With the announcement that Sir Patrick Stewart will be reprising his signature role of Jean-Luc Picard for a planned Star Trek television series on the CBS AllAccess streaming service, speculation has run rampant about what that series could possibly be. Will he return to the Enterprise, or will the series be set planet-side? Will Picard join the admiralty, or will he be retired to his vineyard? Will he lead Star Fleet Academy—a series idea I’ve seen suggested for twenty years—or lead Picard’s 11, where Jean-Luc gets the gang back together to rob the heck out of the Ferengi?
There’s so much speculation because we know so little about the show at this point, just that Stewart is playing Picard and that it’s set 20 years after Nemesis. And yet, that’s enough to get me excited because it means the franchise is doing something it hasn’t done in 15 years: it’s moving the story forward.
Ever since Enterprise debuted in 2001, the franchise has focused on nostalgia and retellings. A prequel, a reboot (Star Trek 2009)*, and another prequel (Discovery). Creators were clearly trying to recapture the thrill of the original series: explorers seeking out new life and new civilizations under the threat of a galactic war.
But by nature of being prequels and reboots, very little of what they find is actually new. It’s just more Klingons and Romulans, Vulcans and Andorians, mirror universes and Khan. Oh, and Sarek, worst Dad in the universe. Additionally, retelling stories from the ’60s—even stories that were impressively progressive for the ’60s—means reviving some sexist, racist, and colonialist tropes that are well over fifty years old.
Nostalgia can be done well. Personally, I quite like nuTrek (Star Trek: Beyond is probably the second or third best Star Trek movie) and I’m coming around on Discovery. But for a franchise that’s about progress and the capital ‘F’ Future, saying that the history of space exploration ends the moment Data fires himself at an enemy ship, and all the interesting stories happen before that, is weirdly cautious and backward-looking. This new series, by necessity, must be truly new and take the franchise where it hasn’t gone before.
Yes, bringing back a fan favorite actor as a fan favorite character is a nostalgia play, but it also means the series must be in continuity with Star Trek: The Next Generation (unlike Discovery, which is ambiguous about whether it takes place in the William Shatner or Chris Pine timeline). And it must be about what happens next: after Picard saves the Romulan Empire from a coup; after the Dominion War reshapes Federation politics; after Voyager returns from the Delta Quadrant with a friendly Borg, a self-determined hologram, and technology from the far-far-far future.
One of the great pleasures of Next Gen is seeing how concepts introduced in the original series developed over time. Kirk and crew constantly grapple with Romulans, Klingons, omnipotent space assholes, and artificial intelligences. Now a Klingon and an android are bridge crew, but the Romulans and jerk gods are still problems. How great will it be to see ideas from Next Gen, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager moved further into the future?
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The Fated Sky
Is there lasting peace with the Romulans or the Founders? Are Cardassians now accepted members of the Federation? If contact with other Quadrants in the galaxy is common, will Star Fleet explore new galaxies? Or new dimensions, like the Mirror-verse or wherever Species 8472 is from? Or new eras, where they have to enforce the Temporal Prime directive? Is there a burgeoning synthetics rights movement? Or eugenics rights for enhanced beings? Did they ever get around to solving that pesky Q problem?
Most importantly, the writers can introduce truly new, unexplored ideas and concepts and take the franchise places it couldn’t go before. Things I can’t predict or guess at because they are intentionally different. They can introduce new life and new civilizations, new technology, new phenomena, new problems, new solutions. Discovery introduces interdimensional fungi and giant tardigrades, but still has to explain why no one uses or even mentions such world-bending technology even a few years later. That won’t be an issue for the new series. The writers can also inject contemporary politics and issues into the new show, so that a series set four hundred years in the future can feel like it was written this year and not during the Johnson administration.
In the end, it almost doesn’t matter what the literal premise of the new show is. Picard could be living on his family farm or leading all of Star Fleet on a mission of cosmic importance or running a school for gifted students dealing with impossible sci-fi problems (that one sounds familiar, for some reason). But whatever he’ll be doing, he’ll be doing it in the future’s future’s future, a space we haven’t seen before, where surprise, change, and growth will be possible. The new series can and must do something that Star Trek hasn’t done in way too long: venture boldly into the unknown.
