quote:The thing is, there's nothing at all in PIC that links it to DSC other than the hologram of the Discoprise seen when Picard enters Starfleet Command
What about Dahj's Xahean boyfriend?
Was he mentioned as being a Xahean in the episode?
-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
I thought we saw one of discos starship abominations in a spacedock? Alongside the new tugs orbiting Mars?
-------------------- "The Starships of the Federation are the physical, tangible manifestations of Humanity´s stubborn insistence that life does indeed mean something." Spock to Leonard McCoy in "Final Frontier"
Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
Spike: I suppose there are Xaheans in the prime universe just like there are in the Discoverse.
Starship Freak: There were Magee and Zimmerman classes seen in the Short Trek “Children of Mars,” but no DSC ships other than shuttles were used in PIC. And I’m pretty sure those DSC ships were used because of time and budget constraints, since we saw more modern ships for the rescue fleet.
-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
Alright, not in PIC, but the timeline is the same right? The short trek episode takes place in PIC time? So, we use our standard explanations, lack of time, other ship entirely, just look similar. We´ve used them all before. Another answer is that they don´t care about design continuity anymore. Either explanation, just sad. From a starship perspective, PIC sucks. And that "fleet" of one (sorry! two!) designs...Looked like a swarm of locusts. Makes me think longingly of Ds9.
-------------------- "The Starships of the Federation are the physical, tangible manifestations of Humanity´s stubborn insistence that life does indeed mean something." Spock to Leonard McCoy in "Final Frontier"
Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
The thing is, Star Trek: Picard was absolutely not a show about Starfleet vessels, so much so that the VFX for Riker’s fleet were only done in a week. As much as people like to think this, Chabon didn’t really care about ships. He was just trying to tell a story (it’s debatable how good or bad that story was, but that’s another topic).
Perhaps with a new showrunner and a new story, maybe more emphasis will be put on Starfleet. My only concern is that John Eaves is still the principal ship designer, and all he does is recycle old designs he made for some video game decades ago. I’m not sure why they even pay that guy.
-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
Registered: Jun 2000
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-------------------- "The Starships of the Federation are the physical, tangible manifestations of Humanity´s stubborn insistence that life does indeed mean something." Spock to Leonard McCoy in "Final Frontier"
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quote:Originally posted by Lee: So on what basis then are you saying PIC is in an alternate reality?
It's part of the new CBS Canon, along with STD, and that new canon is distinct from the old. The inclusion of all past novels as canon, even if (as Kurtzman admitted) they are unable to maintain continuity with everything that came before, means the very content of the CBS universe during the previously observed Roddenberry-Berman era stories is wildly different than it was during the Roddenberry-Berman era of Trek.
Thus, there's no basis for putting it in the Star Trek Original Universe. The onus is on those who would seek to place it there. It's going to be a hard sell.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
The existing canon is the existing canon, it hasn't changed. WHAT past novels, and how are they (all?!) now regarded as canon? Canon is what has been onscreen, with a few offscreen facts generally accepted as canon until either proved or disproved.
posted
Yeah, you kinda lost me too. As far as I'm aware, CBS has not made any novels, video games, comics, etc. part of canon. Although I'm the last person to accept that DSC is in any way in continuity or consistent with TOS/TNG/etc. (I've always been under the assumption that the 'prime universe' as dictated by CBS simply means 'not the Kelvin universe')...
-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
Registered: Jun 2000
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Canon is the guideline for writers what they can do and can't. So it's kind of pointless to declare all novels canon because A) they contradict each other and B) no writer can be expected to read them all.
Heck, the Discovery writers are not even able to use Memory Alpha properly to keep the facts from aired episodes straight.
-------------------- "Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, no matter what - never face the facts." - Ruth Gordon
Registered: Mar 2000
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Click above for proper formatting . . . text included here for ease of reference:
2018-10-25 Discovery and Trek Continuity In an interview with Digital Spy, Kurtzman, co-creator and showrunner of Star Trek: Discovery, was asked about keeping consistent with the novels and comics. Of course, any production staffer asked that in the 90s would've said they weren't part of the canon continuity, besides the little oops-broken handshake agreement not to use Shelby in DS9 while the Calhoun books used her . . . the exception proving the rule.
Kurtzman answered much differently, however, specifically placing them in the continuity that his universe as Trek show developer follows.
"Everybody is always trying to maintain continuity," Kurtzman told us. "But given the 50 plus years of Star Trek, it literally becomes impossible because people decide that they want to follow a character in a book series after the show has been cancelled, and so they'll invent stories." "And then 15 years later, a new show will come on that will take that character back and you can't be consistent with everything. Our goal is always to try, always, always to try and never to negate what has existed in the novels and graphic novels but it is a literal impossibility."
"And part of what has kept Trek going for so long is everyone's wonderful imagination to keep writing books and keep making graphic novels and keep making shows. And at a certain point, given the volume of things that are out there it's just impossible for everything to sync up perfectly. So we give it our best effort."
The big takeaway from that is that Kurtzman didn't mean what everyone thought he meant when he said they were working hard to avoid "violating canon" on the new CBS productions like Discovery.
