Random Star Trek discussion

And let's he honest, the dude was randier than Austin goddamn Powers, the biggest vision the guy had was how big Ferengi dicks could be and how many tits he could put on Troi.

The ENT decon scenes and Lower Decks hologram orgy are as close to Gene's Vision® as we've ever put to screen since he stepped down.

From what I can tell, that seems to be rumor and speculation.. Here’s a detailed explanation of what canon is.
https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/canon.htm

Speaking as one of the rare millennial Trek fans who didn't grow up around Trek before stumbling into it, I can tell you most people are here for entertaining stories and couldn't care less about the minutiae of canon or whatever.

You think 15 year old me cared that Archer's ship got to Kronos and back in a week?

Even after watching nearly all of classic Trek, 37 year old me doesnt care

I'm certainly not going to expect the franchise to be beholden to the well-meaning but flawed ideas of a guy who died before I was old enough to tie my damn shoes.

Actually, I lot of people care.

truth in a typo...

another one that argues from the point that anything set prior to TOS should look as crappy as TOS or is non canon...

yup... don't care what his opinion of what constitutes canon is no matter how detailed it tries to be.

Figuring out canon is easy-peasy.
One just has to figure out what makes Trek canon across episodes of itself, so that it can even be a show.

So, starting with TOS...
-Has "Star Trek" in the title
-Produced by Gene Roddenberry
-Has the same listed cast every week
-Starship Enterprise

"The Cage" only carries over Spock, but you've got Roddenberry, Star Trek, Enterprise, and its connection to "The Menagerie".

So!! This adds the rule that you only need one cast member to pass the torch.

TAS
-Star Trek
-Roddenberry
-TOS cast
-Enterprise

BUT!! Animated.
We'll come back to this.

TOS movies...
-Roddenberry is bumped up to a toothless consultant, but he's there.
-Star Trek in the titles
-Same TOS cast
-Refitted Enterprise, but it's Enterprise.

4, 5, & 6 have Enterprise-A, but it carried over smoothly from 1 ,2, & 3, so we add a new rule that you can have other Enterprises.

TNG
-Star Trek in title
-Roddenberry
-An Enterprise
-Bones passes the torch

NOW! "Assignment Earth" was supposed to be a spinoff, and that wouldn't have had all the Trek stuff, BUT, Kirk and Spock in the backdoor pilot would have done the trick.
SO!! The Trek stuff can be dropped if there's connective tissue from the prior show.
SO!!!

DS9
-Star Trek in title.
-Enterprise and Picard pass the torch
-No Rodenberry, but he passed the torch to Rick Berman (love him or hate him, doesn't matter).

Voyager
-Star Trek in title.
-Rick Berman.
-Quark passes the torch.

Enterprise
-No Star Trek in title at first, but "Assignment Earth" wouldn't have had it, so the Star Treks were a fan courtesy more than a solid rule. Fan whining made them add Star Trek anyway.
-Rick Berman
-Cochrane passes the torch.

Now, it gets tricky...

JJ-movies
-Star Trek in the title.
-Recasted TOS gang, but Nimoy-Spock passes the torch.
-Producers didn't get to pass torches. Do we need that though? I dunno.
Rod Roddenberry gave it his thumbs up though. Can that count? Subject for debate.

Assuming Roddenberry DNA is enough, then...

Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds
-Star Trek in title.
-Alex Kurtzman from JJ-movies as uber-producer.
-Rod Roddenberry thumbs up.
-SNW full-circle back to TOS Enterprise.

BUT!! No more actor baton passes in the pilots.
BUT!! Mariner and Boimler are crossing over to SNW, LD Titan model on Picard, meaning LD Riker and PIC Riker are one and the same, and eyepatch Okona on LD and PROD.
And since LD & PROD are canonized, so is TAS.
So, the animation thing is settled.

I didn't bother with the TNG movies because the cast and producers are so much the same, they may as well just be extra episodes.

Now that we have this as a baseline, we can tackle the novels, comics, and games.

