When did canon become such a hot-button issue?

[Christopher]

I will say it's probably useful to have, esp. nowadays with all the extra universe stuff and all. It's good to know what the owners of the franchise consider canon. But it's more useful to you guys who work on tie ins.

As I've been saying, it's a mistake to think that "canon" is something that has to be judged or decided by the creators. That's getting it backward. "Canon" is a shorthand term that we use to refer to the stories told by the creators. It's not something anyone decides -- it's just a term for what they already are, the stories told by the creators/owners instead of other people. It's tautological to say that the creators decide that the stories they tell are the stories they tell. Most of the time, the actual creators don't have to think about the word "canon" at all, any more than a cat has to think about whether it's a cat. The only time canon becomes an issue is in relation to the stuff beyond canon, the tie-ins and fanfic. Sometimes tie-ins are canonical, though rarely so, and thus there can be uncertainties that need to be clarified about how the tie-ins do or don't fit in with the canon. But whether the canon itself is the canon is a pointless and redundant question.

This is the damage done by the '89 Roddenberry memo. It created the false impression that canon status is something that has to be assigned or removed by the creators. But the only reason Roddenberry and Arnold felt the need to issue that memo is because they didn't have actual control over the franchise anymore and were trying to assert their pathetic need for control by bossing around the fans and tie-in authors. The people who actually make the canon don't have to declare that's what it is. It just is.

To complicate things a bit there are different levels of the franchise. What I mean is we have the canon--I think that's pretty much everything shown on screen that's official by the studio such as the various shows and movies.

Not everything shown onscreen, since every ongoing series contains errors and poor choices that are ignored or retconned away later on. There are episodes or films that have been partly or entirely disregarded by later canon, such as "The Alternative Factor" with its nonsensical portrayal of antimatter (contradicting what "The Naked Time" had previously established), ST V with its 20-minute trip to the center of the galaxy, or "Threshold" with its bizarre version of transwarp. The term "canon" applies to the whole body of work, complete with all its internal contradictions and errors, rather than to discrete pieces of it.

In a way, I'm sort of surprised we are arguing about what is 'canon'. I'm pretty sure what is considered Star Trek canon these days is pretty well defined. It's what's on screen by the studio (CBS or Paramount--I guess soon to be all Paramount once again). As far as I know there's no ambiguity about that.

Reportedly the re-merged corporation that owns the studios is to be called ViacomCBS. I'd say CBS Television Studios itself is likely to keep its current name, since it's a powerhouse in TV while the entity currently using its old name of Paramount Television, founded just 6 years ago as a branch of Paramount Studios, is relatively tiny and less influential. The current Paramount TV might be allowed to coexist with CBSTVS, according to Variety, but it would still be CBS that owns Star Trek.

I think I would just simply call them 'tie-ins'. I think that nicely sums up what novels and comics are. You could probably call them extra-universe works, but that's a bit more wordy.

Yes, exactly. They're tie-ins. No need to invent some other pretentious label.

Take TOS. The show airs, and because of its popularity, expands into novels, comics, games, etc. This material is all building a continuity with what was on the show, filling in all the blanks, creating an expanded universe.
Then the next show comes along, and generally adheres to what was established in the earlier show, but not the books. And new books will be written taking into account both shows, but not necessarily those older books that were written earlier. For the books, there are continual reimaginings with each new on-screen production, while the shows are all building off each other.

Actually continuity within Trek tie-ins is the exception, not the rule. Prior to 2000, the only time there was any degree of shared continuity among Trek novels was in the mid- to late 1980s, and that was only occasional and quite loose, with some books referencing and staying roughly consistent while others took their own conflicting paths. Also, the individual comic book series have tended to maintain continuity within themselves but not with each other or with the novels, except in a small number of cases. And the various computer games and RPGs have all done their own independent things as well.

There has been a fairly consistent continuity unifying the majority of the novels over the past 20 years, but not all of them (TOS novels are still pretty much standalone aside from occasional cross-references at the authors' discretion); and the comics, Star Trek Online, and Star Trek Adventures (as well as the David A. Goodman "nonfiction" books from another publisher) all have their own separate continuities that occasionally borrow individual elements from each other but don't agree in broad strokes.

So there's never really been an "expanded universe" in Trek (like I said, it's always a mistake to think that Star Wars terminology can be grafted onto other franchises). There have been continuities linking some Trek tie-ins to each other, but never a single one that all tie-ins have been expected to follow.

 

[Prax]

"Expanded Universe" is a general term applied all sorts of different franchises that are based on films or TV shows. In Star Trek's case, the books are expanding the universe of TOS, or DS9, or ENT, or whatever characters from whatever show they are based upon. The books are dependent upon what's on screen, but what's on screen is not dependent upon them. Perhaps there are books that outright ignore what was onscreen and create there own different universe, but I wouldn't know, and have never heard of such. The books are beholden to what is established on-screen. If they weren't, they wouldn't be "tie-ins." This being the case, it means there is.. for all intents and purposes.. a "Canon," not a Canon of books and games, but the official story made up from the various tv series and films.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_expanded_universe

No one is claiming that the books are beholden to each other, or that there is some singular universe of books that all books must adhere to.