*yes, thanks to time-travel shenanigans, Star Trek 2009 takes place after Nemesis, but only for Spock Prime, not in any way that truly matters.
Steven Padnick is a freelance writer and editor. By day. You can find more of his writing and funny pictures at padnick.tumblr.com.
Regarding Stewart and Picard:
Fortunately this new show is set 20 years into his future, so any lack of continuity in his characterization can be chalked up to character development rather than the actor not quite being able to recapture what he had established so well almost 30 years ago. I say this only because I remember how disappointed I was when I saw Serenity. The actors seemed to be doing their best to act like their characters from 2 years previously, but were not able to inhabit and be their characters as they had originally, IMO.
@srEDIT: I read the “20 years into his future” more as “we can safely ignore much of the non-canon that has shown up in the novels and MMO, while also avoiding the anger of fans if we _officially_ declared all of that truly non-canon, like Disney did with Star Wars”.
Yawnnnnn Sorry but Picard is my least favorite Trek Captain. I would of much rather seen it focused on Worf or Riker.
I wonder how Star Trek Online is going to deal with this. For all the weirdness necessitated by the MMO format (ships captained by Lieutenants and everyone showing up for work in whatever the hell uniform they feel like), it’s actually done a pretty good job of weaving together all the loose ends left by several series into a reasonably cohesive future story arc.
@1 Or, unlike Sir Patrick, they just were kinda C-listers to begin with and it was just nerd nostalgia and Whedon-Cultism that had made them seem good at the time; once your head cleared you saw them all for what they were. I swear, browncoats man; everytime, these guys.
@@.-@ Who cares how STO handles anything, it has always been a hot mess of rubbish for the milfic fans.
Discovery takes place in the mainline timeline, not the Bad Robot one.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I am cautiously optimistic about this new series, but it should be noted that much of the writing staff responsible for the first season of “Star Trek: Discovery” will be responsible for the Picard sequel. That should give us reasons for concern, not least because D. C. Fontana, David Gerrold and Nicholas Meyer have demonstrated repeatedly that they’ve written scripts far more memorable than anything I have seen on “Star Trek: Discovery”. However, I remain cautiously optimistic because of potential tie-ins too with both “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” – I would love to see Sarina (portrayed in two episodes by actress/writer/journalist/comedian Faith Salie) interact with an older Jean-Luc Picard – and “Star Trek: Voyager”.
As for the Federation’s future relations with some of its neighboring powers, I am certain that there will definitely be peace with the Ferengi and the Klingons. I believe Bajor will have joined the Federation, not the Cardassians, simply because they will be interested in remaining their independence and status as one of the quadrant’s major powers. It’s an open question with both the Romulans and the Dominion.
Be better if they spun STD off into its own little pocket universe and timeline.
Species 8472 not 4872
@9 – Fixed, thank you!
I am 95% sure it takes place in Picard’s vineyard, but Q has bought the vineyard next door.
Trek lives! Truly diverse, truly American. Bravo!
Star Trek Beyond one of the top three Star Trek movies? With judgement like that, it’s hard to give any of your other critical judgements any veracity, as that movie was a piece of trash. I’d count it among the 3 worst. Absurd destruction of the Enterprise in pursuit of a weapon they obviously don’t need if they’re that powerful to begin with, then an unbelievable Rescue Mission with the stupidest motorcycle stunts in history, horrible action-oriented direction, and a complete lack of heart. What qualities would you praise in that film?
Mr. Padnick writes:
This formulation is of a kind — a certain insularity, short-sightedness, and lack of appreciation for sheer scale that I see among Trek fans and Trek books. “We’ve threatened the world; now we need to threaten the galaxy” (because it’s the next linguistically convenient order of magnitude) or “Eighty TV episodes have given us everything we need to know about the TOS era — give us something new.”
It’s like you’re thoroughly familiar with a single sparsely-furnished room of a mansion, but you have no interest in looking at the other rooms before you rush to another neighborhood. For that matter, there are objets d’art on the shelves that you’ve glanced at but haven’t bothered turning to appreciate from all angles.
Much of Star Trek’s best work is when examining the human condition, in particular the aspirational elements afforded by a future where some of today’s societal impediments have been removed. With the right scripts, Sir Patrick has the acting chops to examine those while hanging around Earth — there’s no need to rush outward in a misplaced drive for novelty. (Which, as it happens, is something the Q Continuum would approve of.)
