Strange New Worlds’ Upgraded Tech Has a Canon Explanation
As readers of this blog are doubtless aware, I am unimpressed with Kelvin-timeline Trek and *especially* “Discovery” Trek. STD sucks on a whole multitude of levels, from bad writing and terrible characters, terrible politics and worse ideology; not a lot can fix that. But one thing that the article above *can* deal with is the fact that STD simply doesn’t fit canon-wise with TOS. And what is that explanation? Time travel. There has been a *lot* of time travel in Trek over the years. And Trek has demonstrated that changing the timeline is possible; the universe does not necessarily reset to some special chosen track.
So why does STD not fit with TOS? Because time travelers have mucked up the timeline and have, like in the Star trek: Lens Flare movies made post 2009, created offshoot timelines where things are different. And of course, if the relatively tiny groups of people followed int he shows and movies encounter time travel as often as they do, it’s reasonable to assume that the whole galaxy is filled with people and races constantly mucking up the timeline, unseen by Starfleet.
This seems like a compromise that trek fans should be able to accept: TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY were one timeline… one that got diverted for 2009 and again for STD. They are different canon. I’ve been saying *that* for a while, but here’s a fair in-universe explanation for it.
4 responses to “A fair explanation of why Modern Trek doesn’t fit Classic Trek”
Thing is, all of the crew made it back to their own timelines, though.
Now the transparent aluminum means TOS to TOS-R maybe.
Narada is the big change maker…the last we saw of it was another trip through a black hole.
Now, I see some of that debris being shunted backwards—explaining the complex Romulan drone craft from the Archer era Enterprise series…with the NX-01 looking like it being an ancestor to the SNW Discoprise…but we saw Riker on the NX-01 sim…and the TOS-esque New Jersey.
I guess NX-01 was outnumbered by cheaper Daedalus type craft…it may be that the SNW timeline was affected by more debris…Braxton—something off screen.
The Voyager episode with Begley Jr led to a more damaging WWIII but allowed Cochrane to get a jump start to even things up.
If anything, the TOS classic timeline gave us the DY-100 in 1996, so I have this idea that the aerospace history there was better, divergence coming right after shuttle? The “secret” timeline of Khan is a force-fit…so an Area 51 type deal.
To me, TOS was part of the Voyage of the Bottom of the Sea timeline where propulsion advanced—but we never went cyberpunk.
Or—to really flip things—I’d have Discovery come back from the 32 Century, and make the SNW to TOS overhaul seem a step back—with more Spartan control panels as a Greek revival cultural change—a push to simplicity—but the TOS E would actually be the MOST advanced under the skin.
It’s performance in The Ultimate Computer outclassing similar *looking* ships…the TOS Enterprise seemed stronger than her TMP refit after all.
Having the TOS timeline as not the standard, but the ultimate deviation…might be how this winds up
And on the cloud at your Twitter account-looks like LP supercell…maybe.
Well, we know the real reason is that CBS had to make “their” Star Trek different enough so as to not infringe on Paramount’s copyrights.
Hence all the changes and idiocies.
That’s not actually the case. There was no mandate to change things 25%. They chose to do so for their own intellectual property. All about marketing.
And all pretty much trash.
Discovery is absolute unredeemable trash
I like Anson Mount a lot as Pike, Number One and Dr.. M’Benga but other than that and at least a somewhat faithful update to the bridge the show is trash.
The ship designs are hideous on both shows.
Flat, angular, video game transformers looking designs rather than the very well thought out designers like Jeffries (an aircraft engineer)and Probert (a genius) and Drexler (a true visionary)
I’m actually fine with upscaling the size of the TOS and TMP Enterprises. The scale of the interior sets didn’t actually fit the purported size of the ship and at the time the biggest ships they could conceive were Battleships and Flattops.
What I didn’t like was not using the perfect original designs and simply making them bigger.
Either adding more portholes to denote additional decks or showing the portholes to be bigger to fit the larger scale
Stupid change for the sake of greed just sucks, especially when the change pales in comparison to the originals