Most assumed that he meant not going contrary to the prior live-action Trek, but that was assuming a definition for both "violating" and "canon". For the former, some have argued that canon isn't violated so long as no one in prior live-action Trek specifically stated that no such thing as spore drive existed in the 2250s, for example. I find such a requirement a rather unique point of view, as direct negation alone cannot possibly serve as a rational standard. For the latter, of course, the exact meaning of "canon" is rather important. Since he includes the books and comics, we now know his definition was never the same.
Such quotes don't come along often, but with further review we can confirm this reading. Ten years prior, Kurtzman said:
Alex Kurtzman: We did a lot of reading of the books. I think we consider the books canon to a large degree so it’s very important to us to stay consistent. But there is a bit of a hole and there’s actually different mythologies about {Kirk & Spock's} history so it’s a matter of staying consistent but also figuring out how you can play around a little bit anchored by the rules Source: https://trekmovie.com/2008/09/19/orci-kurtzman-trek-very-true-to-canon-even-books/
TrekMovie even identifies it as him treating the "Star Trek EU" as canon.
Thus, Kurtzman has revealed that the canon policy he's operating under is totally different than the one used during the Roddenberry- and Berman-era of Trek production, instead matching the JJ-verse's. Through the end of Enterprise and the Viacom split, Star Trek canon included only live-action Trek, with ultra-rare, explicit exception.
By adding in novels & comics generally, most never intended to be canon anyway, Kurtzman has fundamentally altered the Trek universe. This is more than the references we had before of them consulting "The Final Reflection" by John Ford for background material… that's little different in principle than using a WW2 submarine flick for inspiration. Making it canon, however, is a much different animal.
For example, if I take Battlestar Galactica and declare that Stargate SG-1 is suddenly canon in that universe, I just radically altered Battlestar Galactica at the stroke of a pen. But can I say I altered it, or is it that I have made a new universe different from what existed before?
Clearly, the answer can only logically be the latter, because such a fundamental shift in meaning and fact cannot work any more than one can have a visual-only reboot of an audio-visual medium (e.g. replacing TOS visuals with clips from Star Wars).
Still, many view Discovery as true Trek because it is, to borrow a phrase, the next closest continuer of the Trek shows of the past. It was marketed that way, after all. And naturally, one can argue that the rights-holder can modify their universe via a change in canon policy as they see fit. I agree.
Indeed, in the case of subtraction, this can have only a limited effect on the universe. If one were to decanonize DS9 or The Empire Strikes Back, for instance, we would lose information but there'd still be the same story thereafter. Similarly, a minor clarification in the margins, or even minor additions, don't break the universe. Major additions, however, do.
In the earlier 'BattleStargate' example, BSG's owners could claim that it was the same BSG universe as before, but this is a fundamental impossibility. Even had they been written so as not to contradict (in which case they'd have already been in the same universe), any new production of BSG that referenced SG-1 would be a break from what came before.
They can change the universe with a penstroke, in other words, but that doesn't negate the fictional reality and continuity that existed prior to the shift.
In effect, what we have here is Tuvix, the being created when a transporter accident merged the characters of the Vulcan Tuvok and the nutty alien Neelix. If the classic Trek canon is Tuvok and the books and comics continuities are Neelix, what Kurtzman has done with Discovery is not to give us more Tuvok, but to execute a transporter accident and give us Tuvix.
Why would I, to learn about Tuvok, waste my time on Tuvix? Tuvix can tell me things about Tuvok but only via a distorted lens, so I might as well stick with what Tuvok said. This is doubly true when Tuvix seems to sometimes "reimagine" assorted Tuvok things, add in new contrary info, and otherwise get Tuvok details wrong.
This is not to suggest Tuvix is bad, mind you, or that it is bad for you to like him. However, pretending he is Tuvok is pretty silly.
Some might argue the analogy and say the change is merely an addition of new information, as if giving Tuvok new memories, but that's not the case. The very identity of Trek is altered just as surely as Tuvok's DNA was . . . and his uniform, too.
While perhaps not as emotionally satisfying as having CBS explicitly say it is a reboot, the same effect is achieved over and above Fuller's previous "reimagine" comments or listing all the myriad differences in history, technology, culture, et cetera ad nauseum. STD's universe is not the same as the one first seen in Star Trek: The Original Series and last seen in Star Trek: Enterprise. It inhabits a new universe that includes other material, like the Star Wars EU before it.
Indeed, calling it a reboot might be unfair, as a reboot is usually something new. This is just something completely different.
Registered: Nov 2001
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Putting aside my feelings on the word "canon" as applied to Star Trek (which can be summed up as "it should be shot from an actual cannon into the sun"), I would point out that "trying to not negate" is not the same thing as "actively adopting and making part of".
Discovery and Picard are part of the prime timeline. They're in the same universe as Enterprise, TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager, which is the clearly stated intention and position of the creators of the shows. I think the creators taking a respectful position towards books / graphic novels etc is a good thing but they're right - keeping everything straight in over a half century of creative output is impossible because the Star Trek universe from the very start was never intended to be a consistently told story with an overarching external historical and scientific framework. The best they can do is try not to go out of their way to contradict stuff.
But like I said, "trying to not negate" is not the same thing as "all this stuff is canon now".
Registered: Nov 2004
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