while keeping "The Good That Men Do" in mind. I always thought it was a disappointing way for Berman's era to end. I liked Berman Trek as much as all the other eras of Star Trek and it would have been nice if his era ended with a bang.

Ha-ha. I can see so many ways that can go off the tracks. I mean, the first problem is that we can't even agree with each other.

 

The remaining problem with TATV, though, is that it contradicts "The Pegasus" in a number of ways. It's hard to reconcile its Riker/Troi frame story with the chronology of events in "The Pegasus" and Riker's actions and decisions therein. It would've been wiser to make it a new story aboard the Enterprise-E rather than trying to retcon it into a TNG episode.

 

Yeah. Or at the very least find an episode that maybe had some loose ends or threads that could be developed further. One issue I had with TATV is they picked a story that I thought had a satisfactory conclusion. I never wondered how Riker came to the decision to do the 'right thing' and talk to Captain Picard so it was a wasted episode.

But making it some new mission would have solved that problem, not to mention avoid the continuity errors you noted.

I always thought Enterprise should have ended with the opening salvos of the Romulan War soon after Terra Prime. A sort of thumb in the eye of Paramount for cancelling Enterprise. But that's just my take

 

Just for accuracy, Nemesis was released a week before LotR: The Two Towers ( the second one.)
It also wasn't helped by the fact that HP and the Chamber of Secrets was still in theaters as well.

 

Curiously, the Duck Tales (2017) episode "The Duck Knight Returns" (May 17, 2019) seems somewhat relevant to this discussion. In Duck Tales (2017) as well as in real life, there was a show called Darkwing Duck (1991-92), and in "The Duck Knight Returns" fans are excited about the new Darkwing Duck movie being made. But fans and other have conflicting desires for what the new movie should be like, a conflict that disappoints some and turns some into heroes or villains..

 

And the 007 film "Die Another Day" was out around the same time. Paramount couldn't have picked a worse time to release Nemesis.

I liked Nemesis, but I never had any illusions that it was a blockbuster type film. Paramount didn't do it any favors by releasing it at the time they did.

 

Given fans and their reactions at times I have a feeling it would have all the power

 

I'm not sure that follows. Opening-weekend box office is shaped more by advance buzz than by reaction to the actual movie, for reasons that should be self-evident. If a movie is bad and gets good buzz, then it will open strong but then drop off rapidly after the opening weekend, as happened with, say, Batman v Superman. If even the opening-weekend box office was weak, that suggests it was more due to a weak marketing campaign, or a lukewarm response to the previous movie.

 

Oh good God.

HEAR YE HEAR YE, THE HIGH COUNCIL OF THE NERDS IS IN SESSION

 

Trek Nerd Oversite commitee? Bad Idea Jeans...

 

This is what I mean. I think they overestimated the appeal of TNG at that point and felt its presence would instantly mean praise or ratings. The setting itself was odd. Riker and Troi doing all this during the Pegasus incident, and not looking the way they did when Pegasus was aired. People were going to pick up on that.

It would have been a relatively simple thing to step back, do a double check and try to imagine the end product and the possible reactions, and then decide. So for some, it was an example of the studio being disconnected.

I would say the same thing with Insurrection. From the look of it, it's a TV episode. It looked more like it was designed for TV than the theaters. It's not something you'd imagine people would come back to the theaters again and again to see.

 

That's just part of fiction. Heck, Data looked recognizably older in the "All Good Things..." scenes supposedly set during "Encounter at Farpoint," plus Tasha had a different haircut and Troi a different accent. Not to mention cases where actors are actually recast. Audiences do "pick up on that," but they generally excuse such things because they understand the real-world reasons for the changes.

And it's happened before. For instance, Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines looked 20 years older than they were supposed to in Doctor Who: "The Two Doctors."

 

Or they could have stepped back, noticed that TNG was far and away the most popular of the latter-day Trek shows, and figured that the fans would LOVE to see Riker and Troi again. And since Enterprise was being cancelled anyway, with no new TREK show in the offing, where was the harm? It was meant to be a good-bye treat to the fans who had stuck with modern Trek since TNG had debuted many years earlier.

It's easy to Monday-morning quarterback these things (look at me, using a sports analogy of all things), but I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, and the reaction not as simple to predict as we might imagine in hindsight.

If audiences were that predictable, every show would be a hit and there would never be any flops, but, in truth, show business has always been a horse race.

 

Also, fans aren't the only people who get sentimental. Many of the same producers and crew members had been working on the Trek franchise continuously for the previous 18 years, and it was coming to an end. It's understandable that they'd want to commemorate that by tying back to the show where it all started for them. And it was an attempt to wrap up ENT by confirming that Archer's crew had a historic legacy, one that tied into the Trek shows set in later eras. Those don't strike me as bad things to try to do. They just didn't pull them off very well. People often blame the concept for what's really the fault of the execution.

 

Last Full Measure was the first book that set up Trip faking his death, as I recall, although The Good was the first one that explained how and went into the details of the retcon.

As far as the novel being entirely consistent with the episode, I think that is getting into semantics a bit, given that while the novel technically contradicts nothing, the idea that the episode lied to us (so to speak) is a pretty darn big difference and is not how we're supposed to understand how the story works in the filmed version. Personally, I really don't like the novel retcon (it makes it worse in terms of credibility and the authors seem really smug about throwing shade on the episode), so I am kinda biased about it all when I say that I think sticking to the intent of the TV show would've been the better plan, but that's just me.

Maybe. There were some gaps in the episode it could slot into, and, as I recall, the worst problems are that one of the conversations with Troi suggests that the Pegasus was found before they did that in the original episode, and Riker seems to decide to tell Picard about the cloak before going over to the ship with Pressman instead of when they retrieve the cloak (although you could wiggle it in that Riker didn't have the chance to talk to Picard and was working himself up to confronting Pressman in the scene in question). Either way, we have had worse canon and continuity problems in the franchise before and we're okay, so it never bothered me that much.