In its 4th episode, Star Trek: Discovery rattled off a short list of historical figures responsible for innovating methods of flight. Since Discovery takes place in the 22nd century, this list included the surprise placement of present-day flamethrower salesman Elon Musk, CEO of The Boring Company.
It was a fun Easter Egg–until recently Star Trek generally avoided including cultural references to the late 20th century and early 21st century–but given recent plot twists in the show, that reference now has a whole new meaning.
[Note: Spoilers for the January 2018 episodes of Star Trek: Discovery ahead!]
Here’s the situation in the episode: The Discovery has successfully tested a new organic engine called a “spore drive,” allowing them to jump wherever in space they want regardless of the distance. The only trouble is that using the spore drive requires the torture of a non-consenting organism (a giant tardigrade dubbed “Ripper”), so they let Ripper go and the spore drive becomes dormant.
Captain Lorca single-mindedly wants that spore drive working, so he goes down to engineering and shames the Discovery‘s engineer Stamets into finding another way to activate the drive, noting that Stamets could have his name alongside great aviation/spaceflight pioneers such as the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, and Zephram Cochrane.
(Hah. “Failed fungus expert.” We would wear that t-shirt.)
At this point in the show, Lorca is just a hard-nosed, war-weary Captain of the United Federation of Planets, and his insistence on the spore drive makes a lot of sense in the context of the Klingon-Federation War that Star Trek: Discovery is currently chronicling. Being able to show up anywhere, unannounced, has been shown to be an effective counter against the Klingons’ currently-unbeatable cloaking technology.
Now, however, we know that Captain Lorca is really a barbaric monster from the Mirror Universe, trying to manipulate his way back in order to finish his coup, claim the throne of the Terran Empire, and institute a quadrant-wide cleanse of non-human races.
That means the history he knows is the history of the ruthless Terran Empire. The Zephram Cochrane that Lorca celebrates isn’t the awesome invent-warp-drive-play-a-drinking-game-with-Vulcans fellow, it’s the Cochrane that invented warp drive, shot the Vulcans who came to initiate first contact, then looted their ship.
So. Um. What exactly does Elon Musk do that causes him to be remembered as a notable historical figure by the Terran Empire? And is this “our” Elon Musk or a “mirror” Elon? Or have we already diverged into the Mirror Universe? We’ll probably never know.
Anyway, here’s Elon Musk running at you with a flamethrower.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BeeYW0NA1HU/?utm_source=ig_embed
It’s not Star Trek that Elon Musk reminds me of. I keep thinking he looks like someone morphed together the Arrowverse’s Malcolm Merlyn and Damien Darhk.
I have many problems with this show, its no secret I do not like STD, but even I don’t see a problem with this. Musk wants to see space exploration advance, and that is always going to involve the military as well as exploration, so mirror Lorca and regular Lorca would probably both admire that guy.
This was just an excuse to show Musk going daft with a flamethrower, right? And I have no problem with that either.
The story of innovation is the story of military innovation. Stop fighting, stop innovating. The most implausible part of ST for me is the idea that “Starfleet is not a military organization”. BS. If it’s not, then nothing is.
“until recently Star Trek generally avoided including cultural references to the late 20th century and early 21st century”
That’s not even close to being true. Every St series has referenced this period – almost all of the references are fiction, but they cover every decade of this period.
Don’t forget that even Lt. Stamets himself is a reference to the noted modern-day mycologist Paul Stamets.
@4/Nate: I think the point is that Trek has rarely referenced the present-day or recent culture of the time it was made. TOS referenced Hitler once or twice and various made-up near-future events like the Eugenics Wars and the Earth-Saturn probe (and “the first manned Moon shot,” which was still near-future at the time of the episode), and alluded obliquely to Vietnam and other “20th-century brush wars,” but the closest it came to referencing contemporary pop culture was the mention of the UFO craze and “little green men” in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and Roberta Lincoln’s vaguely hippie-ish personality in “Assignment: Earth.” They never mentioned the Beatles or Lyndon Johnson, or threw in an in-joke reference to their production company’s owner Lucille Ball.
I guess the first Trek production that really leaned on contemporary references was The Voyage Home. Then there was TNG’s unfortunate holodeck-comic episode with Joe Piscopo implicitly playing his own holodeck recreation and doing a Jerry Lewis impression. And there was Enterprise‘s thoroughly pointless “Carpenter Street” sojourn to the early 2000s. More often, though, the references were to the earlier 20th century — jazz, pulp detective fiction, Rat Pack-era Vegas, ’30s sci-fi movie serials, vintage Paramount movies on movie night, that sort of thing.
