When did canon become such a hot-button issue?

[Damian]

IIRC, Nemesis was beaten on its opening weekend by Maid in Manhattan. The only movie to blame for Nemesis’s poor box office is Nemesis.

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.

I do still think there being basically 3 blockbuster films out within a few weeks definitely had an effect on Nemesis. Partly because the people that would go to see a Star Trek film are probably at least some of the same people that would see a Harry Potter film, a Lord of the Rings film and even a James Bond film. They do tend to pull from the same pool of fans. And while I personally liked Nemesis, I'm also self aware enough to know that it's not going to pull blockbuster numbers. And people are only going to see so many movies in a month. I think oversaturation of franchise fantasy/action films had a downward effect on Nemesis' returns.

Whereas "Maid in Manhattan" I would think pulled from a different pool of fans. I would argue many of the people that went to see "Maid in Manhattan" are not really the same people that would go to see any Star Trek film, or even necessarily a Harry Potter film, a Lord of the Rings film or a James Bond film. So I think it's not the best movie to compare to.

And Christopher has a point too. I knew Nemesis was coming out because I'm a Trekkie. But much like Star Trek Beyond, I do remember Paramount put a minimal effort on promoting Nemesis. Now Nemesis-haters would say that's putting good money after bad---but if you do a poor job promoting a movie, you can't expect it to do well.

 

[Damian]

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.

If the episode is good, people I think are more unwilling to overlook superficial things like Riker looking older than he did in "The Pegasus" and things like that. When it is viewed as a poor episode though, then it's just one more thing to add to the list. A good and engaging story can help you overlook less important things more.

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.

Yeah, I get what they were trying to do. I think if it were the normal 2 hour finale then a framing TNG story may have been a bit different. With just an hour (well, really 45 minutes) that took a lot away from what was supposed to be an Enterprise finale.

But it was much more than that for me personally that made it so disappointing. I always said "The Pegasus" was not an episode I thought had any loose threads that could be developed. I never once wondered what caused Riker to do the right thing. In fact, even watching the episode the first time, after seeing Riker for 6+ years, you knew he was going to confide in Captain Picard. So it was a poor choice to begin with.

But even the Enterprise sequences of the episode were not well done. They skip ahead, what was it, 6 years. Yet it seemed like Terra Prime just happened. And to this day I'm still shocked there was absolutely no mention that a war (the Romulan War) had just ended. When I last concluded my Enterprise watch through a few months ago and I watched this episode I looked for something, even a hidden message, referring to the war. But nothing. They told us it was 6 years later, yet it seemed like it was maybe at most a few weeks after Terra Prime. And the plot was meandering, between Archer's upcoming speech and Shran's missing daughter. It was just way too much for a 45 minutes show.

Sorry, I guess I should have saved this rant for one of the many TATV rant threads on the Enterprise forums. But every time I talk about this episode I start unloading.

 

[Christopher]

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.

Yes, that part goes without saying. The point is that Pocket would never have been allowed to tell such a revisionist story if it weren't reconcilable with the onscreen events of the episode; therefore, the fact that the events were presented in the episode as merely a holonovel, with no corroborating proof, was what opened the door for the novel to happen. So it wasn't as defiant a gesture as some people paint it as. It wasn't an exception to the rules of tie-ins. It had to be approved by CBS the same as every other novel, and CBS allowed it because it was still consistent with the letter of the text -- and perhaps because they recognized that the finale had been poorly received by fans and thus a revisionist take would not alienate the book-buying audience.

But even the Enterprise sequences of the episode were not well done. They skip ahead, what was it, 6 years. Yet it seemed like Terra Prime just happened. And to this day I'm still shocked there was absolutely no mention that a war (the Romulan War) had just ended. When I last concluded my Enterprise watch through a few months ago and I watched this episode I looked for something, even a hidden message, referring to the war. But nothing. They told us it was 6 years later, yet it seemed like it was maybe at most a few weeks after Terra Prime. And the plot was meandering, between Archer's upcoming speech and Shran's missing daughter. It was just way too much for a 45 minutes show.

What I heard at the time was that they already planned to do the episode as a season finale, or something, but when the show was cancelled, they decided to make it a series finale and wrote in the 6-year time jump. But they didn't have time to do a major rewrite, so the changes were cosmetic at best -- no advancement in story or character arcs (beyond the Trip/T'Pol thing), no promotions for anyone, nothing.

That's why I'm okay with the novels' premise that the true version actually did happen shortly after "Terra Prime" and was altered to seem to happen 6 years later. That doesn't make much sense in-universe, admittedly -- how do you fake an event happening later than it really did, without contradicting a ton of other evidence? But at least it explains some of the oddities in the story as presented.

