Has there been any word that there are sequels planned following Star Trek XI or do you guys figure, that if the new movie hits off well that there will be automatically follow-ups set in that timeframe using the 'new' crew?
The actors are signed for three movies, but that's standard these days. If the film does well, there will be sequels. Heck, there have even been sequels to Trek films that didn't do so well, so I figure this movie would have to perform disastrously at the box office and on DVD in order for there not to be sequels.
And I would assume that there will be tie-ins set in the continuity of the film. If that's the current face of
Star Trek, then it only makes sense to tie into it. Although since it has been declared a parallel timeline that doesn't replace the old, I'm sure that such tie-ins could coexist with the current Trek-lit continuity or other books/comics set in the original history.
Well, the Picard, Riker, Guinan, Tasha, etc. in "Yesterday's Enterprise" are definitely the same people, just having different life experiences. That's what's happening here. It's not like Galactica where you have a totally new cast of characters with similar names. These are supposed to be the same Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc. that we know, with the same genetics and the same personalities, just living their lives under modified circumstances.
I suppose, but that distinction doesn't mean that a story set in the "Yesterday's Enterprise" timeline would've been what the casual viewer was looking for in a TNG film. Much like your comments in another thread about how tie-ins are meant to evoke the same feel as the source material, fans (and even licence-holders, as you say) want to see stories that "fit."
A casual viewer isn't going to care in the least whether Kirk went to the
Farragut or the
Enterprise after the Academy, or whether Sulu was an astrophysicist before he was a helmsman. All that matters to the casual viewer is whether the characters' personalities and relationships are the ones they know. That actually
is what I'm saying in the other thread: that what matters most isn't the nitpicky details of consistency between stories, but the overall flavor and feel. I didn't say "stories that fit." Detailed continuity matters to geeks like you and me, but to most viewers, all that matters is that Kirk's heroic, Spock's logical, McCoy's acerbic, etc.
The writers want the fans who are actually thinking about this to "relax, it's an alternate timeline," but that gives us an origin story where those same fans would presumably want the origin story of the Kirk et al. they already know--not merely "the same genetics and the same personalities," but also the same circumstances--and not some sort of hybrid where we'd have to work out which bits could fit into the original and which absolutely can't.
OTOH, the writers also (presumably) want the casual or new fan who's not thinking about this to perceive their version of the crew as the crew, i.e. "This is the 'True Story' of how that crew you all at least vaguely know about got together." They don't want viewers to think that well, this is one way they could've gotten together, but not the way the crew as seen in TOS actually got together in the original timeline.
In other words, they want to do a reboot without having most people realise it's a reboot.
Well, yeah, but that's not gonna matter one damn bit to the casual or new fan. For that matter, it probably won't be an overriding priority to the majority of existing fans, because I'm sure that most fans out there still remember that this is fiction, that there is no "True Story" because it's
all made up, and that what matters most is whether a story is enjoyable and intelligent, not whether it "fits."
And yes, it's a tradeoff, but that's the fault of Trek fans for getting so obsessive about continuity in the first place. You just know that if they'd gone for a full reboot, a lot of fans would've been screaming for blood, and if they'd tried to pass it off as being in the original continuity, a lot of other fans would've been crying foul at every tiny inconsistency and retconning it into an alternate timeline anyway, like some have done with ENT. We're a difficult audience to please. I think this is a reasonable tradeoff. Sure, I would've been happy with a totally in-continuity origin (so long as it was consistent), and I would've been happy with a total new-universe reboot (so long as it retained the spirit of ST), but this is an approach that has its merits too.
In fact, as a novelist, I think I'm happiest with this approach. Not only does it mean that the movie won't supersede the existing novel continuity, but it also means that there will be elements of this movie that can potentially be folded into the existing novel continuity (i.e. things like historical events, planets, species, ships, etc. if not specific story events). So it's a source of new material, but one that doesn't jeopardize old books. From a novelist's perspective, that's probably the best outcome we could've gotten.
Even though the writers have clearly given some thought to the changed circumstances, I doubt they thought about this much beyond the desire to have The Big Seven all appear in the movie.
And that's a very reasonable desire for the filmmakers to have. After all, a film does have to be made with the casual audience in mind. The mass of moviegoers don't want to see Kirk, Spock, Piper, Mitchell, Kelso, and Alden. They want to see the crew they know from decades of cultural osmosis.
Remember, Vonda McIntyre did the same thing when she wrote Kirk's first mission in
Enterprise: The First Adventure. She had Mitchell injured so he wasn't available for the mission. She had McCoy instead of Piper, Uhura instead of Alden, Sulu at helm instead of astrophysics, and Chekov aboard on the night shift.
