Cowards

Not pictured: O’brien

keep it all inside and one day, die

What sort of advice do you have for an upstart Ensign?

Hopefully this keeps it going! Haven’t been feeling optimistic about Trek lately w/ Prodigy getting un-confirmed and DIS cancelled.

The point is though that DW confirms again and again that how things looked is accurate. We see a 70s Cyberman helmet in 2005, before we see the Modern Cyberman. We’ve seen the Dalek redesigns happen, and past designs all the way back to the 60s reappear.

Sontarans are a clone race, so its not difficult to imagine changes happened to their process or gene template over time. Perhaps one day we’ll see a mixed Sontaran fleet with the short stocky guys from Series 4 and the taller ones from Classic Who and Chibnal. Perhaps Silurians have different subspecies. Those are easy, one sentence explanations, that don’t rely on scoffing at old SFX and going “well its broken already anyways”.

Any example I can think of I have an answer for that solves any sort of continuity issue. Events change because of actual meddling in events and in-universe continuity resets. Events contradict each other between comics and TV and movies because they for all intents and purposes, are as seperate from each other’s continuity as Star Wars and Babylon 5.

James Bond, for instance, is a different person from each actor to have played him, in addition to the version from the novels by Ian Fleming. His backstory can change between them, drastically. It doesn’t make it in the same category as Discovery Klingons.

Thats an assumption. It was okay barely 12 years earlier? It’s pretentious to act like it wouldn’t have been possible, and if that’s really the case, then why the hell is it being set in the oldest production era? It’s not a problem for modern Doctor Who to faithfully recreate sets from the 60s, and those weren’t even in color originally.

Making a series in the 2250s I would expect sets to at least feel like they fit together. They had to extrapolate what a jefferies tube looked like in ENT, since we never saw that set in TOS. The new things should look spiffy (so the Crossfield class, and aliens like Kelpiens are a-okay in my book since we never saw either of those things before and can therefore exist alongside each other), but older things should be recreated with better quality (like the ENT modernisations of Tellarites and Andorians, for example) as much as possible, and I’d argue most of the time that is the default in shared universes.

Well that’s the thing that I don’t like - we got 40+ years of TOS looking like TOS across three examples in three shows, and when it was done it was fun as heck on all three, and all managed to include modern sfx for their time alongside authentic TOS visuals. That’s all I wanted from Discovery when it was announced to be between The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before.

As far as I know, those examples all either explicitly exist or are treated as seperate and distinct when you look at their wikis. Comic book continuity sometimes is something the characters are aware of too, so differences are also explained. Crisis on Infinite Earths comes to mind.

There’s also the idea that the Empire mass produced everything to a cheaper quality which lead to less frills and faster decay. Supposedly The Acolyte show is gonna extrapolate from this further, and is set like 300 years before the prequels.

I should clarify that people at the time of tng airing complained about the look of the series in general with the touch screens and carpets and stuff.

Rod at the time of TMP did imply the Klingon ridges were a retcon but it was never confirmed, and it’s unclear how we’re supposed to interpret the augment virus now with SNW reverting to the TMP/TNG look.

Personally I’d love for Kor, Kang, or Koloth to make an appearance without ridges in SNW.

You, when you got on my case for referencing discussions and things I’d seen outside this thread.

Here’s a discussion about the marketing for 09, to refer to an example of what I’m talking about.

The Kurtzman era of trek’s default is to be embarrassed to be a spin-off of a campy 60s sci-fi show. For me, Beyond, Prodigy, and Lower Decks are the handful of cases where they don’t seem to be trying to “fix” or “solve” being attached to TOS.

I don’t get how you can take it as serious confirmation that Klingon’s appearance changed in universe in that context. Because it was said by a Star Trek character in a Star Trek episode and words have meaning? I don’t get to pick and choose which lines of dialogue matter and what lines of dialogue don’t, no one does.

Frankly, I don’t get how someone can watch a whole scene and go “well that didn’t actually mean anything for the characters that just experienced it”. It makes more sense to assume that words have their intended meaning, and that Worf’s friends were genuinely shocked to see flat-headed Klingons than it does to pretend Worf, Bashir, and company never actually had that discussion. Like, yeah it’s all fake but main characters are supposed to be real people, the situations are supposed to be real to them…

I mean, I can IMAGINE plenty of workarounds, the problem is that even the most practical way to explain them is illogical. It made far more sense that the NCC-1701 looked like how it did in the Cage (2254) up until sometime after Where No Man Has Gone Before (2265), before getting a refit for how it looks the rest of TOS (and again for the movies). Now, if I’m supposed to take the show at it’s word, the ship went through a massive, complete refit by 3 years later in Will You Take My Hand? (2257), only to revert one time to it’s 2254 appearance for 2265, and go through another refit by the Corbomite Maneuver (2266)? Is it really a lack of imagination here or is it actually that my imagination thinks about these things and fictional implications?