I’d love for them to at least take a stab at Q’s promise to Picard at the end of “All Good Things…”:
“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.”
Also, you wrote:
“*yes, thanks to time-travel shenanigans, Star Trek 2009 takes place after Nemesis, but only for Spock Prime, not in any way that truly matters.”
I think the destruction of Romulus in the prime timeline would probably matter, going forward!
@15/Phillip Thorne: Very good point. To be fair, the TOS writers already suffered from the same affliction in 1967. Several times in the second season the antagonists came from a different galaxy for no good reason.
@18/JanaJansen,
And Lazarus came from another universe, for no particularly good reason. :)
The reason to explore new galaxies and dimensions is a good one, I think, when you consider the interconnected baggage Star Trek carries with it now. The Milky Way has been carved up into quadrants and populated by so many iconic species, locations, and characters, the moment you send new characters into our local galactic neighborhood, as is the case with Discovery, they’re immediately surrounded and weighed down by canonical questions and conundrums and timeline/universe mishegoss.
Setting this new Picard series 20 years after what we know might be enough to free itself from this weight, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this ‘trek through the stars’ ends up, again, being an insular game of “recognize this?” The temptation seems to be too great for current Hollywood creators to exploit iconic IP for every penny they can wring out of it. But I hold out some hope Patrick Stewart will put his foot down with some of the lunacy they might throw at him.
@20/DingoD,
I actually think the temptation to play “remember that?” is a good reason to stay out of Space for awhile, or at least stay within our Solar System, by focusing on Starfleet Academy, and letting us see a lot more civilians, perhaps interacting with Starfleet but not living in service of it. Isn’t the whole point of achieving peace and freedom to be able to live in peace and freedom? So let’s see at least some of that.
(21)
Well, it’s just my opinion, but peace and freedom on Earth or our solar system isn’t the primary purpose of Star Trek. It should always have something to do with, you know, being in unfamiliar places and trekking… among the stars. Even when it’s about the Picard in Winter.
One of the things I appreciated about Star Trek Beyond was the lack of familiar Star Trek things. There’s no Klingons or Romulans or frozen supermen, and Earth is never seen. Bravo.
@22,
I am reminded of Kylo Ren saying he wanted to “create something new”. Actually, I think somebody else famous also said that.
I would be happy to see new Space Ventures in the spirit you describe. But the risk of playing the kind of nostalgia games you mentioned seems to me to be not only a risk, but very likely. That’s why I suggest Star Trek staying at home for awhile would actually be a better way to do something new.
Of course the two approaches can be combined. Keep things on Earth for awhile, until dramatic events elsewhere in the Galaxy demand that attention be shifted there.
Edit: it just occurred to me what would tie all of these together. The Kelvins from Andromeda arrive! :)
The fact this takes place after all the other shows is the best thing about it. All the reboots and retcons feel claustrophobic after a while, hemmed in by what has already happened. Let’s travel to the edge of known space, and find something new!
@24,
What’s that Eastern Saying about knocking down a wall to get to the other side? What do you find there?
Just another damn wall!
(23)
As charmed as I am being compared to Space Hitler, I really just prefer Star Trek to do what it says on the box.
@26,
I kept from naming the nameless one precisely for fear of being taken that way. But it would have been better if I had simply said that I think that getting rid of the Romulans was a high price to price to pay for doing something new, for being able to avoid treading old paths. If the Romulans could ever have become friends, that would also be a good way to do something new.
My response was also a bit mixed up with my distaste for the Kelvin timeline in general. But on that, to each his own.
@23/Keleborn: The Kelvans aren’t due for another five hundred years.
As for the new versus the old, it’s a big galaxy, the Federation consists of many colonies, alien planets, and species, and they’re still surrounded by unknown space. If we keep seeing the same ones, it’s because the writers choose to revisit the same ones, not because the setting requires it.
You can see the biggest problem with prequels on the bridge of the Discovery every episode. There’s a woman with a strange robotic appearance that would inspire all kinds of speculation. Android? Cyborg? Some kind of isolation suit? Except that it’s a prequel, so there are all kinds of dull canonical restrictions on what she can be. “Androids weren’t invented until the 24th century…” Congratulations, you’ve limited your options by making a prequel. In this new series, her equivalent can be whatever you want.