Novels!!

Well, you can't stuff the actors inside, and Roddenberry couldn't be hands on involved and do all his movie/show stuff, so this gets tricky.

I'd go with, if something from the books makes it to show/movie canon, that book at least is canon.
And if that book is canon, all the books connected to it are canon. Like episodes in a show.
And if everything BUT the detail that made it to "real" canon conflicts, then Trek has timey-wimey and multiverse, so it's just multiverse, and still canon, like a mirror universe episode, or the JJ-movies.

Things that made it to "real" canon.
Hikaru Sulu.
Nyota Uhura.
S'Chn T'Gai Spock

Boom, novels are canon, even if in a multiverse.

Comics!!

Alex Kurtzman was hands-on involved with the JJ-verse comics that filled the gaps between movies.
The intention was that these were 100% canon.
EXCEPT! Kurtzman produced Picard, and Picard trampled over the "Countdown" prequel to ST09 set in the TNG era. Pull that string, and the whole line falls apart.
Kurtzman deleted his own goddamned canon.
I'm gonna carry over the multiverse rule from the novels, and say they're BOTH canon.
If the INTENT is that a comic is supposed to be canon, it is.
All of them TRIED to be canon, but Paramount kept foiling them.

Games!!

I'd go with multiverse, plus preference towards stuff with Trek actors.
Its gotta be some level of sorta-canon, or why are you playing the fucking thing?
Y'know?


SO!! It's not that things are canon or not, but how VALID is it?
I'd go with this.
TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT/DISCO/PIC/LD/PROD/SNW (and their movies) are the prime timeline.
The holy continuum.
JJ-verse is a side pit-stop. You can count it as season 0 of TOS.
Novels/comics/games, are part of that 285,000 timelines from "Parallels".
Stuff from them can be cherry picked over into the holy timeline, but they're more like quantum echoes.

His mother provided the computer voice in the first JJ movie.

Notice who stands up and says, "The tribunal is now in session..."

You have waaaaaaaaay too much time on your hands.

"Far Beyond The Stars".
I could have watched a whole spinoff show of these characters.

Every time I see it again, it makes me wish Aaron Eisenberg had portrayed Nog more like the newsstand kid in FBTS. It would've made the character more interesting and way less annoying.

"Emanations"
I thought he sounded familiar!
The mortician guy is Jerry Hardin, who played Mark Twain!

"Shadows Of P'Jem".
Another familiar vocal chord!
Jeff Kober was the death row inmate on Voyager's "Repentance" and is a guard in this one.

“Conundrum” Riker and Ro hook up. Now there’s a scenario for a secret son we never heard about.

Tom Riker and Ro were both in the Maquis.
I said before, they should have been the villains in "Insurrection".
And it shouldn't have involved the dumb fountain of youth planet.

That would have been great.

I'm rewatching the Mutura nebula sequence, and something just occurred to me. Kirk tells Uhura to patch him into Reliant, and when she does, Kirk's voice is heard on the bridge of the Reliant. Did Uhura contact a member of Khan's people who is acting as Reliant's communication officer and say, "We have a message for Khan"? Or, because the Enterprise had earlier hacked into Reliant's computer, was she able to hit a couple of buttons and have Kirk's voice suddenly start speaking to the Reliant's bridge as a bit of a surprise? If it's the latter, then why didn't they just shut down Reliant's engines and take the weapon's systems offline? (Now that I think about it, you kinda wonder why they didn't do that when they first hacked into the Reliant, but you can handwave that away as it being the heat of battle and Kirk having to scramble to do something to try and save the ship.)

"Imaginary Friend".

Isabella destroys Alexander's crappy clay ashtray thingy.

Alexander- Clara!! I spent two weeks on that!!!

Two weeks?!?!? Two weeks?!?!?
I could pound that out in under 10 minutes!
Jesus, Alexander really does suck!

He’s a good luck charm.

Alexander is a proud graduate of the Montgomery Scott Art Institute.



*It took me three hours to post this, btw