 

[Christopher]

"Expanded Universe" is a general term applied all sorts of different franchises that are based on films or TV shows.

It's a term that was originally used for Star Wars and that some fans started using generically because they assumed that everything else had to work like Star Wars, which is both misleading and annoying. (Star Trek came first, damn it.) The fact that somebody wrote a Wikipedia article about it doesn't make it true. The makers of Star Trek tie-ins have never used or endorsed that term.

No one is claiming that the books are beholden to each other, or that there is some singular universe of books that all books must adhere to.

That's exactly what the EU label was meant to indicate for Star Wars tie-ins when it was in use. How soon we forget.

 

[Damian]

It's a term that was originally used for Star Wars and that some fans started using generically because they assumed that everything else had to work like Star Wars, which is both misleading and annoying. (Star Trek came first, damn it.) The fact that somebody wrote a Wikipedia article about it doesn't make it true. The makers of Star Trek tie-ins have never used or endorsed that term.

In a way, Star Wars has become more like Star Trek in the sense now their tie ins are sort of treated like ours now, if I understand it correctly. I never got into Star Wars beyond the films, but as I understood it at one time Star Wars tie-ins had some sort of canon, or continuity value. But as I understand that's no longer the case. So in a way, if that's the case, Star Wars has become more like Star Trek.

Some of us Star Trek novel fans are facing the same conundrum Star Wars fans did, that is with the new Picard show we are looking at large swaths of the novelverse likely coming to an end because they will be inconsistent with the new show (presumably at least). But there is one difference. Star Trek has always operated in that way. Novels were rarely, if ever, taken into consideration when on screen shows are created. Star Wars novel fans thought their stories had at least some continuity value.

And yes, Star Trek came first. And there is way more Star Trek stories then Star Wars out there, if for no other reason we have hundreds of episodes, 13 movies (so we even beat them in movies if I count the number of Star Wars films correctly), and hundreds, maybe thousands of novels. And I hate comparing Star Trek to Star Wars. Other than taking place in space, they share very little in common.

And....Star Trek is way better too

 

[Boris Skrbic]

as I understood it at one time Star Wars tie-ins had some sort of canon, or continuity value. But as I understand that's no longer the case.

George Lucas was even quoted as looking at his EU in similar fashion to how he understood Star Trek tie-ins operated, but the major difference was that a) such tie-ins were tracked, ranked and combined with ongoing retcons b) George Lucas had nothing against using them as a resource, similar to concept art created for the films; he even referred to Sansweet’s encyclopedia to avoid unnecessary conflict with the prequels, and Dave Filoni would later present EU lore to him when they worked on The Clone Wars together.

That principle was maintained following his retirement and Disney’s acquisition, except that the Story Group determined it was possible to create canon tie-ins also, presumably because with George Lucas’s retirement they’d have a full overview of where the films were going and which gaps could be filled safely, with prior, non-Lucas continuity frozen into Legends but used as a day-to-day resource unless there was a major conflict with George Lucas’s ideas on a subject. (For example, they haven’t found it necessary to reimagine things like blaster designations or galactic maps, treating them as shared props to be used in different storytelling.)

 

[Christopher]

In a way, Star Wars has become more like Star Trek in the sense now their tie ins are sort of treated like ours now, if I understand it correctly. I never got into Star Wars beyond the films, but as I understood it at one time Star Wars tie-ins had some sort of canon, or continuity value. But as I understand that's no longer the case. So in a way, if that's the case, Star Wars has become more like Star Trek.

No, just the opposite. Before, the "Expanded Universe" novels, comics, and games maintained a unified continuity among themselves, much like the Pocket Novelverse but encompassing every tie-in, even hand-wavily integrating the earlier stuff that didn't fit like Splinter of the Mind's Eye and the old Marvel comics. However, the prequel films and The Clone Wars, while mining the occasional character and idea from the EU, didn't bother to stay consistent with the allegedly "canonical" tie-ins, and so the publishers of the tie-ins had to retcon and revise their continuity to stay consistent with the new screen canon while pretending it was all still unified (much like the Trek Novelverse did when Enterprise came along and contradicted past portrayals of Andor, the Tholians, etc.). Yes, SW fans were led to believe that the tie-ins had canon value, but that was deceptive. The tie-ins stayed consistent with each other, but the screen productions ignored them except when they found it convenient to borrow a character, species, or the like.

But when Disney bought Star Wars and began developing new shows and films, they made the decision that from then on, everything would be a single, unified canon -- films, TV shows, novels, comics, games, online shorts, everything sharing a consistent, overarching continuity. They chose to disregard the previous tie-in continuity because it had already covered the period of SW history that they wanted to cover in the movies (and had killed off Chewbacca), but every tie-in going forward since 2014 (the first being New Dawn by our own John Jackson Miller) has been treated as absolutely canonical in the way that the previous EU only pretended to be. (At least, that's the claim. It hasn't yet been put to the test whether the movies and shows would really be unwilling to contradict the novels and comics.)