As for the continuing timeline, it’s puzzled me how the destruction of Romulus seems to be minimized, whether it’s people speculating about the state of the Galaxy, or the Star Trek Online version. The Romulan Empire was a centralized totalitarian state. Destroying the capital should have reduced it to pure chaos. I’d expect the Federation to have to occupy part of it just to suppress the pirates.
@29/Gareth Wilson: Perhaps because it was destroyed in such an offhand manner. I agree, it should have major repercussions. It would probably be wisest to decide that the whole thing never happened, but I don’t expect them to do that.
(28)
The setting requires it because the writers can’t help themselves. They’re canon addicts. Even the far-flung Voyager managed to occasionally wedge Cardassians and Klingons in the Delta Quadrant. So if they remove the setting, such as another galaxy, the temptation is no longer there.
Though I’m sure they’d find a way to stick a Gorn in there somehow.
@31/DingoD: The other galaxies are very far away. They’d need some new technology to go there, and as soon as this technology exists, the Klingons can go there too. Or, for that matter, the Gorn :)
The real question is whether this will be TV-Picard or Movie-Picard?
Movie-Picard fits better with modern action-oriented television series, and thus I kind of think we’re more likely to get him. I’d rather have TV-Picard, and I think his tendency to defeat opponents with arguments rather than holographic tommy guns would make the new series stand out amidst the fairly standardized “high action high drama high speed” sci-fi series formula we see all over the place today, but that hasn’t been the direction Star Trek has been taken of late, and I think a lot of producers are nervous that to do so would make the show “boring”.
Also, as much as I hate it, I kind of hope they change Klingons again. If they’re going to make nuKlingons a thing every time they feel like it, they should at least go full ham. Give ’em some ovipositors. A secondary jaw. Acid for blood.
@33/Rob: “a lot of producers are nervous that to do so would make the show “boring”.” – if you’ve not checked out THE ORVILLE yet, I would. Ignoring its comedic flavorings (but, why would you? It’s hilarious), its been able to recreate TNG quite well, while also holding its own at the contemplative level.
@34/Morbus Iff: I have, and honestly the episodes I’ve watched have been pretty reasonable. From what I’ve seen, its still trying to find itself as a Star Trek relative, and feels a little shallow at the moment (though they’re clearly working on that), but overall its not bad at all for a first season (especially of a Star Trek-alike).
I think it kind of supports my argument regarding how producers would view it, however. There’s a reason the Orville has great audience reviews but bad critic reviews; the audience it has is clearly finding exactly what they wanted, but the critics are mostly negative. Published critics aren’t always right, but they’re frequently a decent barometer of of widespread appeal. I could easily see a producer taking a look at the Orville’s critics vs audience ratings, and deciding that they indicate that the Orville is performing exceptionally well with its niche, but is unlikely to “spread”.
Contrast to ST:DSC, where the critics are fairly pleased with it, but the audience as a whole is rather meh. A producer could see that as an indication that the show has good general appeal, and may get better audience ratings as it matures and gets its bearings.
And that does seem kind of accurate at first glance — the Orville pulled 4.2 million viewers by the second episode, while ST:D pulled 9.8 millon on its first. Now, that’s a poor comparison, as the Orville is a new product (though inspired by an old) while STD is an old franchise brought back to life (and its viewer count dropped after the first episode), but it could be very easy for someone reviewing the numbers to take that to mean that STD has the potential to be overall more successful.
And that ties back to the topic of the article. ST:DSC is about taking an existing franchise and trying to re-imagine it in the modern action-scifi style, and the result ended up with no small amount of controversy and a fairly strong but still well behind competitor modeled after one of the most popular parts of the existing franchise. Will this new Picard-oriented creation take the same idea as ST:DSC but with that popular franchise element as its focus (i.e. action-scifi but with a familiar face), or will it take inspiration from the Orville’s success and try to merge the two concepts?
@35 Rob, I think among the reasons why “The Orville” is successful and seems both fresh and familiar is because its production team includes diehard fans of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (series creator Seth McFarlane) as well as two who worked on “Star Trek” back in the 90s and early 00s; Brannon Braga and Andre Bormanis. I think the first season of “The Orville” is holding up surprisingly well and may be better than the first seasons of either TOS or TNG.