@5/aethercowboy: That’s not really the same kind of reference, because the real-life person it’s referencing isn’t being acknowledged to exist in-universe; rather, a fictional character shares their name and profession. It’s a particular type of reference called a Tuckerization, like the way Ian Fleming named James Bond after the author of an ornithology book he owned.
@@.-@ STO Assignment Earth. Kirk and crew go back to 1968 and get involved with a Gary Seven.
An entire movie The Voyage Home, Kirk and ‘friends’ using a Kilgon ship go back to 1986 San Fransisco.
EDIT ADDED:
@6 you beat me to it.
@7/sdzald: There’s a difference between going to the present day and referencing real things from the present day, which is what we’re talking about here. They were in 1968 in “Assignment: Earth,” but they didn’t mention any real-world people or events from 1968, just fictional people and events and generalized social trends. On the other hand, The Voyage Home did mention some bits of contemporary pop culture, like Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann.
Until (relatively) recently, the late 20th Century and early 21st Century didn’t exist to reference.
Instead, we have conjectural speculation, which technically has lead to a few errors.
Or rather, it’s just a different time-line. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Still, though it was subtle, Q was a Marine.
@3/chuck: Bicycles? Printing? Photography? X-rays? People have always made inventions and innovations that had nothing to do with the military, and they will continue to do so.
Now, margarine, that was a military invention.
@9/LordVorless: You’re taking it too literally. The point was about Trek shows — which, collectively, have been made from the late 20th to the early 21st century — referencing people or things from their own present-day culture, like Discovery namedropping Elon Musk. The equivalent would’ve been TOS referencing someone famous from the ’60s, TNG referencing some notable ’80s figure, VGR referencing someone from the ’90s, etc. The point of the post is that it’s been unusual for Trek shows in the past to make timely pop-culture references, to nod to people who are famous to the audience in the here and now. Which is probably good, because such references tend to make a show feel dated in retrospect.
Or, you know, Lorca could’ve just read about historical figures from the Prime Universe and used the names to further his agenda. Manipulators talk. Good manipulators do research.
Would’ve really thrown viewers for a loop if Lorca’d said Tony Stark.
Christopher L. Bennett: How would you classify Stephen Hawking playing poker on TNG ?
@14/Steve: Ah, yes, that’s a good example. I guess it’s the only example of a present-day celebrity playing themselves in Trek, unless you count the implication that Joe Piscopo was playing himself.
Honestly, the holodeck concept could’ve really been abused that way, as an excuse to bring in celebrity guests as their holodeck recreations. Imagine if UPN had insisted that Voyager‘s holodeck be used as a nightclub for the crew with simulations of popular bands who’d guest-star to perform music from albums that would then be advertised at the end of the show, like what Buffy, Charmed, and other shows did with their guest bands. I think UPN actually did try to convince Enterprise‘s producers to do that, just without the holodeck element, which makes it a whole lot weirder. We’re lucky that Trek’s producers stuck to their guns on that.
11, or, I’m taking it with a sense of humor, which you seemed to have missed.
15, and he wins with 2 pair. 2 pair of 7s. His book was also in Data’s library in the finale.
Of course, none of us seem to be counting the Okudagrams and prop bits which occasionally have references themselves, if not ones meant to necessarily be considered on screen.
So when the Star Trek: Discovery writers mention the Wright brothers as an inspiration for space flight, are they more specifically referring to Wilbur…
Or Orville?
#10
True. But then there’s this thing we’re on, the internet, that has its roots in Cold War militaristic paranoia and competitiveness.
Of course, civilians making use of former military technology is something Star Trek does as well (the Phoenix).
@17. Athreeren: definitely Wilbur…
It does not seem to be saying anything in particular about Musk. Obviously there is a Musk for each universe. One is the sort of person who receives massive state subsidies to build a factory in exchange for promises to create jobs and then reneges on the deal once the project is built. The other one is evil.
ST:TNG makes direct reference to Stevie Wonder – the guest character saying only the last name “Wonder” in the episode “A Matter of Time”. I remember thinking how interesting that was at the time because the show had never before referenced a celebrity/notable figure who was still very much alive.
In which parallel reality is Elon Musk already somebody who deserves being mentioned in a gallery of scientific heroes? As far as I can see he is pretty good at selling an endless string of utopian promises and ideas without backing this up by any significant success beyond SpaceX. He is more likely just a mere footnote in the history of science and innovation.