 

[Damian]

No, just the opposite. Before, the "Expanded Universe" novels, comics, and games maintained a unified continuity among themselves, much like the Pocket Novelverse but encompassing every tie-in, even hand-wavily integrating the earlier stuff that didn't fit like Splinter of the Mind's Eye and the old Marvel comics. However, the prequel films and The Clone Wars, while mining the occasional character and idea from the EU, didn't bother to stay consistent with the allegedly "canonical" tie-ins, and so the publishers of the tie-ins had to retcon and revise their continuity to stay consistent with the new screen canon while pretending it was all still unified (much like the Trek Novelverse did when Enterprise came along and contradicted past portrayals of Andor, the Tholians, etc.). Yes, SW fans were led to believe that the tie-ins had canon value, but that was deceptive. The tie-ins stayed consistent with each other, but the screen productions ignored them except when they found it convenient to borrow a character, species, or the like.

But when Disney bought Star Wars and began developing new shows and films, they made the decision that from then on, everything would be a single, unified canon -- films, TV shows, novels, comics, games, online shorts, everything sharing a consistent, overarching continuity. They chose to disregard the previous tie-in continuity because it had already covered the period of SW history that they wanted to cover in the movies (and had killed off Chewbacca), but every tie-in going forward since 2014 (the first being New Dawn by our own John Jackson Miller) has been treated as absolutely canonical in the way that the previous EU only pretended to be. (At least, that's the claim. It hasn't yet been put to the test whether the movies and shows would really be unwilling to contradict the novels and comics.)

Shows you what I know.

In a way, with my continuity fetish you'd think I'd be more of a Star Wars fan. I sometimes complain that Star Trek doesn't stay more consistent within all the various media.

But I can't. Star Trek can sometimes be frustrating with some of that, but Star Trek is still my favorite entertainment franchise. I like it's mostly positive portrayal of the future, it's grounding in some science and reality at least, and at least on screen it's willingness to build on the existing universe (however imperfectly at times) and not do what so many other franchises have done. That is throw away all that came before and start from scratch. Hell,. even the Abrams movies aren't true reboots...they come close but they still sprang from the existing universe.

 

[Prax]

In Star Wars, EU writers were not allowed to create content from the prequel era prior to the films being released, but were confined to writing in the era after the original trilogy, since there was no plans for a sequel trilogy at the time. Lucasfilm has always maintained the continuity Star Wars material, at least from the early 90's onward.

 

[Christopher]

Lucasfilm has always maintained the continuity Star Wars material, at least from the early 90's onward.

Lucasfilm Licensing maintained continuity among the various tie-ins, but the movies and TV shows freely contradicted them, and George Lucas was on record as not considering them even slightly canonical. The prequel films portrayed the Clone Wars in a way that completely overwrote the previous tie-in version established by Timothy Zahn and others, as well as contradicting other EU "canon" about the age and history of the Republic, the identity of Boba Fett, and so forth. Similarly, The Clone Wars's Mandalore episodes contradicted Karen Traviss's ongoing novel series about the Mandalorians. Of course, the films and TCW did mine the EU for characters and concepts quite a bit, as I acknowledged, but only to the extent that the film and TV makers wanted to. They weren't required to stay consistent with all of it the way they allegedly are now.

To get back on topic, if the current and future Star Trek shows do mine the tie-ins for continuity elements, it'll almost certainly be like it was for the EU, an optional thing where they take a concept or character and reinvent it in their own way (like how ENT borrowed some ideas about the Andorians from a gaming supplement).

 

[yotsuya]

Let us step back for a moment and examine the concept. Most often canon does not refer to a current series, but one that is finished. Star Trek was finished in 1969 and for 4 years there was nothing new. Then you have the Animated Series. Some liked it and included it some did not. It took 10 years to get to the first movie so for 10 years canon was pretty set. Every time they bring it back they add on to canon and at some point early in TNG production the chronology became such an issue that the Okudas took on the job of setting the official Chronology that was used for the rest of TNG, DS9, and Voyager. Enterprise came along and was shoehorned in the years just before the Federation (the founding of which was in the Okudas timeline). There were several issues with early Enterprise episodes and either due to fan reaction or following something they had planned all along the seeming errors in the early seasons were brought into line with the previously established canon.

And canon is all the details. From the look of things to character histories to important events... everything represented by the sights and sounds of the audio visual media.

I would say that even though the body of Star Trek is often thought of as a whole, it is really combined of different pieces. Each series really has its own canon, which sometimes is counter to other series.

When this really becomes a problem is with the 2009 film (and its sequels) and Discovery. The original run had a lot of team members in common. Roddenberry started things off and ran TOS, DC Fontana handled the Animated Series, Gene cam back for the first film and then for TNG until his health declined. He handed things off to new people both with the original cast films and TNG and most of those people stuck around through Enterprise. But the new version of Star Trek have no carryovers to speak of and the vision that they have given us is quite distant from the TOS through Enterprise greater canon. Many of us just cannot accept anything from the new productions as part of the original canon or timeline because it is just too different and isn't based on the same level of care that was given to the continuity during the TOS through Enterprise time.

Star Wars, as a film series, has a more limited canon. Officially the animated series are included, but so far those have not deviated from what the films have given.

