Why Do We Demand Internal Consistency & Continuity in Star Trek?

[Samuel]

It has been a frequent thing for decades among Star Trek fans: "This happened in this episode so why does this happen instead in a later episode" and stuff like that.

Why do we care or bother?

Other television series seldom do. Take the famous western "Daniel Boone". Built around an actual historical figure and often featuring other historical figures and historical events. Yet it paid no heed whatsoever to internal or historical consistency or continuity.

One episode in the third season focused on a plot to assassinate President George Washington.

Yet later that season, several episodes concerned events in the Revolutionary War and made reference to General Washington. Fully a decade BEFORE Washington became president.

Another episode focused on former Vice President's Aaron Burr's plot to set up his own country in the American southwest. This occurred fully 30 years after most of the events in the series.

So why do we make such a big deal about a science fiction series set in the future being internally inconsistent?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Why not?

 

[Sophie74656]

I tend to do this with everything i watch.

I guess i feel like of you set a rule for your universe you should follow it.

 

[Brass]

It is after all just a TV show, so some people get too caught up in the particulars.For me, as long as the show has a good story and good characters, the technobabble stuff doesn't bother me. IMO star trek is at its best when focusing on social/human issues.

That said, it is important that the technological barriers/rules be consistent in a sci-fi show, which ST is generally good at but I am sure folks can chime in with times they are not.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

I think a lot of Trek fans want to treat it as such because it's a world they want to be in.

If only they could visit Talos IV.

 

[Greg Cox]

Who is this "we" you speak of?

Seriously, I suspect that matters more to some viewers than others. It's a spectrum, not a consensus.

 

[BillJ]

I think it is more of them selling something as a prequel or a sequel to something else. If something is sold to me as one or the other, I expect it to line up, mostly.

 

[eschaton]

I think a lot of it goes back to the short run of TOS, its growing cult popularity in the 1970s, and the huge gap until TNG started up.

Basically the fandom was crazy about Trek, but really, there was a very limited body of work available. So it was rewatched again and again, and endlessly over-analyzed. Fanwank theories to explain everything became popular in zines. By the time the "Berman era" started, the die was basically cast, with Trekkies being a particular type of continuity nerd.

In contrast, I think if Phase 2 ever got off the ground - or even moreso, if like Dr. Who it ran continuously for decades - no one would give a flip about canon.

 

[Kor]

I don't understand why we wouldn't expect a reasonable amount of consistency. It's just part of good, believable world-building, especially in recent media. This wasn't expected with older episodic TV, as each episode was basically a self-contained, standalone story. TOS was remarkably consistent for a show of its era.

Kor

 

[The Wormhole]

It's mostly situational. If continuity or canon stand in the way of telling a good story, then they are ejectable. That said, if you're going to promise to adhere to continuity and canon, and then make no absolute effort, that's on you. *Cough*Disco*Cough*

 

[2takesfrakes]

Unemotional Vulcans are what I feel could've done with some consistency. They've been played like Lord of the Rings elves for so long, it's laughable. Yes, they use "logical" as their catchphrase along with LLAP, but they'd stopped being unemotional during the DS9 years. Even before that, once Spock returned from the grave. It was like Nimoy didn't give a shit, anymore ... but thank Providence for Tim Russ' performance in VOY. He got it. Otherwise, I'm not particularly bothered by inconsistency, in STAR TREK. All I really want to remain consistently the same in this franchise is the portrayal of a positive future for Humanity. That sense of hope for the future, to me, that's really what separates STAR TREK from the rest of sci-fi ... not that I'm a connoisseur, or anything. I just like that STAR TREK has that!

 

[Sophie74656]

It's mostly situational. If continuity or canon stand in the way of telling a good story, then they are ejectable. That said, if you're going to promise to adhere to continuity and canon, and then make no absolute effort, that's on you. *Cough*Disco*Cough*

This this this

 

[BillJ]

Unemotional Vulcans are what I feel could've done with some consistency.

Vulcans were never unemotional, they buried their emotions to varying degrees of success. T'Pring wanted Stonn, and Stonn wanted her. That is an emotion, it is called desire.

T'PRING: Stonn wanted me, I wanted him.

There was also Stonn, who wanted very much to be my consort, and I wanted him.

Spock tried to be the idealized Vulcan for a while, much like Worf tried to be an idealized Klingon. But neither were ever reflective of the realities of their cultures.

 

[Kor]

Spock even noted how flawlessly logical T'Pring's plan was, when the whole purpose of the plan was to serve the emotion of desire! To me, that's a good example Vulcan logic in action in the TOS era.

Kor

 

[MacLeod]

It's mostly situational. If continuity or canon stand in the way of telling a good story, then they are ejectable. That said, if you're going to promise to adhere to continuity and canon, and then make no absolute effort, that's on you. *Cough*Disco*Cough*

I agree with you to a degree, but you can't for example

Ep1: We can't back up the EMH
Ep 7: Have a backup of the EMH appear
Ep 16: We can't back up the EMH

Which is it? The worst continuity errors are when the writers ignore limitations they themselves imposed on themselves. You want to get around the limitation then explain to me why it no longer applies don't treat me as an idiot.