31. DingoD – Though I’m sure they’d find a way to stick a Gorn in there somehow.
You mean like Discovery did with the Gorn skeleton in Lorca’s ready room? or a Tribble when Spock & McCoy had no idea what they were a decade later?
Seeing as these are the same people that turned Sarek into an advocate for planetary scale genocide and turn lovable rogue Harry Mudd into a mass murderer, I don’t have high hope.
By first thought is “Damn, that means all those post-series stories I’ve written, including the one where Picard gets killed, are going to be over-written.” (Well, I’m sure I’ll reconcile them somehow: I had Picard’s ship blow up destroying a weapons platform, so assuming the 20 years thing is accurate and it’s set c.2399, I can easily say he got whisked out at the last minute. So long as they don’t bring Riker back after I gave him a pretty graphic death…) Second thought is “Hang on, is that why they’ve suspended all the licensed Star Trek fiction? So they can do a Star Wars Legends thing and do their own post-Nemesis Picard?” (Because sorry, whatever the gap, I can’t see them being able to fudge it that this is the same Picard that married Beverly Crusher, helped bring about the final destruction of the Borg Collective and had a son creepily named after his dead nephew.)
It feels like this is a scenario similar to the beginning of TNG, or when they brought back Doctor Who written by Russell T Davies, when a story has been taken out of the hands of the fans and the fan professionals and back into the hands of the people who make television for a living. We’re going to have to let go of a lot of cherished fan lore (something Star Trek fans have never been good at, judging by all the whining about Enterprise contradicting something the Okudas once said in a reference book) and that’s going to hurt, but hopefully the end result will be worth it.
Be nice if it’s actually on television too.
All very interesting, and I’d like to say more, but the only thing I can come up with right now is – “or lead Picard’s 11, where Jean-Luc gets the gang back together to rob the heck out of the Ferengi?” *cackling*
cap-mjb: You’re confusing Star Trek fans with Star Wars fans. Trek novels have been overwritten by onscreen canon for ages, starting with the Klingons showing up in The Motion Picture, which overwrote the ending to James Blish’s Spock Must Die! Trek fans are pretty much used to it. Two of the best-regarded Trek novels are Federation by Judith & Garfield-Reeves-Stevens and Imzadi by Peter David. The former was overwritten by First Contact, the latter by “Second Chances,” yet they remain two very well regarded novels. For that matter, the post-finale DS9 novels created an entire detailed backstory for the Andorian species that was utterly shitcanned by Enterprise (though the fiction continued to work with what they’d established, which took some verbal tap-dancing).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@40/krad: And John Ford’s Klingons and Diane Duane’s Romulans were overwritten by TNG.
Jana: Although, amusingly, the setup of the Klingon Empire that Ford set up is remarkably similar to how the Cardassians wound up being developed: power shared by the military and the intelligence organization, service to the state being the noblest goal anyone can achieve, and so forth.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@42/krad: Really? I didn’t know that. I’ve read Duane, but not Ford. This is intriguing, because I’ve always thought myself that the Klingons from “Errand of Mercy” and “Day of the Dove” are much more like Cardassians than like TNG Klingons.
You mean Enterprise finally did something right?
The best Trek novels were all written before TNG aired anyway.
krad: That has not been my experience of Star Trek fans. My experience of Star Trek fans is they sit around whining “But Spock was meant to be the first Vulcan in Starfleet!” “But why don’t you ever mention the Beta Quadrant when half the Federation’s there?” “But how can four episodes ago only be a month when we all know each episode covers two weeks?” “But first contact with the Klingons was in 2218, even though TNG contradicted that over a decade ago!” “But why do they never call the Romulans the Rhianssu?” (Memory Alpha contains an archive of fan questions to Ronald D. Moore on AOL throughout the latter run of DS9, many of which want me to resign from the human race.) Maybe that’s not representative, but there are Star Trek fans who cling rabidly to non-canon facts and berate any writer or producer who deviates from what they think happened.
I found those first post-series Enterprise novels a chore to get through because they seem to be written by exactly that type of fan, who ignores canon in order to carry on believing their preferred version (“The Andorians have four genders, okay?!”), to the point of deliberately contradicting an episode they don’t like in a way that made zero sense, fencing in future writers with a bunch of pointless flash forwards that only serve to make their Trip Tucker Super Spy nonsense set in stone, and then having a couple of characters sit around and whine like a couple of fans in the convention bar with nonsense like “How could Trip be remember as a hero when he died in a stupid manner?” (I dunno, maybe we should ask Abraham Lincoln?)