Both Star Wars and Star Trek have had a huge body of written work in addition to the audio visual work. Neither has ever been considered canon. Only when the original creators hold control over tie-ins can they be considered quasi-canon. When they don't change or disagree with what was established before, they fit well, but as readers of the many ST and SW books know, a great many of them were fun to read, but impossible to fit in with the canon works. Other series suffer the same fate. Doctor Who has a huge number of books, but the only tie-ins that are even contemplated as being canon are the audio dramas (featuring original cast members). Even that isn't truly considered canon. However, both Babylon 5 and Firefly had tie-ins where the creators kept tight reigns on what was done and those have tie-ins that can be or are officially part of the canon.

And no, the creators really don't get a say in what fans consider canon. Creators make the product and the body of the product is the canon. Authors have the same issue with their work. Tolkien's canon is his published work. The films are not his canon, but have their own (there are a variety of differences). Sometimes an author has an early work or later work that is kind of part of a canon of a world they created, but not reallly. Tolkien had a lot of unpublished work that his son has since published, but the question arises as to what he would have included himself. With TV series, and other franchises where the torch is passed to other hands, it is really a matter of how faithful the new creators are to what the old creators did. If they are faithful, the body of fans will accept it as canon. If they are not, many fans will refuse to accept it. This was huge back in the late 80's when TNG came out. A great many fans of TOS were not interested. For some they never accepted it as part of the canon. Others did.

It all boils down to what parts of canon you consider important. I consider it everything presented in audio and visual form. The sights and sounds. When they deliberately change things and provide no continuity reason for the change, it breaks continuity and set the new apart as a separate canon from the old. If they build in reasons for the changes and do it well, it can join the old to make a larger canon. And it is not uncommon for fans to be divided over certain changes. I consider the 25% difference in the look of the Trek universe for Discovery to mark it as enough of a difference that it cannot be in the same canon. That divide is where I draw the line between continuing in the same canon and a reboot. I know others do not share that, but when presented with the very faithful and true to the old canon new installments in other franchises, I just can't accept the new ones as part of the same body of work. The way I see it, we have been presented with three universes. Prime (TOS through Enterprise), The 2009 universe (where Spock arrives and fails to save the Kelvin which results in a different future... but the Kelvin was already in a different universe to start with which is why Spock never tried to fix the timeline), and the Discovery (something where the prime universe events have and likely will transpire, but where nothing looks the same). This gives Star Trek three distinct canons at present that really can't be retconned into one canon.

 

[Christopher]

Let us step back for a moment and examine the concept. Most often canon does not refer to a current series, but one that is finished.

No, it most often applies to a series that has tie-ins, because it basically just means "the original work" and if there's nothing but the original work, then you don't need a specific word for it. And ongoing series are usually more likely to have tie-ins than cancelled or ended ones. There are some exceptions, the really big series like Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, Doctor Who, Buffy, CSI, or Murder, She Wrote (yes, I think they're still doing novels based on that), but most of the time, tie-in lines die out not long after the shows they're based on (just off the top of my head, see Andromeda, The 4400, or Eureka).

So if anything, it's the other way around -- it's a term that's more likely to be applicable to an active, ongoing series that has tie-ins to compare it to than an ended series that no longer has tie-ins or never had more than one or two to begin with.


It sounds like you're making the common mistake of confusing canon with continuity, saying that a series's continuity is only fixed when nothing new is being added to it. That's true, but it's not what the word "canon" means. It just means the stories told by the original creators or owners, even when they contradict each other and change their continuity. Some canons have a tight, largely consistent continuity; others play very fast and loose with continuity and it's merely a pretense that they hold together at all.

And canon is all the details. From the look of things to character histories to important events... everything represented by the sights and sounds of the audio visual media.

Canon is the overall whole, not the individual details. Any long-running continuity is being made up as it goes and will inevitably have inconsistencies, errors, and deliberate revisions on a detail level. The continuity of any work of fiction is as much an imaginary pretense as everything else about it; frequently a continuity will blatantly contradict something it did before and just ask audiences to pretend it was that way all along, like when new Trek productions redesign the Andorians or Tellarites, or like when Marvel recently invented an imaginary, undated Southeast Asian war to take the place of the Vietnam War in the backstories of characters like Iron Man and the Punisher.

I would say that even though the body of Star Trek is often thought of as a whole, it is really combined of different pieces. Each series really has its own canon, which sometimes is counter to other series.

That's true enough. Each series is filtered through its own creators, so each one is a different interpretation in some ways, only pretending to fit together.

When this really becomes a problem is with the 2009 film (and its sequels) and Discovery.

No, that's just the bias of the present day. Fans saw just as huge a problem about the changes in the movies, in TNG, and in ENT, and they protested them just as loudly. Over time, fans gradually adjust to the new information and interpretations and they don't seem as strange or different anymore, so it's always the newest thing that seems more radically different than the older things. But those things seemed just as radically different to fandom when they were new. The complaints I see about DSC today are practically word-for-word the same as the complaints I saw about ENT when it was on.

But the new version of Star Trek have no carryovers to speak of

Except production illustrator John Eaves. He's worked on TFF, TNG, DS9, ENT, DSC, and every TNG and Kelvin movie.

And no, the creators really don't get a say in what fans consider canon.