Simply because of that this an unnecessarily risky bit which might end up being simply embarassing and dating the show like PanAm in Kubrick’s 2001.
@22/Lubitsch: We’re already well removed from Star Trek‘s reality, considering that 2018 is the year Trek-universe humanity stops using interplanetary sleeper ships because a faster space drive is introduced. Also, they launched at least four more Voyager probes in the ’70s than we did, not to mention Nomad.
@23/Christopher: That’s just one more set of inconsistencies to ignore. I still hold onto the original idea that Star Trek takes place in “the future”.
That’s a rather large set of inconsistencies to ignore and believe it’s our same reality.
@25/MaGnUs: Well, what’s the point in imagining that there’s a better future in the universe next door?
Chris, you’re twisting the consistency argument in the direction you just need it to fit. Here minor discrepancies, hardly seen on the screen rule out consistency with our timeline. But in the great cosmos of Star Trek itself any nonsense and contradictions are fine because that’s how it always has been from the beginning.
Also what exactly are you trying to say? That Star Trek takes place in a parallel universe where Elon Musk definitively became a genius? Doesn’t look any less silly to me …
@27/Lubitsch: Huh? You’re conflating two different issues. Obviously no work of fiction is actually going to be in our reality, because our reality includes it as a work of fiction. So that’s a non-starter to begin with. And it’s a separate conversation altogether from the question of how the different works within a fictional series relate to one another.
And neither of them is some moralistic issue that warrants getting judgmental toward someone else. This is just a work of entertainment that we discuss for fun. I think you’re taking this a little too seriously.
@28/Christopher: Obviously, that’s true for every work of fiction. Yet l’ve never heard anybody suggest that Anna Karenina takes place in a different universe because in our universe, it’s a novel by Tolstoy.
@29/Jana: It’s not about “a different universe,” because it’s not a universe at all in the same sense as physical reality. It’s just a story whose imaginary setting is modeled on our own reality. When we use the word “universe” to refer to the putative setting of a work of fiction as distinct from the settings of other works of fiction, that’s a totally different sense of the word than when we use it to refer to the physical reality we inhabit or any other physically real cosmos that might exist beyond it.
But works of SF and fantasy tend to diverge from our reality in somewhat greater ways. Physics and evolution in Star Trek don’t work the same way they do in reality. In reality, the idea of humanoid aliens or parallel Earths is absurd; both those things were breaks from reality inserted for the sake of budgetary convenience. Ditto with the prevalence of aliens with psychic powers and godlike abilities to transmute reality; neither is remotely plausible in real-world terms, but they’re well-suited for depiction in a low-budget show, since the former can be done mostly with acting and pantomime and the latter can be done just by stopping the camera to make something appear/disappear/change in the blink of an eye. So there was never any realistic possibility that Star Trek could ever happen in the actual future. Obviously Vulcan and Qo’noS aren’t really out there in space any more than Lilliput and Brobdingnag were actually to be found on the Earth. Not to mention that some things in the past happened differently in the Trek universe — like Edith Keeler knowing Clark Gable’s name in 1930 before he became famous, or Samuel Clemens being in San Francisco on a date when the real one was traveling in Europe. It’s never been a “reality” that held up to close examination.
And by now, it’s a make-believe setting whose portrayal of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has diverged in many ways from real history — there were no Eugenics Wars, no Voyager 3 through 6, no Nomad probe, no manned Earth-Saturn probe, no DY-class sleeper ships, no Millennium Gate, etc. That’s the problem with a 50-year-old franchise. All science fiction set in the future will be overtaken eventually by the real future.
@30/Christopher: Look – I know that it’s a story. I know that it isn’t the actual future. My point is this: Originally, it was part of this particular make-believe setting that it takes place in “the future”. The portrayal of an optimistic future was a big part of its appeal. It’s still a big part of its appeal for me. The only thing that has changed since 1966 is that inconsistencies have cropped up. These inconsistencies can be treated just like any other set of inconsistencies inside Star Trek – by ignoring them, or by finding explanations. Doing so is not “conflating two different issues”.
I have to agree with those above who disagree that “until recently Star Trek generally avoided including cultural references to the late 20th century and early 21st century.”
What immediately jumped to my mind was the TNG episode The High Ground (obliquely acknowledged above through @9/LordVorless’ link to TV Tropes): because it was banned here in Ireland, and in the UK (it might still be for all I know; I’ve only ever seen it in re-runs in the U.S.): because of Data’s reference to the reunification of Ireland in 2024 as the result of a successful terrorist campaign.