No Star Wars fans were particularly bothered at Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, the Marvel comic strips and the young adult Han Solo novels being ignored, but I think Star Trek has now reached the point that there’s a large body of internally consistent licensed material of a kind that didn’t exist until the DS9 relaunch novels, which many fans consider the One True Continuation of Star Trek.
I guess I’m weird. It never even occurred to me that books had to be canonical. I guess I always took them as AU. I love AU.
There are valid observations from different quarters here, I think.
Speaking strictly from the professional creators’ point of view, KRAD properly notes that “canon” in the strictest sense can refer only to screened Star Trek material, and that in the event of specific inconsistency between screen Trek and book-Trek, the screen content “wins”. OTOH, as a reader — and speaking from a purely practical perspective — I think cap-mjb is absolutely correct to observe that the very sizeable body of published Star Trek fiction developed since the post-DS9 relaunch constitutes a tremendous creative resource, one that’s been deliberately crafted to be as internally consistent as possible while continuing to tell exciting and challenging stories in the best Trek tradition. Essentially, the novels were allowed to drive the storytelling engine for so long because for many years there wasn’t any new screen-Trek available or even contemplated. And I think that, even though their readership base is far, far smaller than the audience for any form of screen-based Star Trek, the groundwork laid by all that material is valuable enough that the new screen franchise should do its best to take advantage of it rather than discarding it wholesale.
There is, in fact, precedent for this approach. While KRAD is right that TNG’s Klingon Empire is wholly inconsistent with that postulated by John M. Ford in The Final Reflection, the TNG Romulans are a different matter. It’s true that in fine detail — language, characters, specific names and places — TNG’s writers went their own way. But the broad outlines of the history Diane Duane relates in Spock’s World and The Romulan Way are mirrored fairly closely in the screen Romulan lore. “Balance of Terror” made it clear that Vulcans and Romulans shared genetic origins, yes — but it was Duane who proposed that the divergence occurred within recorded Vulcan history, rather than resulting from the same sort of random seeding that produced so many human-looking primitive cultures for Kirk and the original Enterprise to find in the TOS era. It was Duane who linked the Romulan exodus to the rise of Surak (I’d have to rewatch the relevant bits of Enterprise to be sure, but I think that’s confirmed onscreen during that show’s run). And the prospect of “Reunification” as envisioned in the TNG two-part episode is grounded in and expands on ideas developed in Duane’s “Rihannsu” novels. The TNG and ENT writers told their own stories, absolutely — but they built on an underlying superstructure that was already in place.
You can see this process from the reverse angle in the “Vulcan’s Soul” trilogy penned by Susan Shwartz and Josepha Sherman. The first two books focus specifically on characters introduced in Duane’s version of Vulcan history, clearly and explicitly linking them to the “Rihannsu” setting — but the third, which takes place chiefly on Remus, functions as a direct prelude to Nemesis, and therefore diverges sharply from Duane’s portrayal of Romulus’ “twin” planet in order to fit better into mainline screen/novel continuity.
Two quick asides to wrap up: I disagree strongly with random22’s assertion that all the best Trek novels predate TNG (I could wax specific, but this post is long enough already). OTOH, princessroxana is partially right, I think, to refer to the novels as AU — at least, perhaps, going forward. (At minimum, I think there are grounds to define the current novelverse as its own timeline, equivalent in status to the Prime and Kelvin timelines, pending further word on the nature of the new Picardian series.) And some subsets of the novel line are AUs in a more official sense — Duane’s “Rihannsu” sequence for one, the “Shatnerverse” group for another. But the fact that they may be AUs in a formal sense is not in itself a reason to abandon or disregard them — if anything, quite the opposite.
And somehow I’ve double-posted again (I quite literally saw one iteration appear a split second after the other — deeply weird, that).
@47/John C. Bunnell: The Romulans have always been related to Vulcans. They discuss it as a theory in “Balance of Terror”, and Spock calls it “likely”. It’s treated as a fact in “The Enterprise Incident”.