They don't have to, and they don't want to. That's not something they even care about, because "what fans consider canon" has no actual effect on future productions. The canon will include what it includes even if a certain segment of fans pretends it doesn't. There were fans back in the '80s who refused to count the movies or TNG as part of the same universe as TOS, but that didn't matter in the slightest to the TV and filmmakers who treated them both as part of the same universe. The majority of fans always accept what the screen canon portrays, even though there's always a minority of holdouts who cling to the past.

This gives Star Trek three distinct canons at present that really can't be retconned into one canon.

Of course they can; you just have to be willing to do it. This is all just made-up stories. We're only pretending that any of it happens at all. We all know that it's just a bunch of actors standing around on wooden sets looking at a blank screen that a computer-animated image will be added to later. We just pretend they're people in the future on a real starship. So why is it so much harder to pretend that two different starship or makeup designs, or two different actors playing the same character, are actually the same entity? You can pretend anything if you choose to. The filmmakers don't have to do it for you. You can use your own imagination to reconcile them.

I mean, if you're willing to pretend that everything from TOS to ENT fits together, then you're already ignoring many, many huge contradictions. Multiple Klingon redesigns, multiple Andorian redesigns, numerous contradictions between TWOK and TOS, numerous contradictions within TOS alone or within TNG alone (like Data using contractions and having emotions up until it was suddenly declared he didn't), the contradictions about the Trill between TNG and DS9, the contradictions about the Borg between TNG and VGR, etc. etc. etc. I will never understand people who are perfectly happy to ignore all those hundreds and hundreds of yawning inconsistencies yet claim that they're somehow mentally incapable of doing the same with a few newer inconsistencies. Why was there a cutoff point? Why could you do it before but not now? Have more faith in your own ability to adapt.

 

[yotsuya]

I am aware of that it includes inconsistencies. That is the nature of long works. But long dead works still have a canon (to separate it from fan produced work). Sherlock Holmes for example. I have been involved with several single author fan groups where the biggest inconsistencies lie in the author's earliest and last works. They are not usually too hard to retconn. Star Trek has a number of those in TOS and Enterprise. Doctor Who is famous for those including three versions of the fall of Atlantis. Usually it is when the creator or creative team do not keep good track of what they have decided to do, which can often lead to different decisions over time. Continuity is just when you have someone watching over canon to keep the continuity intact. Star Trek had that at one time. Star Wars still does have it. Doctor Who only gained that when all the extant episodes became available. Continuity and Canon are not the same. The early Trek episodes are full of continuity gaffs, but a fairly consistent canon.

And while John Eaves did work on multiple Trek projects, he was not involved in the creative decisions. Even for Discovery, he was told the parameters and did a mighty fine job given what the producers wanted. The creative team has the biggest impact on canon.

And you yourself said that canon and continuity are not the same and yet your last paragraph is all about lumping them together. Canon, for Star Trek especially, can be narrowed down to the idea of following the writer's bible for the series. Sure that leads to a variety of scripts with continuity errors, but it also leads to final stories that are molded into a unified end product that fans can see the similarities in. Starting in 2009, new Star Trek took a left turn (or right depending on how you want to look at it) from that core Trekness that Roddenberry had created that the creative team had continued to follow through Enterprise. That is the biggest reason I can't reconcile anything between the old and new. It isn't the new characters. It isn't the redesign of everything, it is that change at the core. The movies have gone for glitz and action over substance. Discovery has gone darker and really missed the core idea that Roddenberry had tried to present. It is fine as a reboot because it is good drama, but it fails the test of what set Star Trek apart to fans. Roddenberry was able to recapture that in TNG and they kept at it even though the following series didn't quite live up to it. Enterprise had the essence of that set in an earlier time. So the core of what I consider to be canon includes the ideas and concepts that make it into the final product. Star Wars has always been about a modern myth using old style story telling in space. Star Trek has always been about a better future for humans and other species. Those core ideas are crucial to keeping true to canon. Keeping the visual and story continuity the same is a great plus and is part of showing the audience that they are trying to expand the canon rather than rewrite it. The new Trek has been more interested in rewriting it and paying lip service to the original. They have made such fundamental changes that I feel it requires an entire separate canon because it is so different.

And this isn't about not liking the new stuff. I like Discovery. One of the best SF shows out there right now. But it fails on so many levels and in so many ways to live up to the original. Yes, the original had an abundance of continuity errors and flaws, but it had a very unified message to deliver and it delivered it well. That is why it is still the most popular Star Trek followed closely by TNG.

 

[Christopher]

I am aware of that it includes inconsistencies. That is the nature of long works. But long dead works still have a canon (to separate it from fan produced work).

Yes, and ongoing works have a canon to separate them from fan-produced and licensed work. Sherlock Holmes canon fluctuated quite a bit while it was ongoing; the fact that it's not being added to anymore creates the illusion of uniformity, but while it was active, new stories frequently contradicted older ones. Canon does not mean continuity. It just means who the author of a set of stories is. Any canon that's still being created will change.

Continuity is just when you have someone watching over canon to keep the continuity intact. Star Trek had that at one time.

Up to a point, sure, but it was such a huge franchise from so many hands that the ability to keep it consistent was limited. Get a half-dozen artists to paint the same model and they'll paint a half-dozen different faces. And any creative process involves mistakes, corrections, revisions, and rethinkings, which in the case of an ongoing series will inevitably create inconsistencies. You have to be flexible-minded enough to understand that it's a work of imagination that sometimes gets adjusted on the fly, and choose to suspend disbelief about the imperfections that will inevitably show up despite the creators' best efforts.