Anecdotally, I know I encountered initial resistance from people I know because Chekov's presence seemed implausible from an age perspective.
That does bother me. I would've preferred it if they'd saved Chekov for the sequels. But then, I never liked Chekov much anyway. And I can understand their reasons, as discussed above.
That's sort of like asking how I feel about
Dr Who and the Daleks or
Death Comes to Time or
Scream of the Shalka--they're not necessarily inferior stories
qua stories, but they're comparatively shunted to the side in the face of the meta-narrative. Even you said you're putting the movie with those alternate-timeline stories and not with your (presumably much larger) ST Chronology file.
But that's not a value judgment, merely a cataloguing convenience. My Alternate Timelines page
is part of the overall Chronology file. Putting a book there doesn't mean it's inferior, it just means that it isn't consistent with the main timeline. (Heck, my own
Places of Exile is in the Alternate Timelines page for obvious reasons. And my own "Empathy" is in the Mirror Universe page. That doesn't mean I consider those stories inferior to my other works.)
Right, but the advertising for the movie isn't trying to convey that this is a timeline where, as Rom would say, "Everything's alternate;" it's trying to evoke TOS (despite the changes) in a way that implies it's the same timeline.
I would submit that the ad campaign is decidedly
not trying to evoke a sense of sameness with TOS; on the contrary, it's aggressively saying "This is a new
Star Trek, this is a whole new approach you haven't seen before." But that's got nothing to do with "timelines," because most viewers
don't care about "timelines" one way or the other. They just want to be entertained.
Other people have used comic-book characters for comparison, but that seems like a limited analogy. This is more like what would have happened if The Phantom Menace had come out and Lucasfilm said that from this point on, there'd still be Jedi and Skywalkers and Han Solo and everybody else, but the events of The Original Trilogy don't happen in this new timeline...
Except he wouldn't have needed to. That's a bad analogy, because the OT is only six hours or so of content. The existing Trek continuity set in the 23rd and 24th centuries is closer to six
hundred hours' worth of material. That's a lot more restrictive to a storyteller attempting to do a prequel. If Lucas had had that much
canonical material to contend with, he very well might have chosen the alternate-timeline route.
Because continuity is not the reason why stories are told. It's a secondary or tertiary concern. The key concern of a storyteller is having the freedom to tell a story in the best possible way. And if continuity gets in the way of that, then you toss it right out the window and tell the damn story the way it needs to be told.
...and now that I think about it, this whole explanation puts a lie to the writers' other explanation that there was "no way" to fit Kirk into the movie because he died in Generations. If this is an alternate timeline, why not have an older, alternate Kirk who didn't experience those events?
That doesn't make sense, because Old Spock is from the same timeline where Kirk died in GEN. What you're proposing would require bringing in an old Spock from one future and an old Kirk from a completely different future. That would be prohibitively confusing and would serve no story purpose.
Besides, they didn't just leave out a Shatner cameo because they couldn't find a
technically workable way to do it -- they left him out because there was no
dramatically meaningful way to do it, nothing that would've actually served the story rather than just being a contrived, gimmicky cameo.
Conversely, however, one common criticism of the Ultimate Marvel universe is that it spends much of its time retelling stories which already occurred on "Earth-616" rather than truly charting a new direction. If the Abramsverse tie-ins end up being dominated by "a new version of 'Space Seed,'" "a new version of 'Amok Time,'" etc. I (at least) won't feel that satisfied.
I think that's a valid point. Although I'm curious about how certain events might happen differently, I wouldn't want that to be the overriding thrust of such a book line.
On the other hand, some events would be likely to happen in both timelines -- the Klingon invasion of Organia, Spock's
pon farr, the attacks of the Doomsday Machine and V'Ger, etc. It would be unbelievable to leave things like that completely out. (When the
Witchblade TV series reset time at the end of the first season, I was frustrated that the second season totally ignored first-season events that should've been happening again, yet gave no explanation for why they didn't.) So hopefully a balance could be struck. Though it's really too soon to speculate.
For me, personally, I just wish this whole movie (which is intended to be the "face" of the franchise for millions of people now) could be part of that existing "Harold" ST-Prime meta-narrative.
Well, it begins in "Harold" (I'm coming to regret starting that joke), and is a consequence of events that happen there (Nero's past, Spock's pursuit of him), so at least it's definitively linked to the prime continuity. It's not a totally disconnected thing. But I think there's merit in a fresh start.
) then I won't be buying any Trek books other than the TNG/DS9 ones.