Naturally it would have been great to have some of the rest of the gang back too, and of course we’re going to get some guest appearances. But leaving Data like we did is especially pining for some kind of fix. If we aren’t going to see him again, I hope AI still re-enters the storyline in some fashion after all the gains it made in TNG (eg “Measure of a Man”) so we can see where it evolves.
John: Diane’s extrapolation that it happened in recent history is not entirely her own invention, as it builds on what was established in both “The Enterprise Incident” (the Commander referring to Vulcans as their brothers and so on) and “All Our Yesterdays” (showing that Vulcans being savage was only a couple of thousand years ago).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
43. JanaJansen – Do yourself a favour and track down The Final Reflection. In my opinion, a much superior version of the Klingons than the space viking/biker that TNG & later shows gave us. An excellet Trek novel but also an outstanding Science Fiction novel in it’s own right.
@35 – Just to note, there’s a reason the viewer count for ST:D dropped after the first episode. I don’t know the exact number, but I presume only a certain number of people wanted to deal with signing up for CBS: All Access. The rest are folks like me who didn’t want to deal with paying for another streaming service, or deal with signing up for a month at the end, binging ST:D, then cancelling, and are perfectly happy to wait for the DVD release. (That or Amazon/Netfilx, if possible.)
@52/kkozoriz: You were right. Thank you!
I especially loved the game with all its different versions. Almost better than 3D chess.
janajansen @49: john says exactly that @47; what he suggested was a later development was that the separation was a known recent historical event (recent in the old world sense rather than the American) .
I’ve said before I think it would have been awesome if they’d had the guts to make the Romulans a spontaneous Vulcan analogue with no historical connection. TOS Trek was littered with Earth analogues. It would also have made Stiles look sillier.
@55/del: It also would have robbed Vulcan of its interesting history and made “The Enterprise Incident” and “Unification” impossible.
There could have been other Vulcan analogues. There were quite a few in the old fanzines, and TNG gave us the Mintakans.
Anyway, where are the Andorian analogues?
That was my point at the time: where were all the Vulcan, and Andorrian, and Klingon analogues? Why are we always encountering Earths that had, say, a nuclear war in their 1960s? or have never stopped being the Roman Empire?
(the Doylean explanation is that they had SF short stories set in the near future or alt-history that could be re-tooled as Trek plots provided you filed the “our near future” serial numbers off. And that actors playing Human analogues cost less in the make-up trailer)
I’m not so much pro-Vulcan analogues as anti-inconsistency. The awesome I referred to would have been their having the balls to go for it consistently.
To be fair, I think at least one episode of TNG had no-kidding Klingon analogues, if I didn’t misinterpret it.
Oh, and I see you pointed out TNG devoting a whole episode to no-kidding Vulcan analogues, too.
@57/del: Yes, that’s true. Part of the Doylist explanation is also that they needed to reuse existing props and settings for budgetary reasons. Sometimes they put them to a really good use, e.g. in “The Squire of Gothos”. And when an alien society was intended as an allegory, it probably worked better when they looked like us.
I’m still waiting for all the wonderful aliens and alien landscapes CGI could give us today.
54. JanaJansen – I’m glad that you enjoyed it. Of all the Trek novels I have, it’s the only one I pull out every couple of years to read again.
kkozoriz: The Final Reflection is indeed a great novel, and one I made sure to make at least one reference to in every Klingon-focused novel I wrote.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@60/kkozoriz: The one I keep going back to is The Wounded Sky. They had some good novels in the eighties.
@62 Jana Jansen – I think that part of the reason we had good, interesting novels was that there was a minimum of continuity between them, much like the episodes. Sure, some authors would reuse characters but for the most part, you didn’t need to be up to date with the previous ones to enjoy the newest one.
Now, a plot introduced in one series can have impacts on novels in other series. The whole idea of which is to convince people that they need to buy them all. It’ll be dressed up as “world building” but, in the fictional reality, the galaxy is so large that there should be essentially no contact between the ships of the various series.
Titan was introduced as a “where no man has gone before” series that almost immediately got drawn back into numerous crossovers with the other series. It’s jarring to read about how Titan is supposedly way out on the frontier, basically on it’s own when, in the next novel, they’re suddenly visited by another Starfleet ship or are called back to Earth, a trip that takes just a few days instead of months.