I do take ChristopherLBennett’s point that there is a difference between references to events which have occurred / might have occurred in the show’s (fictional) past and specific people being referenced or included on the show: but both are surely examples of the same type of whimsy.
Part of the purpose of sci-fi is to shed light on our own selves and our own world by transporting what is familiar to an unfamiliar environment, so we can look at who we are from a unexpected perspective: and part of doing that does involve the whimsy of occasionally dropping in a ‘real-world’ reference; winking at, if not quite breaking, the fourth wall.
Star Trek, being good sci-fi, has surely been doing this ever since it was pitched as a Western in Outer Space. Certainly The Next Generation did it well enough to get one of their episodes censored – indeed outright banned – across the whole of the British Isles!
@31/Jana: Yes, but obviously it wasn’t meant to be a literal prediction that these specific events would happen in our future, because of the obvious impossibilities of physics, biology, and so forth. It was just meant to suggest the kind of future we could aspire to build. A better future isn’t something we sit around passively waiting to arrive, it’s something we get out and build for ourselves and for each other, using optimistic fiction to inspire us. You don’t need to believe Superman or Wonder Woman is flying around out there to be inspired to stand up for truth, justice, and equality. You just need to believe in the things they symbolize.
No matter how far we get out into deep space, we will never, ever find it populated by aliens who look like human actors with rubber glued on their faces. We will never find beings who can read our innermost thoughts and instantly decipher our language by telepathy, because that’s just not how information coding works. We will probably never be able to commute to other star systems in less than objective years or decades. We sure as hell won’t find Earthlike planets around short-lived or irregular stars like Rigel, Deneb, Omicron Ceti, and the like. But we could build a future where all sapient beings have equal rights and dignity, where diversity is celebrated rather than feared, where material scarcity and poverty no longer exist, where people work for the betterment of themselves and others rather than struggling to get rich or avoid starving to death, where we have better ways of solving problems than war or weapons, and where most people believe in science rather than superstition or propaganda. Those are the parts of Star Trek‘s future that matter. Star Trek is not a prediction, it’s a template.
@32/Tomás: Good point. A show can reference a person from our world without pretending to be in our world. The Arrowverse shows are explicitly set in two parallel universes, neither of which can be our present-day world, but they both have a lot of celebrities and current events in common with our world. So the individual and the larger context are two different things.
@26 – JanaJansen: We can imagine there’s a better future in our universe, inspired in Star Trek’s, but not the same. Chris said it better.
@33/Christopher: I agree with you. The only thing I’m saying is that all this doesn’t work for me when it’s treated as a parallel universe. Some people are bothered by inconsistencies; I can ignore inconsistencies, but for me, a fictional parallel universe doesn’t hold the same promise as a fictional future. Is that so weird?
29, I’ve actually heard that idea, that characters from “novels” were in other universes and somehow people were dreaming them or writing biographies or something.
35, nope, a lot of people like that veneer of plausibility, which is why Alternate universe fiction that’s significantly divergent isn’t too popular, they keep it recognizable enough to be other, but it’s always familiar enough. Yes, even Sliders. Especially Sliders.
@35/Jana: Again, I’m not saying anything about a “parallel universe,” I’m saying it’s a story. I’m saying it’s a 50-year-old franchise whose predictions about the future are getting more and more outdated, as is the inevitable fate of any science fiction tale sooner or later. Which is why I think Trek is long overdue for a wholesale reboot, a new incarnation that doesn’t pretend to be compatible with 50-year-old stories and just reinvents the core characters and concepts from a more modern starting point. The more Trek ages, the more its foundations in 1960s and 1990s futurism will make it hard to buy into as anything other than an exercise in nostalgia. In that sense, I think I’m agreeing with you.
@37/Christopher: I wouldn’t like that. I would prefer if the writers just ignored the inconsistencies and kept telling stories about the future. This approach worked in 1987 – nobody was bothered about the number of Voyager probes back then.
Star Trek has the big advantage over other franchises that it’s a bunch of stories about a universe, not about one person. You can get an infinite number of stories out if it. If the old problems seem outdated, move to a different part of the galaxy with different problems. If the old design looks outdated (I love the TOS design more than anything, but that’s just me), move to a later decade.
I don’t think a reboot would solve the problem of nostalgia, either. That’s always a danger if something is as old as Star Trek, and the best way to handle it is by looking forward.