 

[Damian]

That's why I'm okay with the novels' premise that the true version actually did happen shortly after "Terra Prime" and was altered to seem to happen 6 years later. That doesn't make much sense in-universe, admittedly -- how do you fake an event happening later than it really did, without contradicting a ton of other evidence? But at least it explains some of the oddities in the story as presented.

I think IIRC that even Jake and/or Nog when talking about it even mentioned some of the complaints fans had about TATV, the lack of promotions and other elements that made it seem hard to believe 6 years had passed.

Why Section 31 advanced the false narrative 6 years was weak. But at least in my case since I liked the novel, and I liked how it 'revised' TATV it was one of those cases where since I liked the story and the result that occurred I was able to overlook that weak point. I personally think TATV was the worse Star Trek production ever made (there has to be something in last place after all). Anything that makes it watchable for me is a positive. And there was probably only so much Martin and Mangels could do. And like you said, they couldn't contradict canon.

They basically found a way to revise/retcon TATV without actually revising/retconning TATV. So one positive of the whole holodeck adventure angle is it allowed them to do that. Without the holodeck element we would have been stuck with TATV as written with almost no possibility of 'fixing' it.

 

[seigezunt]

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.

Yep. Kind of what I was trying to get at with my earlier reference to the writers room segment of the DS9 doc.

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.

I did not know that! I will need to check that out.

 

[Christopher]

I did not know that! I will need to check that out.

Last Full Measure is mainly a book set early in season 3 of ENT and focused on the MACOs (though it doesn't quite fit series continuity, since it features multiple casualties while the show established that the first crew death occurred rather later in the season). It only has a frame story, set at the launch of NCC-1701 decades later, revealing that Trip is still alive but offering no explanation. I believe the frame was added after the finale aired, so there wasn't room to develop it beyond that initial hint.

 

[Rahul]

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.

The truth is - the TNG crew having an adventure on the holodeck as part of the ENT crew is a friggin' amazing idea for an episode! And hell - if it were just that, I'm pretty sure a wide majority of viewers would simply have ignored the widening and aging of the actors, just for the joy of having them back.

It's just an immensely bad premise for a series finale.
Because - by it's very nature - a series finale should be about, well, the series. Not another, older series. Added with the other problems of the finale - character growth being reversed, the bad overall plot, Trips fumbled death, the passing of time without change - and people hated even the good parts for its's flaws.

But I do have the opinion that - would they simply have switched the order of airing: These are the Voyages, and THEN Demons/Terra Prime as the true series' finale - fan reaction to it would have been immensely improved!

 

[Damian]

But I do have the opinion that - would they simply have switched the order of airing: These are the Voyages, and THEN Demons/Terra Prime as the true series' finale - fan reaction to it would have been immensely improved!

I'm not sure about that. I know my opinion of that episode is pretty low still, after all these years later. You even mentioned some of the flaws like a bad overall plot, Trip's death, etc. Now maybe it would be a bit less reviled--sort of like "Threshold". It seems many consider that at least a weak, if not poor episode. But being that it was in the middle of an early season, it's a bit easier to overlook (as opposed to if it were a series, or even season finale). But I still think TATV would have been poorly received.

I think there are ways to make a TNG framing sequence work. I just think they started from a bad premise from the get go. I sort of agree with Christopher--maybe using a new adventure from the Enterprise-E would have been more interesting. But I know in the Enterprise forum there are multiple threads about TATV and questions as to whether there are any ways to improve it and it seems there's just not enough good there to salvage it without starting from scratch (except for the basic idea of the holodeck).

I did not know that! I will need to check that out.

I wouldn't read "Last Full Measure" just for the framing sequence. I don't actually recall much about that novel other then Trip being alive when the 1701 is launched, and it taking place during the Xindi year (I believe it's the only novel taking place that year). I remember much more about "The Good that Men Do" "Kobayashi Maru" and the ensuing Enterprise novels than that one.

So in my case it wasn't particularly memorable like their next few books.

But your opinion may be more favorable so I wouldn't say don't read it. I just wouldn't read it expecting any great exposition about the 'revisions' made to TATV.

 

[WebLurker]

Yes, that part goes without saying. The point is that Pocket would never have been allowed to tell such a revisionist story if it weren't reconcilable with the onscreen events of the episode; therefore, the fact that the events were presented in the episode as merely a holonovel, with no corroborating proof, was what opened the door for the novel to happen. So it wasn't as defiant a gesture as some people paint it as. It wasn't an exception to the rules of tie-ins. It had to be approved by CBS the same as every other novel, and CBS allowed it because it was still consistent with the letter of the text -- and perhaps because they recognized that the finale had been poorly received by fans and thus a revisionist take would not alienate the book-buying audience.

Fair enough. Still think it made the episode worse in terms of the story making sense, plot holes and the like, but that's just personal opinion.

