Which 23rd Century is canon?

There's a ready-made excuse for that, though, it's all part of the cosmetic surgery he went through to become 'John Harrison'.

The fact that nobody recognized him as Khan on sight is proof of that.

 

The producers set the stage for viewers to pick with the strong development of one Catwoman, and allowed the movie version to be considered non-canonical when the series version was supposed to be dead at the same time, as noted in the series.

Film and TV has to make some sort of sense, otherwise, its Lego bricks for an airplane tossed in a box, shaken, then dumped on the floor for anyone to make a house out of it, when clearly, the manufacturer intention was to build a plane.

 

As opposed to "Space Seed", where it took them half the episode to figure out who he was?

 

I don't buy that. Right now, a LOT of people don't know the faces of most famous and infamous people from 50 years ago, let alone a century ago.

Most people in the 23rd century are certainly not going to know faces of people from 300 years ago.

As Jinn pointed out above, it took research to find out his identity. The typical person and most higher ups, if any, won't recognize Khan immediately.

 

They are all all canon but TOS is what it is supposed to look like. Just ignore the look of the others

 

Okay but which TOS?

 

TOS is canon! And everything built upon the TOS storyline is canon.
The storylines in Enterprise, Discovery and the NuTrek movies are just illusions.
Or more correctly: The storylines in Enterprise, Discovery and the NuTrek movies are just crap. The result of stupid producers and writers trying to set their mark on Star Trek instead of adapting to what is official canon.

 

People get wound up about the ships changing but then are okay that Jeffrey Hunter turns into Anson Mount, Bruce Greenwood and Sean Kenney. So what in the future are humans part shapeshifter or some shit?
R2D2 was in the Battle of Vulcan and the Millenium Falcon fought the Borg.

 

Does Jim Kirk have hazel or blue eyes? Does Spock have earlobes or not? Does the Borg Queen have a lisp? Whether it's these minor changes or bigger ones like April or Khan's ethnicity, it's basically the same thing. Recast characters, recast ship models and set designs.

 

I have never really had any problem with recasting parts. Reality happens where this kind of thing becomes necessary.

And I almost never have an issue with a ship redesign.

Except the Abrams Enterprise. They turned a beautiful, sleek, graceful, elegant ship of exploration into a ridiculous damned hotrod. It was such a terrible redesign. It was a final straw for me when I first saw pictures of that ship... I never bothered to watch that or INTO DARKNESS in the theaters. (I watched BEYOND in the theaters primarily because it was the 50th anniversary of ST. I was surprised to find that, despite some things I thought were ludicrous, it was by far the best of the Kelvin movies.)

I would imagine most people have at least one thing that puts their mind in a 'I can't do this' phase when it comes to updates or recastings or redesigns.

 

Yes, it dies because this isn't literal history.

Recasting makes it make less sense?

Doesn't make it less canon.

Exactly. It's not taking anything away from previous installments. It's allowing others to play and create inside the framework of Star Trek.

 

But the new shoes do make isense, so where's the problem?
There has been no part in DISC, SNW or LD where I was pulled out of the story because it made no sense. And if it happened then it would sure as hell no be because of visual inconsistency with an incarnation from 60 years ago.

And considering how successful NuTrek is, the question whether it's 100% visually consistent with TOS doesn't seem to be that important for large parts of the viewership.

 

I agree about the visual aspect not pulling me out of the story.

But I would definitely argue that season 2 of DISCO pulled me out of the story because the stories made so little sense. (Red Angel, Section 31) Honestly, the only good thing about season 2 is it brought us Mount, Peck, Romijn, and a good redesign of the Enterprise.

 

I will say the over-arcing plot of DISC is not my favourite aspect of the series, which is the reason why I don't watch DISC (I like the characters, but not the story arcs)
But if we go by that, all Star Trek shows (including TOS!) have episodes or stories that are pretty dumb. It's not something endemic to New Trek.
And yeah, thankfully Season 2 brought us the beginning of a Star Trek show that is more to my liking.

My point was that NuTrek is not some sort of logic-less collapsing mess of "lego bricks" (whut?), only because it doesn't always fit with TOS

 

Both are canon. The canon is simply the body of work. Whether it's consistent or not is an entirely different matter.

Kor

 

Spoiler

It's not

 

It is? Because we know what the future is supposed to look like?

Tongue in cheek, but that is my struggle. Star Trek is not history, it is not a period piece. It is designed as an imagination of our current humanity's future and interpreted through a contemporary lens. So, TOS is a 60s view, TMP more 70s, etc. This idea that this is a strict continuity of what it "should" look like is frustrating because it allows for no new information about technology for that period. It's locked.

 

Spoiler

It never was

 

I think It does when it's crap and totally screws up what has been established.

it would be a difference if it was well done and with an explanation why a ship in a pre-TOS series looks more like a ship from the 24th century than a ship from the 23th century.

 

Agreed about the characters and arcs on DISCO.

But to clarify, I'm not saying it was a problem because the plot itself was dumb. My problem is that it took up the whole season. At least with the older shows, a dumb plot only took up a single episode... two if it's a bad two-parter, like "UNIMATRIX ZERO". But not a season or even half a season. That's where you lose me.