@38/Jana: Ohh, trust me, Trek fans have always, always been just as obsessive about continuity details as they are now.
And I think resisting reboots is too limiting. A ton of franchises have multiple distinct continuities — Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men, Sherlock Holmes, Godzilla, Scooby-Doo, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, you name it. It’s not a bad thing to have more than one version of a fictional universe; on the contrary, it opens the door to fresh angles and intriguing new takes.
And honestly, Trek is not as good at pretending to be a consistent whole as something like Star Wars has been onscreen, since so many of its incarnations have been from different creators making different assumptions and not always remembering or bothering to use each other’s ideas. And even SW has discarded some of its onscreen incarnations in favor of new versions (e.g. the Ewok and Droid cartoons, Ewok movies, and the original Clone Wars cartoon). There’s reason to think that the makers of the first few movies and early TNG weren’t even trying to be strictly in continuity with TOS. Anyway, sometimes I just get exhausted by all the crazy rationalizations we have to make to pretend it all fits together, and it would be liberating if we had a version that were just starting over from scratch and didn’t have to be reconciled.
@CLB: “Which is why I think Trek is long overdue for a wholesale reboot, a new incarnation that doesn’t pretend to be compatible with 50-year-old stories and just reinvents the core characters and concepts from a more modern starting point.”
and “…and it would be liberating if we had a version that were just starting over from scratch and didn’t have to be reconciled.”
Would you be happy or accept it if DISC turns out to be that reboot? Or is it too problematic already?
Sometimes I wish they’d gone in a direction like Peter David’s New Frontier series, a “book series with its own continuity and not one that is purely a reaction to the television shows” (per wiki). Perhaps something that is as close to pure exploration as we can get. Maybe spend a short story arc at a particular planet or system, but keep moving.
@40/Sunspear: It would be wasting the opportunity of a reboot to just make something that mostly fits prior continuity with a few changes in detail. That’s not at all what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the freedom to start completely over from scratch, to take the core concepts and characters and reinvent them in a fresh way, founded in the concepts and themes of 2010s science fiction literature rather than 1960s SF literature. I’ve had ideas for decades about what I’d do if I could completely reboot Trek from the ground up, in the way something like Battlestar Galactica or Planet of the Apes was reimagined and reinvented.
@41. CLB: Make a pitch with those ideas. Just make sure you have all the material notarized. You know, just in case.
@39/Christopher: “A ton of franchises have multiple distinct continuities — Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men, Sherlock Holmes, Godzilla, Scooby-Doo, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, you name it.”
I don’t watch any of these except Sherlock Holmes. I’m rather uninterested in superhero stories. And I don’t even know what Scooby-Doo and Transformers are, so I can’t comment on them. But all the others share the trait that they are about one character or a small group of characters. Star Trek isn’t like that.
Concerning Battlestar Galactica and Planet of the Apes – the former is about a unique historical situation, so if you want to tell more stories like that, you have to reboot it. (I haven’t watched the reboot. I watched the pilot episode, and found it both too depressing and ridiculous how much it felt exactly like the US government and US military. The characters even had English names!) I’ve never watched the latter, I’ve only read the novel, but again, it’s about one very special situation. Star Trek isn’t like that, either.
There’s just no need to reboot Star Trek. Having a large established universe of aliens and starship technology and political institutions isn’t a drawback, it’s an asset. If a writing team feels limited by them, they can move outwards and tell stories about a different time, or a different planet, or a different part of the galaxy. If they don’t want to invent a whole new world, they can fall back on them. It combines the advantages of mainstream fiction and SF.
The problem with the recent approaches to Star Trek isn’t that there’s too much continuity. The writers practically court continuity. The problem is that it’s too self-referential, and for me personally, that it’s too depressing. A reboot won’t solve these problems.
@43/Jana: Oh, I hate it when people use “There’s no need” as an excuse to close their minds to an idea. There’s no “need” for any work of fiction, strictly speaking. We don’t invent stories out of “need,” we do it because it’s interesting and imaginative and fun. Creativity is about exploring new possibilities.