And really expecting viewers to remember what happened in previous episodes wasn't even a new thing in the 1990's. Shows like Dallas were doing it in the 1980's.

But I suspect the more we are caught up in a story/characters the more we tend to overlook any continuity errors, whilst the less engaged we the more those errors become apparent.

 

[BillJ]

But I suspect the more we are caught up in a story/characters the more we tend to overlook any continuity errors, whilst the less engaged we the more those errors become apparent.

Yep. The reason Discovery sticks out like a sore thumb for me is that the writers simply didn't give us an engaging story.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Trek was one of the first sprawling franchises to have internal consistency. Yes, it was a lot of illusion, but it was a fun game to see where everything linked up, and they merched the hell out of it with chronology and encyclopedia books.

Then Enterprise came along, and very blatantly squeezed a new, ultra-famous Starship Enterprise into the continuity 100 before the ship from TOS. And in this crew's adventures, they "pre-did" all of Kirk's firsts. Changes were made to the existing continuity in order to squeeze this new show in. And then it was followed by a modern blockbuster re-imagining of the original series, and now a prequel series which deliberately and completely changes the Klingon anatomy and starships (moreso even than in 1979, where at least the ship and prop design was largely intact) and even gives us a new look USS Enterprise NCC-1701 while the producers insisting it's part of the same world as the original series and that nothing has changed.

 

[Butters]

To me it’s about consistency and suspension of disbelief. Break your own rules and I’m pulled out of the story and back to the sofa.

I don’t want to be reminded that I’m watching a TV show by the TV show that I’m watching. I want to be immersed for an hour in a story steeped in something other. Continuity errors, canon violations, technobulshit, it just spoils the experience.

I can cope with retcons, I welcome visual updates and stylistic changes, but please stick to the rules. When the rules of the fictional world are robust, you can drop hints, foreshadow, lay breadcrumb trails, and I can feel smart that I figured it out, my reward for loyal viewership.

But when you change the rules half way through, Moffat, throw a curved ball, just so I didn’t see it, and the writer outsmarts the viewer, that’s just wanky.

It matters because it matters.

 

[lawman]

It's not just about Star Trek for me (although other posters have offered some interesting insights about things that set Trek apart). I care about continuity in all the fiction I consume. It matters to me within a single story, and it matters even more to me as part of worldbuilding across a multi-story fictional reality.

So it bugs me when story elements (and visuals) in DSC undermine parts of the show it's supposed to be a prequel to, yes. But it also bugs me when the Marvel and DC comic-book universes use "sliding timelines" that keep attempting to pack more and more events into a short span of years and make it impossible for the characters to have any connection to historical events. It bugs me when Arthur Conan Doyle writes a Sherlock Holmes story explicitly set in 1892, even though that's in the middle of the three-year period he had previously established that Holmes was presumed dead. It bugs me when the door on the set of WKRP in Cincinnati that leads into Andy's office in S1 leads into the bullpen in later seasons, and that there's no physically possible arrangement of the sets that allows all the windows to face the outside. It bugs me when the Defiant on DS9 noticeably changes size in relation to people and other ships. It bugs me when M*A*S*H has more Christmas episodes than could possibly fit into a three-year war. It bugs me when shows speed up or slow down characters aging (an infant suddenly becomes a toddler, a student stays in high school for five seasons). It bugs me when the movie Wolf has scenes involving full moons (plot-relevent, because werewolves) taking place only two weeks apart in story time. And so on, and so forth.

And I've never seen Daniel Boone, but if I had, this...

One episode in the third season focused on a plot to assassinate President George Washington.

Yet later that season, several episodes concerned events in the Revolutionary War and made reference to General Washington. Fully a decade BEFORE Washington became president.

...would bug the hell out of me too.

I can make exceptions under special circumstances. For instance, Xena: Warrior Princess gleefully scrambles up at least 1,500 years' worth of ancient history and mythology... but that's part of the show's concept, so it's not really an internal inconsistency, and I can enjoy it as a fun conceit.

As a general rule, though, internal consistency about the details of worldbuilding is a big part of my willing suspension of disbelief for anything I'm reading or watching. And I think it's reasonable to expect the people actually writing/crafting the material to be at least as cognizant of the details involved as me, a mere audience member.

(A lot of it for me, although certainly not all, focuses on matters of chronology. I tend to remember things chronologically, and fit logical structures together that way. If a fictional construct doesn't fit that way, it detracts from the experience for me.)

 

[urbandefault]

I don't care much whether everything lines up or not. Hit the high points, make it entertaining. That's my Trek.

That said, I don't accept Roger Davis as Hannibal Heyes on Alias Smith and Jones. It just ain't right.