I did not know that! I will need to check that out.

Yep. @Christopher is right about it being in the bookends of the story and @damien is right about the main novel having nothing to do with the finale. I personally thought the novel was one of the more interesting ENT ones, but I do have to admit that I never found the ENT relaunch novels ever clicked with me that well.

 

[fireproof78]

The truth is - the TNG crew having an adventure on the holodeck as part of the ENT crew is a friggin' amazing idea for an episode! And hell - if it were just that, I'm pretty sure a wide majority of viewers would simply have ignored the widening and aging of the actors, just for the joy of having them back.

Yes, but they then try to insert themselves in to a well known episode (one of my personal favorites), and ignore any sort of development with the ENT characters.

I get wanting the TNG crew back but it is still an oddly framed episode even if it was moved in the broadcast order.

 

[Rahul]

Yes, but they then try to insert themselves in to a well known episode (one of my personal favorites), and ignore any sort of development with the ENT characters.

I get wanting the TNG crew back but it is still an oddly framed episode even if it was moved in the broadcast order.

I get "oddly framed" - but then, this was the season that had a two-parter take entirely place in the Mirror Universe, without any set-up or connection to the current events of the "real" universe other than what happened in some old TOS episodes. I think ENT season 4 was a good place for "oddly framed" episodes.

And yes - that leaves us with the weird idea of it inserting itself into a specific episode of TNG (weird), and also all the ENT oddities - characters at season 1/2-stage (including predjudices agains Vulcans! yay...), Trips senseless death, the fact it takes place 7 years later and nothing changed...

But really - I think for "in-between episodes", I think we Trekkies have a pretty high tolerance bar ("Masks" anyone?). And if it were just another episode, I'm sure people would be more engaged in the "how accurate is the holodeck anyway"-debate. I think it was specifically the problem it was intended as a finale - with the timejump as a "where are they now" (à la "All good things" or "Endgame", just with... exactly where as before as an answer) - that this episode was meant to be a definite closure, that was the main problem.

 

[fireproof78]

I think it was specifically the problem it was intended as a finale - with the timejump as a "where are they now" (à la "All good things" or "Endgame", just with... exactly where as before as an answer) - that this episode was meant to be a definite closure, that was the main problem.

I think it was one of several problems, but I don't think it was the main one. However, this is splitting hairs now.

 

[WinterSoldier]

I like the shows to line-up canonically in broad strokes but I don't need anything more than that. And I get a kick out of recognising when they stick-to/divert from canon, but the diversion has never made me angry.
As far as I'm concerned every new Trek show should have the right to do what they like with the material.

 

[Prax]

The hatred for a thing like These Are The Voyages is simply a popular opinion. Once an opinion gains a little traction, it spreads. If you throw in a little bit of outrage, it becomes very contagious. It's even caught up with the actors.

 

[Paul Weaver]

I do wish that we could have had a proper enterprise finale, then a final movie (even TV only), with characters from across the 24th century, as the 'love letter'

I think the problem is for every 10 trekkies, there's 12 different ideas, and if the wrong idea isn't made, it's outrage.

 

[WebLurker]

The hatred for a thing like These Are The Voyages is simply a popular opinion. Once an opinion gains a little traction, it spreads. If you throw in a little bit of outrage, it becomes very contagious. It's even caught up with the actors.

Yeah, the internet magnifies these things, hence why you have Star Wars: The Last Jedi haters dominating the conversation despite them being the minority of the viewership.

 

[fireproof78]

I think the problem is for every 10 trekkies, there's 12 different ideas, and if the wrong idea isn't made, it's outrage.

Exactly so. It's one thing for a show not be someone's taste but it doesn't make it wrong.

 

[BK613]

I do wish we used a term like 'lore' instead.

 

[WebLurker]

I do wish we used a term like 'lore' instead.

What's the difference?

 

[Spot261]

Yeah, the internet magnifies these things, hence why you have Star Wars: The Last Jedi haters dominating the conversation despite them being the minority of the viewership.

It's very distorting really in that only the most vocal fans (and often least balanced - after all, who gets upset over this stuff really?) are really represented, despite by definition being a vanishingly small minority. Most people will watch a film or a TV show and judge it at face value for what it is, a form of entertainment.

Then they go about their lives having been entertained and deal with the more important stuff they were escaping from in the first place.

Obsession with "canon" or outrage over "identity politics" within entertainment is by and large a niche mentality. It's only of interest to, or discussed by, a small fringe of the population and represents the modern expression of a stereotype which has been around for decades. The difference is now that fringe has a much more effective means of projection into the mainstream and can represent themselves and their concerns as being endemic, their own "outrages" and foibles as being weather vanes for public opinion when the overwhelming majority of people just....don't care.