And Star Trek is supposed to be about seeking out the new and different, embracing it with enthusiasm and wonder. Modern fandom has forgotten that. When it was new, Star Trek was on the cutting edge. It broke new ground for SFTV. It was the first non-anthology SFTV drama in America that was made for adults. It took ideas (and writers) from current and recent SF literature and popularized them to general audiences for the first time. It pushed the envelope (though less successfully than one or two of its contemporaries) on racial and gender inclusion, and it was quite sexually daring for its day. It was a pioneering show that reinvented SFTV and set the template for its successors for decades to come. Now, a lot of successors have followed in its footsteps and expanded on what it pioneered, but Trek itself is no longer on the vanguard. It’s just one show among many now, and it’s following in ground that’s already been well-trodden by others, in terms of serialized storytelling, LGBT inclusion, and so forth. And it’s relying very heavily on nostalgia for the past, rather than trying to break new ground. I don’t see that as being true to Star Trek. That’s being true to the superficial forms and continuity of ST, but not to the original groundbreaking, risk-taking spirit that made ST so special and genre-defining in its day. I’m not sure ST can ever recapture that, can ever fully catch up with the rest of the genre that’s been built on its shoulders. But I do wish that fandom weren’t so hostile to letting it try.
44, you may be losing track of the issue that not everybody considers it creative or fun, but instead, they see it as uninteresting and boring.
Or to put it another way, what you suggest, to others, may be less pioneering, and more retrenching.
Any recapturing of the original spirit of Trek can be done without a reboot, and a reboot is no kind of guarantee that it would recapture it.
@44/Christopher: Huh? I was basically saying that it isn’t a good idea to let the vast universe Star Trek has built go, especially when there’s no need to do so. I’m not saying that Star Trek shouldn’t “seek out the new and the different”. Why would it need a reboot to do so? Besides, there has been a reboot, and the best thing it has produced was nostalgia (which, for Star Trek, is a bad thing – I agree with you about that).
@46/MaGnUs: Exactly.
@45/LV: It’s impossible to know whether an idea is interesting if you haven’t even seen it. All that proves is that you don’t have the imagination to see the possibilities. It’s the height of arrogance to assume that nobody else can imagine anything you can’t. I mean, that is literally a writer’s job.
@47: Jana: How is it “letting the vast universe go” to add another one? This is not a zero-sum game! The existence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe does not erase Marvel Comics. The existence of Sherlock and Elementary does not eliminate the Doyle canon. New interpretations expand and supplement a franchise. They enrich it and deepen it. Different continuities can coexist and draw on each other, feed across into each other. Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Inspector Henderson, and kryptonite were created for the Superman radio show and then added to the comics. Harley Quinn, Renee Montoya, Livewire, and Batman Beyond were created for the DC Animated Universe and then added to the comics. The character of Wolverine’s clone X-23 was created for an animated series, added to the Marvel comics, and used as a central character in Logan, one of the best Marvel movies there is. Different continuities are not at war with each other. They mutually enrich each other, because they expand the range of creative possibilities.
Diversity is good. Different entities benefit each other through the interaction of their differences, rather than being threats to each other. That’s literally the core message of Star Trek!!
And of course, different continuities routinely build on many of the same ideas as each other. The DCAU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Arrowverse, the modern Sherlock Holmes shows, they all draw on elements, characters, and storylines from the original canons and put them together in innovative ways. They distill the best elements of the vast continuities preceding them and get rid of the worst or most outdated elements. They use the old universe, but are not trapped by its baggage.
“Besides, there has been a reboot, and the best thing it has produced was nostalgia (which, for Star Trek, is a bad thing – I agree with you about that).”
The Kelvin timeline is not truly a reboot. It portrays itself as an alternate timeline branching off from the same origins, so it’s limited to being a variation on the same established history and characters. I wish Kelvin had been a real reboot, because then it would be capable of vastly more innovation.
@48/Christopher: I guess it comes down to this: When I like a story, or a place or a person in a story, I like to imagine that they’re real. This becomes much harder when there are multiple versions of that story, place or person. Sherlock Holmes is easy – the Doyle characters are real, the filmed versions are not. (Especially Irene Adler, but that’s a whole different rant.) I wrote in comment #43 that I’m uninterested in superhero stories. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that the publishers and writers have created so many versions of the characters that they stopped feeling real to me. At that point, I have stopped caring. I don’t have that kind of mind.
48, it’s only impossible if you think a person can’t learn from experience, recognize their tastes, and decide their preferences. And many writers are quite arrogant in assuming that their imaginations will produce delectable results, and if that doesn’t happen, it’s somehow the reader’s fault. That’s why they often need editors to yank them back to reality. It’s literally their job.
Really, for all the complaints about judging a book by its cover, I notice they’re quite intent on advertising on the damn covers, so I’m going to take them at their word.