And you yourself said that canon and continuity are not the same and yet your last paragraph is all about lumping them together.

The word "canon" does not appear at all in my last paragraph.

Canon, for Star Trek especially, can be narrowed down to the idea of following the writer's bible for the series.

Wow, really, no. Writers' "bibles" are not actually binding. They're just suggestions. Shows contradict or ignore their bibles all the time. For instance, the TNG bible originally said that Data was built by aliens and his name rhymed with "that-a," that Riker was prejudiced against androids, that Geordi was a liaison with the ship's children, etc. Worf wasn't even in it originally. The Enterprise bible said that Captain Jackson Archer's first officer was T'Pau, his crew included "Spike" Tucker and Joe Mayweather, and the transporter wouldn't become rated for human use until late in the first season.

A writers' bible is not something that Must Be Obeyed. Fiction doesn't work that way. A writers' bible is a guideline for freelancers, a primer on the basics of the show -- the premise, the characters, the terminology, the basic stuff they need to know to come up with ideas. Bibles start out as just suggestions, rough sketches that get polished along the way. Often their suggestions are abandoned because a writer came up with a better idea to replace them. Bibles get rewritten from season to season to stay current with the changes that the actual scripts have introduced. The bible follows the lead of the show, not the other way around.

Starting in 2009, new Star Trek took a left turn (or right depending on how you want to look at it) from that core Trekness that Roddenberry had created that the creative team had continued to follow through Enterprise.

Fifteen or so years ago, when fans were ferociously denouncing Enterprise as a perversion, corruption, betrayal, and insult toward everything that Star Trek had been from TOS to Voyager, I predicted that years down the road, people would have come to accept Enterprise as an integral part of the whole along with everything before it, and would denounce the next new thing as irreconcilably wrong. You've just proven me right. So I can confidently guarantee that 15-20 years from now, most fans will accept Kelvin and Discovery as integral parts of the whole stretching back to TOS and will be stubbornly insisting that whatever new Trek series is being made then will be impossible to reconcile. This happens every. Single. Time. So don't expect me to take your view seriously.

 

[Damian]

Except production illustrator John Eaves.

And while John Eaves did work on multiple Trek projects, he was not involved in the creative decisions.

I would say John Eaves is sort of an informal adviser to the production staff, in addition to his design work. I remember reading somewhere that Scott Chambliss, the production designer for Star Trek (2009) noted Eaves prior experience was very valuable. Abrams wanted to do something new with Star Trek, but still thought it was important to be familiar. You can be new and familiar at the same time. Chambliss had noted Eaves provided some insight, or advice, about the ships seen destroyed around Vulcan for instance. Eaves is also very good at his job, which I'm sure helps. But for all the changes Abrams and the current showrunners made to production design (some that I admit bug me) keeping someone on staff from the Berman era tells me they at least wanted some continuity with the prior shows in some fashion.

Plus illustrators are more than just artists. I know Rick Sternbach has said a couple times there are reasons things are where they are. They don't just put something in to look cool. It has to have some purpose. Even if it's fiction, they wanted to be realistic. So don't underestimate the production guys influence.

I mean, if you're willing to pretend that everything from TOS to ENT fits together, then you're already ignoring many, many huge contradictions.

I admit, for myself, I've done that to some extent. I've always said I was a bit more flexible with Enterprise because they had a real challenge, how to make it less advanced than the original series while being more advanced than today. I knew some liberties would need to be taken. But I liked what they did with Enterprise. They struck a good balance. I had the same philosophy when Discovery came out, but just personally felt they didn't address it being less advanced than the original series all that well. If anything Discovery feels more advanced than TNG in many ways. I personally felt they failed in that area, and I have some issues with the continuity, yes. Before Discovery, Enterprise felt like it led to the original series, which led to the movies, which led to TNG-DS9-Voy all pretty well overall. Not to the last detail, but just in an overall worldbuilding sense. I found Discovery threw that really out of whack. At times it felt Discovery would be better taking place after Voyager. At least for the 1st season it does not at all feel contemporary to the original series. For me personally, that's a difference. Enterprise felt like it could be 100 years pre-original series for the most part. Discovery does not feel 10 years pre-original series.

Up to a point, sure, but it was such a huge franchise from so many hands that the ability to keep it consistent was limited. Get a half-dozen artists to paint the same model and they'll paint a half-dozen different faces. And any creative process involves mistakes, corrections, revisions, and rethinkings, which in the case of an ongoing series will inevitably create inconsistencies. You have to be flexible-minded enough to understand that it's a work of imagination that sometimes gets adjusted on the fly, and choose to suspend disbelief about the imperfections that will inevitably show up despite the creators' best efforts.