I so desperately wish that the Orville writers (IE, the DS9 and TNG writers I liked the most) were writing for current trek. So much of the criticisms levelled at the Berman-era are rectified here, and the show doesn’t serve as propaganda for the US state department.

• We follow up with planets (or get more explicit narration about how they didn’t just abandon some random planet to fend for itself after “fixing” a problem)
• Characters remember things from past episodes
• Gay and trans storylines
• Union politics make more sense than Federation politics

All without:

• Promoting the space NSA (Section 31)
• Promoting the view that governments have no choice but to act in bad faith so its up to Great Individuals to ensure they stay on the correct path

change over time in a 60 year old sci fi franchise.

This common refrain is so condescending, as if we’re being ridiculous expecting consistency in a piece of narrative media! It doesn’t matter if the Klingons, at the time of TMP, were intended to be a total retcon, because DS9 made lines of dialog that make that impossible. I understand that there isn’t a cohesive narrative across all of Star Trek, and I don’t expect writers of an episode of 1990s television to be cognizant that maybe a prequel will come along and show anachronistic Klingons, but what I do expect is the producers of Enterprise to make better decisions than “but da klingons have ridges, how will people recognise the klingons if they look like how they did in TOS?” (IDK Berman, guess you should have thought of that before doing a prequel series).

And today, in this day and age where everyone at least knows about secondary worlds (IE, a setting distinct/irreconcilable from the real world) if not in name than be experience, I absolutely do expect a level of consistency above what we got in the 80s and 90s.

Obviously, advances in real world technology will impact how TV and movies are made, but we’re not talking about Matte Paintings vs CGI. It’s not like when the shows in the 90s made the switch from physical models to CGI, they randomly decided “hey, lets make the Romulan warbird a completely different looking ship”, they recreated the physical model. When they started to be able to show more activity or detail in establishing shots of the ship or station, they didn’t then also decide to give DS9 an extra pylon, or make it yellow and act like it always was like that.

I’ve yet to find any rule stating only that which was commented on this post is valid evidence. You’d have to have your head in the sand to miss that the current iteration of Star Trek stems back to the 2009 reboot movie which literally was marketed as “its not your father’s Star Trek” and who’s director continually complained that he found TNG and TOS to be “too cerebral”. Alex Kurtzman, the guy in charge now, entered the franchise with '09. I don’t think he’s got the same mentality per se, but given that pre-Kurtzman trek saw past sets and props faithfully recreated and even celebrated (Relics from TNG, Trials and Tribble-ations from DS9, In a Mirror Darkly from ENT), while the current iteration, with a few exceptions (Beyond, Lower Decks, Prodigy), feels almost embarassed that it’s a spinoff of a campy show.

Doctor Who has faithfully recreated sets, props, and costumes from as far back as the 60s as recently as 2017. Continuity is a different story - there’s literally no doctor who canon - as the constant time traveling impacts things. Even the smaller TARDIS exterior from the Classic series is referenced as an actual, visual difference by the revival series. The current powers that run Star Trek would just pretend it was always that big.

I’ll never accept the idea that it’s okay to update a design but not properly reboot it and set it in a completely different and seperate continuity just because what you’re making a spin-off of is old enough that it doesn’t deserve to be treated legitimately. How many more years before the crude, gritty aesthetic of Star Wars suffers the same fate as the crude and campy aesthetic of Star Trek?

Whole series of television shouldn’t be ignored by their own spinoffs just because their set designer and marketing teams decided something was lame or uncool.

All that needed to be maintained was that the Klingons we see Kirk face in TOS were all afflicted by the virus - while it’s still reasonable to assume that, the presence of these hitherto unseen 3rd variant of Klingon complicates instead of simplifies, which is what ENT’s arc did. Now what, it’s ANOTHER coincidence that THESE klingons are even ridgier than we’ve seen before, but the other ones are still out there? To borrow your parlance, the Discovery redesign was intended to overwrite and replace what came before, because apparently Star Trek, unlike every other fantasy and science fiction thing I like, is Forbidden from being treated like a secondary world that should have its own internal consistency.

I was completely content to accept it was a coincidence that Kirk only saw augment virus-impacted Klingons in TOS, just like how ST Picard ended up establishing for Romulans (northern vs southern to explain the v shape bone ridge they had through TNG-ENT).