I tend to agree with you there. The only way Star Trek would ever have been able to maintain that kind of consistency would have been at the outset. Someone would have had to have decided Star Trek was going to be neat and tidy all along from the beginning. And even then, things change even with the same people. You yourself noted with your own created works you've made adjustments. It'd be next to impossible to maintain a static continuity in a fictional work. And as much as I love continuity, it would likely stifle creativity. I don't mind creativity per se. I only wish new showrunners would have a sort of baseline they work off of. It's a personal bugaboo, I freely admit, and others feel differently, some want it to be almost wholly consistent with what came before, and others would love it if they truly started over and completely ignored all that came before. So I get half of what I want, that is, for all my complaints, Discovery is part of the same universe as the original series and Enterprise. It's still part of the big picture. I don't care for full on reboots.

Why was there a cutoff point? Why could you do it before but not now? Have more faith in your own ability to adapt.

Hopefully for me that comes in time as you say. I'm the odd one out on that score, because I never felt the way some did about Enterprise. I didn't have a problem accepting it as part of the existing Star Trek universe. And the Abrams movies gave me a pretty good out with the whole alternate universe idea (though I admit there are still some inconsistencies there that bug me a bit). Discovery is the first time I felt like a Star Trek series seemed out of place. I like other aspects of Discovery. But it feels out of place for me.

But opinions change. I thought I was going to hate Tilley. But she grew on me and won me over with that line of hers "If I were your captain I'd cut your tongue out and use it to lick my boot". That has got to be the most AWESOME LINE EVER

 

[yotsuya]

Yes, and ongoing works have a canon to separate them from fan-produced and licensed work. Sherlock Holmes canon fluctuated quite a bit while it was ongoing; the fact that it's not being added to anymore creates the illusion of uniformity, but while it was active, new stories frequently contradicted older ones. Canon does not mean continuity. It just means who the author of a set of stories is. Any canon that's still being created will change.




Up to a point, sure, but it was such a huge franchise from so many hands that the ability to keep it consistent was limited. Get a half-dozen artists to paint the same model and they'll paint a half-dozen different faces. And any creative process involves mistakes, corrections, revisions, and rethinkings, which in the case of an ongoing series will inevitably create inconsistencies. You have to be flexible-minded enough to understand that it's a work of imagination that sometimes gets adjusted on the fly, and choose to suspend disbelief about the imperfections that will inevitably show up despite the creators' best efforts.




The word "canon" does not appear at all in my last paragraph.

I know you didn't use the word, but you were still on the same topic.

Wow, really, no. Writers' "bibles" are not actually binding. They're just suggestions. Shows contradict or ignore their bibles all the time. For instance, the TNG bible originally said that Data was built by aliens and his name rhymed with "that-a," that Riker was prejudiced against androids, that Geordi was a liaison with the ship's children, etc. Worf wasn't even in it originally. The Enterprise bible said that Captain Jackson Archer's first officer was T'Pau, his crew included "Spike" Tucker and Joe Mayweather, and the transporter wouldn't become rated for human use until late in the first season.

A writers' bible is not something that Must Be Obeyed. Fiction doesn't work that way. A writers' bible is a guideline for freelancers, a primer on the basics of the show -- the premise, the characters, the terminology, the basic stuff they need to know to come up with ideas. Bibles start out as just suggestions, rough sketches that get polished along the way. Often their suggestions are abandoned because a writer came up with a better idea to replace them. Bibles get rewritten from season to season to stay current with the changes that the actual scripts have introduced. The bible follows the lead of the show, not the other way around.

I was talking about the concept of the show not the specifics. When you get a show going and things are put in order, the writer's bible is going to provide a good guide to what the show is about underneath the individual stories. Sure the first versions are going to have discarded concepts, but when it is in its prime, it is a great summary of the creators' intent. TOS has had books and books published about it. TNG followed that model, even to the extent that stories originally intended for the TOS crew were reworked for the new crew and some of the key creative minds were back to get TNG on its feet. I'm really hoping that the new Picard show manages to recapture that essence. I have yet to see the second season of Discovery, but the first failed. Good drama, but it is missing that core the Gene used to set it apart from other science fiction.

Fifteen or so years ago, when fans were ferociously denouncing Enterprise as a perversion, corruption, betrayal, and insult toward everything that Star Trek had been from TOS to Voyager, I predicted that years down the road, people would have come to accept Enterprise as an integral part of the whole along with everything before it, and would denounce the next new thing as irreconcilably wrong. You've just proven me right. So I can confidently guarantee that 15-20 years from now, most fans will accept Kelvin and Discovery as integral parts of the whole stretching back to TOS and will be stubbornly insisting that whatever new Trek series is being made then will be impossible to reconcile. This happens every. Single. Time. So don't expect me to take your view seriously.

I didn't have a problem with any of the Trek series when they started. I loved all of them in some ways. But there came a time when they stopped doing anything really new or fresh and the episodes just kind of ran together. There were gems, but just a lot of sameness. Still very Trek, but not very interesting. Each series has had its fans, but in my view the quality has dropped with each new addition to the franchise. The lowest points, in my opinion, were Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek Into Darkness. Both poorly written. But Generations was very much Trek where Into Darkness tried and failed to find that Trek spark. They couldn't even do it by stealing from the greatest of the Trek films. They created a film that was exactly what Star Trek should not be. It was exciting but no substance where Star Trek always had nice meaty substance to all the great stories. Even the novels usually managed to capture that even if their continuity was so off as to be laughable.

For me, canon is that combination of continuity, concept, execution, writing, art direction, special effects... basically the complete package. Sure not every installment gets things right but every installment should feel like part of the whole - or at least closely related. My issue with the new Trek and why I think they follow a different canon is that they don't feel like part of that. Even that nice episode in Discovery season 2 with clips from The Cage. They tried, but they still couldn't make me feel it was part of the same Trek universe as TOS and TNG. Enterprise at least did that even if the continuity was strained if not completely off.

 

[WebLurker]

I mean, if you're willing to pretend that everything from TOS to ENT fits together, then you're already ignoring many, many huge contradictions. Multiple Klingon redesigns, multiple Andorian redesigns, numerous contradictions between TWOK and TOS, numerous contradictions within TOS alone or within TNG alone (like Data using contractions and having emotions up until it was suddenly declared he didn't), the contradictions about the Trill between TNG and DS9, the contradictions about the Borg between TNG and VGR, etc. etc. etc. I will never understand people who are perfectly happy to ignore all those hundreds and hundreds of yawning inconsistencies yet claim that they're somehow mentally incapable of doing the same with a few newer inconsistencies. Why was there a cutoff point? Why could you do it before but not now? Have more faith in your own ability to adapt.

IMHO, continuity errors in a franchise can usually be chalked up to roughly two kinds, the "typos" that can be easily overlooked (like a throwaway line being wrong about some detail, a recast, boom mikes, etc.) vs. ones that actually "break" something (e.g. render certain story elements elsewhere in the franchise "impossible" to take place, break the "rules" to work, something where you really can't reconcile it with the overall canon, biggies like, for example, if one was to try and fit Strangers From the Sky or the Space Flight Chronology into modern canon).

Between that, I think we all have our own standards on which mistakes can be glossed over (either due to being the usual kind that pop up in franchises or having a simple rationalization that doesn't stretch credibility too much). Case in point, you bring up the TNG/VOY Borg contradictions, I ask "what contradictions?" I point out that the DSC Enterprise redesign doesn't make much sense, given that it's sandwiched between materials showing a different design was around during this era, you say "artistic license."

Heck, you, as someone who followed most of the different Star Trek installments in real time say that pre-DSC Trek can't been seen as anything other then a loose collection of different versions of an idea. I, who came into it around the time that ENT was new, ask how can it be seen as anything other then a unified whole?

 

[Boris Skrbic]

But suppose canon were almost made irrelevant by making each Star Trek production as wildly independent from others as possible, by giving fans what they couldn’t know they wanted because characters and places just didn’t exist before? I mean that’s a large part of how the MCU operates, except that most elements did exist but weren’t in the public consciousness necessarily, starting with Iron Man himself.

Why then could the MCU become an anthology of films and even genres (minus the Avengers throughline) yet Star Trek is now stuck following up on the good-old? Where is the confidence to do a comedy or a legal drama or a university series set on Andoria and see how they relate to the words Star Trek? I see here 48 pages of debating side effects, but the core creative issue is this desire to reimagine while also calling forward or back, not just to do something risky and either succeed or fail, using canon merely as punctuation (“I need something contemporary-looking, so the year will be what, let’s see, er, 2396? Couldn’t care less since it hardly affects my show.”)

 

[yotsuya]

IMHO, continuity errors in a franchise can usually be chalked up to roughly two kinds, the "typos" that can be easily overlooked (like a throwaway line being wrong about some detail, a recast, boom mikes, etc.) vs. ones that actually "break" something (e.g. render certain story elements elsewhere in the franchise "impossible" to take place, break the "rules" to work, something where you really can't reconcile it with the overall canon, biggies like, for example, if one was to try and fit Strangers From the Sky or the Space Flight Chronology into modern canon).

Between that, I think we all have our own standards on which mistakes can be glossed over (either due to being the usual kind that pop up in franchises or having a simple rationalization that doesn't stretch credibility too much). Case in point, you bring up the TNG/VOY Borg contradictions, I ask "what contradictions?" I point out that the DSC Enterprise redesign doesn't make much sense, given that it's sandwiched between materials showing a different design was around during this era, you say "artistic license."

Heck, you, as someone who followed most of the different Star Trek installments in real time say that pre-DSC Trek can't been seen as anything other then a loose collection of different versions of an idea. I, who came into it around the time that ENT was new, ask how can it be seen as anything other then a unified whole?

I totally agree. And I've been a Trekkie for 40 years. I saw the premier of each series. Even Discovery. I'm very forgiving of the minor continuity errors. I feel that TOS through Enterprise makes a good solid canon.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

I totally agree. And I've been a Trekkie for 40 years. I saw the premier of each series. Even Discovery. I'm very forgiving of the minor continuity errors. I feel that TOS through Enterprise makes a good solid canon.

You have to take degrees of consistency into account. Since TNG at least, the core idea has been that whatever we’ve seen remains unchanged (“How did Talos IV go down?” “Watch ‘The Menagerie’”), however well or poorly it may fit together, however successful or not a workaround may have been, whereas DSC seems to take its cue from recasting in reimagining everything else. Star Trek should not work like Batman, because the continuity principle encourages infinite diversity in infinite combinations. You want an updated look? Guess what, the year must be 2396 and so you can‘t have Kirk.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Time to wheel this old thing out again: